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4 st the Theologinn Sim 
 
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 ‘BT 1095 .S6 1876. 
 
 Some modern religious 
 difficulties 
 
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 oe 
 
ys 
 y, 
 yA 
 
 a 
 SOME MODERN RELIGIOUS 
 
 DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 SIX SERMONS, 
 
 i 
 
 Preachev bp the request of hoehristian @ovivence Locicty, 
 
 AT 
 
 ST. JAMES’S CHURCH, PICCADILLY, 
 ON 
 
 SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, AFTER 
 EASTER, 1876, 
 
 With a Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE COMMITTEE OF THE 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE; 
 SOLD AT THE DEPOSITORIES : 
 
 77, GREAT QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS}; 
 
 4, ROYAL EXCHANGE; 48, PICCADILLY ; 
 
 AND BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. 
 
 Rew Work: Porr, Youne, anp Co. 
 
Tue Christian Evidence Committee of the $.P.C.K., 
 while giving its general approval to this work of 
 the Christian Evidence Series, does not hold itself 
 responsible for every statement or every line of 
 argument. 
 
 The responsibility of each writer extends to 
 his own work only. 
 
CONTENTS. “\2;,, 
 
 “GOD A PERSONAL ING, NOT AN IMPER. 
 SONAL FORCE” By his Grace the Lord 
 ARCHBISHOP OF YORK 2 . 5 ; 
 
 “HINTS FOR THE SOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS 
 DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 EXISTENCE OF ute eneeee AND MORAL 
 EVIL.” By the Rev. E. J. os Oxford ; 
 Whitehall Preacher . ys yp 
 
 “THE WORK OF CHRIST THE EFFICIENT 
 REMEDY FOR/“MORAL EVIL.” By the 
 Rey. Proressor JELLETT, Trin. Coll., Dublin . 
 
 “CHRIST HIMSELF THE GREATEST MI- 
 RACLE OF CHRISTIANITY, AND THE 
 TRUE EXPLANATION AND VOUCHER 
 OF ALL ITS OTHER MIRACLES.” By 
 the Rev. PREBENDARY Moornovss,. Bishop 
 Designate of Melbourne . . ° : . 
 
 “INFIDELITY REFUTED BY ITS OWN 
 ONCESSIONS.” By the Rev. Proressor 
 b! Piumpree, D.D. 
 
 “THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY 
 AS THE HOPE OF THE WORLD, AND 
 THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF.” By the 
 Lorp BisHop or GLOUCRSTER AND BRISTOL 
 
 a) mn Wee 
 
 ‘ 
 hs ¢ * 
 
 a TF . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 25 
 
 54: 
 
 76 
 
 98 
 
 135 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/somemodernreligi0Ounse- 4 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Mucu of the unbelief of the present day is 
 based on ignorance, first of the nature of the 
 religion assailed; secondly, of the nature of 
 the proofs by which its truth is tested ; 
 thirdly, of the wants and weaknesses of human 
 nature, and their antidote. I am _ speaking 
 of that unbelief which supports itself by ar- 
 gument. Of course there is always in the 
 world a large floating mass of unbelief, which 
 dishkes God’s truth because of its holiness, 
 and which vents itself, not in argument, but in 
 scoffing. With this, at present, we have no- 
 thing to do. It is maintained here, that earnest- 
 minded and truth-loving unbelievers are very 
 much in the dark as to the subjects on which 
 they reason in their attacks on Christianity. 
 This may appear an uncourteous statement 
 with which to commence a discussion ; but truth 
 
vl PREFACE. 
 Na UNS Seta SO RRR ac aa anc Bo AR 
 must not be sacrificed to courtesy, and men will 
 never understand each other in an argument if 
 they do not speak plainly. It is granted that 
 the ignorance complained of is very often un- 
 conscious ; sometimes, however, it is assumed 
 for the sake of the argument, and then there 
 can be no excuse for it. No one has a right 
 to misrepresent the thesis of his antagonist 
 that he may more easily confute it, or to _ 
 mislead those whom he professes to. guide, by 
 affecting a right to call for proofs and argu- 
 ments of which the subject under discussion does 
 not admit. But with many, there is no such 
 conscious darkening of counsel; they really be- 
 lieve the Christianity which they assail to be 
 such as their misrepresentations paint it; they 
 have brought themselves to think that 1t can 
 have no claim to general acceptance, unless it be 
 based on proofs, which the subject-matter does 
 not admit of; and, having little personal ac- 
 quaintance with the wants and weaknesses of 
 which we have spoken, they ignore at once their 
 existence and the value of their cure. 
 
 First, as to ignorance of what Christianity 1s. 
 Nothing is more common than for those who 
 assail it, to begin by misrepresenting it. It is 
 
PREFACE. Vil 
 
 much more easy to knock down a man of straw 
 than an antagonist of flesh and blood. No 
 caricature of Christianity presented at any time 
 by the morbid fancies of the most ignorant of 
 its votaries is too gross to serve the turn of those 
 who desire to disprove its divine origin. At one 
 time we find set up for assault a distorted 
 image of the God of the Old Testament, an un- 
 philosophical and unfair perversion of the ancient 
 Jewish rules of morality and polity, an inter- 
 pretation of the annals and other records of God’s 
 chosen people, such as fair and enlightened 
 criticism has never admitted. At another time 
 we have the Gospel of the merciful and loving 
 Redeemer interpreted according to the unsancti- 
 fied and crude speculations of Oriental mystics, 
 or of those remorseless logicians who have 
 thought far more of establishing a clear, con- 
 sistent, syllogistic system of theology, than of 
 unfolding for the admiration of mankind that 
 varied picture of fatherly love, tempered with 
 fatherly justice, which, in its thousand lights and 
 shades, appeals so powerfully to the heart and con- 
 science in the unsystematic but most convincing 
 teaching of the Lord and His apostles. This 
 picture it has been the glory of the Church 
 
vill PREFACE. 
 
 of Christ to hold forth for admiration, high 
 above all the human speculation with which 
 its brightness has in the darkening ages been 
 obscured. 
 
 There is similar misrepresentation as to in- 
 spiration and miracles generally. Exaggerated 
 theories of verbal inspiration, which have never 
 received the sanction of the Church in any of 
 its acknowledged formularies, are assumed to 
 be of the essence of Christianity; and the 
 mind of the antagonist fixes on those points 
 of resemblance which seem to assimilate the 
 Scriptural with mere legendary ecclesiastical 
 miracles. Our antagonists appear to forget 
 the fact that all the great Apologists have 
 turned to the one miracle of Christ’s resur- 
 rection as the central point of the Church’s 
 teaching on the supernatural, convinced that 
 when this great event has been fully recognized 
 as the obvious sequel of the incarnation, men 
 will not be curious to define with accuracy the 
 exact limits which hem in those supernatural 
 influences, to deny which, in the aggregate, is 
 to say to the Omnipotence of God, Thus far 
 shalt thou go, and no farther. 
 
 That the Eternal Son, out of infinite love 
 
PREFACE. 1X 
 
 for suffering souls, came forth from the bosom 
 of the Infinite, assumed a human form, and 
 died to raise men to new powers of holiness 
 and enjoyment; that the blessed Spirit, pro- 
 ceeding from the same holy source, controls 
 and guides human thoughts amid their end- 
 less wanderings and temptations, and that 
 the presence of these supernatural influences 
 in this lower earth, must of necessity mani- 
 fest itself in a way quite incalculable by ordi- 
 nary human experience—this is the essence of 
 the supernatural as set forth in the Gospel ; 
 and the antagonist who cannot receive these 
 truths, and desires in a philosophical spirit 
 either to have his own doubts solved or to 
 win others to acquiesce in his scepticism, will 
 direct all his efforts to a careful and simple 
 examination of the proofs on which this doc- 
 trine rests. 
 
 But secondly, What are these proofs? What 
 are the proofs we are entitled to require as the 
 condition of our belief or assent ? 
 
 Belief may be given without proof—the 
 generality of the human race so assent and so 
 believe on mere authority, without considering 
 the weight of the authority as an argument ;— 
 
x PREFACE. 
 
 or it may be given because the truths believed 
 are felt to be acceptable without our taking 
 the trouble to test the grounds on which our 
 belief rests: such an unhesitating assent or 
 belief is not to be blamed. Man acts on it 
 without delay in all practical matters, and does 
 not disbelieve the maxims by which it is neces- 
 sary to shape his conduct till he finds in prac- 
 tice some reason to doubt their accuracy. So 
 there can be no @ priort ground for the un- 
 believer to treat with scorn all those who 
 act in matters of religion on this unsifted 
 and untested faith. They are but doing what 
 the law of their nature compels them to do in a 
 thousand most important matters of their every- 
 day conduct. Do not let us then suppose that 
 all are giving an irrational assent to the 
 truths of religion who have not tested them by 
 argument. Far from it; faith, that is, religious 
 principle, like common moral principle, and like 
 the trust which rational beings repose in the 
 evidence of their senses, must, as a necessity of 
 our being, be acted on in many an instance before 
 we can have learned to test it. 
 
