Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious errors have been corrected.

Page 7: Treves possibly should be Trèves
Page 22: First Clause possibly should be First Cause
Page 95: tôi eterôi tanantia possibly should be tôi heterôi tanantia

THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.
JULY AND OCTOBER, 1871.
VOLUME LIV.

AMERICAN EDITION.

NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY THE LEONARD SCOTT PUBLISHING COMPANY.
140 FULTON STREET, BETWEEN BROADWAY AND NASSAU STREET.

1871.

S. W. GREEN.
PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND BINDER,
16 and 18 Jacob St., N.Y.

THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.
JULY, 1871.

Art. I.—The Roman Empire.

(1.) Les Césars, par Franz de Champagny. 3 vols. Paris: Bray.

(2.) Les Antonines, par le Comte de Champagny. 3 vols. Paris: Bray.

The history of the Roman Empire must ever have an interest peculiar to itself. It stands alone. Nothing in the past has been, nothing in the future can be, like it. It was the whole civilized world. It gathered into itself the traditions of all that had ever been great and illustrious in the human race, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Hebrew, Phœnician, Greek, Etruscan, as well as those of the multitudinous western tribes—Italian, Gallic, Iberian or Teutonic, which had only made themselves known as warriors. The civilization, the arts and sciences, the laws and institutions, the poetry and philosophy, the whole accumulated literary treasures of all past generations were risked on a single venture. Rome had no rival on earth, and could have no successor. She was the ark in which were preserved all the riches of the past, all the hopes of the future. For many centuries the most gifted races of men had been toiling and suffering, and there was no reason to suppose that man was capable of doing more than had been effected by their united efforts. If that was lost, all was lost. It was no idle boast, then, when men said, 'When Rome shall fall, the world will fall with her.' In those ages no man looked forward to anything greater or better. The idea that 'progress' is the natural law and condition of the world, is one quite characteristic of modern times. The ancient notion was that its law was that of decay and corruption. The utmost that anyone dared to hope was that things might not change for the worse.

And so far as appears, their judgment was well founded. Man had done all he could. The Roman Empire exhibited the highest state of society, which, without some supernatural interference of a higher power in the affairs of the world, he was able to develope. Viewed in this light, as the last act of a vast drama which had been going on for ages, it must ever be most worthy of study. And in truth there was in it very much that was really great and noble. The impression left on the mind by ordinary histories, which is little more than a vague idea of mad and grotesque tyranny on the one side, and abject servitude on the other, is very far from doing it justice. If, as we know, there has in fact arisen out of its ashes a new world, on the whole vastly superior to the old, this is because, by the mercy of his Creator, man has no longer been left to find his way without light and guidance from on high; because after having, in the old world, left man to work out to the end all that he could do by himself, God Himself has been pleased, in the new world, to stretch out His own right hand and His holy arm, and to work in man and by him. Here, then, is the striking contrast between ancient and modern history. The one shows man working without God, the other God working by man; and man, alas! but too often, crossing, interfering with, and maiming His work.

But this was not all; for although, while the Empire of Rome still lasted, the kingdom of God was not as yet visibly set up among men, yet, almost from its very foundation, the germs of that future kingdom were working in it. It was under the reign of the first heathen emperor that the Prince of Peace was born into the world. The grain of mustard-seed was already sown, and through all the centuries occupied by the heathen empire it was growing night and day, at first unobserved by men, in later times forcing itself on their notice, until it became a tree whose branches overshadowed the whole earth.

There are, then, two subjects which must attract attention in any worthy description of the Roman Empire; first, the political, social, moral, and religious condition of the heathen world, both in itself and in comparison with that of Christian nations, and next the effect produced on the heathen themselves by the gradual growth and development of Christianity in the midst of them. The internal history of Christianity, indeed, belongs in strictness to ecclesiastical history, but no subject has a more direct claim upon the general historian than that of its effects upon the political, moral, and social standard, and upon the religious opinions of those who were not Christians.

We know, however, no English book which throws light upon either of these two subjects. Indeed, we doubt whether there is any which ever attempted to do so. The greatest English writer who has described those times, was made incapable of it by his hatred of Christianity, and by his low standard of moral feeling. In our own times, no doubt, we have had an interesting history of the 'Romans under the Empire' from a writer whom it would be most unjust to compare to Gibbon; but this has not been continued so far as the period when Christianity would have forced itself on the writer's attention. And so far as appears, his thoughts have not been sufficiently turned to the subject to lead him to detect its influence, where it is quite as unquestionable if not as prominent. The result is, that although Mr. Merivale no doubt fully believes and admits the truth and importance of Christianity, he has given us a history of the Romans under the Empire, in which, except in one or two short recognitions of its truth, there is nothing to remind the reader that the old world was ignorant of the fact that God had been manifested in the flesh, while all that is specially worth notice in the new world that has succeeded it, is founded upon that fact.

Mr. Merivale, of course, would reply to this criticism that he undertook to relate the history of the Romans as it had been recorded by Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion, and others; and that if there was nothing in Christianity which arrested their attention, and which they have thought worthy of record, there could be nothing which came into his subject. This, however, implies a total mistake as to the duty of an historian. He has to tell us, of course, what really happened, and nothing else. But it is certain that events, in their consequences of the greatest importance, are often so much undervalued by those who see them in progress, that they pass them over unmentioned, devoting their attention to things which at the moment seem more important, but which after-times see to have been of little interest. It is Arnold's remark, that Phillip de Comines,[1] whose memoirs 'terminate about twenty years before the Reformation, and six years after the first voyage of Columbus,' writes without the least notion of the momentous character of the times which he was describing. His 'memoirs are striking, from their perfect unconsciousness. The knell of the middle ages had already sounded, yet Comines had no other notions than such as they had tended to foster; he describes their events, their characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for centuries.' And he justly blames Barante, because, while fully able to analyze history philosophically, 'he has chosen, in his history of the Dukes of Burgundy, to forfeit the benefits of his own wisdom, and has described the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no otherwise than might have been done by their own simple chroniclers.' What else has Merivale done in describing, for instance, the times of the Antonines as they appeared to contemporary heathen writers, not as we know them really to have been, who have the means of estimating the effects even then produced upon heathen society by the influence of the Christians, already so numerous in the midst of it, and of comparing them with periods in the history of many Christian nations in many respects similar.

In contrast with the deficiencies of histories in our own language, we would call special attention to the historical works of M. de Champagny. We have been surprised to find how little they are known in England, not merely by men of general culture and intelligence, but by many whose studies have been especially directed to the history of the Roman Empire. In France they are not only well known, but so highly appreciated that they have won for their author a seat in the Academy, the great object of literary ambition; and this, although the tone of religious earnestness which runs through them, if it did not hinder, assuredly in no degree tended to promote their popularity. At different periods during the last forty years, M. de Champagny has published four works on Roman history, the first two of which we have placed at the head of this article. None of these works are called by the author, or are exactly entitled to be called histories. They contain, indeed, a narrative strictly confined to the facts recorded by ancient authors, and full of life and interest; yet the narrative is the least valuable part of the work. They are études, a term which, for want of one more exactly expressing it, we may render essays. This character pervades even the narrative: but less than half the three volumes of 'the Cæsars' is narrative even in form. It contains a 'picture of the Roman Empire,' giving innumerable details, full of life and reality, of the provinces, the capital, the daily life of the Romans, their worship, their family and social life, their morals, their literary habits, their public amusements, and ending with an account of the Neo-stoic philosophy which filled (so far as it was filled at all) the place of a religion, as that word is understood among ourselves. And throughout the whole, the comparison of the old world and the new is kept in view. We know no work in the English language, as we have already said, which supplies what we have here. In 'the Antonines,' the proportion devoted to similar pictures, especially to the estimate of the indirect influence of Christianity, is equally large and equally important.

It would be impossible within the limits of an article, to give any idea of the contents of essays in which our author presents, in the lucid epigrammatic form peculiar to his country and language, the results of a life of study and thought. What we specially desire is, that our readers should consider for themselves whether it is not the fact, that great as is the proportion of time and attention devoted to the classics, in English education, the Roman Empire has been far too much overlooked, especially in comparison with the Republic. For this it is very easy to account. It is the natural result, not of any love for a republic, but of that too exclusive love for the writers of the Augustan age, which has long formed a characteristic feature in the cultivated Englishman. The historians of the Empire, and even those who, like Pliny, Seneca, &c., reflect its manners in contemporary writings not professedly historical, but often of even more historical value, are wanting in the especial charm which attracts a fastidious scholar to the earlier history. And hence we greatly doubt whether ninety out of one hundred boys educated at a classical school do not practically think of Roman history, as if its interest ended with Augustus. Before Gibbon turned attention to the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire' this must have been still more the case. Account for this as we may, we are sure that it is greatly to be regretted. For, beautiful as is 'Livy's pictured page,' the state of society which it presents—(that of a simple people, denizens of a single city, retaining many of the virtues and faults of a rude age, esteeming courage in the field as for all citizens the first and most necessary of virtues, and valuing temperance, a life of labour, &c., chiefly, as conducing to it)—has so little in common with our daily life and habits, that the practical lessons impressed upon us are hardly more than if we read as many pages of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' In saying this, we by no means desire to discourage the study of writers whom we heartily love and admire. It is a great thing to store the mind (especially in the plastic season of youth) with images of beauty; nor do we believe that the peculiar refinement of taste formed by such an education is attainable by any other means. The first decade of Livy, for instance, ranks high in that class of books, at the top of which stand the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' Still, history has an importance of its own, and it seems to us indisputable that the strictly historical value of later Roman times is (at least in the present age of the world) far greater than that of the golden age of the Republic. Allowing for the immense difference between a heathen and a Christian society, the world ruled by Marcus Aurelius is one in which we can easily imagine ourselves to be living. We are sure that no thoughtful man can read many pages of M. de Champagny's works without finding his mind filled with thoughts and lessons which bear immediately on the state of society in which our lot is cast. The evils and corruptions which were undermining the Roman world were, in many respects, those against which we are called to guard or contend. Where there is a contrast, it is one which it is well for us to observe; for it may easily be traced to the special blessings which the indirect action of Christianity has conferred upon every class of modern society, even upon those who have, more or less wilfully, rejected it.

One fact which we think will strike every reader is that the state of things under the Empire, as compared with that under the Republic, was far better than ordinary histories would lead us to suppose. They detail the mad and sanguinary tyranny of Caligula and Nero, but give us little means of estimating the peace and prosperity which, for more than two centuries after Augustus, prevailed, almost without interruption, through the vast extent of his empire. Nothing could be stronger than the practical appreciation of this by the generations who lived under it. Pliny speaks of 'the immense majesty of the Roman peace;' and these words 'Pax Romana' seem to have been almost as much household words in his day as the phrase 'Our glorious constitution in Church and State' in those of George III. To say that the heathen world had never seen anything like it would greatly understate the fact. There has been nothing like it since, any more than there had been before. During several centuries, peace reigned almost uninterrupted through the vast regions which extend from the Euphrates to the Western shores of France and Portugal, from the slopes of the Cheviots to the slopes of the Atlas. Passing over the very brief civil contest which followed the death of Nero, the only exception was the Jewish rebellion. The regions most favoured by nature of any that earth holds—those which on every side surround the Mediterranean Sea, Spain, the South of France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the Northern coasts of Africa—were full of rich and highly-civilized cities, which, undisturbed by wars or rumours of wars, freely exchanged the productions of their various climates and their different industries. Many of them, among which we may name Athens, Alexandria, and Carthage, were the chosen seats of learning and philosophy. Men thought little of crossing the sea one way or the other between Africa and Italy, France or Spain, as they might be tempted by facilities for study or business, or even by curiosity. When all formed part of one great empire, trade had no impediments from laws of protection, or from the jealousy of rival nations or governments.

Neither must it be supposed that the peace which afforded these advantages was purchased at the cost of subjection to a great military tyranny. Nothing is more remarkable, yet nothing more certain, than the fact that Rome, which made herself mistress of the world by military force, ruled and maintained her dominion over the world she had conquered, by the superiority of her purely civil administration. Throughout these immense regions, the Roman military establishment consisted, under Tiberius, of between 160,000 and 180,000 men under arms; and even these were not kept in the great cities or the interior of the provinces to preserve order. They were stationed on the frontiers, to guard the unarmed population of those huge countries from the predatory invasions of the surrounding barbarians. Four legions kept watch on the Euphrates, three (or perhaps five) on the Danube, eight on the Rhine, and three on the Northern border of the British province. In the whole interior of Gaul, that is to say, in the districts which are now France, Belgium, and Germany west of the Rhine, there were (see 'Les Césars,' vol. ii. 304) only 1,200 men under arms. The naval force, which maintained the peace of the Mediterranean, checking the plague of piracy which had been so prevalent in earlier times, as it has been almost to the present day, consisted of three fleets, stationed at Ravenna, at Misenum, and at Forum Julii (now Frejus); the three together consisted of 15,000 men. There were also twenty-four vessels employed in the defence of the Rhine, and as many on the Danube. Italy and Spain were without soldiers, except about 9,000 pretorians in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. Asia Minor, abounding in wealth and population, with princely cities enjoying the civilization of a thousand years and all the treasures of art and industry in undisturbed repose, was administered by unarmed governors. 'Beyond the Black Sea there were 3,000 men to guard that inhospitable coast, and retain in obedience to Rome the kings of the Bosphorus. The other kings were responsible to Rome for the tranquillity of their kingdoms, and exercised the police over them at their own cost, with the aid of such troops as Rome permitted them to levy.'

Well may M. de Champagny exclaim—

'These feeble material forces in an empire which was never without some war seem marvellous when we compare them with the burdensome armaments of modern powers, and the enormous sacrifices imposed upon them in time of profound peace, merely to maintain their position with regard to foreign countries, and assure the tranquillity of their States.'—('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 305.)

The contrast is, indeed, remarkable. A very large portion of the old Roman Empire no longer forms part of the modern civilised world. The remainder probably maintained, before the outbreak of the present war, about 3,000,000 of men under arms, none of whom were employed (like the armies of ancient Rome) in defending the frontier of a civilised land against the incursions of warlike barbarous neighbours, but all in jealously watching the power of neighbouring States and maintaining a balance—how effectually the events of the last year have but too plainly shown—or in holding down the struggles of revolutionary parties at home.

To point the contrast, M. de Champagny shows that the army which guarded each province of the Empire was composed of natives of the country in which it was stationed. Roman citizens they no doubt were, but citizens of provincial extraction, posted to defend in arms on behalf of Rome the very land which their fathers, only a few generations back, had defended against her. To this very day neither France nor England has ventured to imitate this liberal policy. Ireland is garrisoned by soldiers of English birth, and Breton conscripts, in times of profound peace, were sent to fulfil their time of service at Lyons and Paris.

It need hardly be said that the rule which was thus maintained, cannot have been felt to be severe or oppressive by the subjugated people. Our author traces the institutions by which the people in the conquered provinces were gradually assimilated to the conquerors. We have no space to follow him in detail. The principle was to leave each nation in possession of its own laws and institutions, and to preserve to the cities the right of self-government. The degrees of liberty were different in different cases. In many cases the only restriction was that they abandoned the right of making war and peace, engaging to hold as their friends and enemies all whom Rome so held.

'No doubt when Rome was a party this liberty shrank into small dimensions. The ancient institutions of the peoples were reduced to the dimensions of municipal charters, their magistrates became lieutenants of police, their areopagus an hôtel de ville. But still, conquered Athens retained its areopagus, the Greek cities had still their senates, their popular assemblies, Marseilles retained that constitution which had been so much admired by Cicero. Some cities, such as Marseilles, Nismes, and Sparta, were not merely free, but sovereign; others remained under their own laws. Leagues which really meant anything, powerful confederations, had been dissolved, but when Greece, in memory of its ancient amphictyonic councils, met at Elis or Olympia to hold dances in honour of her gods, when all the Ionian peoples gathered in the Temple of the Panionium for sacrifices and games, these innocent memorials of a common origin or of hereditary alliances mattered nothing to Rome. More than this, the towns of Caria, or the three and twenty cities of Lycia, assembled their deputies not only for feasts and games, but to deliberate upon their affairs, and, provided they did not discuss peace or war, these traces of political liberty gave no offence to the liberalism of Rome. Rome had a marvellous power of perceiving how much of independence would suffice to content nations without being dangerous; and I doubt whether any free and sovereign city of our modern Europe, Cracow for instance

But while leaving the conquered cities in possession of their ancient laws and government, Rome introduced in the midst of every province Latin and Roman franchises, which were given sometimes to old, sometimes to newly-founded cities. Each of these colonies afforded many steps, by which the members of the conquered countries might ascend, more or less completely, to the privileges of the Roman citizen, and thus the ambition of becoming Romans quickly supplanted the aspirations after political independence, which could hardly fail to remain among a newly-conquered people. While enlarging upon this remarkable characteristic of the Roman system of government over conquered nations, M. de Champagny introduces a curious episode, into which we may venture to follow him, and in which he contrasts the French and English systems in the government of foreign dependencies. He says:—

'The Frenchman is a contrast to the Roman; his conquests are merely military, and are therefore transient in comparison with those of the Roman, which were always political. The Frenchman is a much better master, because more sociable, more humane, but he always wishes to show that he is master, officially, prominently, forcibly. There is wanting to him a sort of reserve, both towards others and himself. Instead of disguising his power he makes a point of letting it be seen, felt, touched, and thus he makes it annoying or compromises it. He never understands the importance of some things which appear very small, but which touch the heart of a foreigner; he laughs at him as he does at himself; he insists that people should be like him. He wishes to enforce on them his own laws, his manners, his language, nay, his vices. He wants them all to be adopted at once, not gradually, but by force, openly, without delay. All this of course as a benefit—but what insults people more than anything else, is a benefit imposed by force. He is unpopular without being the least conscious of it, having no suspicion that he has been tyrannical, and sincerely believes that he is securing the happiness of the people whom he is deeply irritating, till all of a sudden his power is overthrown by a storm which he never thought of expecting. It was thus that India slipped out of our hands in a few years. In a few months all Germany roused herself for the great contest of 1813. In a single day the bells of Palermo gave freedom to Sicily. No French conquest has ever been lasting.

'On the other hand we are reminded by this Roman invasion and colonization, so active, so obstinate, so universal, of the incessant and indefatigable advance of English colonization.'

He attributes this to the manner in which the English have allowed the conquered to retain their own institutions, customs, practices, and religion, thus making the fact of conquest as little evident as possible.

'England, like Rome, does not pride itself on making its own language and its own laws universal. The Prætor peregrinus at Rome judged all peoples according to their national laws. The Lord Chancellor in London judges the Canadian according to French law, the inhabitant of Jersey according to the customs of Normandy, of the Isle of France (Mauritius) according to the Code Napoleon, the Indian according to the law of Manou. The social system of England is no more forced on strangers than the social system of Rome; the Mussulman is not obliged to drink its ale, nor the Hindoo to attend its church. All it demands is the right of introducing itself, and introduce itself it does, whole and entire, without modifying or conforming itself, retaining its proud isolation and disdainful peculiarity. This is the course of nations endowed alike with the spirit of conquest and of conservatism. Rome and England have kept their conquests, because their conquest has always been intelligent and politic, because among them the statesman has always been master of the warrior, when it has not happened that the warrior himself was a statesman.' ('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 333.)

Our first impression in reading this passage was that the author had done more than justice to the wisdom of the English people. On second thoughts, however, we believe what he says to be substantially true. There are obvious exceptions on both sides. For instance, nothing can be more remarkable than the manner in which France has succeeded in attaching to herself the German provinces, stolen by Louis XIV. less than two centuries ago; while, on the other hand, England has held Ireland at least since the accession of James I., partially since Henry II., and has never managed for a single day to attach it to herself. The last case is explained, because England, however it may be accounted for, adopted in Ireland exactly the opposite course to that described by M. de Champagny, and forced her own institutions upon a people for whom they were quite unfit. Mr. Gladstone evidently hopes that it is not too late to reconcile Ireland, by allowing it (as the Romans certainly would have done) to be governed by Irish ideas. The loss of the English colonies in America is another instance, for which M. de Champagny, we think, imperfectly accounts. The other instances he mentions seem in point. We do not believe that Frenchmen would have allowed the people of India to retain their institutions, manners, &c., as they have actually done under English government. As for Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté, it is to be observed that they were not held as dependencies, but were at once made an integral part of France: and we believe that M. de Montalembert was right in the opinion he expressed, that they had remained intensely anti-French, until after the great Revolution, which for the first time melted down the whole of France into one nationality. This may easily be accounted for. Englishmen who think of that revolution are apt to remember only the hideous crimes by which it was sullied. To the French peasants, and perhaps more especially in the German provinces, the revolution meant the abolition of the feudal system; a system always oppressive to all classes, and most of all to those lower classes on whom the whole weight of the enormous structure rested and pressed.

But we must return to the Roman Empire. By the system we have described it avoided what is ever the most grinding of tyrannies, the domination of race over race. The conquered races, while retaining their national institutions, very easily attained a place among the Romans themselves, and before long, felt that the Empire and all it contained was their own. Before the fall of the Republic, all Italians either enjoyed the full privileges of Romans or knew that they could very easily obtain them. Julius Cæsar had no sooner conquered Gaul than he admitted some Gauls to the senate. This seems to have been premature, and they are said to have been excluded from it by Augustus. But the policy was steadily continued. Claudius, who was an antiquarian, made a well-known speech on the occasion of admitting more Gauls to the honour. Later we find men of almost every province in the highest offices, and even attaining the imperial dignity.

The great proof of the wisdom of this system was in its working. The civilized world was under the dominion of a single city; and yet there was no example of any national revolt, except in the one instance of Judæa; nay, conquered countries deprecated as the greatest of evils separation from the Roman Empire. The 'groans of Britain' when the Romans withdrew from her are well known. But the Gauls afforded a still stronger example. They were among the most warlike and restless of all ancient nations. Their very name had been the greatest terror Rome ever knew. They were made subjects of Rome, after an heroic and desperate resistance, in which a million of them perished, only fifty years before the Christian era. How soon they were left without the presence of any controlling Roman force we are not informed. Such, unquestionably, must have been their ordinary position, to say the least, long before the death of Nero, only one hundred and eighteen years later (a.d. 68). In the civil commotions which followed, almost the whole Roman force (itself, as we have already seen, composed of natives, and employed not to enforce obedience, but to protect the frontier against invasion) was withdrawn into Italy. A small number of enterprising Gauls thought this a favourable opportunity for restoring the national independence. What, however, is most remarkable is, that it does not seem for one moment to have suggested itself, even to them, to abolish the Roman or restore the ancient national institutions. Their hope was to separate themselves from Italy, and set up a Roman Empire, whose seat should be in Gaul. It seems to have been owing to this circumstance, that the small remains of the legionary soldiers still left in the country joined in the movement—an event quite without example. For several months Gaul was to all intents and purposes independent, yet its internal affairs and government seem to have gone on without the least change. The provincials, left wholly to themselves, convened at Treves a general assembly of all the Gallic nations, and this assembly determined, after full discussion, that Gaul should remain a province of the Roman Empire.

And this was the voluntary resolution of a nation celebrated all over the world for its warlike courage, and which had been conquered by Rome less than one hundred and twenty years before. It seems impossible that anything could more clearly have demonstrated that the Empire of Rome over the conquered provinces was maintained, not by force, but by the free will of the provincials.

M. de Champagny gives it as his deliberate opinion that the Roman Empire, during the first two centuries, is to be regarded as 'a federation of free nations under an absolute monarch.' He has a most interesting chapter ('Antonines,' book iv. ch. 11) on the liberties of the Roman Empire, in which he especially compares them with those of the nations of modern Europe. It was published under the reign of Louis Philippe, and is doubly interesting to English readers, both for the contrast which it establishes between the Roman Empire and the most free Continental States; and also because it throws much undesigned light upon the immense difference between the meaning attached to the word liberty in France and in England. He deliberately declares, and, we think, proves, that a subject had much greater personal freedom under the Antonines than under any of the most free Continental kingdoms. Of political liberty, he says the moderns have much more—the free press, the right of voting, the tribune (i.e., the power of addressing a public legislative assembly), charters, constitutions, habeas corpus.

'And yet I venture to doubt whether Europe in the nineteenth century, at the present moment, is much more free than the ancient world, even under the Roman Empire (of course I do not include the slaves).... We, the proud citizens of a Parliamentary monarchy, who have made revolutions when we were called subjects—subjects nevertheless we were and still are, every day of our lives. We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or to dine more than twenty together; or to have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or to lend a book to a friend; or to put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in a street; or to kill a partridge, or to plant a tree near a roadside; or to dig coal out of our own land; or to teach three or four children to read; or to gather our neighbours for prayer; or to have an oratory in our house (what is it that constitutes an oratory?); or to bleed a sick man; or to sell him a medicine; or (in some countries) to be married; or to do any one of a thousand other things, which it would fill volumes to enumerate; without permission from the Government, which permission, we are carefully told, is always, and in its very nature, subject to be recalled. In three cases out of four, indeed, the Government does not either authorise or forbid; it tolerates. We live by toleration. We are born, we have a home, a family, we bring up our children, we have a God, we have a religion, all by the indulgent and merciful, but always revocable, toleration of the ruling power. Of all things that man does there is only one over which the Government has no authority. We are allowed to die without its permission. Still, we do need it in order to allow us to be buried. At certain moments we have sovereign power over great and public matters, but in small matters of private life we are subjects, nay, inferior to subjects. Unluckily, these small matters make up our life, and these private matters are just the things important in life.'—('Antonines,' vol. ii. 182.)