 But when controversy has arisen, and the 
 test of argument is demanded, what is the 
 
PREFACK. 2h 
 
 sort of proof by which the truth of our reli- 
 gion is to be tried? Not by demonstration. 
 Obviously abstract mathematics alone admit 
 of absolute demonstrative proof. Moral evi- 
 dence, probability, is the guide of life, and 
 of knowledge. Man may desire something 
 surer, but he cannot attain to it. In decid- 
 ing questions of conduct, in scrutinizing his- 
 tory and weighing its lessons, in construct- 
 ing our theories of moral or political science, 
 and in our conclusions also as to material 
 nature—the rules by which it acts, and the 
 phenomena of which we may expect the recur- 
 rence—we must be guided by arguments, 
 not of demonstration, but of probability. A 
 man trusts his sensations, his conscience, his 
 aspirations after the pure and holy on the 
 same ground, because if he refuses to do so 
 he has nothing else to trust—because there is 
 the highest probability that duly tested and 
 watched they will tell him the truth. If he 
 cannot trust them he must cease to be a man, 
 and abandon in despair all man’s work. In 
 these various sorts of probable arguments, on 
 the faith of the accuracy of which man works— 
 whether his mind be exercised on material, or 
 
xi PREFACE. 
 
 moral, or purely spiritual subjects—there is no 
 difference, in that the tests and arguments which 
 he uses are all founded on probability. Some 
 of his conclusions may rest on weak, some on 
 strong arguments of probability ; but it is not 
 in the nature but in the degree of the evidence 
 attainable that the distinction between one and 
 another sort of his conclusions rests. Our con- 
 clusions in material science may indeed be tested 
 by repeated experiments; but. still material 
 like moral science rests, as we have said, on 
 arguments of probability, and it is on grounds 
 of probability that all conclusions, except those 
 of pure mathematics, must be established. 
 
 Material, then, has no higher claim than 
 metaphysical science to the name of science ; 
 and material, metaphysical, and religious 
 theories must all be estimated, not by any 
 peculiarity in the nature of the arguments by 
 which they may be sustained, but by the 
 strength or weakness of these arguments when 
 put to the proof. 
 
 Moreover the arguments for Christianity are 
 essentially historical. Its truth must be tested 
 as other histories are tested. Modern philosophy 
 has not yet arrived at the conclusion that there 
 
PREFACE, xill 
 
 is no truth in history. A wise man, starting 
 from the fact that the Christian Church exists, 
 with all the teachings of its doctrines formulated 
 from its sacred books, will refuse to begin by 
 treating its whole history as a fable: as a 
 matter of observed fact, he finds it living; 
 and some intelligible account. must be given 
 and accepted of its birth and life. A wise and 
 fair antagonist, then, will fully acknowledge that 
 he must carefully examine the Christian evidence 
 as a matter of history, while he seeks, in testing 
 its truth, to be guided only by those conclusions 
 of probable and moral evidence of which he admits 
 the force in every other field of speculation ex- 
 cept abstract mathematics. A wise man will 
 estimate only at their real value those claims 
 to a higher species of evidence and proof which 
 physical philosophers are fond of arrogating for 
 their own favourite pursuits. 
 
 Lastly, it will not do to overlook how Chris- 
 tianity meets the wants of human nature. All 
 experience shows that man cannot live in any 
 state approaching to perfection without religion. 
 The Christian is the best specimen of man 
 which the world has yet seen. He is ignorant 
 or unfair who overlooks this fact, corroborated 
 
X1V PREFACE. 
 
 by the whole history of the race. Yet some 
 men, we trust they are few, talk as if the perfec- 
 tion of society could be attained without poetry, 
 without philosophy, without the teaching of 
 history, without the knowledge of God ; as if the 
 construction of railroads and steam engines were 
 the highest product of man’s intelligence; and 
 as if his highest knowledge were confined to the 
 contemplation of mechanical forces at work in a 
 dead machine which we call nature, without 
 any thoughts of the Eternal manifesting Himself 
 in the longings of the human soul to conform to, 
 those dictates of unchanging morality which it 
 believes to be the expression of a Father’s will. 
 Physical science has, indeed, before it a noble 
 and an almost boundless field for inquiry and 
 speculation. It would be unwise to depreciate the 
 ennobling effects of its studies, and the marvellous 
 additions which have been made in our time to 
 the sphere of its observation. But he knows 
 nothing of the real greatness of man who, in a 
 misplaced zeal for material science, ignores the 
 moral and spiritual principles which live and 
 breathe within him, and which ever prompt 
 him to rise from the contemplation of nature to 
 the God of Nature. As in reviewing the past, 
 
PREFACE. “XV 
 So EE POT ORI) Te 
 so, in anticipating the future, that is a blind 
 and unintelligent philosophy which obliterates 
 or overlooks those clear marks of God’s super- 
 intending power, which are legibly written in 
 every record of what man has done hitherto as 
 a moral being endowed with a free will, and in 
 every longing to which the noblest specimens 
 of human intelligence have given utterance, 
 while they yearned for communion with the 
 Eternal above the limits of sight and sound, in 
 regions far beyond the furthest domain of the 
 material universe, and extending into Infinity. 
 We charge modern infidelity, in its subserviency 
 to a debasing materialism, with the crime or folly 
 of neglecting the highest element in man, and, 
 if in man, in nature. 
 
 Now, it has been in the hope of directing 
 attention to the true issues involved in the con- 
 test with modern infidelity, and to the sort of 
 arguments by which that contest ought to be 
 conducted, that the following addresses have 
 been published. 
 
 The Christian Evidence Society takes this 
 opportunity of returning thanks to Mr. Kempe 
 for allowing the addresses to be delivered jin 
 St. James’s Church, Westminster ; and to the 
 
Xvl PREFACE. 
 
 Christian Knowledge Society, for undertaking 
 the publication of the present volume. These 
 papers are submitted to the public in full con- 
 sciousness that the subjects of which they treat, 
 if adequately handled, would fill many volumes, 
 and yet in the hope that even the few words 
 here spoken may at this emergency subserve 
 the cause of truth and goodness. Of course, 
 the author of each separate paper is responsible 
 only for what he has himself written. 
 
 A, C. CANTUAR. 
 
 LAMBETH PALACE, 
 June 21, 1876. 
 
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 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, NOT AN 
 IMPERSONAL FORCE, 
 
 ‘* For every house is builded by some man; but He that 
 built all things is God.’’—Hxrn. iii. 4. 
 
 Tur Power that brought into existence a world 
 that seems to us full of beauty and purpose, and 
 a race of men capable of thought and of worship, 
 and of a law of duty, is a Power that possesses 
 thought and wisdom, and that does not regard 
 with indifference the actions of men. Such is 
 the thesis of the present lecture ; and I regard 
 it as equivalent to the statement that God is a 
 personal Being, and not an impersonal force. 
 The word “ personal”’ will seldom be employed, 
 because it is desirable to avoid any term which 
 might give rise to a verbal dispute, in the 
 narrow limits of an address like this. The one 
 question to which I invite your attention is 
 this: ought we to allow our minds to connect 
 B 
 
2 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 with the beauty of nature and with the sym- 
 metry of nature’s laws, and with the dictates of 
 conscience, the thought of a Being who has 
 caused all these, or ought we to seek nothing 
 beyond the facts themselves, and to dismiss all 
 thought of a wise and loving Being whom we 
 have not seen, as unscientific, and as belonging 
 to the vague region of metaphysics ? 
 
 All will admit that mankind has shown itself 
 religious. Man and man alone is a religious 
 animal. The exceptions alleged are these: that 
 some savages are so low in condition that they 
 do not seem capable of worship, the condition of 
 the few who are in this plight being miserable 
 to the last degree; and in the second place, 
 that Buddhism, a system embracing millions of 
 votaries, is an atheistic system. But as to the 
 savage, it may be observed that the statement 
 seems to be that men who have lost all the worth 
 and dignity of men in other things have parted 
 with religion too, and, so far, this goes to con- 
 firm the view that men are religious, if the less 
 they are men the less they are religious. And as 
 to the much more difficult problem of Buddhism, 
 it may be said that Gakya-Mouni, the founder 
 of that profound system, taught that men should 
 die to all worldly interests—to pain and joy 
 and love and life—and thus attain Nirvana, 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 3 
 
 annihilation—and that this involved a with- 
 drawal from God also and a dying to God; since 
 how could man hope to attain Nirvana so long 
 as the potent motive of religion was left active 
 in his heart? Of Buddha you must say that, 
 in abdicating manhood and ail human interests, 
 he abdicated the thought of God: as of the 
 savage you say that, being below the level of 
 manhood, he had not attained to manhood’s 
 privilege of worshipping God. Neither of these 
 exceptions prevents us from saying that man is 
 the religious animal, and that the more vigorous 
 the manhood of any tribe or nation the more 
 marked is the part that religion plays in its 
 action and destiny. 
 
 Many of the accounts of the origin of this be- 
 lief are framed to detract from the marvel of this 
 universal impression. “ Primus in orbe deos fecit 
 wzmor,’ says Lucretius. “ But who,” says Lich- 
 tenberg, “implanted this overmastering fear?” 
 And how can fear of the gods have made the 
 gods that it presupposes? To hide from the 
 thunder when it seems to shake the very heavens, 
 to keep close to the shore in tempests, and to be 
 wary and brave against an enemy in battle, these 
 are natural impulses or circumspect precautions ; 
 but to propitiate Jove because of thunder, or 
 Neptune against the storm at sea, is different 
 
 B2 
 
4 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 in kind. It goes beyond what it sees, to some 
 living powers supposed to produce them. ‘That 
 is exactly the point that constitutes a religion. 
 To bend in terror before the lightning flash is 
 one thing; to assign it to a potent being that 
 no one has seen is a further step of thought. 
 Experience does not warrant that furtherstep ; but 
 yet the mind does not hesitate to take it. “ Fear 
 first made gods :” this cannot be exact. Fear does 
 not make: itis fear of whatis made. The mind 
 conceives gods, and then fears them. Some one 
 tells us that that which we wonder at in nature 
 is force: another says it is wid, a third calls it 
 nature. But force that is not the force of some- 
 thing or of some person, is an incomplete con- 
 ception; and we know no w7d/ that is not some 
 one’s will; and as for nature, the fancies of men 
 were never content until they had peopled nature 
 with gods. Nymphs were in every fountain ; 
 and every gentle breeze that blew breathed from 
 the syrinx of the god Pan: and no storm swept 
 through the woodland that did not suggest the 
 wild hunts and dances of the Satyrs. Observe, 
 then, the first point that appears to be gained. 
 Man is religious, and needs no help in arriving 
 at the belief that something divine exists. And 
 when thinkers, believing that this kind of con- 
 ception is not for man’s good, invite him to sub- 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 5 
 
 stitute something else, called force, or will, or 
 universe, we feel that these ideas must have some- 
 thing behind them : they are not final. The new 
 conception which is meant to be the background 
 of all our thoughts proves to be a thin screen 
 through which the awful shadow appears of Him 
 Whom we seek to know. 
 