This passage brings out in strong light the substantial difference between our own system and that of the Continental nations. In France, notwithstanding the passionate demand for liberty which has been uttered from time to time, we sincerely believe there neither now is nor ever has been any party which has ever desired what we mean by liberty, or even understood what it is; and hence, numerous as have been its revolutions, there is one point on which every government in France, at least since the days of Richelieu, has been of one mind. No one of them has respected what we mean by 'personal liberty.' No one has seriously thought of leaving men to do what they like, as long as they do not interfere with the liberty and rights of their neighbour. In this there has been no substantial difference between the ancien régime, the republic, the first empire, the monarchy of the restoration, the monarchy of July, the second republic, the second empire, the government of defence. We see no reason to hope that the system to be authorised by the Assembly just elected will, in this respect, differ from any of its predecessors. But this is not a thing peculiar to France. We doubt whether it is not carried even farther in Germany. We believe the Continental State which, in this respect, is most like England, to be Switzerland. If Englishmen are wise they will be on the watch to prevent the gradual introduction of this Continental system. It is evil, not merely because it needlessly limits and interferes with the liberty which is the choicest of the natural gifts of God to man, but because by accustoming men to walk in leading strings it gradually makes them incapable of walking without them. A Prussian in England last winter expressed strong misgivings whether it would be right to skate, because the Government had not yet authorised it. We have known a Roman gentleman of our own day complain of the Pope's Government, because he had never been taught to swim. These things, ludicrous as they are, are symptoms of a very serious evil, they show that men have been treated like children until their minds have become childish. Mr. Göschen, some years back, said that he saw great danger of the same system gradually creeping in among ourselves. It was likely to come, he said, not because the Government is anxious to interfere, but because there is a continual tendency on the part of the people to call for its interference. We shall do well to sacrifice something of uniformity and energy in many departments, if they can only be obtained by the sacrifice of liberty. The very fact that political power has lately been extended so much more widely among us increases instead of diminishing the danger. Classes long shut out from political power naturally feel much more eager for equality than for liberty. In France it is this passion for equality that makes personal liberty almost hopeless. Under the Roman Empire equality was never dreamed of. The cities of the same province might be divided into half a dozen classes, each of which had different degrees of self-government. But there was none in which a man could so little do what he liked as in modern Paris. M. de Champagny accounts for this:—

'The liberties of the Roman Empire consisted not in its laws, but in something greater or less than laws—in facts, and these facts may be summed up in one. The art of government was not then brought to perfection as it is now. There was more freedom because there was less civilization. Not to say that Cæsar had neither telegraphs nor railroads, he had not even any system of administration. This was his first want. He had no hierarchy of functionaries, depending upon each other, each subject to be promoted or dismissed by some other, or by the common master.... Then (a second want), he neither had nor could have a police; all he had was a set of volunteer spies, called delators, inconvenient and even dangerous instruments. The heart of Tiberius would have bounded at the very idea of a great system of administrative délation and espionage [thank God English writers are compelled to use Latin or French words to express a thought so foreign to our manners] organised from above, and extending its branches everywhere below, such as that for which I believe we are indebted to M. de Sartines.[2] His heart would have bounded, but his purse would have failed, for (his third want) Cæsar had no budget. The art of finance was in its infancy. Those vast regions, on an average as rich as they are now, and which now pay to their actual sovereigns, without much complaint, at least two hundred millions sterling, did not produce to Cæsar sixteen millions sterling, and inasmuch as the contributions which produced these sixteen millions had to pass through the hands of some fifty thousand publicans and agents of finance, the contributors, who paid perhaps twice as much as the Emperor received, cried out fearfully. Lastly, if Cæsar, wishing to compel his people, had brought on any serious rising, he would have had no means of putting it down, for (a fourth want) Cæsar, having no budget, had no army. Those countries, which now furnish not less than three millions of soldiers, in those days, without being much less populous than they are now, did not furnish more than 300,000 men, and these 300,000 were absorbed by the guard on the frontiers. There were whole provinces without a single soldier. This Empire, without administration, without police, without budget, without army, would make the lowest clerk in the prefecture of police, the prefecture of the Seine, the offices of the Minister of War, or the Minister of Finance, shrug his shoulders at its poverty—military, fiscal, and administrative—I know that. But what would have been thought of our monarchies, so well constituted, so vigilant, so rich, so powerfully armed, I do not say by the clerks, but by the subjects of the Roman Empire?'—('Anton.,' vol. ii. p. 185.)

We heartily wish we had space to give the whole of the chapter from which we have made these extracts. The author proves in detail that under the Empire there was liberty of property, municipal liberty, liberty of association, liberty of worship (except for the Christians), liberty of education, liberty of speech. This last, M. de Champagny most truly says, was far more general at Rome under Trajan than under Louis Philippe at Paris. 'That liberty of the tongue was the liberty of every man: what is our liberty of the press than the liberty of two hundred journalists?' It was this that made Tacitus exclaim, 'Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias licet dicere.' The effect of this was that

'A modern European, as soon as he goes out of his own door and begins to act, to think, to live, among his fellows, must take for granted that everything is forbidden except what is expressly authorized. Under the Roman Empire, everything not expressly forbidden was understood to be authorized. Above all, intellectual liberty was complete. Every one talked, listened, gave and received information publicly as he pleased. Doctrines spread. Schools of thought raised themselves without interference of authority until it felt itself in danger, not from the general independence of thought (that misgiving had not yet come into anyone's mind), but from the special character of some teaching which arrested its attention. Even when the Imperial Government made up its mind to be severe, its rigour might often be averted, sometimes even paralyzed, by the municipal authority, which alone was on the spot and in activity in the interior of each great city. It was thus that the Christian teachers and apologists presented themselves as "philosophers," for, as a general rule, philosophers were at liberty to teach what they thought fit.'

No wonder that centuries of peace, free government of each city and nation under its own immemorial laws and customs, and taxation little more than nominal, led to the mighty public works, the very ruins of which are still the wonders of the world—the roads, 'massy causeways, whose foundations were beneath the surface, their surface many feet above it'—the system of navigable rivers and canals which made communication through the whole world (as it then was) easier and swifter than it ever was in England before the time of the generation not yet passed away. M. de Champagny quotes the words of Tertullian:—

'The world itself is opened up, and becomes from day to day more civilized, and increases the sum of human enjoyment. Every place is reached, has been made known, is full of business. Solitudes, famous of old, have changed their aspects under the richest cultivation. The plough has levelled forests, and the beasts that prey on man have given place to those that serve him. Corn waves on the sea-shores; rocks are opened out into roads, marshes are drained, cities are more numerous now than villages in former times. The island has lost its savageness, and the cliff its desolation. Houses spring up everywhere, and men to dwell in them. On all sides are government and life. What better proof can we have of the multiplication of our race than that man has become a drug, while the very elements scarcely meet our needs; our wants outrun the supplies; and the complaint is general that we have exhausted Nature herself.'[3]

Again, he quotes Pliny:—

'Rome has united the scattered empires. She has given softness to manners; she has made the industry of all peoples, the productiveness of all climates, a common possession. She has given a common language to nations separated by the discordance and the rudeness of their dialects. She has civilized the most savage and most distant tribes. She has taught man humanity.'

'War,' says another writer, 'is now nothing more than a tale of ancient days, which our age refuses to believe; or, if it does chance that we learn that some Moorish or Getulean clan has presumed to provoke the arms of Rome, we seem to dream, as we hear of these distant combats. The world seems to keep perpetual holiday. It has laid aside the sword, and thinks only of rejoicings and feasts. There is no rivalry between cities except in magnificence and luxury; they are made up of porticoes, aqueducts, temples, and colleges. Not cities only, but the earth itself puts on gay attire and cultivation, like that of a sumptuous garden. Rome, in one word, has given to the world something like a new life.'

M. de Champagny thinks that our present civilization would 'seem mean and poor to one of the contemporaries of Cicero, or even to one of the subjects of Nero.' ('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 397.) He shows how this would be felt, both as to public and private life, and especially refers to Pompeii. In proof of his assertion we must refer our readers to a passage, much too long to quote, as to the daily life of Rome itself. He follows a Roman, 'not opulent, but merely well off' through his day:—

The sun has no sooner risen than his house is thronged by clients (manè salutantes). This is a hasty levée. Then the patron, surrounded by his followers, goes down to the forum; if he likes, he is carried in a litter by his slaves. There the serious business of the day is conducted—causes, money payments, and arrangements; "all is activity, chatter, noise." But, at noon, all ceases; the audience breaks up, the shops are deserted, the streets are soon silent, and during the artificial night of the siesta no one is to be seen but stragglers returning to their houses, or lovers, who come, as if it were really night, to sigh beneath the balcony of their ladies. Business to-morrow. For the rest of the day Rome was free; Rome was asleep. The poor man lay down to sleep in the portico; the rich on the ground-floor of his house, in the silence and darkness of a room without windows, and to the sound of the fountains in the cavædium, slept, mused, or dreamed. Later than four o'clock, no business might be proposed in the Senate, and there were Romans who after that hour would not open a letter.

'About two the streets began to fill again. The crowd flowed towards the Campus Martius. There was a vast meadow, where the young men practised athletics, ran, and threw the javelin. The elders sat, talked, and looked on. Sometimes they had exercises of their own; often they walked in the sun. The exposure of the naked body to its life-giving action served them instead of the gymnasium. The women had their walks under the porticoes. This, too, was an hour of activity, but of merry, gay, satisfied activity.

'At three a bell sounded, and the baths were opened. The bath combined business, medical treatment, and pleasure. The poor enjoyed them in the public baths, the voluptuous rich, in their palaces.... The bath was a place of assembly, with a degree of boyish freedom. There was laughing, talk, gaming, even dancing.... There, too, the great affair of the day was arranged—the supper—almost the only social meal of a Roman. As evening came on, the party stretched themselves, leaning on their elbows, round the hospitable table, and had before them for the meal and for society all the hours till night. It commonly consisted of six or seven (never more than the Muses, said the proverb, or less than the Graces), stretched on couches of purple and gold, round a table of precious wood. A large band of servants was employed in the service of the feast; the maître d'hôtel provided it, the structor placed the dishes in symmetrical order, the scissor carved. Young slaves, in short tunics, placed on the table the huge silver salver, changed for each course, upon which the dishes were tastefully arranged. Children kept, what Indians in our day call punkahs, in motion over the heads of the company, to drive away the flies, and to cool them. Young and beautiful cup-bearers, with long robes and flowing hair, filled the cups with wine, others sprinkled on the floor an infusion of vervain and Venus-hair, which was supposed to promote cheerfulness. Round the table are songs, dances, and symphonies, tricks of buffoons, or discussions of philosophers. In the midst of all this merry-making the king of the feast gives the toasts, counts the cups, and crowns the guests with short-lived flowers. "Let us lose no time to live," he said, "for death is drawing near; let us crown our heads before we go down to Pluto." In fact, the dominant thought of ancient society was to live, to enjoy, to shut out from life as much as possible everything of suffering, care, toil, and duty.'—('Les Césars,' vol. ii. p. 388.)[4]

One essential feature of the Roman world, as compared with ours, judging alike by the remains which still exist, and by the hints of ancient authors, was the far greater extent and magnificence of the public buildings of all kinds, and the comparatively confined size of ordinary private houses. This our author especially points out at Pompeii, a country town of the third or fourth class, the public buildings of which, as far as they have hitherto been uncovered, astonish modern visitors by their extent and magnificence. Such was the natural tendency of a society in which men spent little time in their own houses, and mixed much with their fellows. Many a Roman in easy circumstances seems to have used his house chiefly for sleeping and meals. It mattered little, with such habits, how contracted might be the other parts, if the public banqueting room was spacious and highly ornamented; and such was the character of the houses at Pompeii. The extreme magnificence of the baths, porticoes, theatres, &c., at Rome, all the world knows. Our author enlarges on this part of the subject. But we will quote a few words upon it from a living English writer:—

'What was the life that Rome bestowed upon her inhabitants? Judge of it by the gift of an emperor to his people; of such gifts there were many in Rome. A vast square, of more than a thousand feet, comprehended within its various courts three great divisions. One contained libraries, picture and sculpture galleries, music halls, and every need for the cultivation of the mind. A second, courts for gymnastics, riding, wrestling, and every bodily exercise. A third, the baths; but how little the word, associated with modern poverty conveys a notion of the thing! There were tepid, vapour, and swimming baths, accompanied with perfumes and frictions, giving to the body an elastic suppleness. [We believe the author has omitted the chief thing conveyed to a Roman by the term, viz., what we now call the Turkish bath, dry heat, producing perspiration.] Then, as to their material: alabaster vied with marble; mosaic pavements, with ceilings painted in fresco; walls were encrusted with ivory, and a softened daylight reflected from mirrors; while on all sides a host of servants were engaged in the various offices of the bath. The afternoon siesta is over; a bell sounds, the thermæ open. There all Rome assembles, to chat, to criticise, to declaim. There is the coffee-house, theatre, exchange, palace, school, museum, parliament, and drawing-room, in one. There is food for the mind, exercise and refreshment for the body. There, if anywhere, the eye can be satisfied with seeing, and the ear with hearing; and every sense and every taste find but a too ready gratification. This feast of intellect, this palace of ancient power and art is open daily, without cost, or for the smallest sum, to every Roman citizen. Private wealth in modern times bestows a few of these gifts on a select number; but poor as well as rich could revel in them, without fear of exhaustion, in this treasure-house of material civilization.'

We have enlarged on the material blessings enjoyed under the Roman Empire, because, as we began by saying, we are convinced that the mass, even of those who have received a classical education, have never sufficiently estimated them. But it is curious, on the other hand, to observe how much the judgment even of the most learned and thoughtful men, whose standard of excellence was merely earthly, has been dazzled when they have allowed themselves seriously to consider them. Gibbon goes so far as to say, 'If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.'

The great poet of the last generation mourns over the fall of Rome—

'Alas! the golden city, and alas!

The trebly kindred triumphs.'

He laments over fallen earthly greatness:

'Dost thou flow,

Old Tiber, through a marble wilderness?

Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress.'

So laments the world over fallen worldly greatness and glory. Our own estimate of the matter is the very opposite. We know, indeed, that the time was coming, and coming apace, in which not only the great city and its empire, but all the greatness and glory of the old heathen world was to be so utterly swept away, that for weeks together the very spot where Rome had once stood remained untrodden by any human foot, and abandoned to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. But in all this we see nothing over which any man need lament, unless, indeed, he esteems mere material prosperity above all that is truly noble and exalted in man. Rather are we disposed to cry out with exultation—

'Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become the habitation of devils, and hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.—The kings of the earth shall bewail over her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas! that great city Babylon, that mighty city,... which was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls.—Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her!'

For, in truth, all this splendour and luxury was not merely associated, but inseparably one with a moral system, by far the most execrable, the most indescribable, the most inconceivable, under which God's earth ever groaned. The morals of the accursed race were far too foul to be described here. They became the wonder and loathing, the byword of contempt even of the heathen barbarians by whom they were surrounded.[5] Lust, not merely unbridled, but wearing out and jading itself to invent new ways of pollution; and cruelty, shedding man's blood like water—these were the very foundations of the gorgeous fabric. Any cure for these evils, except in the total sweeping away of the whole order of society, was, as we shall soon see, utterly hopeless.

First of all, the prosperity which we have described was only the privilege of a favoured class. The mass of the population derived from it no benefit. The whole social system was founded on slavery. The whole domestic service, nay, the manufacturing, and what is to modern ideas far more marvellous, even the intellectual labour, was performed by slaves. It is calculated that in Rome itself the slave population was twice or three times as numerous as the free. These slaves were drawn from races fully equal to their masters in natural gifts, they were often their equals even in culture; and every one of these slaves was by Roman law not a person, but a thing. The male slave was not a man, the female slave not a woman. 'The slave is without rights, without a family, without a God.'[6] The hideous moral pollution which this state of law not merely rendered possible, but consecrated, is defended from exposure in the language of a Christian country by its unutterable, inconceivable foulness; and of the moral system of heathen Rome, as a whole, the same must be said. It is like the beast of the American prairies, which no hunter dare touch because it emits a stench which none can endure. We are well aware that this of necessity prevents our exhibiting this side of the question with anything like justice. Let us thank God that, far as our age has fallen beneath the standard of Christianity, it is still so much pervaded by Christian instincts that no writer, not even the most utterly abandoned in his personal character, would dare to publish to the world what was practised without shame or concealment by men who were esteemed free from reproach and models of virtue. 'It is a shame even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.' Thus much, however, we may say, that the men whom the heathen Romans honoured, not merely for greatness, but especially for virtue, lived without shame in all the horrors described by St. Paul in that terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; and poets, as deeply pervaded as man ever was with a sense of the beautiful, nay, who undertook to be the moral reformers of their age, introduced into the midst of their most delicious strains not mention merely, but praises of things which the moral standard of our age forbids us to mention—even for execration; for these are they of whom the Apostles testifies that 'they not only do such things, but have pleasure in them that do them.'

Neither must we look upon slavery, and the indescribable system of pollution which it sprang from, as an evil accidentally attached to heathen society. It was intimately and essentially mixed with its very life. It is important to observe that, so far as we know, there has never existed upon earth any purely heathen civilized society of which slavery has not been the basis. There is no reason to suppose that if the Roman Empire had continued in all its greatness to the present day, and had continued heathen, slavery would at this hour have been a less essential part of its social and moral system than it was in the days of Nero. Before it could have been abandoned, the whole habits of life of all the free population of the Empire, and especially of Rome, must have been fundamentally changed; and the change must have been such that we can hardly imagine any nation to have been reconciled to it except by some superhuman power; for it would have implied the sacrifice of all the habits of self-indulgence and luxury upon which Roman society was built. It is impossible to suppose that such a change could have been effected, especially because, as far as experience teaches, there never has been any instance of a heathen nation which has begun to fall into decay and has been raised in any degree to a new life. Such a national resurrection is one of the miracles which nothing except Christianity has ever worked.

As to the barbarity of which the slave at Rome was the victim, we might speak with less reserve if our space allowed. But we can devote only a few words to a subject which would fill volumes. We will, then, confine ourselves to suggesting two subjects for the consideration of our readers,—first, the wholesale slaughter, merely for amusement, which was one of the most cherished and universally diffused institutions of Roman society, and was the delight of women as well as men; next the state of the law with regard to slaves, and the manner in which it was administered. The life of a Roman was of course always held subject to the despair of his slaves, and hence it was the law, that if a master was killed by his slave, under whatever circumstances, or for whatever cause, every one of his slaves, male and female, old and young, however manifestly innocent of all complicity in the murder, however without power to have prevented it, was to die upon the cross.[7] Tacitus tells how, in the reign of Nero, even the populace of Rome was horrified at the execution of this law in the case of the 'family,' as it was called, of a man of consular dignity murdered by one of his slaves, it was reported, in consequence of rivalry in a matter of infamous passion, or because the master had received the price of his slave's freedom and then refused to fulfil his engagement by giving him his liberty. His slaves were four hundred in number; among them were not only men and women, but little children, and the matter was brought before the Senate by some who wished to temper in this instance the severity of the law. But the proposal was indignantly rejected by Cassius, a Roman of noble family, and whom the philosophic historian Tacitus expressly praises for his knowledge of the laws of Rome. He argued that although in this case the innocent would perish with the guilty, this must happen even when a legion was punished by decimation, and that if some injustice was committed, it would be outweighed by the public benefit. But his chief argument was the authority of ancestral law:

'Our ancestors were wiser than we. I have often abstained from resisting proposals to dispense with their laws, when I felt that the change would be for the worse, lest I should seem to be carried away by love of my profession. To-day I cannot abstain. They suspected the disposition of their slaves, even when they had been born in the same lands and houses, and bred up in affection for their lords. But since we have begun to have in our families whole nations who have different customs, different religious rites, or none at all, this confused sediment of all peoples can be mastered only by terror.'

His arguments prevailed, and the whole four hundred, men, women, and children, were sent to execution. The indignation of the populace was overawed by soldiers supplied by the Emperor.

We have only indicated, not described the hideous state of Roman society; what is really important is to observe, that man being what he is, this monstrous system of blood and pollution must not be regarded as any accidental evil; it was the natural, we do not hesitate to say, the certain consequence of a high state of wealth, civilization, and refinement in a heathen society. So far as we are aware, there is no record of any heathen nation which has ever attained to such a condition, in which moral corruption has not overflowed all bounds, and in the end destroyed the nation itself. Wealth, leisure, luxury, are of necessity temptations to an easy, indulgent life. To this the experience of Christian nations forbids us to shut our eyes. But in them, however far they may have fallen below the practical standard of Christianity, unless all faith in the supernatural, in the unseen world, in God, and in Christ is wholly extinct, there are always fixed recognised principles upon which to fall back; and there is a part at least of every nation resolved to act on these principles, at all cost and all sacrifice. These are they to whom our blessed Lord said, 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' In a heathen society, on the contrary, when corruption once breaks loose, where is the salt? There may be men like Cato the censor, who believe that the fall of states is usually to be traced, not so much to political as to moral and social causes, and foresee in the decay of morals the ruin of their country. But what are they to do? They may remonstrate, they may argue; but the evil they have to encounter is not in the intellect, but in the will; and the will is exactly that which they have no means of affecting. At Rome, for instance, the danger and evil was not that men denied or doubted that it was only by the stern and self-denying virtues that a State could be preserved, it was that each man for himself preferred indulgence and ease, and despaired of doing anything effectual for the public good, for he felt, very truly, that even if he were, in his own person, to revive all the simplicity and hardness of life of Cincinnatus or Fabricius, he would not be able to change the national habits, or restore to the standard of times gone by. Each, therefore, preferred to praise the rigid virtues of former ages, and to practise the laxity of his own. No man wrote more strongly or more eloquently in praise of ancient manners and in condemnation of modern corruption than Sallust, the historian. Yet no Roman palace equalled in luxury the gardens of Sallust, the man. Nor was any Roman less scrupulous either in getting money or in spending it. What, then, was to be done? The power of passion was real and overpowering; virtue could only oppose to it common-places and fine words, without being able to appeal to any fixed principles or practical sanctions. It was a lamentable state of things, but, as the ancients themselves believed, one which, in the heathen world, followed by a necessary law, whenever any brave, hardy, self-denying, and virtuous race of men, by the natural operation of these virtues, rose to empire, and attained wealth, and the means of luxury. The later Romans held up their own ancestors of early days as the brightest example of virtue. Among them the gods were honoured and worshipped, and the rules which had come down from their fathers were strictly observed. Men were frugal, laborious, content with little, valuing right and honour far above wealth and pleasure, and ever ready to suffer or die for their country; women were chaste, modest, retiring, preferring their honour to their life. That the men and women of their own day were in all respects the opposite, was self-evident; but it is to be observed, that they were so far from considering this to be any special fault or misery of Rome, that even those who most bitterly complained of the change were wont to boast that no other nation had so long resisted the universal law, by which wealth generated luxury, and luxury the desire of increased gain; and this again made money, not honour and virtue, the national standard of right and wrong, until at last, things getting ever worse and worse, society itself was dissolved, and the national life perished. This they considered to be the natural, nay inevitable course of things.[8]

This was a melancholy view of human affairs, but it seems certain that with regard to a heathen state (and they knew of no other) it was true. For to take the case of Rome itself, what sanction was there even in the purest times of the Republic for those rules of right and wrong—those great moral principles, which to a very considerable extent were actually preserved; although, no doubt, men in later times dreamed of a golden age which had never really existed. The only religion they knew was silent about moral virtues. It taught men to honour and worship the gods of their fathers, and to ask and hope from them such worldly blessings as long life, health, &c. But that a man of moral purity, justice, and mercy was a more acceptable worshipper than one who was impure, unjust, and cruel, they never imagined, and indeed, as long as they in any degree believed the traditions which they had received as to the character of the gods they worshipped, it was simply impossible that they should imagine it. There was nothing contrary to the national religion, however men's consciences might tell them that there was something immoral, in the prayer which Horace attributes to one of his contemporaries—'Grant that I may succeed in wearing a mask, that I may be supposed to be just and good. Throw a cloud and darkness over my cheats and frauds.'

Religion, then, gave no moral rule, or at least none to individuals. M. de Champagny ('Les Césars,' iii. p. 4) remarks, with great truth, that so far as it had a moral code at all, that code and its sanctions touched, not the individual man, but the State. Its morality was that of the family, and through the family that of the city. Its object was the prosperity, the glory, the aggrandisement of the public welfare. The Roman virtues—courage in war, moderation in peace, economy in private life, fidelity in marriage, these were patriotic virtues, taught and practised as such.' What, then, was the moral code of the early Romans? It was, as this passage suggests, the fundamental and original law of the Roman people. Arnold well points out[9] that this and this alone was the real moral law of the heathen nations in general. In this sense their only standard of right and wrong was human law; but not exactly what we mean when we speak of human law, because we live in a state of society in which new laws are continually passed; and to imagine that the 'statutes at large' could be the real rule and measure of right and wrong, would go beyond the possible limits of human credulity. But among the ancient nations new laws were comparatively very rare. The Romans themselves had a great system of what Jeremy Bentham used to call 'judge-made law.' This grew to its perfection at rather a late period of the Empire, and still forms the foundation of most of the systems of law existing in Europe. It is not of this, however, that we are speaking. Of what we should call statutes, there were passed in the whole of their history very few. Only 207 in all are recorded as having been enacted in the whole period of the Republic, and of these no less than 133 were passed just at the latest period of its decay.[10] Their greater frequency at this period was considered one of the signs of national degeneracy, for it was a proverb, corruptissimâ republicâ plurimæ leges. In fact, at Rome in its best days there can hardly be said to have existed any machinery for making new statutes. There was, as we understand the word, no legislative assembly. The judicial system out of which grew the code of law to which we have referred already existed; and when it was necessary, one of those grave changes which are known among our kindred on the other side of the Atlantic as 'amendments of the constitution,' could be made by a vote of the whole Roman people. To get one of these passed was often, during the best periods of the Republic, a matter requiring years of furious struggle.

It is not, then, of statutes such as are passed year by year in our Parliament that we are speaking, when we say that the law of the land was the chief code of morals existing in heathen States. Quite distinct from anything of this kind, and more answering to our 'common law,' there were certain great principles of the constitution which had come down to the Romans of the historical period by an immemorial tradition, and which all men believed to have in them something sacred. To touch them was to touch the very life of the Roman people. Such principles there were in all the ancient heathen States, and their sacredness was in each State a fundamental principle as long as it retained any fundamental principles at all. This was, in fact, a necessary part of heathenism itself; for the very essence of polytheism is the belief that each people has its own gods, and, therefore, springing from them, its own traditions of right and wrong. From its own gods each people hoped for blessings and prosperity in its national and corporate capacity. To offend or alienate them was to risk the existence of the civil community, and what was the will of the gods of any particular nation was to be learned from the primitive original tradition of that nation.

Thus, the great principles of the ancient Roman morality, such for instance as the sanctity of marriage, parental authority, and the like, were, in the earlier days of the Republic, so mingled in the notions of a Roman with patriotism, that it was impossible to separate them. Adultery in a Roman matron, incontinence in a vestal virgin, was an act of high treason against the common weal of the Roman people. As such, it was monstrous and terrible to the whole people. Every man, every woman, every child, felt it as much a personal injury, as each would have felt the violation of the temples of their country's gods, or the taking away of the palladium or the ancilia. The instance we have selected was that upon which the Romans themselves felt that the whole stability of their country rested. The sanctity of marriage was the principle of the life of the Roman State. In the worst times a poet, himself licentious, recognised corruption on that point as the main cause of the ruin of the country—

'Fecunda culpæ sæcula nuptias

Primùm inquinavere, et genus, et domos

Hoc fonte derivata clades

In patriam populumque fluxit.'

But it would have been easy to mention other moral offences which in their judgment directly threatened the safety of the common country. Such, for instance, was the breach of a treaty, any outrage offered to the sacred person of an ambassador, or even the removal of ancient landmarks.

Thus it was that, in the earlier state of Roman society, the most important moral principles—not to add that, from their nature, conscience confirmed and enforced the national law and feeling—really had an authority as strong as any human sanction can give. To violate them involved loss of caste, and a great deal more. The offenders were regarded as traitors against their country; the very mention of their names would be the most deadly insult to those who had the misfortune to be allied to them by blood or marriage. They became a proverb of reproach. So terrible was this punishment that the law which gave to a husband power of life or death over a guilty wife, and the feeling of the nation which not only justified him in executing it, but required it of him, hardly added to its severity. The virtues which tends to success in war were also enforced by the circumstances of Rome. A State contained within the walls of a single city and surrounded by cities, many of which were as powerful as itself, and with each of which it was liable to be at war, depended for its very existence upon the courage, bodily strength, and military training of all its citizens; and if the city was overcome in war, each of them was likely enough to be sold as a slave, or at the very best to be reduced to a position something like that of a serf. No wonder that under such circumstances consuls and dictators were content to hold the plough, and esteemed the success and victory of their country far more important to each of them than their possessions or their life.