 Another remedy has been devised to save men 
 the trouble of believing. It is that of asking 
 them not to deal with metaphysical problems at 
 all. The study of facts, the facts of nature, are 
 the sufficient and satisfactory occupation of the 
 human mind; what les beyond is hopeless of 
 approach ; for its study we must desert the sure 
 rules of experience and of science, and adopt 
 methods which are no methods. “ Let us then,” 
 says Science, “do our day’s work here honestly 
 and well, and take no account of the wages, if 
 any, nor of the honour, if any, nor of the ques- 
 tion whether the spirit that we employ is eternal 
 or ephemeral. The proper study of mankind is 
 facts; and there are no means of reaching facts 
 except through the senses. Here let us rest, 
 seeking nothing beyond: for doubt and danger 
 he in the further region.” The defect of this 
 philosophy is that it is an artificial limitation of 
 the powers and instincts of man, to which man- 
 kind can never be expected to submit. To see 
 
6 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 on the horizon of life great realities, for the 
 search after which some of the noblest of men 
 have set out, leaving all other aims, is to con- 
 ceive the wish that we too should essay the 
 same problems and seek the solution of the 
 same mysteries. Our methods may be bad; but 
 we must employ such as we possess. Our 
 labour may be in vain; but where would 
 have been the thought of the world, and where 
 would science herself have been, if a timorous 
 apprehension of waste had kept her from re- 
 search? Nor need we be reminded that when 
 science holds her carnival in this country once 
 every year, that time, consecrated to the exact 
 study of laws, is usually marked by an unusual 
 revival of metaphysical controversy, and from 
 the chair of the president, answered by echoes 
 from all pulpits, resounds the world-old contyro- 
 versy about divine truths,— 
 “‘ Of fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute ;”’ 
 
 of the purpose of God, of the power of prayer, 
 of the boundaries of knowledge ; and all the old 
 vehemence is there, and much of the old argu- 
 ment which the Greeks bequeathed us. Man’s 
 nature has not altered much, and he will not 
 accept limitations and restrictions on his know- 
 ledge. He will grapple with hard things; he 
 will put forth vague hands into the region that 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. ‘ 
 
 may seem darkest; and the harder the task and 
 the darker the outlook, the more earnestly will 
 he strive and peer. 
 
 Here let us sum up what we have gained so 
 far. Man is prone to seek some knowledge of 
 God; and whether this was given him as an in- 
 tuition or is worked out by a course of reasoning 
 we need not for our present purpose inquire. 
 We see, too, that some at least of the attempts 
 to substitute another notion for that of God, or 
 to restrain the mind from thinking of God, fail 
 in that they are incomplete, and only stimulate 
 the inquiry that they are meant to restrain. 
 Let us now proceed to examine one or two of 
 the lines of thought in which light is thrown 
 upon the nature of God. 
 
 I. The study of final causes has fallen lately 
 into great disrepute, and not without some 
 reason. All things are created with a purpose, 
 an object; but we are not bound to know and 
 define the purposes of everything. If science 
 is forced upon this attempt, she is likely to fall 
 into mistakes and absurdities. Physical science 
 has long since broken with the doctrine of final 
 causes on this account. Lucretius denied it;’ 
 
 1 iv. 835. 
 
 * Nil natum est in corpore, ut uti 
 Possemus, sed quod natum est, id procreat usum.” 
 
8 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 Spinoza dismisses it as a figment of the imagi- 
 nation ;* Kant describes it as an argument 
 entitled to great respect as the oldest, the 
 clearest, and the most suitable to the human 
 mind,* but he denies its cogency as a demon- 
 stration. 
 
 The world is full of facts which, in the case 
 of any human works of like kind, would be con- 
 clusive evidence of an intelligent maker: and 
 therefore the mind hastens to the conclusion 
 that intelligence is at work here. Such marks 
 of design are very numerous; they extend over 
 long times; they are found equally in the most 
 vast and in the minutest phenomena. Jor the 
 fulfilment of these apparent purposes the wills 
 of men and the facts of nature are bent and 
 overruled in a wonderful degree. 
 
 If it could be shown that there is no being in 
 existence to whom this work of wise design 
 could be attributed, then we might be bound to 
 mistrust our own inferences, and to seek some 
 other hypothesis than that of an intelligent 
 Creator. As this cannot be shown, and as no 
 one denies that it is possible that God exists, 
 then the attraction in our minds between the 
 idea of God and the intelligence that presides 
 
 * Ethics, Part I., Appendix. 
 3 Critique of Pure Reason. 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 9) 
 
 in creation is so powerful, that we shall not 
 hesitate to attribute the creation to God, and to 
 admit that His work as Creator is a just title 
 to our admiration and our love. But in de- 
 ciphering the characters in which God has 
 written His purpose on the ancient page of the 
 world’s history, we must be cautious not to 
 attribute to Him our own limited views and 
 partial fancies. With that one caution, I 
 believe that the argument from design is just 
 as powerful to persuade as it has ever been, and 
 deserves a consideration as careful. That which 
 brought it into just disrepute was, that people 
 spoke of the creation as if it were all made for 
 man’s convenience and profit; and dreamed not 
 that those things which man found so much 
 to his advantage could have any other use in 
 creation except to subserve his wants. This 
 complacent egotism was capable of an easy 
 answer both by argument and by ridicule: it 
 was answered by both. If the cinchona-tree 
 was created for the cure of men’s agues and 
 fevers, what was its use when it waved through 
 centuries, unknown and unvalued, until the 
 Jesuits found out its healing power, whilst the 
 men that it might have cured continued to 
 quake under their ailments? Fénélon in his 
 beautiful treatise, says that the fleece of the 
 
10 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 sheep is a superfluity that invites man to shear 
 it every year, and notes with satisfaction that 
 the animals which man slays for food are far 
 more fruitful than the wild beasts which he 
 cannot use; we kill many sheep and oxen and 
 few lions, yet there are far more sheep and oxen 
 than there are lions. “ Man,” says Githe, “is 
 naturally disposed to consider himself as the 
 centre and the object of all creation, and to 
 regard all the creatures that surround him as 
 ordained to serve his personal profit. He gets 
 into his possession all the animal and vegetable 
 kingdoms; he devours them, and glorifies God 
 whose fatherly goodness has prepared the table 
 for his feast. He takes the milk from the cow, 
 and the honey from the bee, and the fleece from 
 the sheep; and because he uses these animals 
 to his profit, he imagines that they have been 
 created only for his use. He cannot conceive 
 that the least blade of grass was created for any 
 purpose but for him.” The laughing comment 
 of Montaigne on that kind of argument has 
 had its weight; he describes a humble coose 
 as using the same argument, and assigns to 
 man his place in nature as that of sheltering 
 and feeding geese.* Perhaps, after all, not 
 
 4 Janet, Causes Finales. 1876 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. ll 
 use but beauty and harmony are the chief ends 
 of created things. We may one day understand 
 that already one great end of creation was 
 answered when “ God saw that it was good.” 
 All created things are ends as well as means. 
 The fragrant rose, the leaping brook, the spotted 
 leopard are, because it is good that they should 
 be; and though no man shall ever inhale the 
 perfume of the flower, or drink of the brook in 
 the way, or possess the flecked and glossy skin 
 —they shall not have been made in vain. 
 
 How, then, does it stand with the argument 
 from design at present? Science tells us that 
 the earth was once a globe of white fire, with- 
 out life upon it of plant or beast. Long ages 
 passed over: it became a dwelling for Homer 
 and Aristotle, for Dante and Shakspeare. As 
 no one alleges a change of purpose in the 
 world’s upbuilding, we must assume that in 
 that liquid ball of scathing fire all the beauty of 
 nature, all noble deeds and great thoughts of 
 mankind, and mankind itself, were potentially 
 contained. That was the fiery bud, this is the 
 expanded flower. There was in that no life of 
 plant or animal, no wise discourse, no moral 
 order; and yet the germ of them all must have 
 been there undiscernible. Geology writes, as 
 well as she can, the first chapter of the account 
 
12 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 of that growth. Then history takes up the 
 wondrous tale—history, which Augustine calls 
 a beautiful poem, decked out by God’s own 
 hand for man—the most wonderful epic of 
 creation, full of grand surprises, of patient 
 waiting, of skilful construction, of glorious 
 adornment. Each stage of growth was won- 
 derful, until the next surpassed it. Each had 
 m itself some completeness, yet each laid the 
 foundation for higher forms of beauty and for 
 fresh races of living beings. Of the cause of 
 this growth there are but two opinions, to speak 
 broadly and roughly: one of which is, that a 
 Being of infinite wisdom contrived and effected 
 it; and the other is, that it evolved itself with 
 no thought or contrivance at all, and that the 
 thought that can understand and appreciate its 
 marvels came first into being when man ap- 
 peared—that, in a word, there is no conscious 
 thought or wisdom but in man. 
 