But when Rome became the head of a widespread empire, the preservation of her early traditions became simply impossible. The contemporaries of Augustus well knew that from war (except, indeed, civil war) they had nothing to fear. The men of a generation earlier were no doubt vexed and provoked by the disastrous defeat of Crassus and the destruction of his army; but their personal comfort, nay, their very pride of superiority to all the world, was no way affected by it. How was it possible that they should really feel like their forefathers,

'When Romans in Rome's quarrel

Spared neither land nor gold,

Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,

In the brave days of old?'

And, as for the more strictly moral traditions of the early Republicans, they were, from their nature, from the very first, of very limited application. Men who had never learned those glorious truths,

'Which sages would have died to learn,

Now taught by cottage dames,'

that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men on the face of the whole earth,' and (as the corollary from this) that 'God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation, he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,' were by no means offended at the supposition that there was a different rule of morality for men of different nations. Why not, as they had different gods? The virtues, then, on which they insisted, were duties, not of man as man to his Creator, but of Romans to Rome. They prized, not the virtue of chastity, but the honour of the Roman matron; not truth and good faith, but the oath to which the gods of Rome were invoked as witnesses. The chastity of a slave or a freedwoman or even a foreigner, was of no value. Men, to whom the Roman was not bound by an oath taken before the gods of his country, had no rights. It was an essential part of this system that men could not, if they would, transplant themselves at will from the allegiance of the gods and of the moral traditions of their fathers to those of another nation. It was on this principle that in the earliest times marriages between citizens of different cities were forbidden, and for the same reason even those between a patrician of Rome and a plebeian.

Now, when many nations were welded together into a single empire, the whole of this tradition broke down. Arnold remarks it as one great political benefit of Christianity, that by 'providing a fixed moral standard independent of human law, it allows human law to be altered, as circumstances may require, without destroying thereby the greatest sanction of human conduct.' What, then, was the situation of a Roman, when the mingling together of all nations had effectually destroyed all idea of the sanctity of the original traditions of any—his own included—and yet he had found no 'moral standard independent' of them. It is not too much to say that he was left without moral standard at all. Patriotism and the tradition of their fathers had become a name to men who could hardly be said to have any 'fatherland,' and whose country was the civilized world, and they had no higher principle to supply their place.

In this utter break-down of all fixed principles which, in a heathen age, necessarily resulted from the substitution of one great empire for a multitude of minute republics; and in the complete isolation in which it left every individual, when he lost the idea of that duty to his country and his country's traditions which had been the moral law of his ancestors, M. de Champagny sees the explanation of the fact, so hard to account for, that men whose fathers had been proud nobles of free and lordly Rome should have submitted as they did to such a tyranny as that of Tiberius. For his was not one of those which are supported by the sword. In Italy he had only about 9,000 men under arms, and even they were scattered in the neighbourhood of the city. Yet the Senate allowed itself to be decimated, its chief members cut off day by day. It seems as if each man thought only of himself, and calculated that although, of course, none could be safe, he was safer by remaining quiet, and taking his chance, than he would be by boldly appealing to the Senate and people to put an end to the protracted massacre, by depriving the tyrant of his power.

The circumstance which, perhaps, is most revolting to our feelings as Englishmen in the tyranny of the bad Emperor is, that it was hardly possible to draw a line between an execution and an assassination. A great man, untried, nay, so far as he knew, unaccused, was suddenly roused from his sleep by the arrival of half a dozen soldiers, who came to put him to death on the spot, or, perhaps, as a great favour, to bring him the commands of the Emperor that he should kill himself. How does this differ from an assassination, except in the assured impunity of the murderers? Yet, so common was it, that when the Emperor Pertinax was suddenly awakened on the night in which Commodus had been slain, by those who brought him the offer of the purple, he took for granted that he was to die. The feelings with which we regard such proceedings have been formed by the immemorial law of our country (which not even Henry VIII., in his wildest excess of tyranny, ever dared to violate, except in a few cases, in which he obtained an Act of Parliament, to authorize its violation)—that no man can be condemned without trial. The Roman law, during the best days of the Republic, carried the notion of 'strong government' farther than even our neighbours in France would like. Within the walls of Rome there was an appeal to the people from the sentence of any magistrate; everywhere else, a consul or other officer holding the 'imperium' might order whom he pleased to be beheaded by his lictors, without trial. This, no doubt, was because, outside the city, the office of a Roman consul was purely military. But this 'martial law' prepared men's minds for the abuse of the same discretion within the city itself by the Cæsars, whose position, as everybody knows, was, legally, only that they were servants of the Republic, privileged to hold a number of offices at the same time, and for years together. They, therefore, naturally inherited and abused the discretion of the old magistrates.

When such power fell into the hands of a Caligula or a Commodus, who would not take the trouble of governing, it was really little more than an entire exemption of the Cæsars from all law and all restraints. The government seems to have gone on throughout the Roman Empire much as usual. But there was in Rome itself one miserable youth, mad with absolute licence, who could with impunity order the murder of any one whom it struck his fancy to destroy, for any cause, or for no cause, or because he was in want of money, and might take the property of any one he was pleased to murder.

It was but for a time comparatively short that this state of things lasted. Still, under the best reigns, one can hardly doubt, that there must have been an uneasy feeling in the mind of the Emperor, as well as of his subjects, that his successor might renew the times of Caligula or Nero. Under the Antonines, perhaps, when there was a long succession of good governors for more than eighty years without interruption, men may have learned to look back on such things as belonging exclusively to a by-gone age. But they were too soon undeceived, after the death of Marcus Aurelius had left the succession open to his unworthy son. Yet the crimes even of the worst of the Cæsars affected Rome, not the world, and, indeed, in Rome itself, almost exclusively a single class—the senators and the rich. They seem, therefore, hardly to have been considered as an interruption of the general felicity of the Pax Romana; any more than an epidemic of cholera in our own days, which for a moment strikes terror upon the city which it attacks, but is forgotten almost as soon as it passes away.

Nothing so effectually blinds even the naturally clearest sight as moral perversion. Over the very soul of Gibbon, strange to say, this Egyptian darkness brooded so thick, that after intelligently studying this vast, pathetic, and most instructive history, the only practical lesson he drew from it was, that the great corruptor of human society is—Peace. He says, 'It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the Empire,' and the effects of this poison he traces in the 'decline of courage and genius, and in general degeneracy.' Strange that he could imagine that war and bloodshed are the only conceivable prophylactics against self-indulgence, luxury, and unmanly sloth. Within the last few months we have had a remarkable proof of the contrary. For fifty years after Waterloo, Prussia enjoyed profound peace. France, to mention no other wars, had a continual school of war in Algeria. Yet, though the French are as brave as the Germans, they have been unable to stand against them for an hour in the present war; because the tone of the governing class and of the army had been undermined by the moral corruption of the Second Empire. Even if war was indispensable, no man knew better than Gibbon that the Roman frontiers were always in a chronic state of war. The lessons really taught by the history of the Roman Empire during the first century and a half, are so plain that one would hardly have thought they could be missed. Here was a great Empire upon which all the best gifts of God, in the purely natural order, had been poured with a lavish hand. It occupied all the fairest, most fruitful, and most illustrious regions of the globe, to which the climate and situation can never fail to attract intelligent travellers from all less favoured countries. The presiding races of that Empire, which gave their character to all the rest, were those whom God had made His instruments to convey to all nations the best gifts of Nature—the Greek, in whom were stored and preserved the richest powers of genius, art, eloquence and philosophy; the Roman, who has been the example and teacher of all nations, in the great principles of stability, law, and order. For the use and enjoyment of this Empire were stored all the accumulated wealth of literature, poetry, learning, philosophy and art, which all ages of the world had produced and treasured up. To complete the whole, it was exempted for generations together from the scourge of war. In one word, it had everything that God could give to man, except the supernatural gifts of Faith, Hope, and Charity. And the result showed, that, without these, all gifts of the natural order, however precious, were unavailing to preserve human society from utter decay and dissolution. It was not broken in pieces by the blows of foreign enemies, but died of its own inherent corruption. The most prominent visible effect of this corruption, which struck the eyes even of heathens, was that man's vices made void the primeval blessing, 'Be fruitful and multiply.' Plutarch, a Greek of the age of Trajan, lamented that all Greece in his day could not supply as many men as one of its smaller cities sent out to war four hundred years earlier. The decline of population in Rome itself was no less rapid and steady. And men died out, not because they were wasted by war, by pestilence, by famine, or by grinding tyranny, but because unrestrained self-indulgence dried up the very sources of increase. If there had been no barbarians to rush in and fill up the void, the Empire would have fallen in pieces for want of life enough to hold it together. Its history proved that the real causes of the ruin of States are not political, but moral and social, and that in nations, as in individuals, the words of the poet are most strictly fulfilled:—

'Thou art the source and centre of all minds,

Their only point of rest, Eternal Word.

From Thee departing they are lost, and rove

At random, without honour, hope, or peace;

From Thee is all that soothes the life of man—

His high endeavour, and his glad success,

His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.

But oh! Thou bounteous Giver of all good,

Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;

Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,

And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'

Art. II.—Theism—Desiderata in the Theistic Argument.

It is a philosophical commonplace that all human questioning leads back to ultimate truths which cannot be further analysed, and of which no other explanation can be given than that they exist. Every explanation of the universe rests and must rest on the inexplicable. The borders of the known and the knowable are fringed with mystery, and all the data of knowledge recede into it by longer or shorter pathways. Thus, while it is the very mystery of the universe that has given rise to human knowledge, by quickening the curiosity of man, it is the same mystery which prescribes a limit to his insight, which continues to overshadow him in his researches, and to girdle him, in his latest discoveries, with its veil. In wonder all philosophy is born; in wonder it always ends: and, to adopt a well-known illustration, our human knowledge is a stream of which the source is hid, and the destination unknown, although we may surmise regarding both.

But the mystery which thus envelopes the origin and the destination of the universe is not absolutely overpowering; nor does it lay an arrest on the human faculties in their efforts to understand that universe as a whole. Man strives to penetrate farther and farther into the shrine of nature, and records in the several sciences the stages of his progress. These sciences are of necessity inter-related and dependent. Each section of human knowledge has a doorway leading into these on either side, and one which opens behind into the region of first principles. Separate inquirers may content themselves with their special region of phenomena and its laws, which they seek to understand more perfectly and to interpret more clearly, and never so beyond their own domain. It is by such division of labour and concentration of aim that the achievements of modern science have been won. But it is only by forsaking the narrow region, and, without entering the borderland of some new science, receding behind it, and contemplating it from a distance, that its value as a contribution to our knowledge of the universe can be discerned. Each of the sciences has its own ideal, but the goal of universal science is the discovery of one ultimate principle which will be explanatory of all observed phenomenon.

And the speculative thinker has a similar aim. The perennial question of philosophy is the discovery of the central principle of Existence, its haunting problem is the ultimate explanation of the universe of being. The universe—what is it? whence is it? whither is it tending? can we know anything beyond the fleeting phenomena of its ever unfolding and ever varying history? Is its source, and therefore its central principle, accessible to our faculties of knowledge?

And this is the distinctive problem of rational theology. Philosophy and science both lead up to theology as the apex of human knowledge. The latter may be fitly called the scientia scientiarum. Questions as to the nature and origin of Life upon our planet, the nature of Force or energy, the problems of Substance and of Cause, the questions of the Absolute and Infinite, all centre in this, are all the several ways of expressing it from the point of view which the questioner occupies, 'What is the ultimate principle of the universe, the ἀρχὴ of all existence?' Speculative philosophy and science deal proximately, it is true, with the problems of finite existence, existence as presented to us in the surrounding universe, and the laws which regulate it; but they covertly imply and remotely lead up to the question we have stated. They are the several approaches to that science which sits enthroned on the very summit of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, the science of speculative theology is as yet lamentably incomplete. We have scores of treatises devoted to the subject, and numerous professed solutions of the problem. But we have not, in the English language, a single treatise which even contemplates a philosophical arrangement and classification of the various theories, actual and possible, upon the subject. It is otherwise with the great questions of intellectual and ethical philosophy. We have elaborate and almost exhaustive schemes of theories on the nature of perception, or our knowledge of the external world, the laws of association, the problem of causality, and the nature of conscience. But we look in vain for any similar attempt to classify the several lines of argument, or possible modes of theistic proof, so as to present a tabular view of the various doctrines on this subject. We are limited to the well-known but precarious scheme of proofs à priori and à posteriori,[11] and to the more accurate classification of Kant, the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological proofs, with his own argument from the moral faculty or practical reason. In addition, we are not aware of any English treatise specially devoted to the history of this branch of philosophical literature, with the exception of a brief essay by Dr. Waterland, in which he traverses a small section of the whole area; and that not as the historian of philosophical opinion, but in the interest of a special theory.[12]

The present condition of 'natural theology' in England is scarcely creditable to the critical insight of the British mind. There has been little earnest grappling with the problem in the light of the past history of opinions; and traditionary stock-proofs have been relied upon with a perilous complacency. The majority of theologians trust to an utterly futile and treacherous argument, from what has long been termed 'final causes,' and when beaten from that field, at once by the rigour of speculative thought and the march of the inductive sciences, the refuge that is taken in the region of our moral nature is scarcely less secure, while the character of the theistic argument from conscience is suffered to remain in the obscurity which still shrouds it.

In the following pages we propose to show the invalidity of some of the popular modes of proof, and to suggest a few desiderata in the future working out of the problem.

It may be useful to preface our criticism by a classification of the various theistic theories, rather as a provisional chart of opinion, than as an exhaustive summary of all the arguments which have been advanced, or of all possible varieties in the mode of proof. Many thinkers, perhaps the majority, and notably the mediæval schoolmen, have combined several distinct lines of evidence; and have occasionally borrowed from a doctrine which they explicitly reject some of the very elements of their argument. They have often forsaken their own theory at a crisis, and not observed their departure from the data on which they profess exclusively to build.

The first class of theories are strictly ontological or ontotheological. They attempt to prove the objective existence of Deity from the subjective notion of necessary existence in the human mind, or from the assumed objectivity of space and time which they interpret as the attributes of a necessary substance.

The second are the cosmological or cosmo-theological proofs. They essay to prove the existence of a supreme self-existent cause from the mere fact of the existence of the world, by the application of the principle of causality. Starting with the postulate of any single existence whatsoever, the world or anything in the world, and proceeding to argue backwards or upwards, the existence of one supreme cause is held to be 'a regressive inference' from the existence of these effects. As there cannot be, it is alleged, an infinite series of derived or dependent effects, we at length reach the infinite or uncaused cause. This has been termed the proof from contingency, as it rises from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute. But the cosmological proof may have a threefold character, according as it is argued: 1. That the necessary is the antithesis of the contingent; or, 2. That because some being now exists, some being must have always existed; or, 3. That because we now exist and have not caused ourselves, some cause adequate to produce us, must also now exist.

A third class of proofs are somewhat inaccurately termed physico-theological, a phrase equally descriptive of them and of those last mentioned. They are rather teleological or teleotheological. The former proof started from any finite existence. It did not scrutinise its character, but rose from it to an absolute cause, by a direct mental leap or inference. This scrutinises the effect, and finds traces of intelligence within it. It detects the presence or the vestiges of mind in the particular effect it examines, viz., the phenomena of the world, and from them it infers the existence of Deity. One branch of it is the popular argument from design, or adaptation in nature, the fitness of means to ends implying, it is said, an architect or designer. It may be called techno-theology, and is variously treated according as the technologist (α) starts from human contrivance and reasons to nature, or (β) starts from nature's products and reasons toward man. Another branch is the argument from the order of the universe, from the types or laws of nature, indicating, it is said, an orderer or law-giver, whose intelligence we thus discern. It is not, in this case, that the adjustment of means to ends proves the presence of a mind that has adjusted these. But the law itself, in its regularity and continuity, implies a mind behind it, an intelligence animating the otherwise soulless universe. It might be termed nomo-theology or typo-theology. Under the same general category may be placed the argument from animal instinct, which is distinct at once from the evidence of design and that of law or typical order. To take one instance: The bee forms its cells, following unconsciously, and by what we term 'instinct,' the most intricate, mathematical, laws. There is mind, there is thought in the process; but whose mind, whose thought? Not the animal's, because it is not guided by experience. The result arrived at is a result which could be attained by man only through the exercise of reason of the very highest order. And the question arises, are we not warranted in supposing that a hidden pilot guides the bee, concealed behind what we call its instinct. We do not, meanwhile, discuss the merit of this argument; but merely indicate the difference between it and the argument from design, and that from law and order. It is not a question of the adjustment of phenomena. It is the demand of the intellect for a cause adequate to account for a unique phenomenon. It approaches the cosmo-theological argument as closely as it approaches the techno-theological one; yet it is different from both. The cosmo-theological rises from any particular effect, and by a backward mental bound reaches an infinite first cause. The techno-theological attempts to rise from the adjustment of means to ends, to an adjuster or contriver. This simply asks, whence comes the mind that is here in operation, perceived by its effects?

The next class of arguments are based upon the moral nature of man. They may be termed in general ethico-theological; and there are, at least, two main branches in this line of proof. The former is the argument from conscience as a moral law, pointing to Another above it; the law that is 'in us, yet not of us'—not the 'autonomy' of Kant, but a theonomy—bearing witness to a legislator above. It is the moral echo within the soul of a Voice louder and vaster without. And, as evidence, it is direct and intuitive, not inferential. The latter is the argument of Kant, (in which he was anticipated by several, notably by Raimund of Sabunde.) It is indirect and inferential, based upon the present phenomena of our moral nature. The moral law declares that evil is punishable and to be punished, that virtue is rewardable and to be rewarded; but in this life they are not so: therefore, said Kant, there must be a futurity in which the rectification will take place, and a moral arbiter by whom it will be effected.

Finally, there is the argument, which, when philosophically unfolded, is the only unassailable stronghold of theism, its impregnable fortress, that of intuition. As it is simply the utterance or attestation of the soul in the presence of the Object which it does not so much discover by searching, as apprehend in the art of revealing itself, it may be called (keeping to the analogy of our former terms) eso-theological or esoterico-theological. It is not an argument, an inference, a conclusion. It is an attestation, the glimpse of a reality which is apprehended by the instinct of the worshipper, and through the poet's vision, as much as by the gaze of the speculative reason. It is not the verdict of one part of human nature, of reason, or the conscience, the feelings, or the affections; but of the whole being, when thrown into the poise or attitude of recognition, before the presence of the self-revealing object. There are several phases of this, which we term the eso-theological proof. We see its most rudimental traces in the polytheism of the savage mind, and its unconscious personification of nature's forces. When this crude conception of diverse powers in partial antagonism gives place to the notion of one central power, the instinct asserts itself in the common verdict of the common mind as to One above, yet kindred to it. It is attested by the feeling of dependence, and by the instinct of worship, which witnesses to some outward object corresponding to the inward impulse, in analogy with all the other instincts of our nature. It is farther attested by the poet's interpretation of nature, the verdict of the great seers, that the universe is pervaded by a supreme Spirit, 'haunted for ever by the eternal mind.' We find its highest attestation in that consciousness of the Infinite itself which is man's highest prerogative as a rational creature. We have thus the following chart of theistic theories.

• I. Onto-theological—
  • 1. From necessary notion to reality.
    • (α) Anselm's proof.
    • (β) Descartes' first argument.
  • 2. From space and time, as attributes to their substance.
• II. Cosmo-theological—
  • 1. Antithetic.
  • 2. Causal.
  • 3. 'Sufficient reason.' (Leibnitz.)
• III. Teleo-theological—
  • 1. Techno-theology.
  • 2. Typo-theology.
  • 3. (Animal instinct.)
• IV. Ethico-theological—
  • 1. Deonto-theological. (direct.)
  • 2. Indirect and inferential. (Kant.)
• V. Eso-theological—
  • 1. The infinite. (Fenelon. Cousin.)
  • 2. The world soul.
  • 3. The instinct of worship.

In addition, we might mention several subsidiary or sporadic proofs which have little or no philosophical relevancy, but which have some theological suggestiveness, viz., 1. The historical consensus. 2. The felicity of the theist. 3. The testimony of revelation.

It is unnecessary to discuss all these alleged proofs at length; but the powerlessness of the most of them to establish the transcendent fact they profess to reach, demands much more serious thought than it has yet received.

The ontological proof has always possessed a singular fascination for the speculative mind. It promises, and would accomplish so much, if only it were valid. It would be so powerful, if only it were conclusive. But had demonstration been possible, the theistic argument, like the proofs of mathematics, would have carried conviction to the majority of thinkers long ago. The historical failure is signal. Whether in the form in which it was originally cast by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, or in the more elaborate theory of Descartes, or as presented by the ponderous English minds of Cudworth, Henry More, and Dr. Samuel Clarke, it is altogether a petitio principii. Under all its modifications, it reasons from the necessary notion of God, to his necessary existence; or from the necessary existence of space and time, which are assumed to be the properties or attributes of a substance, to the necessary existence of that substance. A purely subjective necessity of the reason is carried from within, and held conclusive in the realm of objective reality. But the very essence of the problem is the discovery of a valid pathway by which to pass from the notions of the intellect to the realities of the universe beyond it; we may not, therefore, summarily identify the two, and at the outset take the existence of the one as demonstrative of the other. In the affirmation of real existence we pass from the notion that has entered the mind (or is innate), to the realm of objective being, which exists independently of us who affirm it; and how to pass warrantably from the ideal world within to the real world without is the very problem to be solved. To be valid at its starting-point, the ontological argument ought to prove that the notion of God is so fixed in the very root of our intelligent nature that it cannot be dislodged from the mind; and this some thinkers, such as Clark, have had the hardihood to affirm. To be valid as it proceeds, it ought to prove that the notion thus necessary in thought, has a real counterpart in the realm of things, in order to vindicate the step it so quietly takes from the ideal notion to the world of real existence. It passes from thought to things, as it passes from logical premiss to conclusion. But to be logical, it must rest contented with an ideal conclusion deduced from its ideal premises. And thus, the only valid issue of the ontological argument is a system of absolute idealism, of which the theological corollary is pantheism. But as this is not the Deity the argument essays to reach, it must be pronounced illogical throughout.

Thus the ontological argument identifies the logical and the real. But the illicit procedure in which it indulges would be more apparent than it is to à priori theorists, if the object they imagine they have reached were visible in nature, and apprehensible by the senses. To pass from the ideal to the real sphere by a transcendant act of thought is seen at once to be unwarrantable in the case of sense-perception. In this case, it is the presence of the object that alone warrants the transition, else we should have as much right to believe in the real existence of the hippogriff as in the reality of the horse. But when the object is invisible, and is at the same time the supreme being in the universe, the speculative thinker is more easily deceived. We must, therefore, in every instance ask him, where is the bridge from the notion to the reality? What is the plank thrown across the chasm which separates these two regions, (to use an old philosophical phrase) 'by the whole diameter of being?' We can never, by any vault of logic pass from the one to the other. We are imprisoned within the region of mere subjectivity in all à priori demonstration, and how to escape from it, is (as we said before) the very problem to be solved.

Anselm, who was the first to formulate the ontological proof, argued that our idea of God is the idea of a being than whom we can conceive nothing greater. But inasmuch as real existence is greater than mere thought, the existence of God is guaranteed in the very idea of the most perfect being; otherwise the contradiction of one still more perfect would emerge. The error of Anselm was the error of his age, the main blot in the whole mediæval philosophy. It first seemed to him that reason and instinctive faith were separated by a wide interval. He then wished to have a reason for his faith, cast in the form of a syllogism. And he failed to see, or adequately to understand, that all demonstrative reasoning hangs upon axiomatic truths which cannot be demonstrated, not because they are inferior to reason, but because they are superior to reasoning—the pillars upon which all ratiocination rests. This was his first mistake. Dissatisfied with the data upon which all reasoning hangs, he preferred the stream to the fountain-head, while he thought (contradictory as it is) that by going down the stream he could reach the fountain! But his second mistake was the greater of the two. He confounded the necessities of thought with the necessities of the universe. He passed without a warrant from his own subjective thought to the region of objective reality. And it has been the same with all who have since followed him in this ambitious path. But after witnessing the elaborate tortures to which the mediæval theologians subjected their intellects in the process, we see their powers fail, and the chasm still yawning between the abstract notions of the mind and the concrete facts of the universe. It is remarkable that any of them were satisfied with the accuracy of their reasonings. We can explain it only by the intellectual habit of the age, and the (misread) traditions of the Stagyrite. They made use, unconsciously, of that intuition which carries us across the gulf, and they misread the process by which they reached the other side. They set down to the credit of their intellect what was due to the necessities of the moral nature, and the voice of the heart.

Descartes was the most illustrious thinker, who, at the dawn of modern philosophy, developed the scholastic theism. While inaugurating a new method of experimental research, he nevertheless retained the most characteristic doctrine of mediæval ontology. He argues that necessary existence is as essential to the idea of an all-perfect being, as the equality of its three angles to two right angles is essential to the idea of a triangle. But though he admits that his 'thought imposes no necessity on things,' he contradicts his own admission by adding, 'I cannot conceive God except as existing, and hence it follows that existence is inseparable from him.' In his 'Principles of Philosophy' we find the following argument:—

'As the equality of its three angles to two right angles is necessarily comprised in the idea of the 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 external 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.'—(Pt. i. sec. 14.)

This argument is more formally expounded in his 'Reply to Objections to the Meditations,' thus:—

'Proposition I. The existence of God is known from the consideration of His nature alone. Demonstration: To say that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the concept of a thing, is the same as to say that this attribute is true of this thing, and that it may be affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained in the nature or the concept of God. Hence, it may be with truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists.'

A slight amount of thought will suffice to show that in this elaborate array of argumentation, Descartes is the victim of a subtle fallacy. Our conception of necessary existence cannot include the fact of necessary existence, for (to repeat what we have already said) the one is an ideal concept of the mind, the other is a fact of real existence. The one demands an object beyond the mind conceiving it, the other does not. All that the Cartesian argument could prove would be that the mental concept was necessary, not that the concept had a counterpart in the outer universe. It is, indeed, a necessary judgment that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, because this is an identical proposition; the subject and the predicate are the same, the one being only an expansion of the other. We cannot, therefore, destroy the predicate and leave the subject intact. But it is otherwise when we affirm that any triangular object exists, we may then destroy the predicate 'existence,' and yet leave the subject (the notion of the triangle) intact in the mind.

It is true that Descartes has not limited himself to this futile à priori demonstration. He has buttressed his formal ontology by a much more suggestive though logically as inconclusive an argument. He again reasons thus in his 'Principles:' We have the idea of an all-perfect being in the mind, but whence do we derive it? It is impossible that we can have an idea of anything, unless there be an original somewhere in the universe whence we derive it, as the shadow is the sign of a substance that casts it. But it is manifest that the more perfect cannot arise from the less perfect, and that which knows something more perfect than itself is not the cause of its own being. Since, therefore, we ourselves are not so perfect as the idea of perfection which we find within us, we are forced to believe that this idea in us is derived from a more perfect being above us, and consequently that such a being exists.

It will be observed that this second argument of Descartes is partly cosmological,—though ultimately it merges in the ontological, and falls back upon it for support. Hence, Descartes himself called it an à posteriori argument. And it may therefore serve as a link of connection and transition to the second class of arguments.

But before passing to these, we may observe that all the à priori theorists, professing to conduct us to the desired conclusion on the level road of demonstration (while they all contradict their own principles, and furtively introduce the contingent facts of experience), have but a faint conception of the magnitude of the question at issue. To work out a demonstration as with algebraic formulæ, to contemplate the problem as one of mathematical science, under the light and guidance of the reason alone, and unaided by the moral intuitions, betokens a lack of insight into the very problem in question. The object of which we are in search is not a blank colourless abstraction, or necessary entity. Suppose that a supreme existence were demonstrable, that bare entity is not the God of theism, the infinite Intelligence and Personality, of whose existence the human spirit desires some assurance, if it can be had. And a formal demonstration of a primitive source of existence (more geometrico) is of no theological value. It is an absolute zero, inaccessible alike to the reason and to the heart, before which the human spirit freezes; and as a mere ultimatum its existence is conceded by every philosophic school.

The germs of the cosmological argument (as of the ontological) are found in the scholastic philosophy, though its elaboration was left to the first and second periods of the modern era. Diodorus of Tarsus, John Damascenus, Hugo of St. Victor, and Peter of Poitiers, have each contributed to the development of this mode of proof. It is the argument à contingentia mundi, or ex rerum mutabilitate; and may be briefly stated thus: If the contingent exists, the necessary also exists. I myself, the world, the objects of sense, are contingent existences, and there must be a cause of these, which cause must be also an effect. Go back, therefore, to the cause of that cause, and to its cause again, and you must at length pause in the regress; and by rising to a First Clause, you escape from the contingent and reach the necessary. From the observation of the manifold sequences of nature you rise to the causal fountain-head, as you cannot travel backwards for ever along an infinite line of dependent sequences.

But this argument is as illusory as the ontological one, from which, indeed, it borrows its strength, and of which it shares the weakness. For why should we ever pause in the regressive study of the phenomena of the universe, of which we only observe the slow evolution through immeasurable time? How do we reach a fountain-head at all? We are not warranted in saying that because we cannot think out an endless regress of infinite antecedents, therefore we must assume a first cause. For that assumption of the ἀρχὴ, of an uncaused cause, when we have wearied ourselves in mounting the steps of the ladder of finite agency, is to the speculative reason equally illicit as is its assumption while we are standing on the first round of the ladder. Why should we not assume it, step over to it at the first, if we may do so, or are compelled to do so, at the last? The argument starts from the concrete and works its way backward along the channel of the concrete, till it turns round, bolts up, takes wing, and 'suddenly scales the height.' The speculative reason at length essays to cross over the chasm between the long series of dependent sequences, and the original or uncreated cause; but it does so furtively. It crosses over by an unknown path to an unknown source, supposed to be necessary.

But again, what light is cast by this ambitious regress on the nature of the fountain-head. How is the being we are supposed to have reached at length, the source of that series of effects which are supposed to have sprung from his creative fiat? If we experienced a difficulty in our regress in connecting the last link of the chain with the causa causans, we experience the same or a counter-difficulty in our descent, in connecting the first link of the chain with the creative energy. And how, it may be asked, do we connect that supreme cause with intelligence, or with personality? We have called the assumption of this ἀρχὴ a leap in the dark, and we ask how can we ever escape from the phenomenal series of effects which we perceive in nature, to the noumenal source of which we are in search? By the observation of what is or what has been, we merely ascend backwards in time, through the ever-changing forms of phenomenal energy (our effects being but developed causes, and our causes potential effects), but we never reach a noumenal source. That is reserved for the flight of the speculative reason vainly soaring into the empyrean, beyond the very atmosphere of thought.

The admission that some kind of being or substance must have always existed in the universe, is the common property of all the systems of philosophy. Materialist and idealist, theist and atheist, alike admit it, but its admission is theologically worthless. 'The notion of a God,' says Sir William Hamilton, in his admirable manner, 'is not contained in the notion of a mere first cause; for, in the admission of a first cause, atheist and theist are as one.' The being that is assumed to exist is, therefore, a mere blank essence, a zero, an 'everything = nothing,' so far as this argument can carry us. Nature remains a fathomless abyss, telling us nothing of its whence and whither. It is still the fountain-head of inscrutable mystery, which overshadows and overmasters us. The natura naturata casts no light on the natura naturans. The systole and diastole of the universe goes on; the flux and reflux of its phenomena are endless. That something always was, every one admits. The question between the rival philosophic schools is as to what that something was and is. We may choose to call it 'the first cause,' (an explanation which implies that our notion of endless regression has broken down) and we may say that we have reached the notion of an uncaused cause. But is that a notion at all? Is it intelligible, conceivable? Do we not, in the very assumption, bid farewell to reason, and fall back on some form of faith?

Finally, the moment that supposed cause is reached, does not the principle that was supposed to bring us to it break down? And by thus destroying the bridge behind us, the very principle of casuality which was valid in our progress and ascent, valid in the limited area of experience—now emptied of all philosophical meaning when we desert experience and rise to the transcendental—invalidates the whole series of effects which are supposed to have sprung from it? We need not rise above any single event, contingent and finite, to any other event as the proximate cause of it; if, when we have essayed to carry out the regress, we stop short, and, crying εὕρηκα, congratulate ourselves that we have at length reached an uncaused cause.

Thus when the cosmological theorist asks: Does the universe contain its own cause within itself? and answering in the negative, asserts that it must therefore have sprung from a supra-mundane source, we may validly reply, may it not have been eternal? May not its history be but the ceaseless evolution, the endless transformation of unknown primeval forces? So far as this argument conducts us, we affirm that it may. And to pass from the present contingent state of the universe to its originating source, the theorist must make use of the ontological inference, of which we have already indicated the double flaw. There is one point of affinity between all forms of the cosmological and ontological arguments. They all profess to reach a necessary conclusion. They are not satisfied with the contingent or the probable. But the notion of necessity is a logical notion of the intellect. It exists in thought alone. Whoever, therefore, would escape from that ideal sphere must forego the evidence of necessity. Real existence is not and never can be synonymous with necessary existence. For necessary existence is always ideal. It is reached by a formal process. It is the product of pure thought.

But the teleological argument is that which has been most popular in England. It has carried (apparent) conviction to many minds that have seen the futility of the à priori processes of proof. It is the stock argument of British 'natural theology;' in explanation and defence of which volume upon volume has been written. It is, as Kant remarked, 'the oldest, the clearest, and the most adapted to the ordinary human reason.' Nevertheless, its failure is the more signal, considering that its reputation has been so great, and its claim so vast. The argument has at least three branches, to which we have already referred. We confine ourselves meanwhile to the first of the three, the techno-theological argument, or that which reasons from the phenomena of design.

Stated in brief compass, that argument amounts to the following inference. We see marks of adaptation, of purpose, or of foresight in the objects which, as we learn from experience, proceed from the contrivance of man. We see similar marks of design or adaptation in nature. We are therefore warranted in inferring a world-designer; and from the indefinite number of these an infinite designer; and from their harmony His unity. Or thus,—we see the traces of wise and various purpose everywhere in nature. But nature could not of herself have fortuitously produced this arrangement. It could not have fallen into such harmony by accident. Therefore the cause of this wise order cannot be a blind, unintelligent principle, but must be a free and rational mind. The argument is based upon analogy (and might be termed analogical as strictly as technological). It asserts that because mind is concerned in the production of those objects of art which bear the traces of design, therefore a resembling mind was concerned in the production of nature.

The objections to this mode of proof are indeed 'legion.' In the first place, admitting its validity so far, it falls short of the conclusion it attempts and professes to reach. For,

1. The effects it examines, and from which it infers a cause, are finite, while the cause it assumes is infinite; but the infinity of the cause can be no valid inference, from an indefinite number of finite effects. The indefinite is still the finite; and we can never perform the intellectual feat of educing the infinite from the finite by any multiplication of the latter. It has been said by an acute defender of the teleological argument, that the number of designed phenomena (indefinitely vast) with which the universe is filled, is sufficient to suggest the infinity of the designing cause. And it may be admitted that it is by the ladder of finite designs that we rise to some of our grandest conceptions of divine agency; but this ascent and survey are only possible after we have discovered from some other source that a divine being exists. The vastest range of design is of no greater validity than one attested instance of it, so far as proof is concerned. It is not accumulation, but relevancy of data that we need. But,

2. At the most we only reach an artificer or protoplast, not a creator,—one who arranged the phenomena of the world, not the originator of its substance,—the architect of the cosmos, not the maker of the universe. Traces of mind discoverable amid the phenomena of the world cast no light upon the fact of its creation, or the nature of its source. There is no analogy between a human artificer arranging a finite mechanism, and a divine creator originating a world; nor is there a parallel between the order, the method, and the plan of nature, and what we see when we watch a mechanician working according to a plan to produce a designed result. The only real parallel would be our perception by sense of a world slowly evolving from chaos according to a plan previously foreseen. From the product you are at liberty to infer a producer only after having seen a similar product formerly produced. But the product which supplies the basis of this argument is unique and unparalleled, 'a singular effect,' in the language of Hume, whose reasoning on this point has never been successfully assailed. And the main difficulty which confronts the theist, and which theism essays to remove, is precisely that which the consideration of design does not touch, viz., the origin and not the arrangements of the universe. The teleological analogy is therefore worthless. There is no parallel, we repeat, between the process of manufacture, and the product of creation, between the act of a carpenter working with his tools to construct a cabinet, and the evolution of life in nature. On the contrary, there are many marked and sharply defined contrasts between them. In the latter case there is fixed and ordered regularity, no deviation from law; in the former contingency enters, and often alters and mars the work. Again, the artificer simply uses the materials, which he finds lying ready to hand in nature. He detaches them from their 'natural' connections. He arranges them in a special fashion. But in nature, in the successive evolution of her organisms there is no detachment, no displacement, no interference or isolation. All things are linked together. Every atom is dependent on every other atom, while the organisms seem to grow and develop 'after their kind' by some vital force, but by no manipulation similar to the architect's or builder's work. And yet again, in the one case, the purpose is comprehensible—the end is foreseen from the beginning. We know what the mechanician desires to effect; but in the other case we have no clue to the 'thought' of the architect. Who will presume to say that he has adequately fathomed the purposes of nature in the adjustment of one of her phenomena to another? But,

3. The only valid inference from the phenomena of design would be that of a phenomenal first cause. The inference of a personal Divine Agent or substance from the observation of the mechanism of the universe is invalid. What link connects the traces of mind which are discerned in nature (those vestigia animi) with an agent who produced them? There is no such link. And thus the divine personality remains unattested. The same may be said of the divine unity. Why should we rest in our inductive inference of one designer from the phenomena of design, when these are so varied and complex? Or grant that in all that we observe a subtle and pervading 'unity' is found, and as a consequence all existing arrangements point to one designer, why may not that Demiurgos have been at some remote period himself designed? And so on ad infinitum.

But, in the second place, not only is the argument defective (admitting its validity so far as it goes), even partial validity cannot be conceded to it. The phenomena of design not only limit us to a finite designer, not only fail to lead us to the originator of the world, or to a personal first cause, but they confine us within the network of observed designs, and do not warrant faith in a being detached from or independent of these designs, and therefore able to modify them with a boundless reserve of power. These designs only suggest mechanical agency, working in fixed forms, according to prescribed law. In other words, the phenomena of the universe which distantly resemble the operations of man, do not in the least suggest an agent exterior to themselves. We are not intellectually constrained to ascribe the arrangement of means to ends in nature to anything supra-mundane. Such constraint would proceed from our projecting the shadow of ourselves within the realm of nature, and investing it with human characteristics, a procedure for which we have no warrant. Why may not the arrangements of nature be due to a principle of life imminent in nature, the mere endless evolution and development of the world itself? We observe that phenomenon A fits into phenomena B, C, and D, and we therefore infer that A was fitted to its place by an intelligent mind. But suppose that A did not fit into B, C, or D, it might in some way unknown fit into X, Y, or Z,—it would in any case be related to its antecedent and consequent phenomena. But our perception of the fitness or relationship gives us no information beyond the fact of fitness. Any other (larger) conclusion is illegitimate.

It is often asserted that the phenomenal changes which we observe in nature, bear witness to their being effects. But what are effects? Transformed causes, modified by the transformation—mere changed appearances. We see the effects of volitional energy in the phenomena which our consciousness forces us to trace back to our own personality as the producing cause. But where do we see in nature, in the universe, phenomena which we are similarly warranted in construing as the effects of volitional energy, or of constructive intelligence? We are not conscious of the power of creation, nor do we perceive it. We have never witnessed the construction of a world. We only perceive the everlasting flux and reflux of phenomena, the ceaseless pulsation of nature's life,—evolution, transformation, birth, death, and birth again. But nature is herself dumb as to her whence or whither. And, as we have already hinted, could we detect a real analogy between the two, we are not warranted in saying that the constructive intelligence which explains the one class of phenomena is the only possible explanation of the other.[13]

And thus it is that no study of the arrangements and disposition of the mechanism can carry us beyond the mechanism itself. The teleological argument professes to carry us above the chain of natural sequence. It proclaims that those traces of intelligence everywhere visible hint that long ago mind was engaged in the construction of the universe. It is not that the phenomena 'give forth at times a little flash, a mystic hint' of a living will within or behind the mechanism, a personality kindred to that of the artificer who observes it. With that we should have no quarrel. But the teleological argument is said to bring us authentic tidings of the origin of the universe. If it does not carry us beyond the chain of dependent sequence it is of no value. Its advocates are aware of this, and assert that it can thus carry us beyond the adamantine links. But this is precisely what it fails to do. It can never assure us that those traces of intelligence to which it invites our study, proceeded from a constructive mind detached from the universe; or that, if they did, another mind did not fashion that mind, and so on ad infinitum. And thus the perplexing puzzle of the origin of all things remains as insoluble as before.

But farther, the validity of the teleological argument depends upon the accuracy of our interpretation of those 'signs of intelligence' of which it makes so much, and which it interprets analogically in the light of human nature. But the 'interpreter' is ever 'one among a thousand.' Who is to guarantee to us that we have not erred as to the meaning of Nature's secret tracery? Who is to secure us against inerrancy in this? Before we deduce so weighty a conclusion from data so peculiar, we must obtain some assurance that no further insight will disallow the interpretation we have given. But is not this presumptuous in those who are acquainted in a very partial manner with the significance of a few of nature's laws? Who will presume to say that he has penetrated to the meaning of any one of these laws? And, if he has not done so, can he validly single out a few resemblances he has detected, and explain the nature of the infinite, by a sample of the finite? Nature is so inscrutable that, even when a law is discerned, the scientific explorer will not venture to say that he has read its character, so as to be sure that the law reflects the ultimate meaning of the several phenomena it explains. Nay, is he not convinced that other and deeper meanings must lie within them? A law of nature is but the generalized expression of the extent to which our human insight has as yet extended into the secret laboratory of her powers. But as that insight deepens, our explanations change. We say the lower law is resolved back into a higher one, the more detailed into the more comprehensive. But if our scientific conceptions themselves are thus constantly changing, progressing, enlarging, how can we venture to erect our natural theology on the surface interpretation of the fleeting phenomena of the universe? 'Lo, these are a part of His ways, but how little a portion is known of Him!'

And this conclusion we advance against those who as dogmatically deny that there can be any resemblance between the forces of nature as a revelation of the Infinite, and the volitional energy of man. Both assumptions are equally arbitrary and illegitimate. We shall shortly endeavour to show on what grounds (remote from teleology) we are warranted in believing that a resemblance does exist.

But, to return, if the inference from design is valid at all, it must be valid everywhere—all the phenomena of the world must yield it equally. No part of the universe is better made than any other part. Every phenomenon is adjusted to every other phenomenon nearly or remotely as means to ends. Therefore, if the few phenomena which our teleologists single out from the many are a valid index to the character of the source whence they have proceeded, everything that exists must find its counterpart in the divine nature. If we are at liberty to infer an Archetype above from the traces of mind beneath, must not the phenomena of moral evil, malevolence, and sin be on the same principle carried upwards by analogy?—a procedure which would destroy the notion of Deity which the teleologists advocate. If we are at liberty to conclude that a few phenomena which seem to us designed, proceed from and find their counterpart in God, reason must be shown why we should select a few and pass over other phenomena of the universe. In other words, if the constructor of the universe designed one result from the agency which he has established, must he not have designed all the results that actually emerge; and if the character of the architect be legitimately deduced from one or a few designs, must we not take all the phenomena which exist to help out our idea of his character? Look, then, at these phenomena as a whole. Consider the elaborate contrivances for inflicting pain, and the apparatus so exquisitely adjusted to produce a wholesale carnage of the animal tribes. They have existed from the very dawn of geologic time. The whole world teems with the proofs of such intended carnage. Every organism has parasites which prey upon it; and not only do the superior tribes feed upon the inferior (the less yielding to the greater), but the inferior prey at the very same time no less remorselessly upon the superior. If, therefore, the inference of benevolence be valid, the inference of malevolence is at least equally valid: and as equal and opposite, the one notion destroys the other.

But lastly, while we are philosophically impelled to consider all events as designed, if we interpret one as such, nay, to believe that the exact relation of every atom to every other atom in the universe has been adjusted in 'a pre-established harmony,' the moment we do thus universalize design, that moment the notion escapes us, is emptied of all philosophical meaning or theological relevancy. Let it be granted that phenomenon A is related to phenomenon B, as means to an end. Carry out the principle (as philosophy and science alike compel us to do), and consider A as related by remoter adaptation to all the other phenomena of the universe; in short, regard every atom as interrelated to every other atom, every change as co-related to every other change; then the notion of design breaks down, from the very width of the area it covers. We can understand a finite mechanician planning that a finite phenomenon shall be related to another finite phenomenon so as to produce a desired result; but if the mechanician himself be a designed phenomenon, and all that he works upon be equally so, every single atom and every individual change being subtilly interlaced and all reciprocally dependent, then the very notion of design vanishes. Seemingly valid on the limited area of finite observation and of human agency, it disappears when the whole universe is seen to be one vast network of interconnected law and order.

Combining this objection with what may seem to be its opposite, but is really a supplement to it, we may again say, that we, who are a part of the universal order, cannot pronounce a verdict as to the intended design of the parts, till able to see the whole. If elevated to a station whence we could look down on the entire mechanism, if outside of the universe (a sheer impossibility to the creature), we might see the exact bearing of part to part, and of link with link, so as to pronounce with confidence as to the intention of the contriver. If, like the wisdom of which Solomon writes, any creature had been with the Almighty 'in the beginning of His way, before His works of old, set up from everlasting, or even the earth was;' had a creature been with Him 'when as yet He had not made the world, when He prepared the heavens, and gave His decree' to the inanimate and animated worlds as they severally arose, he might be able to understand the meaning of their creation. And yet the moment this knowledge was gained, the value of the perception would disappear; because 'being as God,' he should no longer require the circuitous report or inference.

Thus the teleological argument must be pronounced fallacious. It is illusive as well as incomplete: and were we to admit its relevancy, it would afford no basis for worship, or the recognition of the object it infers. The conception of deity as a workman, laying stress upon the notion of cleverness in contrivance, and subordinating moral character to skill, would never lead to reverence, or the adoration of the architect.

It must be conceded, however, that there is a subsidiary value in this as in all the other arguments, even while their failure is most conspicuous. They prove (as Kant has shown) that if they cannot lead us to the reality we are in search of, the phenomena of nature cannot discredit its existence. They do not turn the argument the other way, or weight the scales on the opposite side. They are merely negative, and indeed clear the ground for other and more valid modes of proof.

They are of farther use (as Kant has also shown) in correcting our conceptions of the Divine Being, when from other sources we have learned his existence, in defining and enlarging our notions of his attributes. They discourage and disallow some unworthy conceptions, and enlarge the scope of others. But to leave those celebrated lines of argument which have gathered around them so much of the intellectual strife of rival philosophies, it is needful now to tread warily when we are forced to come to so decided a conclusion against them.

We do not deny that the idea of God exists in the human mind as one of its ultimate and ineradicable notions: we only dispute the inference which ontology has deduced from its existence there. We do not deny that by regressive ascent from finite sequences we are at length constrained to rest in some causal fountain-head; we only dispute the validity of the process by which that fountain-head is identified with the absolute source of existence, and that source of existence with a personal God. We do not deny the presence of design in nature when by that term is meant the signs or indices of mind in the relation of phenomena to phenomena as means to ends; we only assert that these designs have no theistic value, and are only intelligible after we have discovered the existence of a supreme mind within the universe, from another and independent source. Till then the book of nature presents us only with blank, unilluminated pages. Thereafter it is radiant with the light of design, full of that mystic tracery which proclaims the presence of a living will behind it. To a mind that has attained to the knowledge or belief in God, it becomes the 'garment it thereafter sees Him by,' as one might see a pattern issuing from a loom while the weaver was concealed, and infer some of the designs of the workman from the characteristics of his work.

The remaining lines of proof, followed, though not worked out in the past, are the intuitional and the moral. And it is by a combination of the data from which they spring and a readjustment of their respective parts and harmonies, that the foundations of theism can alone be securely laid. As the evidence of intuition is of greatest value, and is also most generally disesteemed, we shall take its testimony first, and examine the moral evidence of conscience afterwards.

The modern spirit is suspicious of the evidence of intuition. It is loudly proclaimed on all sides by the teachers of positive science that instinct is a dubious guide, liable to the accidents of chance interpretation, variously understood by various minds; that in following it we may be pursuing an ignis fatuus; that it is at best only valid for the individual who may happen to feel its force; that it is not a universal endowment (as it should be if trustworthy), but often altogether wanting; and that it can never yield us certainty, because its root is a subjective feeling or conviction, which cannot be verified by external test. These charges cannot be ignored, or lightly passed over. And for the theist merely to proclaim, as an ultimate fact, that the human soul has an intuition of God, that we are endowed with a faculty of apprehension of which the correlative object is divine, will carry no conviction to the atheist. Suppose that he replies, 'This intuition may be valid evidence for you, but I have no such irrepressible instinct; I see no evidence in favour of innate ideas in the soul, or of a substance underneath the phenomena of nature of which we can have any adequate knowledge;' we may close the argument by simple re-assertion, and vindicate our procedure on the ground that in the region of first principles there can be no farther proof. We may also affirm that the instinct being a sacred endowment, and delicate in proportion to the stupendous nature of the object it attests, it may, like every other function of the human spirit, collapse from mere disuse. But if we are to succeed in even suggesting a doubt in the mind of our opponent as to the accuracy of his analysis, we must verify our primary belief, and exhibit its credentials so far as that is possible. We must show why we cannot trace its genealogy farther back, or resolve it into simpler elements, and we must not keep its nature shrouded in darkness, but disclose it so far as may be. This, then, is our task.

The instinct to which we make our ultimate appeal is in its first rise in the soul, crude, dim, and inarticulate. Gradually it shapes itself into greater clearness, aided, in the case of most men, by the myriad influences of religious thought and of historical tradition,—heightening and refining it when educed, but not creating it; separating the real gold from any spurious alloy it may have contracted. Like all our innate instincts this one is at first infantile, and, when it begins to assert itself, it prattles rather than speaks coherently. We do not here raise the general question of the existence of à priori principles. We assume that the mind is not originally an abrasa tabula, but the endowments with which it starts are all gifts in embryo. They are not full-formed powers, so much as the capacities and potentialities of mental life. Their growth to maturity is most gradual, and the difference between their adult and their rudimentary phases is as wide as is the interval between a mature organization and the egg from which it springs. It is therefore no evidence against the reality or the trustworthiness of the intuition to which we appeal, that its manifestations are not uniform, or that it sometimes seems absent in the abnormal states of consciousness, or among the ruder civilizations of the world. We admit that it is difficult for the uninitiated to trace any affinity between its normal and its abnormal manifestations, when it is modified by circumstances to any extent. We farther admit that while never entirely absent, it may sometimes seem to slumber not only in stray individuals, but in a race or an era, and be transmitted from generation to generation in a latent state. It may hybernate, and then awake as from the sleep of years, arising against the will of its possessor and refusing to be silenced. Almost any phenomenon may call it forth, and no single phenomenon can quench it. It is the spontaneous utterance of the soul in presence of the object whose existence it attests, and as such it is necessarily prior to any act of reflection upon its character, validity, or significance. Reflex thought, which is the product of experience, cannot in any case originate an intuition, or account for those phenomena which we may call by that name, supposing them to be delusive. Nothing in us, from the simplest instinct to the loftiest intuition, could in any sense create the object it attests, or after which it seeks and feels. And all our ultimate principles, irreducible by analysis, simply attest and assert.

The very existence of the intuition of which we now speak is itself a revelation, because pointing to a Revealer within or behind itself. And however crude in its elementary forms, it manifests itself in its highest and purest state at once as an act of intelligence and of faith. It may be most fitly described as a direct gaze by the inner eye of the spirit, into a region over which mists usually brood. The great and transcendant Reality it apprehends lies evermore behind the veil of phenomena. It does not see far into that reality, yet it grasps it, and recognises in it 'the open secret' of the universe. This, then, is the main characteristic of the theistic intuition. It proclaims a supreme Existence without and beyond the mind, which it apprehends in the act of revealing itself. It perceives through the vistas of phenomenal sequence, as through breaks in the cloud, the glimpses of a Presence which it can know only in part, but which it does not follow in the dark, or merely infer from its obscure and vanishing footprints. Unlike the 'necessary notion' of the Cartesian school, unlike the space and time which are but subjective forms of thought, unlike the 'regressive inference' from the phenomena of the world, the conclusion it reaches is not the creation of its own subjectivity. The God of the logical understanding, whose existence is supposed to be attested by the necessary laws of the mind, is the mere projected shadow of self. It has no more than an ideal significance. The same may be said, with some abatements, of the being whose existence is inferred from the phenomena of design. The ontologist and the teleologist unconsciously draw their own portrait, and by an effort of thought project it outwards on the canvass of infinity. The intuitionalist, on the other hand, perceives that a revelation has been made to him, descending as through an opened cloud, which closes again. It is 'a moment seen, then gone;' for while we are always conscious of our contact with the natural, we are less frequently aware of the presence of the supernatural.