 Now I will ask you to give your attention 
 and to decide between these two. Thought and 
 all that it includes place man at the head of 
 creation, and constitute his true nobility. A 
 thinking man, as Pascal finely says,’ amid the 
 brute and senseless forces of nature, feels his 
 superiority to those forces even whilst they 
 
 5 Pensées, Edition of Astié, ii. p. 177. 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 13 
 
 crush him ; for he can understand them and think 
 them. Is he, then, the only thinking being that 
 exists? Did something or other—call it fate, 
 call it nature, call it energy—make thought, 
 having itself no thought? Did the blind make 
 eyes, and the deaf ears? Were conscience and 
 duty evolved by themselves, without assistance, 
 out of seething slime? I am challenged to 
 demonstrate the contrary. From this one argu- 
 ment of the wisdom of creation I confess I 
 cannot demonstrate. There was Kant’s success. 
 He proved that the argument from design 
 could not amount to a demonstration. But 
 there, too, his success ended. We are free to 
 decide what is probable, what is practical. Well, 
 it is not probable that the world was prepared 
 for life by a power that knew not life; for thought, 
 by a power that could not think; for law and 
 duty and love of God, by a force to which those 
 ideas are as alien as they are to the weathered 
 brows of the stony Memnon whose sightless balls 
 pretend to look over the Egyptian waste. 
 
 Did I say probable? Here is one of the in- 
 consistencies of the modern scientific method. 
 Those who reject the conception of God some- 
 times accept this mechanical view of the uni- 
 verse, which is not only not an induction from 
 facts, but is so strangely at variance with them 
 
14, - GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 that the mind ean hardly get the idea before it 
 in a shape for judging whether it is probable or 
 not. It requires a special metaphysical training 
 to form a notion of life from the lifeless—con- 
 science from mechanism—thought from that 
 which cannot think. If experience would lend 
 us first some facts to make this miracle con- 
 ceivable; if yonder windmill, trusted with corn, 
 would grind out diamonds and rubies ; if canvas, 
 woven in a loom, rolled forth with Raffaelle’s 
 pictures covering it; in a word, if we could be 
 children again, and revel in fairy tales, the last 
 new tale, that a great blind idol changed into 
 this wonderful world, would be more easy to 
 accept. But science is specially severe on all 
 such tales. All new and gratuitous assump- 
 tions she holds in disesteem. She holds it mat- 
 ter of conscience not to go beyond the data of 
 observation. This is not only not observed, but 
 it is hard even to be conceived, and utterly at 
 variance with all that we have observed. 
 
 And what would be the practical effect? If 
 thought is the highest thing and man alone has 
 thought, man is a god in himself. The poet, 
 
 borne down by the mystery of creation, says,— 
 ‘J falter where I firmly trod, 
 And fall with all my weight of cares 
 Upon the great world’s altar-stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God.” 
 
NOT AN. IMPERSONAL FORCE. ] 
 
 >A! 
 
 Arise, oh friend, and do not consider it so 
 seriously. ‘The altar-stairs are but a part of 
 the machinery ; all is blind but you. Ask no 
 counsel save of your own mind; there is no 
 other mind to dominate, to lead, to comfort you. 
 You—you alone—exist. Tread firmly once 
 more. The blind clod of earth ‘on which you 
 stand, you may spurn it: it has nothing divine. 
 It is only a round pedestal for your divine foot, 
 king of creation—for so you are; ruling it with 
 the unique sceptre of your thought. Oh misery. 
 I cannot play the god. You have brought us 
 round at last to that to which all misbelief does 
 lead: Man “as God, sitteth in the Temple of 
 God, showing himself that he is God,” (2 Thess. 
 u. 4.) 
 
 Ii. Obliged by the limits of time to select 
 and to abridge, I will only speak in detail of 
 one other of the arguments for the personal 
 existence of God. It is not difficult to read the 
 general purpose that pervades the government 
 of the world. The race of man is to be pre- 
 served, order and mutual love are to prevail, 
 the laws of nations are to be framed for this 
 end, arts are to be cultivated which will make 
 the world more fit for man’s habitation and will 
 remove obstacles out of the way. A man born 
 into this system, conceives the wish to act so 
 
16 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 that he shall further, and not hinder, the inten- 
 tions of the divine government under which he 
 lives. This we call the law, or principle, of 
 duty. It seems to make no difference as to the 
 truth of this conception, that it is arrived at 
 gradually, that it is dependent on public opinion 
 in some measure, that it makes mistakes about 
 what is right and wrong. I do not pretend 
 that it needs no education, nor that it is un-— 
 erring in its decisions. I only say that men in 
 all ages try to act according to their notions of 
 right, and thus become a law to themselves. 
 Now the more we think about it the more we 
 perceive, that a law coercive of our will, and 
 regulating our life, must be something more 
 than a mere balance of calculations. Right and 
 wrong are so in themselves; if a heroic enter- 
 prise or a life of self-denial is right, it is nght 
 as such. A sudden change in public opinion 
 would not make it other than it was before the 
 change took effect. Christianity, the religion 
 of all the highest nations of the modern world, 
 is founded on a life, and that life was founded 
 on the maxim, “ I must work the works of Him 
 that sent Me, while it is day.” We take no ad- 
 vantage of this at present, except to show how 
 the world has been able to understand and 
 revere a life devoted to the highest duty. Now 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 17 
 
 the law of duty can be no higher than the law- 
 giver that prescribes it. If, as some say, there 
 is no right or wrong, but what is pleasurable to 
 the enlightened mind, or none but what is 
 useful to the community, the standard of con- 
 duct and of aim will fluctuate with the supposed 
 pleasure or advantage. A good man could 
 not hold his own against the ridicule and the 
 example of others, against the hindrances that 
 nature opposes to him, but for the faith in 
 something beyond him and above him, to 
 Whose perfect nature he draws nearer by his 
 endeavours to love and obey His will. 
 
 ‘Thus conscience is a witness to a higher power, 
 and that higher power must also know and ob- 
 serve us, otherwise it would cease to give us 
 any motive for good; it must also be able in 
 some way to reward us for the effort we make 
 to draw near it: in short, that power is God, 
 and the conscience of man bears witness by its 
 struggles and its judgments on itself, to the 
 truth that God exists. Ido not pretend with 
 Kant that this is a demonstration, though it is 
 remarkable that he leaves standing this mode of 
 proof when all the rest are laid low before his 
 criticism. Ido not like the word demonstya- 
 tion as applied to religion. Conscience is not a 
 demonstration of God; it is something better 
 
 C 
 
18 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 and higher—a way to God. “If any man is 
 willing to do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
 trine, whether it be of God.” 
 
 It may be said of all the arguments for the 
 existence of a living God who knows, sees, and 
 loves us, that they are all good; but that they 
 are not separate demonstrations. ‘The universal 
 consent of mankind, the need of some end of the 
 chain of causes, the abhorrence of an infinite 
 series, the signs of love and wisdom and good- 
 ness in creation, the law of duty, the idea in our 
 minds of an absolute eternal being, on whom 
 may rest all that we see that is relative and 
 changing, all these make up the bundle of rods 
 which no metaphysical strength can break up 
 whilst they are united; but which never should 
 be offered as separately indestructible. These so- 
 called proofs are rather descriptions of what the 
 human mind knows already about God. Even 
 that which is called the ontological proof, the 
 logical fault of which is so obvious, is but a too 
 formal expression of an intuitive conviction. 
 “ Our idea of God includes all perfections, now 
 existence 1s necessary for perfection—therefore 
 God exists.” Anselm and Descartes knew the 
 formal fault of that argument as well as youand I. 
 But it is not with this idea as with others. The 
 mind, when it recognizes the idea, knows that it 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 19 
 
 must have its counterpart in fact. The fact that 
 it is within us, joined to the impossibility of 
 having learnt it from experience, persuades us 
 that it was given for a purpose. God exists ; 
 and if so, to Him must belong the wisdom that 
 we see in the world, and the law that is written 
 in our conscience. God exists; and from His 
 hand must have commenced the motion that 
 has caused the universe. He exists; and the 
 mind, tracing back the chain of causation, stops 
 in its search when it reaches Him—the First 
 Cause. Thus this idea gathers to itself the scat- 
 tered lights that flash across the spirit to show 
 it God. God exists; but Who is He, and what 
 is His power? He must be wise and good, for 
 He made the world and all that there is there 
 of beauty and of love. He must be Judge of 
 all the earth, for already, in the sphere of con- 
 science, He judges men. He must be Alpha 
 and Omega, the beginning and the end; for in 
 the facts that I see there are no signs that the 
 world is eternal, but many proofs that it is 
 tending to rest and to an end. Thus the vaunted 
 proots of God’s existence, of the Schools, deposed 
 from the position of demonstrations, have still 
 an important place: they help us to think out 
 with clearness the common-sense intuitions of 
 mankind upon this subject. 
 C2 
 
20 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 It is sometimes made a reproach to us that 
 these theistic ideas are only popular notions 
 or impressions, and are unworthy to be con- 
 sidered on that ground. But if Science is 
 bound to study facts, it must be a fault in her 
 that she despises any facts: and the common- 
 sense view of the world about religion is 
 well entitled to be weighed, and the more so 
 because it 7s common or general. If it were 
 only true that the nations of the world believe in 
 God and have some forms of worship, it would 
 be noteworthy. But the religion that they 
 profess reaches much deeper than that: it is 
 inwoven with the life of the peoples, it is the 
 strength of their strength, it is the cause of their 
 
 activity. There is a short treatise by De Laveleye*. 
 