The difference between the evidence of intuition and the supposed warrant of the other proofs we have reviewed is apparent. It is one thing to create or evolve (even unconsciously) a mental image of ourselves which we vainly attempt to magnify to infinity, and thereafter worship the image that our minds have framed; it is another to discern for a moment an august Presence, other than the human, through a break in the clouds which usually veil Him from our eyes. And it is to the inward recognition of this self-revealing object that the theist makes appeal. What he discerns is at least not a 'form of his mind's own throwing;' while his knowledge is due not to the penetration of his own finite spirit, but to the condescension of the infinite.

But we admit that this intuition is not naturally luminous. It is the presence of the transcendant Object which makes it luminous.[14] Its light is therefore fitful. It is itself rather an eye than a light; (a passive organ, rather than an active power); and when not lit up by light strictly supra-natural,—because emanating from the object it discerns,—it is dull and lustreless. The varying intelligence it reports of that object, corresponds to the changing perceptions of the human eye in a day of alternate gloom and sunlight. It is itself a human trust which ripens gradually into a matured belief, rather than a clear perception, self-luminous from the first.

It may be needful, however, as the evidence of our intuitions is so generally suspected, to examine a little more fully into the credentials of this one, in common with all its allies.

Our knowledge of the object which intuition discloses is at first, in all cases, necessarily unreflective. In the presence of that object, the mind does not double back upon itself, to scrutinise the origin and test the accuracy of the report that has reached it. And thus the truth which it apprehends is at first only presumptive. It remains to be afterwards tested by reflection, that no illusion be mistaken for reality. What, then, are the tests of our intuitions?[15]

The following seem sufficient criteria of their validity and truthworthiness. 1. The persistence with which they appear and reappear after experimental reflection upon them, the obstinacy with which they reassert themselves when silenced, the tenacity with which they cling to us. 2. Their historical permanence; the confirmation of ages and of generations. The hold they have upon the general mind of the race is the sign of some 'root of endurance' planted firmly in the soil of human nature. If 'deep in the general heart of men, their power survives,' we may accept them as true, or interpret them as a phase of some deeper yet kindred truth, of which they are the popular distortion. 3. The interior harmony which they exhibit with each other, and with the rest of our psychological nature; each of the intuitions being in harmony with the entire circle, and with the whole realm of knowledge. If any alleged intuition should come into collision with any other and disturb it, there would be good reason for suspecting its genuineness; and in that case the lower and less authenticated must always yield to the higher and better attested. But if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. 4. If the results of its action and influence are such as to elevate and etherealize our nature, its validity may be assumed. This is no test by itself, for an erroneous belief might for a time even elevate the mind that held it; as the intellectual life evoked by many of the erroneous theories and exploded hypotheses of the past has been great. But no error could do so permanently. No illusion could survive as an educative and elevating power over humanity; and no alleged instinct could sustain its claim, and vindicate its presumptive title, if it could not stand the test we mention. A theoretic error is seen to be such when we attempt to reduce it to practice; as a hidden crack or fissure in a metal becomes visible when a strain is applied, or the folly of an ideal Utopia is seen in the actual life of a mixed commonwealth. Many of those scientific guesses which have served as good provisional hypotheses, have been abandoned in the actual working of them out, and so the flaw that lurks within an alleged intuition, (if there be a flaw) will become apparent when we try to apply it in actual life, and take it as a regulative principle in action. Thus, take the belief in the Divine existence, attested, as we affirm, by intuition, and apply it in the act of worship or adoration. Does that belief (which fulfils the conditions of our previous tests,—for it appears everywhere and clings tenaciously to man, and comes into collision with no other normal tendency of our nature, or defrauds any instinct of its due) does it elevate the nature of him who holds it? The reply of history is conclusive, and its attestation is abundantly clear. The power of the theistic faith over the rest of human nature is such that it has quickened the other faculties into a more vigorous life. Its moral leverage has been vast, while it has sharpened the æsthetic sense to some of its most delicate perceptions, and in some instances brought a new accession of intellectual power. The intuition which men trust in the dark, gradually leads the whole nature towards the light. Its dimness and its dumbness are exchanged for clearness and an intelligible voice; and while it thus grows luminous, it gains new power, and our confidence in its verdict strengthens.

We have now stated what seems to us the general nature of the theistic intuition, and added one or two criteria by which all intuitions must be tested. It remains that we indicate more precisely the phases which it assumes; and the channels in which it works. Though ultimate and insusceptible of analysis, it has a triple character. It manifests itself in the consciousness which the human mind has of the Infinite (an intellectual phase); in its perception of the world-soul, which is Nature's 'open secret' revealed to the poet (an æsthetic phase); and in the act of worship, in which an object correlative to the worshipper is revealed in his very sense of dependence (a moral and religious phase).

It is not only essential to the validity of the theistic intuition that the human mind has a positive though imperfect knowledge of the infinite, but the assertion of this is involved in the very intuition itself. If we had no positive knowledge of the source it seeks to reach, the instinct, benumbed as by an intellectual frost, and unable to rise, would be fatally paralysed; or if it could move along its finite area, it would wander helplessly, feeling after its object, 'if haply it might find it.' And it will be found that all who deny the validity of our intuition, either limit us to the knowledge of phenomena, or while admitting that we have a certain knowledge of finite substance adopt the cold theory of nescience. From the earliest Greek schools, or from the earlier speculation of the Chinese mind, a powerful band of thinkers have denied to man the knowledge of aught beyond phenomena, and from Confucius to Comte the list is an ample one. In our own day this school includes some of the clearest and subtilest minds devoted to philosophy. Comte, Lewes, Mill, Mr. Bain, Herbert Spencer, and the majority of our best scientific guides (however they differ in detail) agree in the common postulate that all that man can know, and intelligibly reason about, are phenomena, and the laws of these phenomena, 'that which doth appear.' There is, however, a positivist 'religion,' which consists now in the worship of phenomena, and again in homage paid to mystery, to the unknown and the unknowable which lies beyond the known. Comte deified man and nature, in their phenomenal aspects, without becoming pantheist; and the instinct of worship though outlawed from his philosophy (which denies the existence of its object), asserted itself within his nature—at least in the second period of his intellectual career—and led him not only to deify humanity, but to prescribe a minute and cumbrous ritual, as puerile as it is inconsistent. It is true that worship is philosophically an excrescence on his system. The advanced secularist who disowns it is logically more consistent with the first principle of positivism. To adore the grande être as personified in woman is as great a mimicry of worship as to offer homage to the law of gravitation. Comte, says his acutest critic, 'forgot that the wine of the real Presence was poured out, and adored the empty cup.' But we may note in this latter graft upon his earlier system a testimony to the operation of that very intuition which positivism disowns; its uncouth form, when distorted by an alien philosophy, being a more expressive witness to its irrepressible character.

Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, with some of our scientific teachers, bids us bow down before the unknown and unknowable power which subsists in the universe. The highest triumph of the human spirit, according to him, is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, and then to worship the dark abyss of the inscrutable beyond them. But there is surely neither humility nor sanity in worshipping darkness, any more than there would be in erecting an altar to chaos: and the advice seems strange coming from those who claim to be the special teachers of clear knowledge and comprehensible law. If we must at length erect an altar at all, we must have some knowledge of the existence to whom it is erected, and have some better reason for doing so than the blank and bland confession that we have not the smallest idea of its nature! Mr. Spencer undertakes to 'reconcile' the claims of science and religion; and he finds the rallying-point to be the recognition of mystery, into which all knowledge recedes. But if religion has any function, and a reconciliation between her and science be possible, the harmony cannot be effected by first denying the postulate from which religion starts, and quietly sweeping her into the background of the inconceivable, consigning her to the realm of the unknowable, and then proclaiming that the conciliation is complete. This is to silence or annihilate one of the two powers which the philosopher undertook to reconcile. It is annexation accomplished by conquest, the cessation of strife, effected by the destruction of one opposing force, not by an armistice, or the ratification of articles of peace. Mr. Spencer does not come between two combatants who are wounding each other needlessly, and bid each put his sword into its sheath, for they are brethren; but he turns round and (to his own satisfaction) slays one of them, and then informs the other that the reconciliation is effected.

We must therefore ask the positivist for his warrant, on the one hand, in denying the existence of a world of substance, underneath the fleeting phenomena of being, out of which a revelation may emerge, apprehensible by man; and on the other, in denying to man positive knowledge of the infinite as a substance. We must remind him that infinite and finite, absolute and relative, substance and phenomena, are terms of a relation: while we ask him for his warrant in differentiating these terms, and proclaiming that the one set are knowable and known, the others unknown and unknowable. He arbitrarily singles out one of the two factors which together constitute a relation, and are only known as complementary terms, and he bestows upon it a spurious honour, by proclaiming that it alone is intelligible, while he relegates the other term to the region of darkness. We ask him on what ground he does so? and whether the law of contrast does not render phenomena as unintelligible, without substance, as substance without phenomena? Can we pronounce the one to be known and the other unknown, merely because the former reaches us through the five gateways of sense, and the latter through the avenue of intuition? Now, no wise theist ever asserted that God was phenomenally known. God is no phenomenon, but the noumenal essence underlying all phenomena. We have admitted and contended that no study of the laws of the universe can give us direct information as to the first cause; for a first cause could never be revealed to the senses, nor be an inference deduced from the data which sense supplies. The assertion therefore, that nature (of which the physical sciences are the interpretation) does not reveal God by its phenomena, is as strongly asserted by the theist as by the positivist. It may reveal his footprints, but we only know whose foot has left its mark on nature when we have learned from another source that He is. As little, however, can the laws of nature discredit faith in a first cause, which springs from a region at once beneath, above, and beyond phenomena. And our theistic faith is not an inference; it is a postulate: an axiomatic truth, affirmed on the report of that intuition, of which the root is planted so firmly in the soil of consciousness, that no form of the positivist philosophy can tear it thence. Let science, therefore, march as it will, and where it will, being hemmed in by the very laws of the universe which give rise to it, and of which it is the exposition, it cannot interfere with or encroach upon the theistic intuition. If there be a region behind phenomena and their laws, accessible to knowledge or to philosophic faith, no conclusion gathered from the scientific survey can touch it, whether to discredit or attest.

The fundamental doctrine of both the schools of nescience is the relativity of human knowledge, and that doctrine as taught by the Scottish psychologists (and notably by Scotland's greatest metaphysician since Hume, Sir William Hamilton) has been wrested out of their hands, and turned against the theism they also advocate. Mr. Spencer would exhibit them all as 'hoist with their own petard.' It is necessary, therefore, to enquire whether this doctrine of relativity favours a theory of nescience, or warrants a counter-doctrine of the knowledge of the infinite, or is indifferent to both.

With us the relativity of knowledge is a first principle in philosophy. But to affirm it, is merely to assert that all that is known occupies a fixed relation to the knower. It is to affirm nothing as to the character or contents of his knowledge. As regards the objects known we further maintain that they are apprehended only in their differences and contrasts. We know self only in its contrast with what is not self, a particular portion of matter only in its relation to other portions which surround and transcend it. So also and for the same reason, with the finite and the infinite. The one is not a positive notion, and the other negative; the one clear, and the other obscure. Both are equally clear, both sharply defined, so far as they are given us in relation. If the one notion suffers, the other suffers with it. In short, if we discharge any notion from all relation with its opposite or contrary, it ceases to be a notion at all. The finite, if we take it alone, is as inconceivable as the infinite, if we take it alone; phenomena by themselves are as incogitable as substance by itself: and the relative as a notion cut off from the absolute which antithetically bounds it, is not more intelligible than the absolute as an essence absolved from all relations. And thus the entire fabric of our knowledge being founded on contrasts, and arising out of differences, involving in its every datum another element hidden in the background, may be said to be a vast double chain of relatives mutually complementary. It looks ever in two directions, without and within, above and beneath, before and after.

We maintain, therefore, that we have positive knowledge of the infinite. Whosoever says that the infinite cannot be known contradicts himself. For he must possess a notion of it before he can deny that he has a positive knowledge of it, before he can predict aught regarding it. And so he says he cannot know what he says, though in another fashion, that he does know. It could never have come within the horizon of hypothetical knowledge, never have become the subject of discussion, unless positively (though inadequately) known; and thus the infinite stands as the antithetic background of the finite. Sir William Hamilton's and Dr. Mansel's doctrine of nescience, no less than Mr. Spencer's, we regard as absolute intellectual suicide. It implies that we have no knowledge of that which we are compelled to conceive in order to know that it is unknowable. We could not compare the two notions, if the one were unthinkable. For if all knowledge is a relation, in each act of knowing I must know both the terms related. The one term causes us no difficulty, being admitted on both sides. But the other which so perplexes our teachers of nescience, is, it must be owned, as to its contents a somewhat vague residuum. It is without an outline. It is not given us with the luminous clearness that its correlative is given. Nevertheless, it is a real term in a real relation. The moment we proceed to analyse our consciousness of the relative, we find it as the penumbra of the notion, its shadowy complement. We may never obtain more than a vague, and what we might call a moonlight view of it: nevertheless behold it we do; apprehend it we must.

But it is objected that as human knowledge is always finite, we can never have a positive apprehension of an infinite object; that as the subject of knowledge is necessarily finite, its object must be the same. Let us sift this objection.

I may know an object in itself as related to me the knower, or I may know it in its relation to other objects also known by me the knower. But in both and in all cases, knowledge is limited by the power of the knower, therefore it is always finite knowledge. But it may be finite knowledge of an infinite object, incomplete knowledge of a complete object, partial knowledge of a transcendent object. The boundary or fence may be within the faculty of the knower, while the object he imperfectly grasps may not only be infinite, but be known to transcend his faculties in the very act of conscious knowledge. For example, I may know that a line is infinite while I have only a finite knowledge of the points along which that line extends. And similarly my knowledge of the Infinite Mind is partial and incomplete, but it is clear and defined. It is definite knowledge of an indefinite object. We may have a partial knowledge not only of a part, but of the whole. Thus, I have a partial knowledge of a circle, because I know only a few of its properties; but it is not to a part of the circle that my partial knowledge extends, but to the whole which I know in part. In like manner as the Infinite Object has no parts, it is not of a portion of His being that we possess a partial knowledge, but of the whole. We know Him as we know the circle, inadequately yet directly, immediately, though in part. He is dark to us by excess of light. Thus, although our knowledge of the infinite may be vivified, it is not really enlarged by goading our thought to wider and wider imaginings, or spurring our faculties onwards over areas of space, or intervals of time. That knowledge is directly revealed while we are apprehending any finite object, as its correlative and complementary antithesis.

Again it is said that to know the infinite is to know the sum of all reality, and as that would include the universe and its source together, it must necessarily include on the one hand the knower along with his knowledge, and on the other all the possibilities of existence. The possibility of our knowing the Infinite Being as distinct from the universe is denied, since infinite existence is said to be coextensive with the whole universe of things. But that the source of the universe must necessarily exhaust existence and contain within himself all actual being is a mere theoretic assumption. The presence of the finite does not limit the infinite as if the area of the latter were contracted by so much of the former as exists within it. For the relation of the infinite being to the finite is not similar to the relation between infinite space and a segment of it. It is true that so much of finite space is so much cut out of the whole area of infinite space—though, if the remainder is infinite, the portion removed will not really limit it. But as our intuition of the infinite has no resemblance to our knowledge of space, we believe that the relations which their respective objects sustain have no affinity with each other. The intuition of God is a purely spiritual revelation, informing us not of the quantity but of the quality of the supreme being in the universe. And to affirm that the finite spirit of man standing in a fixed relation to the infinite spirit of God limits it, by virtue of that relation, is covertly to introduce a spatial concept into a region to which it is utterly foreign, and which it has no right to enter.[16]

We therefore maintain, in opposition to the teachers of nescience, that a positive knowledge of the Infinite is competent to man, because involved in his very consciousness of the finite. And when psychologically analysed, this intuition explains and vindicates itself.

But there is another aspect, no less important, in which it may be regarded. To say that the infinite is wholly inscrutable by man, is to limit not man's faculty only, but the possibilities of the divine nature itself. If God cannot unveil himself to man through the openings of those clouds which ordinarily conceal His presence, can His resources be illimitable, can He be the infinitely perfect? It is said, on the one hand, that the unknown Force reveals itself in the laws of nature, but cannot disclose its essence; and, on the other, that the infinite being reveals His handiwork, from which He permits us to infer His existence, but cannot reveal Himself. Such assertions are either subtle instances of verbal jugglery or manifest contradictions in terms. All revelation of whatever kind, presupposes some knowledge of the revealer. That knowledge may be imparted the moment the revelation is made, or prior to it, and from an independent source; but no revelation could be made, were the being to whom it was addressed ignorant of the source whence it came. Is there really any special difficulty in supposing that the infinite intelligence can directly disclose His nature to a creature fashioned in His image, the disclosure quickening the latent power of intuition, which, thus touched from above, springs forth to meet its source and object?

The question between the theist and the positivist is brought to its real issue when the latter is forced to recognise that the God of theism is no inference from phenomena, but if we may so speak, a postulate of intuition. And hence it is so necessary to concede frankly the failure of the teleological argument from final causes, as well as the ontological argument from the necessary notions of the intellect. We not only admit, we are forward to proclaim that by inductive science we can never rise higher than phenomena; and hence at the end of our researches we should be no nearer God than at the outset. But though we cannot reach Him by induction, we may do so before we begin our induction, by simply giving the intuition of the soul free scope to rise towards its source. And to dislodge the theist from his position, his opponent must succeed in proving that this intuition, whose root springs from a region beneath phenomena, and which in its flight outsoars phenomena, is as baseless and unauthenticated as a dream.

There are two principles, one of them metaphysical, and the other scientific, which are helpful at this point in our inquiry. These are the principle of causality, and the doctrine of the correlation of forces, or the conservation of energy. We cannot discuss them at any length, but we shall briefly state their nature, and their relation to the theistic intuition.

The phenomena of nature (using that term in its widest sense) are not only a series of sequences, they are also the revelation of a mysterious Power or living Force. All that we perceive by the senses, and, inductively register in nature, is a series of phenomena, of which the laws of nature are the generalized expression and interpretation. But every change is a revelation not only of succession, but of causal power. No matter where we take our stand along the line of sequence, mental or material, always and at every point this conviction is flashed in upon the mind, 'there is a hidden Power behind.' But we instinctively ask, 'what is this power or force determining the changes of the universe?' Is it material or spiritual? Can the force which moves the particles of matter be material? We do not perceive it by the senses, which take note only of the modified phenomena of matter. It is neither visible, nor audible, nor tangible. It is invisible; must we not therefore believe it to be incorporeal? We cannot reach it by analysis. We conclude that it is not physical but hyper-physical, not natural but supranatural. We have an intellectual intuition of it. It announces its presence in every change that occurs, but it nowhere shows its face as a material entity. It is a mystic agency endlessly revealing its existence, everywhere concealing its source. We watch its evolutions, but it escapes our scrutiny; we try to detain it, and we find that it is gone; yet it reappears in the next thing we examine, and in the very phenomena of our search for it; the agency is manifest, but it is the Agent we wish to discover. Must it be, like the sangreal of mediæval legend, sought for in many lands, but nowhere found by any wanderer in quest of it?

Before attempting an answer, we shall state the scientific principle referred to, which is entitled to rank as one of the greatest of modern discoveries. All the forms of force are convertible amongst themselves. They are all ultimately identical, and are endlessly passing and repassing into each other: the mechanical, the chemical, the vital, are all one. 'The many' are 'the one,' its varying phrases, its protean raiment. In short, there is but a single supreme force, ubiquitous and plastic, the fountain of all change. It now evolves itself in heat, now masks itself in light, reveals itself in electricity, or sleeps in the law of gravitation: one solitary pulse within Nature's vast machine, and behind the barrier of her laws. This force, thus endlessly changing, is neither diminished nor replenished; it is not added to, nor subtracted from; it is perennial, and is its own conservator. It is not synthesis, but analysis that has resolved it into unity. But can synthesis combine its manifold phases under one regulative notion? In realizing its general character we cannot discharge from our minds in turn all the known features of particular forces, so as to leave a vague resultant common to all, yet especially identified with none. The diverse types must have an archetype. What is that archetype?

It seems to us self-evident that we must seek for it, not in nature, but in man; not in the lower plane of the cosmical forces, but in the human will, the root of our personality. Comte begins with the lowermost grade of force (to wit, the mechanical), and ascends with it, bringing all the finer and more subtle forms under its sway, and interpreting the higher by the lower. We, on the contrary, begin with the highest known type, that which lies nearest ourselves, with which we are earliest acquainted, and whence we derive our notion of force beyond ourselves; and we descend with it as a light to guide our footsteps amongst the lower. This we hold to be the correct, to be indeed the only admissible philosophical procedure. If it is only through the consciousness of force within ourselves that we have any intelligible notion of it in nature (and are thus first initiated into the idea), we must come back to the will for an explanation of what the one force external to us is. Our own personality supplies us with the archetype of which we are in search. We thus throw the plank across the chasm between man and nature; we interpret the latter by the former (not the reverse); and the discovery of the correlation of forces, and the conservation of energy, becomes the scientific equivalent of the doctrine of philosophical theology, that one supreme Will pervades the universe, that in nature lives and moves and has its being.

If we can vindicate this procedure, and prove our right to interpret the forces, if not the phenomena of nature, as the outcome of a living will, the energy of a nature like our own, our goal is reached. But, say the Comtists, that is a mere imagination of theology, the creation of a superstitious mind, 'transcendant audacity,' 'a form of the mind's own throwing,' just as much as the teleological explanation of nature. It has been spoken of as presumptuous, as well as fanciful, betokening a lack of humility and philosophic caution; it being sheer egotism to interpret nature by what we are, and a return to the Protagorean doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things.' In reply, we give only hints and suggestions, for the region is high, and the atmosphere rarefied.

In the first place, it is to be observed that we do not take one class of phenomena to explain the inner nature of another class; the phenomena of will to explain, say those of electricity, in outward nature; for in that case we might as well, with just as much reason and plausibility, with just as much authority, take the latter class of phenomena to explain the former; and we should learn quite as much, that is to say, we should learn nothing at all. But we take a certain special noumenal force, one that is transcendant but revealed in our innermost life and consciousness, in the will's autocracy, and by the help and suggestion of this known force we explain (not the phenomena of Nature nor her laws), but the darker, the unknown noumenal Force, the pulse of nature.

In the next place, it is also to be observed that as the human will, while noumenally free, is phenomenally under law and governed most rigidly by motives, so the force which we interpret as the expression of personal will in nature, acts in perfect conformity to law. The laws of nature are the expression of its bondage. The minor scattered forces, which may be spoken of as the messengers and servitors of the supreme will, are no more fitful but no less capricious than is the human will, in which the causal nexus is not broken while it remains free. The supernatural reveals itself in an orderly fashion through the natural. Its will is expressed by law.

In the third place, so far as bridging the chasm between the two orders of phenomena, it is not accomplished by the poetic intuition (to which we shall immediately refer), but by the human intellect, it seems legitimated by analogy. In our inductive interpretation of nature we perceive resemblances, and infer a likeness. 'Analogy is the soul of induction.' If, therefore, it be an illicit act of the reason which ventures to trace a parallel between nature and man, and interpret the former by the latter, how fares it with the foundations of human knowledge, and with the pillars of science herself? Is not all physical science the rational interpretation of nature? If we may not read the meaning of the great central force in the light of that force which we carry in the will, how can we warrantably interpret the laws of nature, in the light of that which we carry in the intellect? Are we not left in uncertainty as to the character of the entire fabric of our knowledge? The oracle is altogether dumb. If the way which seems to lead from the interior of the human will into the temple of outward nature be really a cul-de-sac, what warrant have we for opening a door on the other side, and walking down the avenues of positive science, imagining that in these pathways we shall find the only key to nature? To bring the analogy into effect, let us take two instances: the force with which I discharge a projectile and the force of gravitation. The former proceeds from the will, which is the originating power, though mechanical and physiological causes intervene. Since, therefore, similar effects have similar or resembling causes, it is a strictly analogical inference that as the effects correspond, the causes will resemble each other, and the essential part of the correspondence will not consist in the apparatus used (the phenomena), but in the will underlying, which is noumenal.[17]

In the fourth place, as the force of the will is both higher and better known than the mechanical, chemical, and vital forces of nature, we are warranted in interpreting the lower by the higher, and not in reducing the higher to the level of the lower. As we ascend in nature from the lowest vital forms to the highest type of organization, we find that the higher is not only an advance upon the lower, but that it includes it; and no naturalist would describe a vertebrated animal by that which it held in common with the mollusca. That in which it differs from the types beneath it is held to be its distinctive and descriptive feature. When, therefore, we reach man at the top of the scale, separated by a distinct endowment from the classes beneath him, yet conserving all their main characteristics in his nature, and describe him not by what he has in common with the lower animals, but by that in which he differs from them, we act on the principle of selecting the highest feature we can find, and taking it as our guide. And similarly when we are in search of the Supreme Principle of the universe, the causa causarum, we interpret it by the highest features in human nature, because that nature is the highest with which we are experimentally acquainted. And we may validly throw the burden of proof upon the positivist, and ask why the great cosmical force that rules in nature should be radically different from the volitional force which is the root of our personality? Reverting again to the force of gravitation, why should it not be the outcome in nature of a Will vaster than man's, resembling, yet transcending it? To what does that force amount? The phenomenalist cannot arrest our inquiry by simply drawing the veil of nescience over it. He cannot slip a lid over the end of our telescope turned skyward by merely exclaiming 'mystery of mysteries, all is mystery.' And it seems to us that we must either divest the word gravitation of all intelligible meaning, or while perceiving the unlikeness at a glance, we must 'invest it with a human or quasi-human vitality.'

Quasi, for again in the fifth place, this all-pervasive protean force assumes many a phase which is exceedingly unlike the operations of a personal power. In many of her moods, Nature has the countenance of the sphinx. She is sublimely silent as to her inmost essence. Cold, stern, inflexible, neutral, taciturn, apathetic—all these terms seem applicable to her at times, as we gaze across the chasm between man and the universe. But the regulative idea, which we find in the analogy of the human will, is not to be regarded as exhaustive or exclusive of other notions which may unite with it. The personal force may at the same time be more than personal. Its highest quality becomes to us what we have called its regulative idea; but it contains elements within the infinite compass of its nature, different from those features of which we find the mirror in ourselves.[18] It is sufficient if we know that the causa causarum, the all-pervading life of the universe, can in any sense be described as personal, that we can speak of 'the soul of nature,' without being the dupes of a fanciful analogy, dealing merely with figure and hyperbole. Be it admitted by every theist that there are myriad facets which the subtle life of nature may present to the beholder. We not only may, we must think of it as

'He, they, one, all, within, without,

The power in darkness which we guess.'