 on the future destiny of Catholic nations, in 
 which the writer, a most competent witness, 
 tries to measure the future of the peoples of the 
 world by their religious condition, and shows 
 how their position, not merely as to piety and 
 internal conduct, but as to prosperity and 
 power and influence in the commonwealth of 
 the world, is determined by their religious life. 
 The philosophic historian comes round at last, 
 in other words, to the old prophetic utterance, 
 
 6 Le Protestantisme and le Catholicisme dans leurs 
 
 Rapports avec la Liberté et la Prospérité des Peuples. 
 Bruscels, 1876. 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. ped | 
 
 “ Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, 
 saith the Lord of Hosts”? (Zech. iv. 6). And 
 will you then pluck them out, these oldest, 
 deepest-rooted impressions of the mind, which 
 have been at the bottom of all great deeds, and 
 which have lent intensity to all the fiercest 
 struggles of our race? Will you disregard these 
 common-sense ideas which now, in the full nine- 
 teenth century, with all material improvements 
 and enlightenments, beat in the pulses of the 
 people, and mix with the air they breathe, which 
 excite when they are mentioned an interest 
 more intense, and passions more fierce, than any 
 other topic? I venture to tell you that this shall 
 never be. Nay: it is answered, there is no in- 
 tention to pluck them out, but to replace them 
 with more scientific views. We have glanced over 
 that modern armoury of scientific views; and of 
 its weapons we make bold to say, that they 
 offend by the very defects they were intended to 
 remedy. ‘They deal in ideas such as Science 
 should not originate and cannot verify. Infinite 
 time, illimitable space, eternal matter: “ Where 
 learnt you that heroic measure?” Science has 
 never seen the infinite or eternal. These are not 
 inductions; they are metaphysical idols, and 
 Science, if true to her own principles, should 
 have gathered up her skirts in order not to touch 
 them. Common sense has its defects: but 
 
22 GOD A PERSONAL BEING, 
 
 surely it is not a commendation of a philosophy 
 that we must part with the results of common 
 sense when we approach its gates. The riddle 
 of creation may seem hard, but the interpreta- 
 tions that are offered us are harder far. Change, 
 it seems, comes from the unchangeable, corrup- 
 tion from the imperishable, motion from abso- 
 lute rest, life from the dead, sense from the 
 senseless, purpose from causes that act blindly, 
 intelligence from that which has none, spirit 
 from what is no spirit. We cannot learn these 
 nice conceptions, nor abandon what we must 
 resign to accept them. For the sacrifices that we 
 must make are immense. It seemed to us that 
 we saw God’s purpose sweeping over the creation, 
 as the wind is seen ruffling its path over some 
 calm summer sea. Here a young man, with 
 great powers, is bending them all to the attain- 
 ment of a safe hearth and home, where he may 
 know the sweetness of domestic love. Here a 
 young inother, turning aside from the brilliant 
 circle which she adorns, and unfastening the 
 jewel from her neck and casting down the shim- 
 mering robe, sits a patient watcher at a sick 
 babe’s cradle, for indeed that little cradle holds 
 her star of life, her hope, her deepest joy. We 
 really thought that God had ordered this that the 
 world might still be peopled ; and we ventured 
 to admire the loving wisdom that had adorned 
 
NOT AN IMPERSONAL FORCE. 23 
 
 with love and sweetness the hard task of rearing 
 a fresh generation to succeed us: so that it 
 seemed the best end of life to an ambitious youth 
 to enclose for himself, within that sweet hedge 
 called home, the treasure of wife and child; so 
 that it seemed sweetest to a mature woman to 
 focus all her powers of thought, affection, and 
 devotion, on a helpless creatw¢é that repaid her 
 motherly care with vague touches and some 
 rudiments ofasmile. There was no purpose at all 
 in this. Wonderful it may be ; but it is only the 
 grist of the inexorable mill of destiny, grinding 
 as it may. Prayer, too, must be hushed; and 
 praise is foolish, and intercession utterly vain. 
 Yet, in the last thirty-eight years, one English 
 county has spent more than two millions ster- 
 ling “in building fanes of fruitless prayer ;” 
 ‘and now must learn that they are fruitless. 
 Duty, too, must part with her best sanctions: 
 the poor martyr, upborne at the supreme hour 
 of torment by the vision of blessedness; the 
 friend of men, pursuing some good object, and 
 schooling himself for the sake of it “to scorn 
 delights and live laborious days;” the vision 
 and the good object are delusions. And the future 
 life, to which we look, for which we long for the 
 redress of this one, science refuses the seal of 
 her sanctions to this too. The personality, the 
 unity, will be finished at death, and what re- 
 
24, ‘ GOD A PERSONAT BEING, ETC. 
 Beal ast eb ane A NY CEs SOU See 2D” OD RR 
 mains of us-will be sealed up in the earth, or 
 blown about in dust, or fixed out of the air into 
 fresh life and vegetation. What a sacrifice of 
 the old for the sake of what kind of new! No 
 Worship, no religious duty, no future hope, 
 no providence, no God! Preach this new 
 gospel, or pass this death-sentence, on some 
 other race of menanade with different souls from 
 ours. We have gone much astray: but we are 
 men still, and when God drave us from His 
 presence He did not leave Himself without a 
 witness in us: He did not leave us quite with- 
 out His law in our souls. In order to unteach 
 us so much, you must pluck out soul and all. 
 Pardon us, O Lord, the preacher and the 
 hearers, if in thinking of Thee and Thy presence 
 we have allowed our thoughts or words to offend 
 Thee. We know that Thou livest, and art 
 mighty to save. In many a former age men’s 
 thoughts have wandered from Thee, and they 
 have denied Thee or forgotten ; and yet they have 
 returned to Thee again. For the soul of man 
 that came out from Thee never has found true 
 peace but in returning to Thee and resting in 
 Thee. For Thou art the Living God and stead- 
 fast for ever, and Thy Kingdom that which shall 
 not be destroyed, and Thy dominion shall be 
 even unto the end. 
 
HINTS FOR THE SOLUTION 
 OF RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING 
 FROM THE EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL 
 AND MORAL EVIL. 
 
 “ We walk by faith, not by sight.”—2 Cor. v. 7. 
 
 We are invited this afternoon to confront the 
 darkest, the most overwhelming, of all mysteries 
 —the existence of physical and, still worse, of 
 moral evil ina world which we believe to have 
 been made by an All-Good and Almighty 
 Creator. 
 
 The difficulty is one which has been recognized 
 and struggled with by men of every time and of 
 every creed. Even a thoughtful child will often 
 vex itself with wondering why God does not 
 destroy the devil. But the difficulty must be 
 felt with ever-increasing intensity in proportion 
 as the sympathetic faculty in man is developed 
 under the influence of Christianity, and as, with 
 the progress of science, our acquaintance with 
 
26 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 MASE DLS ME SSR 1 ROR NR Dat Ure SS Grom 
 the workings of evil becomes more extensive and 
 more profound, ‘There is, of course, such a thing 
 asa guilty or an indolent dwelling upon the mys- 
 tery of evil. Our doubts may not be honest; 
 they may be dishonest and interested ; just as, 
 on the other hand, the absence of doubt may 
 proceed not from genuine faith, but from want 
 of knowledge, or of imagination, or of sympathy. 
 Still, speaking generally, it may be asserted with 
 some confidence, that Christianity working upon 
 the heart, and science upon the head, will to- 
 gether render each successive generation more 
 keenly alive to, more painfully perplexed about, 
 the presence of that terrible power of evil which 
 has so Jong been working havoc in God’s glorious 
 creation. 
 
 The temptation to doubt, even to despair, will 
 thus, it is believed, become fiercer and more 
 widely-spread as time goes on. Our very “table” 
 —the influences of religion and of knowledge— 
 will in one sense become a “snare” to us. The 
 larger our Christian love, the more thorough our 
 acquaintance with man and with man’s world, 
 the more hateful, the more intolerable will the 
 tyranny of evil appear. This is one side of the 
 picture. But happily there is another. God 
 will with the temptation make a way to escape. 
 Doubtless He will provide new encouragements 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 27 
 
 to meet the new perplexities. He will open our 
 eyes to behold new and blessed meanings in old 
 truths, old Scriptures. He will from the fiery 
 furnace of doubt bring each generation forth 
 better prepared for the work which lies before 
 it—-more earnest, more humble, more reso- 
 lute, more divinely-equipped for its tremendous 
 wrestling, “not against flesh and blood, but 
 against principalities, against powers, against 
 the rulers of the darkness of this world, against 
 spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 
 
 But we are this afternoon specially concerned 
 with our own generation—with present difficul- 
 ties and with present resources for meeting those 
 difficulties. And it will be well at the outset to 
 understand clearly what we can and what we 
 cannot hope to do. 
 
 I. We cannot hope to solve the mystery of the 
 origin and continuance of evil. The attempt 
 has been made again and again, but failure has 
 been the inevitable result. Hach wave of thought 
 in turn has fallen impotently back from that 
 iron-bound shore. He that runs can read the 
 unchanging leeend—“Thus far shalt thou go and 
 no farther.’ The human understanding has 
 obviously reached its utmost limit, and faith 
 must take up the burden which reason can no 
 longer sustain. Indeed, when we consider not 
 
28 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 only the failure which has invariably attended 
 past efforts to solve the mystery, but, on the 
 one hand, the shortness and insufficiency of our 
 own faculties, and, on the other, the stupendous 
 vastness, the ineffable grandeur, of the scheme 
 of Nature and of the sister-scheme of Grace— 
 when we remember what we are, and again what 
 the universe is, and still more what the Creator 
 of ourselves and of the universe is—remembering 
 all this, it becomes easier to believe that we 
 cannot know the whole, that there are certain 
 fundamental difficulties which can wxever be 
 removed on this side of the grave, than it would 
 be to accept any hypothesis which should claim 
 to solve those mysteries—to offer us sight in- 
 stead of faith. Harsh as the paradox may sound, 
 we believe some doctrines because they are irra- 
 tional. For instance, that God should be All- 
 Good and Almighty, and yet that there should 
 be evil in His world, seems the very climax 
 of irrationality. But the doctrine, though it 
 sets the teeth of mere /ogic all on edge, exercises 
 a strange, a soothing, fascination over ourselves, 
 over the real, complex self in every man which 
 is infinitely greater, nobler, more intelligent than 
 that part which he calls his logical faculty. In 
 the presence of the more awful mysteries of the 
 world the logical faculty, if well disciplined, if, 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 29 
 
 as we say, it knows its place, is hushed into 
 reverent silence, and then we—our whole, true 
 selves—yield the adoration of humble faith. 
 
 And hence it is that, with regard to the special 
 problem of evil, we instinctively recoil from any 
 of those theories which attempt to remove or 
 even to tone down the great difficulty. We are 
 convinced that we shall in the long-run thrive 
 better on the pulse and water of Faith than on 
 the rich meats and wines of Sight. 
 
 For instance, it is suggested that evil is not 
 really evil; that it is a phase, a transition-stage 
 in the development of good, a fashion, as it were, 
 which is passing away, and will soon manifest 
 and give place to the kernel of which it is but 
 the husk. Attractive supposition, nay, even 
 with a germ of truth contained init! For is 
 not evil often made the minister of good? Do 
 not afflictions, bereavements, persecutions, even 
 backshdings, often constitute the furnace in 
 which character is refined and ennobled? But, 
 readily granting this, Conscience stubbornly re- 
 fuses to allow that evilin itself is aught but evil. 
 She will have no concord with it. She regards 
 it as a pestilent exotic in God’s good creation— 
 a mysterious, hateful something which needs not 
 to be transformed, but to be extirpated or at least 
 suppressed. 
 
30 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING KROM THE 
 
 But if our Moral Sense rejects this hypothesis, 
 she shrinks in utter abhorrence from the attempt 
 to ease faith’s burden by representing the Creator 
 as not wholly good—from the theory which 
 denies that God is Love, which suggests that, 
 though He cares for His creatures, His care 
 is but cold and listless—that He regards us as 
 bastards rather than as sons. -If this were true, 
 the monstrous result would be that God has 
 formed a creature nobler than Himself—that 
 man may justly boast himself to be far better 
 than his Father which isin heaven! Such a 
 Creator could never retain the allegiance of His 
 creatures: against Him the human heart would 
 cry out, “ Though He slay me, yet will I od put 
 my trust in Him!” How thankfully we betake 
 ourselves to the counter-doctrine, “ There is but 
 one good, that is, God.” 
 
 Once more, well-meaning thinkers have sought 
 to lighten our load by explaining that, though 
 God is supremely Good, He is not Omnipotent. 
 His Omnipotence must be sacrificed to His Bene- 
 volence. Now, in considering this hypothesis, 
 it may probably be granted that religious writers | 
 have sometimes pushed the idea of God’s Omni- 
 potence to an untenable, perhaps an inconceiv- 
 able, position. The subject is one, it need not 
 be said, which almost defies the powers of human 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 31 
 
 thought and of human language. But it is 
 acknowledged by theologians of authority that 
 the Divine Omnipotence must be regarded as 
 (so to speak) limited, not indeed by anything 
 or any person external to Itself, but ad intra, 
 from within, by the conditions, nature, or attri- 
 butes of the Deity. With reference to the 
 subject under discussion— and the concession, 
 if allowed, is an important one—may it not be 
 said, in all reverence, that even God could not 
 create a virtuous being without the discipline 
 of trial—the very idea involving a contra- 
 diction ? 
 
 But such self-imposed limitations of the 
 Divine Omnipotence differ totally from those 
 ab extra restraints or oppositions by means of 
 which it has been attempted to account for 
 the flaws and evils of the world. It has 
 been supposed that God’s power has from 
 the first been thwarted by a rival agency— 
 by a great Bad God—a Being of whom the 
 Satan of Scripture is but a faint and feeble 
 shadow. Now, to such a notion we may 
 reply that, so far as we can understand, an 
 Infinite Evil Being could not exist. So far as 
 we can comprehend the nature of evil it is sedf- 
 destructive ; corruption can beget nothing but 
 corruption. We can understand the Creator’s 
 
32 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 retaining the fallen angels—/inzte evil beings— 
 in existence for some mysterious purpose. What 
 is said about Pharaoh may help us here :—the 
 devils may be sustained in life that in them 
 God’s power may be shown—that in and through 
 them He may be glorified. Or, again, the 
 fallen angels may possibly retain some faint 
 relics of goodness in their nature. But an 
 absolutely Evil Principle—a great Bad God— 
 such a Being is surely a self-contradiction, an 
 impossibility of thought. 
 
 Another form of the same hypothesis is that 
 which imagines, in the material out of which 
 God formed the world, certain intractable pro- 
 perties which have thwarted His will and 
 marred His work. The Creator could only do 
 the best wader the circumstances ; and what we 
 call evil is the sum of His unavoidable fallings- 
 short of absolute perfection. ‘To this theory it 
 has been replied that it conflicts with the appear- 
 ance of things in the world—that “‘there is 
 ‘nothing in the visible world corroborating the 
 notion of yet incomplete conquests of the 
 Creator over Matter. No discoverer has found 
 an outlying tract of Chaos... . If Nature ex- 
 plains herself to us,— 
 
 ‘“‘ Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, 
 And weave for God the garb thou seest Him by,” 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 33 
 
 that ‘garb’ we behold is neither unfinished 
 in the minutest hem, nor yet torn or spotted 
 anywhere as by an enemy’s hand.”' The ad- 
 vances of Science, far from suggesting the 
 impotence, tend rather to demonstrate the Om- 
 nipotence, of the Creator, to represent Him as 
 working not only with consummate skill, but 
 with the calmness and facility of an absolute 
 Master. ‘“ Hath He said, and shall He not do 
 it? hath He spoken, and shall He not make it 
 good?” To this testimony of Holy Scripture 
 Nature seems to set her seal. 
 
 We have very briefly reviewed the leading 
 attempts which have been made to solve, or at 
 least to lessen the intricacy of, the great problem 
 of evil; but none of them has commended itself 
 to us as either adequate or tenable. Conscience 
 has forbidden us to call evil, in any essential 
 sense, good. Still more vehemently has she 
 protested against the supposition that the 
 Creator is a Being of mixed or doubtful character. 
 Reason has declared that the notion of a Great 
 Bad God, co-eternal though not perhaps co- 
 equal with the Good God, is an impossibility—a 
 monstrosity ; while Nature seems, the more 
 we know her, the more distinctly to proclaim 
 
 1 Miss Cobbe’s “Hopes of the Human Race,” preface, 
 xk 
 
 D 
 
34 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 that the Wisdom and the Power of Him who 
 formed her are unrivalled and unbounded. 
 
 We return, therefore, with increased satisfac- 
 tion to the old grandly-illogical position, and are 
 content to Jdelieve that, though evil is above, 
 beneath, around, within us, yet God, even our 
 God, is at once All-Good and Almighty. 
 “ Exiles from rigid logic,” we rejoice in our 
 discomfiture, for we feel that in our weakness 
 is our real and invincible strength. 
 
 II. We cannot, then, solve the mystery of 
 the origin and continuance of evil, but we may 
 hope to solve or remove the religious difficulties 
 which that mystery is so apt to occasion ; and it 
 is to this task that we shall now reverently 
 address ourselves. 
 
 (a) In the first place, it must be noticed that 
 the surrender of the restless longing to find 
 out the whence and the why of evil—the frank 
 recognition that so long as we are in the body 
 we must walk by faith—this is in itself an 
 unspeakable gain. Suspense is always trying. 
 The parent, while his child is yet alive, fasts, 
 mourns, weeps; but when the vain hope has 
 been abandoned, rest ensues, and comfort is 
 found at the true source of comfort. To know 
 the worst is the first great step towards know- 
 ing the best. And so, in the present instance, 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 35 
 
 when we have made up our minds simply to 
 accept, as a fact, the existence of evil instead 
 of perplexing ourselves with speculations as to 
 its origin, the mental energies, turning aside 
 from fruitless and enervating struggles, lay 
 hold of their true work—the wrestling with evil 
 as it actually exists around and within ourselves. 
 Thus, by accepting faith as our director, we not 
 only obtain repose, but are enabled to concen- 
 trate the forces of mind and heart upon the task 
 which has been given us to perform. 
 
 (4) And, next, it may be remarked that, un- 
 less the wise and good of all times and of every 
 race have been strangely mistaken—nay, unless 
 our own personal experience mischievously de- 
 ceives us—the method I have been advocating 
 is broadly and deeply stamped with the seal of 
 success. It, and it only, works weil. No man 
 has ever yet found peace or light or holiness in 
 discussing the problem of evil, but tens of thou- 
 sands have found every comfort and blessing 
 in contending against evil, Who ever tried 
 patiently and humbly the experiment of obe- 
 dience, and found it fail? Who ever set himself 
 to do the will of God without coming to snow 
 of the doctrine that it is from God ? 
 