It reveals itself to us now as personal, awakening and responding to the instinct of worship, calling forth our wonder and reverence, with the hunger and the thirst of the human spirit in rising to its source; now it turns its cold, impassive, silent face towards us; and as we feel its immeasurable transcendency we are warned against the error of construing it into a mere exaggeration of ourselves. We thus learn on the one hand, the indefinite unlikeness between man and the Supreme Spirit of the universe, and on the other their positive likeness or kindredness. We escape the prevailing error of mediævalism, and the equally fatal error of the modern scientific spirit. The tendency of the schoolmen was to interpret all the laws of nature in the light of à priori notions of the mind. They did not search laboriously for her own meaning, and wait patiently for her revelations; but distorted nature by outré hypotheses fetched altogether from within. It is, however, an equal if not a greater onesidedness to do exactly the reverse; to interpret the human spirit in the light of external nature and organic law. The apotheosis of man was at least no worse—(we think it rather better)—than making a fetish of nature, and explaining the sublime mysteries of the human will by the phenomena of molecular action. We therefore maintain that amid the many possible manifestations of the infinite Life, they may be reduced to two primary forms, the one impersonal and the other personal. God is infinitely unlike the creature. He is also the archetype of which we are the type. And we have less need to be philosophically warned against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift into exaggeration and a lie.

The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in a crucible. But he is the

'Mighty prophet, seer blest,

With whom these truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our years to find

In darkness lost.'

And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural, he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'

Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America. He writes—

'As blind nestlings, unafraid,

Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade,

By which their downy dream is stirred,

Taking it for the mother-bird;

So, when God's shadow, which is light,

My wakening instincts falls across,

Silent as sunbeams over moss,

In my heart's-nest half-conscious things

Stir with a helpless sense of wings,

Lift themselves up, and tremble long

With premonitions sweet of song.'

The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight, which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart across the world and bring back this report of correspondence, illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces around him are an interpretation of what he is. They are the symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations, while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward. In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw them together.

This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they see: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that Wordsworth's 'inward eye'—by the use and cultivation of which he became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature—in seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and was not in contact with real existence? Are his 'spiritual presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend? And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder testimony in the same direction,—the belief in these deities of the wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, a seer,[19] or only the elaborator of fancies?—the mere creator of ideal shapes, or the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it a soul, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that nature's great soul—the Presence—cannot reveal itself at once as all-in-all and all inclusive; within the boundaries of the finite mind. In its very wealth it reveals itself as manifold. But as the poet and the philosopher may combine the manifold in the unity of their own mind, why not also in the unity of the object revealing itself to them?

It is to be observed, however, that the object which the poet's insight attests and reveals, is not phenomenal, but substantial. Hence no question arises as to its origin. It is only that which enters on the theatre of phenomenal existence that demands a further explanation. The entrance and the exit of phenomena are explained, when we refer them to the substance out of which they have emerged, and to which they return. But we do not ask for the origin of substance, any more than for the origin of space, time, or number.

There is still another branch of the theistic evidence from intuition. It is the instinct of worship. Our space admits of but a sentence regarding it. It is seen in the mere uprise of the soul, spontaneously doing homage to a higher than itself; in the sense of dependence, felt by all men who 'know themselves;' in the need which the worshipper feels of approaching One who is higher and holier than himself, and in whom all perfection resides, who is recognisable by him, and is interested in his state; in the workings of the filial instinct seeking its source, and, as said St. Augustine, 'restless till it rests in Thee;' in the suffrage of the heart rising amid the miseries of its lot, and even against the surmises of the intellect, to the 'Rock that is higher than it;' in the soul's aspirations—its thirst for the ideal, while it feels the necessity of an absolute centre or ultimate standard of truth, beauty, and goodness; and even in the passionate longings of the mystic to reach an utterly transcendent good. All these things bear witness to an instinct, working often in the dark, but always seeking its source. They are almost universal, and they are certainly ineradicable. They show how deeply the roots of the theistic faith are planted in the soil of the moral consciousness. We cannot, however, pursue these several lines of proof in detail. They form a fitting link of connection with the more strictly ethical evidence, on which we must add a few paragraphs.

The Kantian argument is more intricate and much less satisfactory than the common evidence from the phenomena of conscience itself. It is founded on the moral law, with its 'categorical imperative,' asserting that certain actions are right and others wrong, in a world in which the right is often defrauded of its legitimate awards, and the wrong is temporarily successful. This, however, says Kant, points to a future; in which the irregularity will be redressed, and therefore to a Supreme Moral Power, able to effect it. The argument is altogether inferential. It is circuitous, its conclusion being in a sense an appendix to the doctrine of immortality; and it has only a secondary connection with the data of the moral law itself. But the phenomena of conscience afford the data of theism directly. We do not raise the question of the nature or the origin of the moral faculty. We assume its existence, as an à priori principle, carrying with it not a contingent but an absolute and unconditional authority. But this moral law within us is the index of another power, a higher personality whence it emanates, and of whose character it is the expression. The law carries in its very heart or centre the evidence of a moral law-giver, his existence not being an inference from, but a postulate of this law. It is given with the direct and antithetic clearness with which the infinite is given as the correlative of the finite; and the ascent from the law to the supreme legislator is not greater than is the ascent from space and time, revealed in limited areas and intervals, to immensity and eternity. The two data are the terms of relation. And thus we do not rise to the divine existence by any 'regressive inference,' as the Kantian argument reaches it; we find God in conscience. Moral analysis reveals Another, within and yet above our own personality: and if we reject that implicate which is folded within the very idea of conscience, it ceases to be authoritative; and, divested of all ethical significance, it sinks to the level of expediency.

Thus the moral part of our nature rests upon the background of another and a divine personality. Let us analyse the notion of duty, the idea of obligation contained in the word 'ought.' If it resolves itself into this, 'it is expedient to act in a certain manner, because, if we do not, we injure the balance of our faculties, promote a schism amongst the several powers, and put the machinery of human nature out of working gear:' then it does not point to one behind it, any more than the phenomenal sequences and designs in nature point in that direction. But if we 'ought simply because we ought,' i.e., because the law which we find within us, but did not produce, controls us, haunts us, and claims supremacy over us, then we find in such a fact the revelation of One from whom the law has emanated. As Fenelon says in reference to the idea of the infinite, breathing the spirit of St. Augustine—

'Where have I obtained this idea, which is so much above me, which infinitely surpasses me, which astonishes me, which makes me disappear in my own eyes, which renders the infinite present to me. It is in me; it is more than myself. It seems to me everything, and myself nothing. I can neither efface, obscure, diminish, nor contradict it. It is in me; I have not put it there, I have found it there: and I have found it there only because it was already there before I sought it. It remains there invariable even if I do not think of it, when I think of something else. I find it wherever I seek it, and it often presents itself when I am not seeking it. It does not depend upon me. I depend upon it.'[20]

Similarly Newman writes of conscience,—

'A voice within forbids, and summons us to refrain;

And if we bid it to be silent, it yet is not still: it is not in our control,

It acts without our order, without our asking, against our will.

It is in us, it belongs to us, but it is not of us: it is above us.

It is moral, it is intelligent, it is not we, nor at our bidding;

It pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees.'[21]

Whence then comes this law which is 'in us, yet not of us, but above us,' which we did not create, and which circumstances do not fashion, though they modify its action? Is it not the moral echo within of a Voice louder and vaster without—a voice which legislates, and in its sanctity commands, issuing imperial edicts for the entire universe of moral agency? In one sense conscience is the viceroy or representative of a higher power; in another it is the voice of one crying in the wilderness of the human spirit, 'Prepare ye the way for the Law.' It ever speaks 'as one having authority,' and yet its central characteristic (as pointed out by a living teacher) is not that the conscience has authority, but that it is 'the consciousness of authority.' It testifies to another: the implanted instinct bearing witness to its Implanter; and through the hints and intimations of this master-faculty thus throned amidst the other powers, we are able to ascend intuitively and directly to God. We are 'constituted to transcend ourselves,' and conscience becomes a ladder by which we mount to the supernatural, as well as the voice inarticulate, yet audible, which speaks to us of God. Thus, to quote the language of one of the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century (Dr. John Smith)—

'As Plotinus teaches us, "he who reflects upon himself reflects upon his own original," God has so copied forth himself into the whole life and energy of man's soul as that the character of the divinity may be most easily seen and read of all within themselves. And whenever we look upon our souls in a right manner we shall find a Urim and a Thummim there; and though the whole fabric of this visible universe be whispering out the notion of a Deity, yet we cannot understand it without this interpreter within.'

Art. III.—Hugh Miller.—(1). Life and Letters of Hugh Miller. By Peter Bayne, A.M. 2 vols. Strahan and Co.

(2). Works of Hugh Miller. Nimmo.

What strikes us as most admirable in Hugh Miller is, that he was a man of genius and yet a man of sense. There has been, and will be, diversity of opinion as to the value or even the existence of his genius, but there can be no doubt as to the robust and masculine character of his mind. When we think of him we recall what Macaulay said of Cromwell, 'He was emphatically a man.' He possessed, in an eminent degree, that 'equally-diffused intellectual health' which can no more be acquired by effort or artifice than a sound physical constitution can be obtained by the use of drugs. So often, of late, has genius been freakish, whimsical, fantastic—evinced a perverse contempt for the moderation and equipoise of truth—substituted feminine vehemence of assertion for clear statement and rational inference—nay, seemed to hover on the very verge of madness—that we are disposed to accommodate ourselves to considerable defect in startling and meteoric qualities on the part of one who, while veritably possessing genius, was distinguished for sagacity, manliness, and the avoidance of extremes.

But was Hugh Miller a man of genius? We see not how any but an affirmative answer can be returned to the question. Metaphysical people may perplex themselves with attempts to define genius, but no practical evil can ensue from the application of the word 'genius' to qualities of mind, unique either in nature or in degree. It is correct to speak of mathematical genius when we mean an altogether extraordinary capacity for solving mathematical problems. It is correct to speak of poetical genius when we mean an inborn tunefulness of nature which awakens to vocal melody at the sight of beauty or the touch of pathos. When we say Hugh Miller was a man of genius, we mean that, take him all in all, in his life, in his character, in his books, he was unique. In a remote Highland village, one of the quietest, least important places in the world, amid a simple, ruminating population, with no Alpine grandeur of surrounding scenery or stirring memorials of local life, the sea-captain's son is born. Nothing in the history of his father's house for generations affords suggestion of an hereditary gift of expression; and though his mother had a fund of ghost-stories and delighted to tell them, she passed among her neighbours for an entirely undistinguished, commonplace woman. And yet, before he was ten years old, the child Hugh would quit his boyish companions for the sea-shore, and there saunter for hours, pouring forth blank-verse effusions about sea-fights, ghosts, and desert islands. A peculiar imaginative susceptibility and a passion for expression revealed themselves in him from his infancy. The strong bent of his nature regulated his education. He is bookish—his fairy tales, voyages, 'Pilgrim's Progress,' Bible stories, afford him enchanting pleasure—but he will pay no attention to the books which his schoolmaster puts into his hand. He is the dunce of the school, yet his class-fellows hang on his lips while he charms them with extemporised narratives, and in the wood and the caves he is acknowledged as the leader of them all. His mind is ever open; at every moment knowledge is streaming in upon him; but the whole method of his intellectual growth is conditioned from within, through the peremptory determinations of his inborn spiritual force and personality. At all hours he is an observer of nature, and acquires, without knowing it, a perfect familiarity with every living thing—bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, as well as with every tree, plant, flower, and stone, which are to be met with from the pine-wood on the cliff, to the wet sand left by the last wave of the retreating tide upon the shore. He thus grows up a naturalist. With a mind opulently furnished, and well acquainted even with books, he nevertheless finds himself, when his boyhood and early youth are spent, entirely unqualified to proceed to College. He chooses the trade of a mason, but the irresistible bent of his nature is obeyed even in this choice, for he knew that masons in the Highlands of Scotland did not work in the winter months, and in these he would betake himself to his beloved pen. For fifteen years he worked as a mason, earning his bread by steady, effective labour, but aware all the time of a power within him, a force of giant mould imprisoned beneath the mountain of adverse circumstance, which, he doubted not, would one day make itself known to the world. This vague prophecy in his heart, which surely was the voice of his genius speaking within him, was fulfilled. Sorcerers in the old time professed to show visions of the past and future in magic mirrors; but the true magical mirror is the mind of genius; and when Hugh Miller's contemporaries beheld, reflected in the mirror of his mind, lifted from the profound obscurity in which they had formerly slept and set in vivid clearness before the eyes of the world, the little town he loved, the Sutors, the bay, the hill, they felt that the one Cromarty man of all generations who had done this was possessed of genius. With this decision we rest content.

The true greatness of Hugh Miller lay, however, in his moral qualities. Here we may give our enthusiasm the rein. There was a rare nobleness, a rare blending of magnanimity, rectitude and gentleness, in this man. His affections were at once tender and constant, and when you search the very deeps of his soul, you find in it no malice, no guile, no greed, nothing which can be called base or selfish. We are struck with admiration as we mark the high tones of his mind, his superiority to all vulgar ambitions. There has probably been some romancing about the peasant nobles of Scotland, but in Hugh Miller, the journeyman mason, and in his uncles James and Sandy, the one a saddler, the other a wood-cutter, we have three men who, so long as the mind is the standard of the man, will be classed with the finest type of gentleman. It is greatly to the honour of Scotland, and of the old evangelical religion of Scotland, that she produced such men. Hugh Miller's uncles performed for him a father's part, and he learned from them, not so much through formal instruction as by a certain contagion—to use the phrase in which the Londoners, a hundred years ago, in their inscription on Blackfriars Bridge, described with felicitous precision the manner of Pitt's influence on his contemporaries—that sensitive uprightness, that manly independence, and that love of nature, by which he was distinguished. The ambition of money-making, which as it were naturally and inevitably suggests itself to a youth of parts in an English village, never seems to have so much as presented itself to the mind of Hugh Miller. In cultivating the spiritual faculties of his soul, in adding province after province to the empire of his mind, lay at once the delight and the ambition of this young mechanic. He aspired to fame, but his conception of fame was pure and lofty. Of the vanity which feeds on notoriety he had no trace, and cared not for reputation if he could not deliberately accept it as his due. A proud man he was; perhaps, at times, too sternly proud; but from the myriad pains and pettinesses which have their root in vanity, he was conspicuously free. Very beautiful also is the unaffected delight which this rough-handed mason takes in the aspects of nature. It has none of that sickliness or excess which strong men admit to have more or less characterised the enthusiasm for the freshness of spring and the splendour of summer of what has been called the London school of poetry. In the rapture with which Keats sang of trees and fields, there is something of the nature of calenture. Pent in the heart of London, he thought of the crystal brooks and the wood-hyacinths with a weeping fondness, instinct indeed with finest melody, but akin to that sick and melancholy joy with which the sailor in mid-ocean gazes on the waste of billows, gazes and still gazes until on their broad green sides the little meadow at his father's cottage door with its grey willows and white maythorns seems to smile out on his tear-filled eyes. Had Keats run about the hills and played in the twilight woods as a little boy, he would not have loved nature less, but his poetical expression of that love would not have struck masculine intellects as verging on the lachrymose and the fantastic. Nature to Miller was a constant joy, a part of the wonted aliment of his soul, an inspiring, elevating influence, strengthening him for the tasks of life. 'I remember,' he writes of the days of his youth,

'how my happiness was enhanced by every little bird that burst out into sudden song among the trees, and then as suddenly became silent, or by every bright-scaled fish that went darting through the topaz-coloured depths of the water, or rose for a moment over its calm surface,—how the blue sheets of hyacinths that carpeted the openings in the wood delighted me, and every golden-tinted cloud that gleamed over the setting sun, and threw its bright flush on the river, seemed to inform the heart of a heaven beyond.'

The mason lad who could feel thus had little to envy in the gold of the millionaire or the title of the aristocrat. Well did the ancients match sound and sense in that phrase, sancta simplicitas; such simplicity of soul is indeed holy and healing.

The sterling worth and fine moral quality of Miller are brought out in his relations with his friends. Of passion in the common sense he was singularly void, and there is no evidence that, until he passed his thirtieth year, female beauty once touched his heart. But his affection for his friends was ardent to the degree of passion, and constant as it was ardent. Both autobiographers and biographers are apt to paint up the youthful friendships of their heroes, and we are glad that Mr. Bayne has been able to verify, and more than verify, by infallible documentary evidence, all that, in his 'Schools and Schoolmasters,' Miller tells us of his relations to his two friends, William Ross and John Swanson. Ross was perhaps the most finely gifted of the three, but the circumstances of his birth were hopelessly depressing. His parents were sunk in the lowest depths of poverty; but this was not the worst; his constitution was so feeble that sustained and resolute effort was for him a physical impossibility. Amid the debility of his bodily energies there burned, with strange, sad, piercing radiance, the flame of genius. With exquisite accuracy of discernment he took the measure of Miller, pointing out to him where his strength lay and where his weakness. He knew his own powers, also, but saw that Miller had stamina while he had none; and, with tragic pathos, accused himself of indolence and vacillation, when his only fault was that he was dying. Delicately organised in all respects, he displayed a musical faculty more usual among peasant boys in Italy than in Scotland, made himself a fife and clarionet of elder-shoots, and became one of the best flute-players in the district. From the little damp room in which Ross slept during his apprenticeship to a house-painter, Miller used to hear the sweet sounds on which his soul rose for the time above all its sorrows. He had a fine appreciation, too, of the beauty of landscape. 'I have seen him,' says Miller, 'awed into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered down upon us over the hill, red and broad and cloud-encircled, through the interstices of some clump of dark firs; and have observed him become suddenly silent, as, emerging from the moonlight woods, we looked into a rugged dell, and saw, far beneath, the slim rippling streamlet gleaming in the light, like a narrow strip of the aurora borealis shot athwart a dark sky, when the steep, rough sides of the ravine, on either hand, were enveloped in gloom.' Ross had educated his faculty of æsthetic perception and of art-criticism by study of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Fresnoy's Art of Painting, Gessner's Letters, and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Lectures. Miller describes him as looking constantly on nature with the eye of the artist, signalising and selecting the characteristic beauties of the landscape. This habit of imaginative composition would, we believe, have been fixed on by the most accomplished instructors in the art of painting at this moment in Europe, as the best proof that could be given by Ross of the possession of artistic genius. Turner was at all times a composer, and never painted a leaf with photographic correctness. But the poverty of William Ross condemned him to the drudgery of a house-painter, and he had no teaching in the higher departments of art. He proceeded to Edinburgh, and thence to Glasgow, his fine talent distinguishing him from ordinary workmen, and enabling him to procure work of such delicacy that he could continue it when too weak to engage in the usual tasks of house-painting. Thoughtful and kind, he assisted a brother-workman who was dying by his side, and having shielded his friend from want, and soothed his last moments, he followed him speedily to the grave.

John Swanson was of a different build, physically and intellectually, from Ross. His characteristic was energy of mind and of body. He was a distinguished student at the University, an athlete in mathematics, an acute metaphysician; but the mystic fire of genius, which Miller saw in the eye of Ross, and which he believed to have fallen on himself, threw none of its prismatic colouring over the framework of Swanson's mind. He was the first of the three to come under strong religious impressions. Abandoning philosophical subtleties, and accepting, with the whole force of his robust mind, the salvation offered by Christ, he pressed upon Miller with importunate earnestness the heavenly treasure which himself had found. He was not at first successful. Steady labour, indeed, in the quarry, and in the hewing shed, had chastened the youthful wildness of Miller, and he had become, though not religious, at least reverent and thoughtful. As Swanson's appeals took effect, the early religious teaching of his uncles, which had probably lain dormant in his mind, asserted its influence. He does not appear to have been conscious of this fact, and indeed it was not the catechetic instruction, but the personal example of his uncles, that told upon him. At all events, after hesitating and playing shy, he was fairly brought to a stand by Swanson; and though he underwent no paroxysm of religious excitement, a profound change took place in his character, a change which penetrated to the inmost depths of his nature, changed the current of his being, and was regarded by himself as his conversion. He was thus knit in still closer fellowship with Swanson, and their friendship continued uninterrupted until his death. Had his opinions not taken this shape, it seems likely that he would have become daringly sceptical. He had assuredly, to use the words of Coleridge, skirted the deserts of infidelity. He was familiar with the writings of Hume, whose argument against miracles defines to this hour the position taken up by all who, on scientific grounds deny the supernatural origin of Christianity. There was a time when he fancied himself an atheist, and the profane affectation might have deepened into reality. But after his correspondence with Swanson, he never wavered. The consideration which, from an intellectual point of view, chiefly influenced him in pronouncing Christianity Divine, was two-fold. Christianity, he said, was no cunningly devised fable. It offended man at too many points—it seemed too palpably to contradict his instincts of justice—to have been invented by man. At the same time, it was fitted, with exquisite nicety of adaptation, and with measureless amplitude of comprehension, to meet the wants of man's spiritual nature. Man neither would nor could have created it, any more than he could or would have created manna; but when he took of it, and did eat, he found that it was angels' food, making him, though his steps were still through the wilderness of this world, the brother of angels. Miller has not in any of his writings elaborated this idea with the fulness of exposition, defence and illustration which the importance of the part it played in his system of thought might render desirable; but it is obvious that it would, for him, not only silence the arguments which had previously seemed to tell against Christianity, but array them on the side of belief. The more offensive and contradictory Christianity might be to natural reason and conscience, the stronger would be the logical chain by which he was drawn to infer its supernatural origin. The courses of the stars might appear to him a maze of lawless and inadmissible movements, but when he steered his little boat by them, he was led safely across dark billows and perilous currents; clearly, therefore, One who understood the whole matter infinitely better than he had put together the time-piece of the heavens. Such was his argument, and it is not without force. Practically his religion consisted in an inexpressible enthusiasm of devotion to Christ. The term which he uniformly applies to the Saviour is 'The Adorable,' and he dwelt, with lingering, wondering, rejoicing affection on the sympathy of the Man Christ Jesus with human wants and weaknesses. Seldom have the efforts of friendship been more nobly crowned than were those of John Swanson when this radical change took place in the spiritual condition of Hugh Miller.

His relations with Swanson and with Ross attest the warmth and constancy of his affections; but the gentleness of his nature does not fully dawn upon us until we read his letters to Miss Dunbar, and understand the friendship which subsisted between him and that lady. She was many years his senior, and as the sister of a Scottish Baronet, Sir Alexander Dunbar, of Boath, and a Tory of the old school, we should have expected her to be shy of poetical masons. Something in Miller's verses, however, attracted her, and a singularly tender and romantic friendship sprung up between them. On his side, it was confined to affectionate appreciation and admiring esteem; but she wrote to him with the tenderness of a mother, and did not scruple to tell him that he was the dearest friend she had in the world. His letters to her are not distinguished by originality or by extraordinary power; but they abound in delineations of nature, poetic in their loveliness; they are just in thought, and faultless in feeling; and in literary style they are perhaps, on the whole, the most melodious and beautiful of his compositions. Like his other writings these letters are full of self-portrayal, and the face which, with pensive, fascinating smile, seems to beam on us from the page, is that of a right noble and loveable man. We feel that this mason is a gentleman; a gentleman of the finest strain; one whose gentleness is of the heart, and manifests itself, not in the polished urbanity of cities which often hides a bad and cold nature, but in a vigilant kindness, a manly deference, and above all a delicate sympathy. The few words of reference to Hugh Miller occurring incidentally in Dr. McCosh's recollections of Bunsen, and published in the biography of the latter—which, by the way, seem to us to cast a more vivid light upon the man than the far lengthier recollections of Miller by Dr. McCosh, printed in Mr. Bayne's biography—specify the intense sweetness and fascination belonging to his presence. Despite his rugged exterior, his shaggy head and rough-hewn features, his mason's apron, his slowly enunciated speech, and his somewhat heavy manner, this fascination was felt by all who had an opportunity of experiencing it.

We hinted that he was singularly devoid of sensibility to the charm of female beauty. In this respect he presents a marked contrast to Burns, and indeed to most men of powerful intellect and vivid imagination. But he loved once, and then he loved with all the intensity of his nature. At the time when his name was beginning to be known through the north of Scotland as that of one who had a future, Miss Lydia Fraser, ten years his junior, arrived in Cromarty. She was possessed of no small personal beauty, had received a good education, was addicted to intellectual pursuits, wrote fluently both in prose and verse, and was gifted with remarkable acuteness and clearness of mind. Her temperament was more mercurial than Miller's; he was more capable of patient thought, and, on the whole, more solidly able. It may be doubted whether a pair thus matched enjoyed the surest prospect of happiness in the married state, but it is evident that they were precisely in the position to strike up a romantic friendship. He was the literary lion of Cromarty, she the gifted beauty of the place; their friendship and their love were as much in the order of nature as that of Tenfelsdröckh and Blumine, though happily it had no such tragic conclusion. The gifted beauty could not help pausing in her walk to have a few words with the poetic mason as he hewed in the churchyard, his head sure to be full of some book or subject, his eye quick to catch every new light of beauty that fell upon the landscape. They soon found that they were more to each other than friends, and thereupon difficulties manifold interfered with their meeting. The young lady's mother was startled at the idea that her daughter should bestow her affections on a horn-handed mechanic, even though he had issued a volume of poems, a volume much praised, not so much bought, and already looked on almost with contempt by its sternly critical author. Miller, for his own part, had no wish to rise in the world. With a philosophy antique and astonishing in these restless times, he had arrived at the conclusion that the world had nothing to offer which would make him substantially happier than he was while hewing on the hill of Cromarty. Had he not the skies and the sea, the wood and the shore, and had not the whole world of literature and science been thrown open to him when he learned to read? His wants were perfectly simple, and exceedingly few, and were supplied to the utmost. He could be quite happy in a cave with a boulder for table, and a stone for chair, a book to read, and a pot in which to cook his homely fare; he might well be less happy, he could not be more, in a gilded drawing-room.

These pleasing but somewhat effeminate dreams were dissipated by his love for Miss Fraser, as a pretty little garden on the flanks of Etna might be torn to pieces by the heavings of the volcano. He would marry her into the rank of a lady, or he would not marry her, in Scotland at least, at all. If it proved impossible for him to rise in his native country, the lovers would seek a nook in the backwoods, and place the Atlantic between them and the conventional notions and estimates of British society. But the necessity for this step did not occur. Miller was offered a situation in a branch office of the Commercial Bank, which was opened in Cromarty in 1835. He laid down the mallet, not without satisfaction but assuredly with no exultation, and, after a brief initiation in the mysteries of banking at Linlithgow, entered on his duties as bank accountant. Too healthful and honest of nature to trifle in the discharge of any duties which he undertook, he addressed himself with vigorous application to the business of the bank, and found his new situation an admirable post for the study of human nature. It was in conveying the bank's money between Cromarty and Tain that he first carried firearms, a practice which he seems to have almost constantly maintained from this time forward. It was at the time of his joining the bank that his first prose volume, 'Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland,' was published. It contains passages of exquisite beauty, and has since attained to considerable popularity; but it was not immediately successful, and added little to the modest income of its author. His marriage took place in the beginning of 1837; he was then thirty-five years old, and had been engaged to Miss Fraser for five years.