 (c) But though God calls upon us chiefiy to 
 believe and to obey—though He has retained in 
 
 De 
 
36 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 His own keeping the solution of the great 
 mystery—He has, nevertheless, not left us 
 wholly uninformed as to the way in which evil 
 invaded our world, and it may be well for us to 
 call to mind the teaching of Holy Scripture 
 upon this subject. God, the Infinite, willed 
 to create finite beings, that is to say, beings 
 of limited rights and powers, apart from Him- 
 self, distinct personalities, each gifted with 
 free-will. Of these “sons of God,’ angels 
 were the first-born, men the later creation. 
 All alike were created upright, with natures 
 pure and perfectly-balanced; but, though up- 
 right, they were not beyond the reach of the 
 possibility of sinning, for, where a limit has 
 been fixed, and at the same time the limited or 
 finite being has the power of choice, there is a 
 possibility of the transgression of limit—that is 
 to say, of siz. Thus a certain amount of risk, so 
 to speak, was necessarily involved in the crea- 
 tion of men and angels. Well, trial, temptation 
 (how, we know not) came first to the angels. 
 Those who in the dark hour were “ faithful 
 found” became not only upright, but virtuous : 
 their nature was now not only exquisitely- 
 balanced, but established, immoveably set, in 
 that exquisiteness of balance. ‘Those who yielded 
 underwent an irretrievable, an all-pervading, 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVI. oT 
 
 shock; the fallen angel became a devil, accord- 
 ing to the maxim, ‘ Corruptio optimi cujusque 
 pessima.” The full effects of the “ fall74.) of 
 these first-born sons of God we cannot trace. 
 Possibly it may have left its pernicious mark 
 upon the lower creation—the animals, Itseems 
 an almost universal law that the inferior must 
 suffer for the crimes of the superior; but, how- 
 ever this may be, we are at all events certain 
 that, when man appeared upon the earth, there 
 was an agency ready at hand, maliciously eager 
 to test his constancy, to tempt him across the 
 appointed limit, and seduce him into sin. Man, 
 as we all know by bitter experience, yielded and 
 fell. And what a fall was that! The origi- 
 nally-upright nature, instead of being improved 
 into the character of settled virtue, was utterly 
 unhinged, corrupted, depraved; and death, 
 bodily and spiritual, followed, as it would seem 
 naturally upon the great transgression. More- 
 over, Scripture appears to hint that the fatal 
 influence of man’s fall reached even the lower 
 creation. “The creature,’ we read, ‘was 
 made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by 
 reason of him who hath subjected the same in 
 hope; because the creature itself also shall be 
 delivered from the bondage of corruption into 
 the glorious liberty of the children of God.” 
 
88 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 We are here on particularly difficult ground, for 
 Science seems to have shown incontestably that 
 death, violent death, was in the world long 
 before the creation and fall of man. Nay, more, 
 that “the fundamental principle at work in the 
 development of life was, and is, death—lavish, 
 illimitable death.” Indeed, if we suppose that 
 the “fall” of the sons of God, angelic or 
 human, caused or added the “sting” to the 
 death of the lower animals, our difficulty is only 
 enhanced; for we are induced to ask, “ Wherein 
 is the justice of the fiat? These sheep—these 
 helpless, irresponsible animals—what had they 
 done?” Here again, then, we are perforce 
 driven for protection to the good shield of azz. 
 Something more will be said on the subject of 
 the sufferings of animals, but under the present 
 head of The Fall it need only be added that in 
 the Scripture record we have a notable instance 
 of evil being made to minister to good—of grace 
 superabounding where sin abounded—in the 
 great Messianic promise that the seed of the 
 woman should bruise the serpent’s head ; while 
 St. Paul gives us to understand that the final 
 victory of the woman’s seed, and the mani- 
 festation of the sons of God, will involve the 
 rescue and deliverance of the much-suffering 
 lower creation. ‘Jn hope it was subjected.” 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 39 
 Pe Lie ee 28 a SN A A et 
 
 (2) In the fourth place—waiving the question 
 of the exact connexion between The Fall and 
 the sufferings of animals, and keeping as far as 
 possible to matters of fact—we will inquire 
 what is the extent of the influence and empire of 
 evil. his is a most important inquiry. There 
 is, of course, such a thing as a light and shallow 
 optimism, which will see only the world’s bright 
 side. But the danger of thinking men in our 
 generation is rather from an exaggerated and 
 paralyzing pessimism. ‘We are so bitterly con- 
 scious of the presence of evil that we are apt 
 to forget the more abounding and beneficent 
 presence of good. We feel keenly the sufferings 
 of our poorer brethren and of the lower animals, 
 and this is well; but we go on to attribute to 
 the sufferers our own fine sensibilities, and 
 thus seriously magnify the sum of the world’s 
 misery. 
 
 It has been acknowledged that the sufferings 
 of the lower creation present an insuperable 
 difficulty. We cannot understand why a Bene- 
 volent Creator should have permitted them. 
 But, granting this, we may thankfully re- 
 member that the life of animals is by no means 
 all suffering. For them it is doubtless “a 
 happy world after all” “The sum and sub- 
 stance of their lives under all normal conditions 
 
4() RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 is surely beyond question happy, and the 
 anxieties and cares which in their position 
 would be ours, and which we are apt to lend 
 them in imagination, are by them as totally 
 unfelt as are our miserable vanities, our sorrow- 
 ful memories, and our bitter remorse. The 
 scene which the woods and pastures present to 
 a thoughtful eye of a summer morning is not 
 one to ‘blacken’ the character of the Creator, 
 but to lift up the soul in rapture, and prompt 
 us to add a human voice of thanksgiving to the 
 chirp of the happy birds, the bleating of the 
 playful lambs, and the hum of the bees in the 
 cowslips and the clover.”” 
 
 But our sensitiveness about the unavoidable 
 misery of animals, if sometimes exaggerated, 
 promises to do a good work by the suppression 
 of all avoidable wrongs and cruelties. Our 
 societies for the prevention of cruelty to 
 animals, our anxiety on the score of vivisection 
 and of field-sports, are the tokens of a growing 
 spirit which may hereafter work wonders of 
 mercy and love. A third thought of unspeak- 
 able consolation is that suggested by more than 
 one passage of Scripture and endorsed by the 
 undisguised approval of the cautious Bishop 
 
 ? Miss Cobbe’s “Topes of the Human Race,” preface 
 p. xliv. 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 41 
 0 2 RD ik Se Le ee er 
 Butler,—the thought that, for animals as for 
 men, a future state of happiness may be in 
 store. If we turn to the prophecies of Isaiah, 
 or to that great utterance of St. Paul,* already 
 quoted—if we consider the leadings of reason, 
 or the demands of our sympathetic faculty— 
 from every side grounds are afforded us for 
 concluding, or at least for hoping,— 
 
 “ That not a worm is cloven in vain, 
 That not a moth with vain desire 
 Is shrivel’d in a fruitless fire, 
 
 Or but subserves another’s gain.” 
 
 As regards the lower creation, then, the 
 prospect fairly viewed is, in spite of the dark 
 shadow of pain and death, a prospect of beauty 
 and gladness and, above all, of hope. 
 
 When we turn to the human race the scene 
 is less encouraging, Man the sinner is also the 
 ereat sufferer. His bodily sufferings are terribly 
 intensified by the wounds which Conscience in- 
 flicts, and by the presages of future retribution. 
 But even in this case it is possible to exag- 
 gerate; and exaggeration, though it may some- 
 times serve to awaken thought and stimulate 
 energy, yet, if stereotyped into a settled pessi- 
 mism, must prove fatal to effort and progress. 
 
 3 See Analogy, Part i. ch. i. § 2, ad jinem. 
 4 Romans viii. 19—22. 
 
42 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 - 
 
 In the commoner sort of minds at all events it 
 must lead to the sullen resolve, “ Let us eat 
 and drink, for to-morrow we die.” In contrast 
 with this paralyzing, even maddening, creed, 
 we may welcome almost any form of optimism.; 
 for optimism bids us be strong and of a good 
 courage, it supplies hope, and “ we are saved by 
 hope.” But when we steadily face the dark 
 ‘and giant form of evil, measure its dimensions 
 and review its history, standing aloof alike 
 from the over-sanguineness of optimism and 
 the despondency of pessimism, we may assuredly 
 discern grounds for hope and encouragement. 
 Thus we look fairly at the condition of the poor 
 and ignorant, and we find that on the whole 
 they are perhaps as happy as ourselves. The 
 ragged urchin in the narrow, dirty alley has 
 often joys as real and intense as those of the 
 child of wealth and luxury. Again, is it not 
 true that happiness is more nearly within the 
 reach of every man than is sometimes supposed ? 
 “Tf one only wished to be happy, this could be 
 readily accomplished : but we wish to be happier 
 than other people; and this is almost always 
 difficult, for we believe others to be happier 
 than they are.’ And this brings us to the 
 inspiriting, if in one sense humiliating, thought 
 that the large majority of the evils of life are 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL Evin. 43 
 
 of man’s making, and are also capable of 
 removal. Much has already been done. No 
 impartial student of history can deny that the 
 human race has on the whole gained upon evil, 
 weakened its influence, circumscribed its sway. 
 The remainder is of course appallingly great, 
 but of that remainder a large part is not a 
 fixture. Death indeed we cannot get rid of, 
 and death brings in its train sorrow, bereave- 
 ment, and many other ills. But premature 
 death may be rendered far less frequent, disease 
 may be mitigated or avoided, base pleasures 
 may be suppressed, pure pleasures promoted, 
 slavery and famine may be banished, war held 
 in check, superstition dispelled, ignorance en- 
 lightened, and, in a word, life made infinitely 
 more happy, noble, precious, than it now is or 
 ever has been. 
 