Miller was a naturalist from his infancy, in the sense of habitually observing nature and laying up store of natural facts in his memory; but it was not until he had passed his thirtieth year, and until his severe self-censure pronounced him to have failed, first in poetry and secondly in prose literature, that he conscientiously and with the whole force of his mind devoted himself to science. His mental changes and processes were never sudden, and there was a transition period, during which he hesitated between literature and science; but when his resolution had once been taken, he cast no look behind. With intense, absorbing, impassioned energy, he gave himself to the pursuit of science. His experience in the quarry—of quite inestimable value to him as a geologist—determined his choice of a scientific province for special culture. His progress was wonderfully rapid. The geological nomenclature which he found in books served to classify and formalise knowledge which he had already acquired, and opened his eyes to the fact that he was a geologist. But for the interruption of his plans, by the agitation which issued in the disruption of the Scottish State Church in 1843, and his being summoned to Edinburgh to undertake the conduct of the Witness newspaper, he would have published a treatise, on the geology of the Cromarty district at least a year earlier than the date at which he became known to the public as a man of science.

It reminds us how fast and how far the world has travelled in the last thirty years to note that, in the year 1840, Hugh Miller was an enthusiast for the State Church of Scotland. There are no enthusiastic believers in the State Church theory, or what Miller called the 'establishment principle,' now. The most logical and consistent members of the State Church of England avow that her chance of vindicating her claim to the name and privilege of a Church depends upon her ceasing to be a State Church; and the back of the Established Church of Scotland was broken by the disruption. Sensible men, with nothing of the revolutionist in their composition, are now generally of opinion that the days of both our ecclesiastical establishments are numbered. The opinion, also, would be generally assented to, that it is when viewed as a contribution to the cause of ecclesiastical freedom throughout the United Kingdom, that the disruption of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, in 1843, can be seen to be of historical importance. Of this Hugh Miller had no idea. He accepted the theory of a State Church, and he lent his championship to the Majority in the Scottish Church, when contending against the Court of Session, because he believed that the compact agreed upon between Church and State in Scotland, at the time of the union of England and Scotland, had been infringed. It would occupy too much space to explain fully to English readers how the State Church of Scotland had become endeared to the people, and was to them a symbol, not of oppression or of bondage, but of freedom. Suffice it to say that the Scottish Reformation of the sixteenth century was thoroughly popular, and essentially Presbyterian; that, in the seventeenth century, the cause of the Presbyterian Church was always the cause of civil freedom; and that, when the Church was finally established, after the expulsion of James II., she emerged from a long period of persecution, during which she had been regarded with reverence and affection by the great body of the Scottish people. Add to this that the lay elders, standing, as they did, on the same level of authority with the clergy in the Church courts, prevented the latter from becoming a mere clerical caste. It was an eminently felicitous circumstance for the Scottish Church, in the 'ten years' conflict,' that her dispute with the civil authorities turned on the rights of congregations. Her offence in the eyes of the Court of Session and the British Parliament, was that she had, in a manner deemed by them high-handed, asserted the right of congregations to have no ministers thrust upon them against their will. When we think of the profound indifference with which State Churchmen, in England, regard the whole subject of the settlement of ministers—when we observe the stone-like apathy with which they see dawdling youths purchase with a bit of money the privilege of consuming a parochial income and paralysing for, say thirty years, the spiritual life of a parish—we cannot but contemplate with a mixture of wonder and admiration the intense excitement which thrilled through Scotland when the Evangelical majority in the Church Courts stood up to vindicate the right of the people to be consulted in the choice of their pastors. It was into the popular side of the controversy that Hugh Miller threw his force. The right of the Church of Scotland to govern herself, a right unquestionably conceded to her at the Union, he distinctly maintained; but his most eloquent and effective pleading was in defence of the privileges of congregations. He contributed more perhaps than any other man, to secure for the Church in her struggles with the Courts, and subsequently for the Free Church, the support of the people of Scotland. Strange to say, though one of the principal founders of the Free Church, he had no glimpse of that future of ecclesiastical freedom of which, as we trust, the Free Church has been the harbinger. To the last he talked of the 'establishment principle' and the 'voluntary principle,' and fancied that some ineffable advantage would be derived by the Church from the State, if only the State could be induced to make a just league with the Church, and to stand true to its conditions. This was one of the weakest points in Hugh Miller's system of thought, and it must be allowed to have been a very weak one. If the disruption of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1843 proved anything, it proved that, even under the most favourable circumstances, the State Church principle will not work. If two ride upon a horse, one must ride behind, and if Scottish Presbyterians have yet to learn that the State, having established a Church, will sooner or later thrust it into a position of subservience and slavery, they may be pronounced unteachable upon that subject.

But it is was our intention to speak of Hugh Miller almost exclusively as a man of science, and we have lingered too long upon other phases of his history. His scientific talent was, we think, of a high order. It consisted mainly in an admirable faculty of observation, keen, clear, exact, comprehensive. He was habitually, and at all moments, an observer. Mr. James Robertson, a gentleman who knew him intimately and walked much with him in 1834, states, in some valuable recollections of Miller, contributed to Mr. Bayne's biography, that he, Mr. R., soon remarked how vividly alive he was to the appearances of nature, darting now at a pebble in the bed of a brook, now, at a plant by the wayside, never for one moment suspending his inquisition into the scene of wonders spread around him. Such being his habit of observation, two conditions only were required in order that he might become famous as a man of science, first that the district in which he pursued his researches had not been exhausted by previous explorers; secondly, that he possessed a literary faculty adequate to the communication of his knowledge. He was fortunate in both respects. The Cromarty district afforded extraordinary opportunities of observation in a department of the geological record until then but partially known. The Old Red Sandstone system had only begun to attract the attention of geologists. The Silurian system, below it, had been successfully explored; the Carboniferous system, above it, had been penetrated in all directions for its treasures of coal, and geologists had large acquaintance with its organisms; but the Old Red Sandstone had been comparatively overlooked. Miller found himself in the neighbourhood of good sections of the formation, and studied them with the utmost care and assiduity. His journeyings as a mason had made him familiar with the rocky framework of the north of Scotland, into which the Old Red Sandstone largely enters. He was able, therefore, on claiming recognition as a man of science, to tender a highly important contribution to the world's knowledge of one of the great geological systems. His name is imperishably inscribed among the original workers in the Old Red Sandstone, along with those of Sedgwick, Agassiz, and Murchison. His specific contribution was connected with the ichthyic organisms of the system, and no contribution could have been more important. The Old Red Sandstone system is distinguished, biologically, as that in which the vertebrate kingdom, in its lowest or fish division, was first prominently developed; and the most niggardly estimate of the achievement of Miller, as a geologist, must recognise that the discoverer of Pterichthys first called the attention of scientific men to the enormous wealth of the Old Red Sandstone in fish. If this is so, it will be difficult to refuse the addition that he determined the character of the formation. There are fish in the upper beds of the Silurian system, but the characteristic organisms are molluscan and crustacean; there are traces of reptile existence in the Old Red, but its characteristic organisms are fish.

Unquestionably, the sudden rise of Miller into eminence and reputation as a geologist, was due, in some measure, to the exquisite clearness and picturesqueness of his style. From his boyhood he had made it one of his chief aims to perfect his literary workmanship. He had striven to attain skill in writing, as an enthusiastic painter strives to attain skill in the technical art of realising form and laying on colour. His descriptions of fossil organisms surprised and delighted scientific men, while the imaginative boldness and breadth with which he depicted the landscapes of the remote past fascinated general readers. After all, it maybe doubted whether the extreme elaboration and minuteness with which he described individual organisms, such as the Pterichthys, was not labour lost. A carefully executed wood-cut conveys a more correct and impressive idea of the creature than any words which could be devised. At all events, the descriptions of fossil organisms in the works of Hugh Miller are as exact and vivid as any in the English language.

We spoke of the sincerity and earnestness of his religion. He had in fact that quality of the true man, that he could be nothing by halves. His religion was what genuine religion always is, a fire warming his whole nature, and mingling with every operation of his mind. He was thoroughly acquainted with the works of Hume, and had felt their subtle and searching power. He had skirted, as we said, the howling solitudes of infidelity, and now having, as he devoutly believed, been led by a Divine hand to the green pastures and living waters and healthful, habitable lands of faith, the central ambition of his life, never asleep in his breast, was to lead others to the refuge which he had found. He could not read in God's book of nature without thinking of God, and endeavouring to trace the marks of His finger, and looking for smooth stones to be put into his sling, and aimed at the foreheads of the enemies of the faith. He had no sooner mastered the logic of geology, and formed a conception of the platforms of life which have been unveiled by the science in the remoteness of the past, than he began to perceive, or think that he perceived, certain positions afforded by it, which the defender of revealed religion might take up with much advantage in carrying on the conflict with infidelity. Of these, the best known is his scheme for reconciling the Mosaic account of the creation of the heavens and the earth with the conclusions of geologic science. This subject is disposed of in the 'Life and Letters' in a single sentence; we think it deserved, and propose to devote to it, more space and attention.

Miller frankly avowed that the view which he originally held as to the scientific interpretation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis had been modified. He had believed, with Chalmers and Buckland, that the six days were natural days of twenty-four hours each; that the operations performed in them had reference to the world as inhabited by man; that a 'great chaotic gap' separated the 'latest of the geologic ages' from the human period; and the Scripture contained no account whatever of those myriads of ages during which the several geological formations came into the state in which we now find them. As his geological knowledge extended, and in particular, when he engaged in close personal inspection of the Tertiary and Post-tertiary formations, he perceived that the hypothesis of a chaotic period, dividing the present from the past, in the history of our planet, was untenable. 'No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness,' thus he announces the result of his investigations, 'separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna; for familiar animals, such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild-cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity.'

It was legitimate for theologians, sixty years ago, to put their trust in the theory of a chaotic state of the planet immediately before the commencement of the human period, and to allege that Scripture had folded up all reference to preceeding geological ages, in the words 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' The authority of Cuvier was then supreme in the world of science, and Cuvier held that 'not much earlier than 5,000 or 6,000 years ago' the surface of the globe underwent a sudden and subversive catastrophe. But no theologian who now maintains this hypothesis can place his theology on a level with the scientific acquirement of the day. Dr. Kurtz is the only theologian of any standing who is known to us as still holding the view of Chalmers; and if we were asked how a person accurately acquainted with geological science might best obtain a conception of the untenability of the theory of a recent chaos, we should advise him to read Dr. Kurtz's defence of the hypothesis. The German divine repeatedly specifies 6,000 years as the period during which man and the existing order of terrestrial beings have occupied our planet. 'According to the Scriptures,' he says, 'the present order of things has existed for nearly 6,000 years.' He has a theory of his own on the subject of fossils. 'The types buried in the rocks were not destined to continue perpetually, or else have not attained their destination.' They were mere transient phenomena. It would be difficult to put into language a proposition more inconsistent with geological fact. The species of the Silurian mollusca have changed, but mollusca of Silurian type abound at this hour. Evidence amounting almost to absolute demonstration identifies the globigerina of the Atlantic mud of to-day with the globigerina of the Cretaceous system; and Sir Charles Lyell calculates that the Cretaceous system came to an end 80,000,000 years ago. Pronouncing the types of the past evanescent, Dr. Kurtz pronounces the type of the present permanent. The creatures called into existence on the six days of Genesis, which last he holds to have been natural days, 'were intended to continue, and not to perish, and their families were not to be petrified in strata, but each individual was to decay in the ordinary manner, so that their bones have mostly passed away without leaving any trace.' This is a pure imagination. There is no reason to believe that the petrifactive agencies are less active at present than they were in by-gone geological epochs. The essential and irreconcilable discrepancy, however, between the views of Dr. Kurtz and the conclusions of geology, consists in his assumption of a universal deluge, sweeping away all life, and leaving the surface of the world a tabula rasa, immediately before the appearance of man. He speaks of 'a flood, which destroyed and prevented all life, and after the removal of which the present state of the earth, with its plants, animals, and man, was immediately restored.' With marvellous simplicity he declares that 'the only thing' he 'demands,' 'and which no geological theory can or will deny,' is that 'the globe was covered with water' before the appearance of man 'and the present plants and animals.' There is no geologist deserving the name at present alive who would admit this proposition; and we suppose that a large majority of living geologists would maintain that the earth has certainly not been covered with water since the time of those forests whose remains are preserved for us in Devonian strata. To name one among many proofs, the state of the fauna of the Atlantic islands, Madeira and the Desertas, demonstrates that the earth has not been enveloped by the ocean for a period compared with which Dr. Kurtz's 6,000 years dwindle into insignificance. Geology pronounces as decisively against the occurrence of a universal chaos upon earth 6,000 years ago as against the accumulation of all the strata of the earth's crust in six natural days. There is no sense recognisable by geological science in which the word 'beginning' can be applied to the condition presented by the surface of the earth at any period nearly so recent as 6,000 years ago.

According to the theory of Mosaic geology ultimately adopted by Hugh Miller, the 'beginning' spoken of in the first verse of the Bible corresponds to that period when the planet, wrapt in primeval fires, was about to enter upon the series of changes which is inscribed in the geologic record. The chaos, dark and formless, which preceded the dawn of organic existence upon earth, was no temporary inundation, no miraculous catastrophe, but an actual state of things of which the evidence still exists in the rocks. Strictly speaking, indeed, the term 'chaos' has no scientific meaning. Science is acquainted with no period in time, no locality in space, where there has been a general suspension of law; and it may be worthy of remark that, although Scripture speaks of the original state of things as without form and void, there is no hint that it was beyond control of Divine and natural ordinance. Relatively to man, however, and to those changes in the structure and organisms of the planet which the geologist chronicles, the fiery vesture, in which advocates of the Age theory of reconciliation between Genesis and geology allege the earth to have been at one time enveloped, constitutes an interruption to all research, a commencement of all that can be called scientific discovery. If it could be shown that the first chapter of Genesis contains an intelligible and accurate account of the changes which have taken place in the crust of the earth from the time when form first rose out of formlessness, and light sprang from darkness, to the time when man began to build his cities and till his fields, no candid judge would refuse to admit that the problem presented by the chapter had been satisfactorily solved, and that the chapter itself formed a sublimely appropriate vestibule to the temple of Revelation.

Let us state Miller's conception of the meaning and scientific purport of the first chapter of Genesis in his own words:—

'What may be termed,' we quote from the Testimony of the Rocks, 'the three geologic days—the third, fifth, and sixth—may be held to have extended over those Carboniferous periods during which the great plants were created—over those Oolitic and Cretaceous periods during which the great sea-monsters and birds were created—and over those Tertiary periods during which the great terrestrial mammals were created. For the intervening, or fourth day, we have that wide space represented by the Permian and Triassic periods, which, less conspicuous in their floras than the periods that went immediately before, and less conspicuous in their faunas than the periods that came immediately after, were marked by the decline and ultimate extinction of the Palæozoic forms, and the first partially developed beginnings of the secondary ones. And for the first and second days there remains the great Azoic period, during which the immensely developed gneisses, mica-schists, and primary clay-slates were deposited, and the two extended periods represented by the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone system. These, taken together, exhaust the geological scale, and may be named in their order as, first, the Azoic day or period; second, the Silurian, or Old Red Sandstone day, or period; third, the Carboniferous day, or period; fourth, the Permian or Triassic day, or period; and sixth, the Tertiary day, or period.'

It is important to observe that Miller here expressly fits into his scheme the work of the six days. In another passage he remarks that it is specifically his task, as a geologist, to account for the operations of the third, fifth, and sixth days, and this circumstance has occasioned the mistake, which has crept into so respectable a work as Smith's 'Dictionary of the Bible,' that he did not profess to explain the creative proceedings of the first, second, and fourth days. In the passage we have quoted he assigns to each successive day its distinctive character and work. The entire scheme, then, may be thrown into a single sentence. A beginning of formlessness and fire, indefinite in duration; a first and second day, not discriminated by Miller from each other, during which light, though created, did not reach, the surface of our planet, but gradually struggled through the thick enveloping canopy of steam rising from a boiling ocean; a third day, in which an enormous development of vegetable life took place, a development due in part to the warm and humid atmosphere, which no clear sunbeam could as yet penetrate; a fourth day, marked by the emergence of sun, moon, and stars in unclouded splendour, but by no striking phenomena of organic life; a fifth day, in which the most imposing features in the creative procession were sea-monsters and birds; and a sixth day, in which huge mammals crowded the stage of existence, and man appeared. Each of these days is, of course, supposed to have occupied an indefinite number of years.

It is obviously the principle or method of this scheme of reconciliation between Genesis and geology to look for points in the Mosaic narrative which correspond with the facts revealed by geology. The words in the Scriptural account are few; are they so express, vivid, and characteristic that they epitomise, as in a Divine telegram, the geological history of millions of years? A consummate artist looks upon a face and throws a few strokes, quick as lightning, upon his canvas. The countenance seems to live. Revealings of character, which we might have required years to trace, flash on us from the eye, and chronicles of passion are written in a speck of crimson on the lip. The portrait is only a sketch; weeks or months might be spent in elaborating its colour, and perfecting its gradation of light and shade; but not less on this account, does it accurately correspond with the original, and show the man to those who knew him. The advocates of the Age theory of Mosaic geology maintain that, few as are the touches in the pictured history of the world in the first chapter of Genesis, the geologist can recognise them as unmistakeably true to the facts of the past. The correspondence alleged to exist has been illustrated in yet another fashion. Look upon a mountainous horizon, in the far distance, on a clear day, and you perceive a delicate film of blue or pearly grey, relieved against the sky. The outline of that film, faint though it be, is, for every kind of mountain range, more or less characteristic. The horizon line of the primaries will be serrated, peaked, and jagged. The horizon line of the metamorphic hills, though fantastic, will have more of curve and undulation. The horizon of the tertiaries will be in long sweeps, and tenderly modulated, far-stretching lines. Those minute jags and points of the primaries are dizzy precipices and towering peaks. The glacier is creeping on under that filmy blue; the avalanche is thundering in that intense silence. Rivers that will channel continents and separate nation from nation, bound along in foaming cataracts, where you perceive only that the tender amethyst of the sky has taken a deeper tinge. That undulating line of the crystalline hills tells of broad, dreary moors, dark, sullen streams, sparse fields of stunted corn. That sweeping, melting, waving line of the tertiaries tells of stately forest and gardened plain, of lordly mansions and bustling villages. The Mosaic record, as interpreted by the advocates of the Age theory, gives the horizon lines of successive geological eras. Its descriptions, they maintain, are correct, viewed as horizon lines. They convey the largest amount of knowledge concerning the several periods which could possibly be conveyed under the given conditions. Such is the method or logic of the Age theory of Mosaic geology; and it is manifest that, whatever may be its scientific value, it is no more to be refuted by the mention of geological facts which the Mosaic record, does not specify, than the accuracy of a map, constructed on the scale of half an inch to the hundred miles, would be impugned by proving that it omitted a particular wood, rock, hill, or village.

It is indispensable to the establishment of this theory, that the geological changes which the earth has undergone, shall admit of being arranged in certain divisions. The lines of demarcation between these may be drawn within wide limits of variation; but should it become an unquestioned truth of geologic science that absolute uniformity of phenomena has reigned in our world so long as the geologist traces its history, the Age theory would be untenable. The theory does not require that the 'solutions of continuity' should be abrupt or catastrophic. On the contrary, the 'morning' and' evening' of the Mosaic record suggest gradation; and the pause of night, with its silence, its slumber, its gathering up of force for new outgoings of the creative energy, by no means suggests cataclysm or revolution. But the days or periods, though they may melt into each other with the tender modulation of broad billows on a calming sea, must possess a true differentiation, and cannot be accepted by those who believe in absolute geological uniformitarianism. We are not sure, however, that any geologists profess this creed, and the views propounded by very eminent geologists on the nature of the changes which have taken place on the earth appear to us to satisfy the requirements of the Age theory, in respect of division and succession. In the sixth edition of his 'Elements of Geology' Sir Charles Lyell writes thus:—'Geology, although it cannot prove that other planets are peopled with appropriate races of living beings, has demonstrated the truth of conclusions scarcely less wonderful—the existence on our planet of so many habitable surfaces, or worlds as they have been called, each distinct in time, and peopled with its peculiar races of aquatic and terrestrial beings.' He proceeds to state that living nature, with its inexhaustible variety, displaying 'infinite wisdom and power,' is 'but the last of a great series of pre-existing creations.' Mr. Darwin, in the fourth edition of his 'Origin of Species,' makes the weighty remark that 'scarcely any palæontological discovery is more striking than the fact, that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout the world.' Qualifying his words by the statement that they apply chiefly to marine forms of life, and that the simultaneity referred to, does not necessarily fall within 'the same thousandth or hundred-thousandth year,' he writes as follows:—

'The fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously, in the above large sense, at distant parts of the world, has greatly struck those admirable observers, MM. de Verneuil and d'Archiac. After referring to the parallelism of the palæozoic forms of life in various parts of Europe, they add, "If struck by this strange sequence, we turn our attention to North America, and there discover a series of analogous phenomena, it will appear certain that all these modifications of species, their extinction, and the introduction of new ones, cannot be owing to mere changes in marine currents, or other causes more or less local and temporary, but depend on general laws which govern the whole animal kingdom." M. Barrande has made forcible remarks to precisely the same effect. It is indeed quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates.'

Mr. Darwin holds that 'looking to a remotely future epoch,' the later tertiaries, namely, 'the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains, in some degree allied, from not including those forms which are only found in the older under-lying deposits, would be correctly ranked as simultaneous, in a geological sense.'

These statements afford, we think, a sufficient basis for the general scheme of Mosaic geology which we are considering; and it may be remarked that the latest of the geological epochs of simultaneity, as defined by Mr. Darwin, would agree indifferently well with the last of the Mosaic days or periods, as defined by Hugh Miller.

There is yet another proposition which must be established if the Age theory of Mosaic geology is to be maintained. The scheme depends essentially on the theory of central heat. We saw that Miller undertakes to account for each of the six Mosaic days or periods. As a geologist, indeed, he felt himself to be under a special obligation to explain the creative operations of the third, fifth, and sixth days, that is to say, the day on which vegetable life was created and the successive days on which different orders of vertebrate animals were introduced into the world; but he gives delineations of the prophetic vision of the first two days, and he assigns the occurrences of the fourth day, namely, the appearance of the sun and moon, to the Permian and Triassic periods. In one word, he accepted the responsibility of adapting his scheme of reconciliation to all the day-periods of Genesis, and he was perfectly aware that the hypothesis would require to be rejected if the theory of central heat were invalidated. His geological explanation of the first four days depends explicitly upon the opinion that, at the time when the earth entered upon those changes which are chronicled by geological science, it was under the influence of intense heat, and gradually cooling and solidifying. In the first day thick darkness lay upon the surface of the earth, owing to the canopy of steam, impermeable by light, under which it lay shrouded. During the second day the light began to penetrate the vapoury veil, and dim curtains of clouds raised themselves from the sea. On the third day the forests, which were heaped up for us into treasuries of coal, came into existence, and Miller accounts for their luxuriance by supposing that the heated and humid state of the atmosphere of the planet, still dependent upon the central fires, favoured their growth. It was not until the fourth day that the blanket of the ancient night was rent asunder, that sun, moon, and stars beamed out, and that a state of the atmosphere and a succession of summer and winter, day and night, identical with those we now witness, began. Possibly enough, had Miller found himself ultimately forced to abandon the theory of central heat, he would have entrenched himself, as in a second line of defence, in the three specially geological day-periods. But he never contemplated an abandonment of the doctrine of central heat. He held that the earth was once a molten mass, and that the series of changes through which it has passed arose naturally out of this fact. The crust of granite he believed to have been enveloped, in the process of cooling, by a heated ocean whose waters held in solution the ingredients of gneiss, mica-schist, hornblende-schist, and clay-slate. The planet gradually matured 'from ages in which its surface was a thin earthquake-shaken crust, subject to continual sinkings, and to fiery outbursts of the Plutonic matter, to ages in which it is the very nature of its noblest inhabitant to calculate on its stability as the surest and most certain of all things.' In short, he maintained that 'there existed long periods in the history of the earth, in which there obtained conditions of things entirely different from any which obtain now—periods during which life, either animal or vegetable, could not have existed on our planet; and further, that the sedimentary rocks of this early age may have derived, even in the forming, a constitution and texture which, in present circumstances, sedimentary rocks cannot receive.'

Sir Charles Lyell rejects absolutely the theory of central heat as a mode of accounting for these changes on the terrestrial surface, which are classified by geologists. He declares that no kind of rocks known to us can be proved to belong to 'a nascent state of the planet.' Disclaiming the opinion 'that there never was a beginning to the present order of things,' he nevertheless holds that geologists have found 'no decided evidence of a commencement.' Granite, gneiss, hornblende-schist, and the rest of the crystalline rocks, 'belong not to an order of things which has passed away; they are not the monuments of the primeval period, bearing inscribed upon them in obsolete characters the words and phrases of a dead language; but they teach us that part of the living language of nature, which we cannot learn by our daily intercourse with what passes on the habitable surface.'

From the phenomena of precession and nutation, Mr. Hopkins, reasoning mathematically, inferred that the minimum present thickness of the crust of the earth is from 800 to 1,000 miles. This conclusion is the basis of Sir Charles Lyell's opinion respecting the Plutonic agencies which take part, or have taken part, in the formation of rocks. He shows by diagram that, if even 200 miles are allowed for the thickness of the crust, seas or oceans of lava five miles deep and 5,000 miles long might be represented by lines which, in relation to the mass of the earth, would be extremely unimportant. 'The expansion, melting, solidification, and shrinking of such subterranean seas of lava at various depths, might,' he contends, 'suffice to cause great movements or earthquakes at the surface, and even great rents in the earth's crust several thousand miles long, such as may be implied by the linearly-arranged cones of the Andes, or mountain-chains like the Alps.' To invoke the igneous fusion of the whole planet, to account for phenomena like these is, therefore, he concludes, to have recourse to a machinery 'utterly disproportionate to the effects which it is required to explain.'

Sir Charles Lyell derives an argument against the theory of central heat, from the consideration that it would, in his opinion, involve the existence of tides in the internal fire-ocean, which tides would register themselves in the swellings and subsidences of volcanoes. 'May we not ask,' he says, 'whether, in every volcano during an eruption, the lava which is supposed to communicate with a great central ocean, would not rise and fall sensibly; or whether, in a crater like Stromboli, where there is always melted matter in a state of ebullition, the ebbing and flowing of the liquid would not be constant?' We venture to remark that this argument does not seem unanswerable. No one denies that the crust is at present consolidated to the depth of at least from thirty to eighty miles. The capacity of known chemical forces to produce intense heat in this region is not disputed. The eruptions of now active volcanoes might arise, therefore, from processes going on in a part of the crust separated by solidified strata from the internal reservoir of liquid fire, and not accessible to its tides. We might ask also, in turn, whether observations have been made upon volcanoes in a state of eruption, exact enough to determine whether they are or are not influenced by internal tides?

It is affirmed by Mr. David Forbes, in a recent number of Nature, that Professor Palmieri stated, as the result of observations made by him during the last eruption of Vesuvius, 'that the moon's attraction occasioned tides in the central zone of molten lava, in quite a similar manner as it causes them in the ocean.' Mr. Forbes adds that 'a further corroboration of this view is seen in the results of an examination of the records of some 7,000 earthquake shocks which occurred during the first half of this century, compiled by Perry, and which, according to him, demonstrate that earthquakes are much more frequent in the conjunction and opposition of the moon than at other times, more so when the moon is near the earth than when it is distant, and also more frequent in the hour of its passage through the meridian.' If these statements are correct—and we have no reason to call them in question—the supposed fact, which Sir Charles presumed to tell in his favour, has been converted into an ascertained fact which tells most forcibly against him.

In the latest edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' Sir Charles Lyell seems, in at least one passage, to assume that this controversy is at an end.

'It must not be forgotten,' (these are his words) 'that the geological speculations still in vogue respecting the original fluidity of the planet, and the gradual consolidation of its external shell, belong to a period when theoretical ideas were entertained as to the relative age of the crystalline foundations of that shell wholly at variance with the present state of our knowledge. It was formerly imagined that all granite was of very high antiquity, and that rocks, such as gneiss, mica-schist, and clay-slate, were also anterior in date to the existence of organic beings on a habitable surface. It was, moreover, supposed that these primitive formations, as they are called, implied a continual thickening of the crust at the expense of the original fluid nucleus. These notions have been universally abandoned. It is now ascertained that the granites of different regions are by no means all of the same antiquity, and it is hardly possible to prove any one of them to be as old as the oldest known fossil organic remains. It is likewise now admitted, that gneiss and other crystalline strata are sedimentary deposits which have undergone metamorphic action, and they can almost all be demonstrated to be newer than the lately-discovered fossil called Eozoon Canadense.'

"With all deference to one whom we acknowledge to be among the very ablest living geologists, we must say that this language strikes us as more emphatic than the state of the discussion warrants. We do not undertake absolutely to maintain the theory of central heat as explaining the formation of the granitic and metamorphic rocks, but we cannot admit, what Sir Charles seems to imply, that the time has arrived when investigation and experiment on the subject may be relinquished, and the tone of dogmatic confidence assumed. The reasonableness of permitting a certain degree of suspense of judgment regarding it becomes the more evident when we observe that Sir Charles is not prepared to maintain against astronomers that the planet was not originally fluid. 'The astronomer,' he says,

'may find good reasons for ascribing the earth's form to the original fluidity of the mass in times long antecedent to the first introduction of living beings into the planet; but the geologist must be content to regard the earliest monuments which it is his task to interpret as belonging to a period when the crust had already acquired great solidity and thickness, probably as great as it now possesses, and when volcanic rocks not essentially differing from those now produced, were formed from time to time, the intensity of volcanic heat being neither greater nor less than it is now.'

There can be no doubt that astronomers have been startled into something like general protest against the rigid uniformitarianism of Sir Charles Lyell. Differing as they do very widely in their conceptions of the probable manner in which planets are formed, they seem to agree that those bodies have their beginning in heat and in fusion. The phenomena of variable stars, taken in connection with the revelations of spectrum analysis, demonstrate that the combustion and the cooling of starry masses are occurrences not unknown in the economy of the universe. If Sir Charles declines to contest the astronomical position of the original fluidity of the planet, considerable plausibility will continue to attach to that geological doctrine which connects the crystalline rocks with the fluidity in question. Those rocks, from the most ancient granites to the most recent clay-slates, occupy a large proportion of the earth's surface. Their great general antiquity is indisputable. The theory that they furnish the link between the past and the present of the earth's crust—that they furnish the point where the lights of geological and of astronomical science meet—strongly commends itself to the mind.

These observations derive additional force from the circumstance that Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine of the modern and chemical origin of all crystalline rocks is dependent upon considerations which must be allowed to possess not a little of a hypothetical and precarious character. The phenomena of metamorphism, as arising from heat, from thermal springs, and so on, are well-known and important; but there is nothing like adequate evidence that they are capable of giving the crystalline rocks that structure and aspect under which we behold them. The chemical substances in the crust which Sir Charles presumes to be capable of forming seas of molten matter, five miles deep and 5,000 miles long, have never placed before human eyes a lake of fire three miles across; is there not a trace of arbitrary hypothesis in supposing that, during hundreds of millions of years, those chemical agencies have been providing, beneath the surface of the world, cauldrons of fire to melt the granites of all known ages, from the Laurentian to the Tertiary, to produce the twistings, undulations, contortions of the metamorphic strata throughout hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of rock, and to feed every volcano that ever flamed on the planet? Not even to that proposition which is avowedly at the basis of Sir Charles's theory, namely, that the solidified shell of the earth is at least from 800 to 1,000 miles thick, can absolute certainty be said to belong. We are willing to admit the distinguished ability of Mr. Hopkins; but it is a fatal mistake to impute to solutions of problems in mixed mathematics that character of certainty which belongs to the results of purely mathematical reasoning. Into every problem of mixed mathematics one element at least enters which depends for its correctness upon observation. In many cases this correctness depends on the perfect accuracy of instruments, and upon consummate skill in using them. A minute error in the original observation may produce comprehensive error in the conclusion. It is still fresh in the public memory that new and more accurate observation corrected by millions of miles a calculation comparatively so simple as the distance between the earth and the sun. The problem by the solution of which Mr. Hopkins determined that the minimum thickness of the crust is from 800 to 1,000 miles depends for its reliability on certain obscure phenomena connected with precession and nutation. Sir Charles Lyell admits that the problem is a 'delicate' one. Mr. Charles MacLaren remarked, and Miller quotes the remark with approval, that Mr. Hopkins's inference 'is somewhat like an estimate, of the distance of the stars deduced from a difference of one or two seconds in their apparent position, a difference scarcely distinguishable from errors of observation.' Add to this that opinions might be quoted from mathematicians of name as decidedly in favour of the theory that the geological changes which have taken place in the earth's crust are due to central heat, as the deduction of Mr. Hopkins is opposed to it. In the ninth edition of his 'Principles,' i.e., in the edition immediately preceding that now current, Sir Charles informs us that

'Baron Fourier, after making a curious series of experiments on the cooling of incandescent bodies, considers it to be proved mathematically, that the actual distribution of heat in the earth's envelope is precisely that which would have taken place if the globe had been formed in a medium of a very high temperature, and had afterwards been constantly cooled.'

Sir Charles replied to this in the same edition that, if the earth were a fluid mass, a circulation would exist between centre and circumference, and solidification of the latter could not commence until the whole had been reduced to about the temperature of incipient fusion. We fail to see that this is an answer to Baron Fourier. What necessity is there for supposing that the solidification of the crust commenced before the matter of the globe had been reduced throughout to about the temperature of incipient fusion? The water in a pond must be reduced to about the temperature of incipient freezing before ice can form on the surface, but this does not prevent the formation of a sheet of ice on the top.

In the article in Nature, from which we have already quoted, Mr. David Forbes mentions that M. De Launay, Director of the Observatory at Paris, 'an authority equally eminent as a mathematician and an astronomer,' having carefully considered Mr. Hopkins's problem, decided that its data were incorrect, and that it could shed no light whatever on the question whether the globe is liquid or solid. There is some doubt, however, as to the import of M. De Launay's statement.

We may be the more disposed to wonder at the decision with which Sir Charles Lyell pronounces upon this subject in his latest edition, by the fact that, since the publication of the previous edition, he has modified, to a very serious extent, his conception of the evidence on which the theory which he adopts is based. In the ninth edition of the 'Principles' he laid so much stress on Sir Humphry Davy's hypothesis of an un-oxidized metallic nucleus of the globe, liable to be oxidized at any point of its periphery by the percolation of water, and thus to evolve heat sufficient to melt the adjacent rocks, that Hugh Miller, in contending against Sir Charles, selected this as an essential part of the argument. In his tenth edition Sir Charles does not even mention Sir Humphry Davy's theory. The star under the influence of which the tenth edition was prepared was that of Mr. Darwin. No brighter star may be above the geological horizon, and Sir Charles may have done well to own its influence, but we submit that opinions which undergo important modification within a few years ought hardly to be promulgated as marking the limit between the era of darkness and the era of light in geological discovery.

After all, however, the crucial question is, whether the theory of central heat has any positive evidence to support it. Here we meet, in the first place, with the undisputed fact that heat increases as we descend from the surface of the earth. Sir Charles Lyell admits that the fact of augmentation is proved. Experiment and observation, no doubt, have not yet enabled us to determine the ratio in which the heat increases as we penetrate into the crust; but this does not neutralise the force of the fact itself. Sir Charles endeavours to parry its effect by remarking that if we take a certain ratio of increase, a ratio which seems to be countenanced by experiment, we shall, 'long before approaching the central nucleus,' arrive at a degree of heat so great 'that we cannot conceive the external crust to resist fusion.' It is surely a sufficient reply to this to say that our conceptions as to the consequences arising from an admitted fact can neither invalidate its evidence nor annul the obvious inferences from it. The reader of the 'Principles of Geology,' besides, who has been told by Sir Charles Lyell that the interposition of a few feet of scoriæ and pumice enables him to stand without inconvenience on molten lava, may be permitted to form a high estimate of the power of many miles of stratified and unstratified rock to resist fusion by the internal fires. Sooth to say, however, it will be time to consider an objection grounded on the ratio of the increase in heat from the surface of the earth downwards, when the ratio in question has been ascertained. The fact of increase is admitted; the ratio of increase is an unknown quantity: it is curious logic to impugn the direct bearing of the former, on the strength of consequences conceived to arise from the latter.

Hugh Miller believed that the existence of the equatorial ring, in virtue of which the polar diameter of the earth is shorter than the equatorial, furnished explicit evidence that the planet once was molten.

'If our earth,' he wrote, 'was always the stiff, rigid, unyielding mass that it is now, a huge metallic ball, bearing, like the rusty ball of a cannon, its crust of oxide, how comes it that its form so entirely belies its history? Its form tells that it also, like the cannon-ball, was once in a viscid state, and that its diurnal motion on its axis, when in this state of viscidity, elongated it, through the operation of a well-known law, at the equator, and flattened it at the poles, and made it altogether the oblate spheroid which experience demonstrates it to be.'

In other planets, he urged, the same form is due manifestly to the action of the same law. Venus, Mars, Saturn, oblate spheroids all, have been similarly 'spun out by their rotatory motion in exactly the line in which, as in the earth, that motion is greatest.' In these, however, we can only approximately determine the lengths of the equatorial and polar diameters; 'in one great planet, Jupiter, we can ascertain them scarce less exactly than our own earth;' and Jupiter's equatorial diameter bears exactly that proportion to his polar diameter which 'the integrity of the law,' as exemplified in the relation between the equatorial and polar diameters of the earth demands. 'Here, then,' proceeds Miller, 'is demonstration that the oblate sphericity of the earth is a consequence of the earth's diurnal motion on its axis; nor is it possible that it could have received this form when in a solid state.'

Sir Charles Lyell holds that the excess of the equatorial diameter over the polar may be accounted for on uniformitarian principles. 'The statical figure,' he says, 'of the terrestrial spheroid (of which the longest diameter exceeds the shortest by about twenty-five miles), may have been the result of gradual and even of existing causes, and not of a primitive, universal, and simultaneous fluidity.' Miller denies this possibility; and we confess that the passage in which he assails the position of Sir Charles Lyell appears to us to have great force. Let us hear him:—

'The laws of deposition are few, simple, and well known. The denuding and transporting agencies are floods, tides, waves, icebergs. The sea has its currents, the land its rivers; but while some of these flow from the poles towards the equator, others flow from the equator towards the poles uninfluenced by the rotatory motion; and the vast depth and extent of the equatorial seas show that the ratio of deposition is not greater in them than in the seas of the temperate regions. We have, indeed, in the Arctic and Antarctic currents, and the icebergs which they bear, agents of denudation and transport permanent in the present state of things, which bring detrital matter from the higher towards the lower latitudes; but they stop far short of the tropics; they have no connection with the rotatory motion; and their influence on the form of the earth must be infinitely slight; nay, even were the case otherwise, instead of tending to the formation of an equatorial ring, they would lead to the production of two rings widely distant from the equator. And, judging from what appears, we must hold that the laws of Plutonic intrusion or upheaval, though more obscure than those of deposition, operate quite as independently of the earth's rotatory motion. Were the case otherwise, the mountain systems of the world, and all the great continents, would be clustered at the equator; and the great lands and great oceans of our planet, instead of running, as they do, in so remarkable a manner, from south to north, would range, like the belts of Jupiter, from west to east. There is no escape for us from the inevitable conclusion that our globe received its form, as an oblate spheroid, at a time when it existed throughout as a viscid mass.'

Accordingly, though admitting that 'there is a wide segment of truth embodied in the views of the metamorphists,' Miller declared his belief on the subject of central heat in these terms: 'I must continue to hold, with Humboldt and with Hutton, with Playfair and with Hall, that this solid earth was at one time, from the centre to the circumference, a mass of molten matter.' Hugh Miller saw the ninth edition of Sir Charles Lyell's 'Principles,' and seems to have had its reasonings in view in writing these and other passages; we cannot persuade ourselves that he would have recalled them if he had lived to see the tenth edition.

We wish to state in the clearest terms that, though we have stated some of the evidence which supports the ordinary geological doctrine of central heat, we do not adduce that evidence as absolutely conclusive. All we argue for is, that the question be not looked upon as decided in favour of the uniformitarians. It may be that more minute and comprehensive observation on the age of the crystalline rocks and on the phenomena of metamorphism will demonstrate that the condition of no system of rocks known to us can be traced to the influence of an originally molten state of the planet. It may be that what seems at present the unanimous opinion of astronomers, that 'the whole quantity of Plutonic energy must have been greater in past times than the present,' is a mistake; it may be, in the last place, that the primeval fusion of the planet ceased to act upon those parts of the crust which are accessible to geological observation before those causes came into operation to which their present state is due. But we deny that these positions are established. A writer in the Edinburgh Review declared, so recently as last year, that M. Durocher, in his 'Essay on Comparative Petrology,' has produced 'absolute proof that the earth was an incandescent molten sphere, before atmospheric and aqueous agencies had clothed it with the strata so familiar to our eyes.' Sir Roderick Murchison, who, as a student not only of books and museums, but of the rock-systems of the world in their own vast solitudes, is an authority as high as any living man, holds that 'the crust and outline of the earth are full of evidences that many of the ruptures and overflows of the strata, as well as great denudations, could not even in millions of years have been produced by agencies like those of our own time.' These statements may be correct or the reverse; but they prove, we submit, that the controversy respecting central heat is not at an end.

Those who hold that Hugh Miller's views as to the connection between an originally molten state of the planet and the most ancient rocks known to us, have been finally disposed of by Sir Charles Lyell, must, we think, admit that his interpretation of the six days' work can no longer be maintained. On the other hand, if his conception of the mode in which the crystalline rocks were formed can be shown to be substantially correct, we see not how any one can refuse to grant that those correspondences between the day-periods of Genesis and successive stages in the geological history of the globe, which he pointed out, are highly remarkable. Ten thousand omissions of detail go for nothing, if it can be proved that, although light existed in space, the condition of the atmosphere of this world prevented the sun's rays for myriads of ages from reaching the surface; that the same atmospheric conditions which excluded light from the planet favoured the development of vegetation in the Carboniferous epoch; that the day-period during which the sun and moon are stated in Genesis to have been set to rule the day and the night coincides with that geological era when light was first poured in clear radiance on our world; that the times of the Oolite and the Lias exhibited an enormous development of reptilian and ornithic existence inevitably suggestive of the creeping things, and fowls, and great sea-monsters of the fifth day-period; and that the predominance of mammalian life, of 'the beast of the earth after his kind, the cattle after their kind,' distinguished alike the latest of the great geological periods and the sixth day of the Mosaic record. Assuming the correctness of his fundamental conception of geological progression, Miller might challenge the geologist—confining himself to the number of words used by the Scriptural writers—to name phenomena, belonging to the successive geological epochs, more distinctive, impressive, and spectacular than those mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. Admitting that life existed in the planet millions of years before the time which he assigns to the third day, Miller might ask whether the darkness, and the slow separation of cloud from wave, were not the unique and universal phenomena of those primeval ages. Granting that there was an important flora, as well as a large development of ichthyic life, in the Devonian epoch, he might ask whether, at any earlier period, the earth possessed forests comparable with those of the Carboniferous epoch; and if it were urged that the Carboniferous flora, consisting as it did in an immense proportion of ferns, cannot be regarded as corresponding to the 'grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself,' of the Mosaic record, he might still reply that the fact of vegetation, apart from botanical distinctions, was then the most conspicuous among the phenomena of the planet. In like manner, while granting that life—animal and vegetable, of many forms—existed in the Oolitic and Liassic ages, he might ask whether the presence in the planet of at least four unique orders of reptilia, to wit; Ichthyosauria, Plesiosauria, Pterosauria, Dinosauria, and perhaps, as Professor Huxley says, 'another or two,' was not the circumstance which a geologist would select as distinctive, and if so, whether the coincidence between these and the creeping things and great sea-monsters of the fifth Mosaic day is not striking. As we formerly remarked, Miller's geological interpretation of the fifth and succeeding day is independent of any theory as to the originally molten state of the planet. On the sixth day-period, both in Genesis and in the geological history of the world, we have a great development of mammalian life, and, finally, the appearance of man. There was a Tertiary flora, but it was not strongly marked off from other floras; there were Tertiary reptiles, but their place was subordinate; in respect of their beasts of the field, and in respect of the presence of man, the Tertiary ages stand alone. The mammoths and mastodons, the rhinoceri and hippopotami, 'the enormous dinotherium and colossal megatherium,' elephants whose bones, preserved in Siberian ice, have furnished 'ivory quarries,' unexhausted by the working of upwards of a hundred years, tigers as large again as the largest Asiatic species, distinguish the Tertiary times from all others known to the geologist. In stating his views, Miller availed himself of the hypothesis, put forward by Kurtz and others, that the phenomena of the geological ages passed before the eyes of Moses by way of panoramic vision. This, we need hardly say, is a pure hypothesis, favourable to pictorial description, but not essentially connected with the logic of the question. Perhaps, the weakest point in Miller's theory—always presuming him to be right as to the originally molten state of the planet—is the apportionment of the present time to the seventh Mosaic day and to the Sabbatic rest of the Creator. Geologists would now, with one voice, refuse to admit that any essential alteration can be traced in the processes by which the face of the earth, and the character of its living creatures, are modified in the present geological epoch, as compared with those of, at least, the two or three preceding epochs. Man, doubtless, effects changes in the aspect of the world on a far greater scale than any other animal. He can reclaim wide regions from the sea, he can arrest the rains far up in the mountains, and lead them to water his terraces, he can temper climates, he can people continents with new animals and plants. It is allowable in Goethe, talking poetically, to style him 'the little god of earth.' But his entire activity, and its results, depend not upon a suspension of the laws and processes of nature—not upon a withdrawal of creative energy—but upon his capacity, as an observing, reasoning being, to ascertain the processes of nature, and use them for his own advantage.

The strongest objection in some minds to this scheme of reconciliation between Genesis and geology will be that it does not harmonise with the general method of Scripture. Miller was abreast of his time as a geologist, but from his complete unacquaintance with the original languages of Scripture and with the history of the canon, he could form a judgment only at secondhand on fundamental questions in theology. That the Bible is inspired—that it is pervaded by a Divine breathing—we have upon apostolic authority. In no part of Scripture, however, is the nature of this Divine breathing explained to us, or information given as to what it implies and what it does not imply. Without question, the inspired writers were neither turned into machines nor wholly disconnected from the circumstances, the prevailing scientific ideas, the modes of expression, of their time. It would seem, therefore, to be in contradiction to the analogy of Scripture that one of the most ancient books of the Bible should contain an elaborately correct presentation, by means of its cardinal facts, of the history of the world for hundreds of millions of years.

Many, therefore, while cherishing the firmest assurance that the Bible is the religious code of man, the inspired Word which authoritatively supplements man's natural light of reason and conscience, will believe that the first chapter of Genesis is a sublime hymn of creation, ascribing all the glory of it to God, wedding the highest knowledge of the primitive age in which it was written to awe-struck reverence for the Almighty Creator, but not containing any scientific account of the processes or periods of creation. To many it will convey the impression that its simplicity, childlike though sublime, and its grouping of natural phenomena, exceedingly noble and comprehensive but naïve and unsophisticated, are not inspired science, but inspired religion. It will appear to them that, looking out and up into the universe, feeling that it infinitely transcended the little might of man, thrilling with the inspired conviction that God had made it all, the poet-sage of that ancient time named in succession each phenomenon, or group of phenomena, which most vividly impressed him, and said or sang that God had called it into being. The beginning he threw into the darkness of the unfathomable past. What first arrested and filled his imagination in the present order of things, was that marvel of beauty and splendour which bathes the world at noontide, and lies in delicate silver upon the crags and the green hills at dawn, that mystery of radiance which is greater than the sun, or moon, or stars, greater than them and before them; and he uttered the words, 'God said, Let there be light, and there was light.' Then he thought of the dividing of the land from the sea, and of the separation between those waters which float and flow and roll in ocean waves and those waters which glide in filmy veils along the blue expanse, and in which God gently folds up the treasure of the rain. The sun and the moon he knew to be those natural ministers which mark off for man day and night, summer and winter, and he told how God had assigned to them this office. The creatures that inhabit the world were grouped for him, as for the young imagination in all ages, into the living things of the earth, cattle, and creeping things, and wild beasts; the living things of the sea, fish and mysterious monsters; the living things of the air, birds; and that vegetable covering which clothes the earth with flower and forest. All these, he said, owed their being to God. Man he discerned to be above nature. Shaped by God like other animals, he alone had the breath, of the Almighty breathed into his nostrils, and the image of his Maker stamped upon his soul. So be it. Such recognitions leave the religious character and authority of the Divine record untouched.

Art. IV.—Hereditary Legislators.

(1.) An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution, from the Reign of Henry VII. to the Present Time. By John, Earl Russell. Longmans and Co.

(2.) Selections from Speeches of Earl Russell, 1817–1841. With Introductions. Longmans and Co.

It happens sometimes that political power is transferred from one set of hands to another without creating a panic, or even greatly startling society. Changes, of so much moment as almost to rank with revolutions, may be effected so calmly and quietly as to leave the society they affect unconscious of their full meaning. If the drums and the banners of revolution are beaten and displayed, and the other outward and visible signs of a violent dislocation of the compact of society are plainly to be discerned, the event takes its place as a revolution, and the nervous system of society is fluttered and shaken. But if the promoters of political change are content to leave undisturbed the ancient symbols, forms, and nomenclature of the past, the substantial alterations may be comparatively unheeded. For example, we are told by Tacitus, in few but pregnant words, that when political power was passing from the senate and the people of Rome into the hands of the Cæsars, the republican forms were so carefully preserved as to mask and veil that immense change. 'Domi res tranquillæ; eadem magistratuum vocabula;... Tiberius cuncta per consules incipiebat tanquam vetere republicâ.... At Romæ ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.'[22] Thus, without appearing to override or annul the functions of the senate or the people, the Emperor made himself, in fact, 'the sole fountain of the national legislation.'[23] So, also, a vital change in the government of Florence was brought about in the same way. The form of government was ostensibly a republic, and was directed by a Council of ten citizens, and a chief executive officer, called the Gonfaliere. Under this establishment, the citizens imagined they enjoyed the full exercise of their liberties. But, in reality, the Medici, acting apparently in harmony with the Constitution, and working under the sanction of republican forms, names, and offices, and ever seeming to defer to public opinion, drew into their own hands, without fluttering or alarming the citizens, the reins of personal government.[24] It is even so with ourselves. The political transfer has taken place in an opposite direction to those which have just been alluded to. But though, in those instances, the tendency was towards the concentration of power, and in ours towards its diffusion, yet they closely resemble each other in that discreet preservation of ancient forms and legal nomenclature which intercepts a veil between the eyes of society and its real position. For the splendours of the royal court are as imposing and attractive as ever. People still talk complacently of royal prerogatives, the hereditary peerage, the House of Lords, and the many shadowy forms of ancient administration. The barriers and landmarks of fashionable society are but slightly altered. To the superficial observer, society presents a picture differing very little from that of earlier times. There are still some Sir Leicester Dedlocks, who live in the contemplation of their family greatness, and some Sir Roger de Coverleys, who sway their neighbourhoods with unresisted authority; and there are thousands of Englishmen who are constitutionally averse to the recognition of distasteful facts. Some persons refuse to perceive that children have become adults, and that they themselves are growing old and weak; and some do not choose to perceive that, despite the ancient names and forms of government, the constitution has been so completely re-cast that we seem destined to live for a time under the reign and influence of democracy.

It will be useful to refer very briefly to the two great statutes which have brought us to the present state of affairs. Prior to the Reform Bill of 1832, the real power of the State was lodged in the hands of certain wealthy and ennobled families, which numbered less than five hundred. This oligarchy, to be sure, was not a pure one, because there were some outlets for genuine popular feeling in a few free constituencies, whose decisions were always watched with special attention. Nottingham, Leicester, Norwich, Westminster, and Southwark had thoroughly popular elections; Liverpool and Bristol had the same privilege; but though these and some other constituencies constituted safety-valves, through which the popular feelings were relieved, yet the essential characteristic of the government was a disguised oligarchy—that is, the possession of political power by a few. Does this assertion seem incredible to our younger readers? Let them listen to the testimony of a witness of the highest authority, who lived in those times, and was profoundly versed in the history and mechanism of governments. 'It is difficult,' says Lord Macaulay, 'to conceive any spectacle more alarming than that which presents itself to us when we look at the two extreme parties in this country—a narrow oligarchy above, and an infuriated multitude below.'[25] This was a description of the British Government in 1831 by that very eminent man. And why did he venture to affirm that a narrow oligarchy was dominant in the State? Oligarchy is chiefly distinguished from aristocracy, by the smaller numbers of the governing body. Before the period of Lord Grey's Reform Bill, the signs and symbols of popular government (inherited from times when the shell contained a kernel) were allowed to appear, and be in use; but the substantial power was vested in the hands of the owners of rotten boroughs, and the great proprietors of estates in the counties. Notwithstanding a few free elections, and many popular rights, the voting power of practical politics was directed by that narrow oligarchy.

In the year 1792, a petition was presented by Mr. Grey, in which it was asserted, and proof was offered, that one hundred and fifty-four peers and rich commoners returned a majority of the House of Commons. This statement may have been somewhat overdrawn, but it had a perfectly truthful basis. We summon the late Duke of Wellington as a witness to prove how boroughs were manipulated, negotiated, bought, and sold. When he was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the year 1807, he wrote the following words:—

'My dear Henry,—I have seen Roden this day about his borough. It is engaged for one more session to Lord Stair under an old sale for years, and he must return Lord Stair's friend, unless Lord Stair should consent to sell his interest for the session which remains.... Portarlington was sold at the late general election for a term of years ... &c.—Ever yours, Arthur Wellesley.'

And, again, he wrote as follows, in 1809:—

'My dear Sir Charles,—The name of the gentleman to be returned for Cashel is Robert Peel, Esq., of Drayton Bassett, in the county of Stafford.—Ever yours, &c., Arthur Wellesley.'[26]