 And thus it would appear that even for man— 
 sinful, diseased, death-doomed man—‘it is a 
 happy world after all”? “ Brought to its actual 
 limits, the problem of evil stands before us as a 
 vast but not immense exception, in a rule of 
 good.” * And it is most inspiriting to think, as 
 we are justified in thinking, that even that vast 
 exception may be rendered far less vast if men 
 will be “strong and of a good courage,” and 
 
 5 Miss Cobbe, p. xlvi. 
 
44, RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 humbly resolve to win back the territory which 
 the black tyrant has usurped. 
 
 (e) A brief word must suffice as a remem- 
 brancer of the familiar, but most consoling 
 fact that evil appears before us, in the world 
 and in Holy Scripture, as often in the garb 
 of a slave as of a tyrant. Evil is con- 
 stantly made to subserve good. ‘‘ Out of 
 the eater comes forth meat, and out of the 
 strong comes forth sweetness.” Death makes 
 a prey of the weaker animals, but, we are 
 told, the strongest and fittest survive, and the 
 species is developed. The tempest comes, sweeps 
 away property, destroys life, but at the same 
 time leaves a priceless blessing behind in the 
 shape of a purer and healthier atmosphere. 
 Pestilence comes and slays its thousands, but 
 the lessons it teaches and the precautions it 
 suggests save tens of thousands. So also in the 
 moral world. Suffering and bereavement come, 
 and the sufferer’s soul is refined as gold which 
 has been tried in the fire. The visitation of 
 war has often proved the regeneration of a 
 people. Temptation comes: if resisted, the 
 faithful soul is ennobled; even if yielded to, the 
 fallen often rises again a wiser, humbler, ten- 
 derer, deeper-minded man. And thus bleeding 
 yet conquering Humanity may triumphantly 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 45 
 
 exclaim, “ Evil, it is thy doom to be my good! 
 Captivity, thou art thyself led captive!” 
 
 (f) But we are not only men, we are Chris- 
 tians; and as Christians we must surely never 
 forget that our chief encouragements under 
 “the sore burden” of evil are to be found in 
 the special teaching of our Holy Faith. 
 
 “ With us,” writes Dr. Arnold,‘ “ the authority 
 of Christ puts things on a different footing. I 
 know nothing about the origin of evil, but I 
 believe that Christ did know..... And I 
 know Christ to have been so wise and so loving 
 to men that I am sure I may trust His word, 
 and that what was entirely agreeable to His 
 sense of justice and goodness cannot, unless 
 through my own defect, be otherwise than 
 agreeable to mine.” 
 
 Christ is indeed the believer’s great consola- 
 tion under the oppressive mystery of evil, partly 
 because His character is our pledge that the 
 Ruler of the Universe is wise, just, and good, 
 partly because His work is at present crippling, 
 and promises eventually to crush, the power of 
 the enemy. He is the professed and approved 
 Champion of good against evil. We may 
 contemplate what He has already done—how 
 the Cross through eighteen centuries has been 
 
 6 Dean Stanley’s Life of Arnold, vol. i. p. 850. 
 
46 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 found mighty in pulling down the strongholds 
 of sin and injustice. Christ did not indeed 
 supply us with detailed rules for meeting each 
 abuse. He has not explained how we should 
 deal with this pestilence or that famine, how to 
 cope with slavery or with the vices of large cities, 
 or with war, or with any other of the crying ills 
 which beset and perplex each generation in its 
 turn. But He did something far better. He 
 gave His Church a principle, an abiding Spirit, 
 which should serve as an ever-quickening motive- 
 power. He left future generations to find out 
 exactly what needed doing, but He commanded 
 and empowered His Church to do that thing 
 when found out—~ Whatsoever true Science, 
 enlightened Civilization, lofty Morality, saith 
 unto you, do it.” And hence Christ’s Spirit is 
 ever warring, and warring not without success, 
 against physical and moral evil. Nor is its 
 operation confined to the limits of the professing 
 Church. “ Lvery good and every perfect gift is 
 from above, and cometh down from the lather 
 of lights.” Certainly no dweller in or about 
 Christendom, however eagerly he may reject the 
 Christian name, can be wholly uninfluenced by 
 the Spirit of the Master. He must breathe that 
 Spirit as he breathes the air in which he lives. 
 And, on the other hand, though professing 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 47 
 
 Christians have too often been behindhand in 
 deserying a wrong and in attempting to cope 
 with it, yet neverin the long-run has the Church 
 —or at least the really representative branches 
 of the Church—failed to sympathize with, to 
 assimilate, to find room for, the honest enthu- 
 siasm or the judicious remedy. Rather has she 
 gathered them to herself as a hen gathereth 
 her chickens under her wings. 
 
 And thus, looking only at the past and the 
 present, we have good reason to feel that in 
 serving under Christ’s banner—though we may 
 fail to comprehend the strategy of our leader, 
 though we may chafe at the weariness of the 
 marchings and counter-marchings, though we 
 may marvel that a decisive blow is not struck—we 
 are nevertheless on the winning side, generaled 
 by One who has been proved worthy of our 
 heartiest allegiance and confidence. 
 
 But what of the future—the remote future, it 
 may be, as man reckons? Does Christianity 
 offer hope zm the end? This is an all-important 
 question. To some minds, and according to 
 some interpretations of Holy Scripture, it has 
 seemed that we have zo¢ hope in the end. Evil 
 is pictured forth as retaining its hold to the end 
 of time, yes, and through all eternity, over the 
 larger portion of God’s noblest creation. Hell 
 
4.8 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 is described as a place handed over to the will of 
 fiends, in which blasphemy, hatred, rebellion, 
 shall for ever reign and exult. Thus evil, 
 though it had a beginning, is found to have no 
 end. It has in some mysterious way forced 
 itself into God’s world, and its usurpation is 
 never to be suppressed. 
 
 But is this, when considered in all its 
 aspects, the real doctrine of the Bible and 
 of the Church? We must not, indeed, tone 
 down the language of Scripture or say smooth 
 things about the tremendous nature of the 
 issues of this present life. We must not forget 
 that Reason, that the natural sense of Justice, 
 calls for a state of Retribution. We must not 
 suppose that it can be well with the wicked— 
 that those who have misused this time of pro- 
 bation can ever be as those who have used it 
 rightly. We must not forget Christ’s words 
 about the undying worm and the unquenchable 
 fire, nor yet that Hell is a state known to us 
 by bitter mental experience already. 
 
 But, on the other hand, we must not forget 
 those passages of Holy Scripture which tell of 
 the complete victory of Divine Goodness—which 
 reveal to us that Christ’s now partial triumph 
 shall hereafter be consummated. “ Add things 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 49 
 
 shall be subdued unto Him .. . . God shall be 
 all in all;” that at ‘the name of Jesus every 
 knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things 
 in earth, and things under the earth; and that 
 every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is 
 Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Such 
 passages (and they do not stand alone) concur 
 with the dictates of Reason and of the highest 
 Morality in teaching that hereafter the authority, 
 the goodness, the justice of God will be acknow- 
 ledged everywhere and by every being; that 
 even the lost will no longer be in a state of re- 
 bellion, but that “out of the depths of their 
 shame there may dawn such a vision of the per- 
 fect goodness of the Most High, such a dis- 
 covery of the wisdom, holiness, and love which 
 have borne with a world of rebels; such strange 
 and vast unfoldings of victorious goodness 
 through the ages to come, as may become a 
 message of real mercy to those who abide for 
 ever under the solemn sentence of the Most 
 High. God shall then be ‘all in all,’ when the 
 depths of that fiery lake wherein death has been 
 destroyed, as well as the heights of glory and 
 the streets of the New Jerusalem, are lit up 
 with the brightness of the Uncreated Light, and 
 everywhere, in the height and in the depth, 
 E 
 
50 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 there is the vision of patient, persevering, tri- 
 umphant, and victorious Love.” ’ » 
 
 III. And now let us sum up as briefly as pos- 
 sible what has been previously said; let us en- 
 deavour to centralize those resources of light 
 and encouragement by the help of which we 
 may be enabled to travel hopefully and usefully 
 to the end of this our dark earthly pilgrimage. 
 
 Evil, physical and moral, is within and on all 
 sides of us. We cannot expect to fathom the 
 mystery. At present we can know only in very 
 small part. As regards the scheme of Nature, 
 we easily recognize and acquiesce in this patent 
 truth. We are content to be acquainted with 
 only the mere skirts of that glorious robe of sky 
 and sea and stars with which God has clothed 
 Himself. We will not be less reasonable as 
 regards His scheme of Moral Government. We 
 will once for all settle it in our hearts that we 
 cannot know the whole—that any theory which 
 professes to solve the mystery is not for us. We 
 will take, as our fundamental rule for life, the 
 maxim that “we walk by faith, not by sight ;” 
 and, having thus resolved, we will look calmly, 
 humbly, cheerfully round for hints and helps 
 whereby faith may be supported. We will mea- 
 
 7 Professor Birks, “Victory of Divine Goodness,” ad 
 jinem. 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EvIL. 51 
 
 sure, so far as we can, the extent of evil. We will 
 go round about her dark strongholds, mark well 
 her frowning bulwarks, tell her haughty palaces, 
 neither ignoring their strength nor, like the ten 
 faithless spies, exaggerating their terrors and 
 invincibility. We will thus give Evil its due, 
 but only its due. We will notice, too, how, by 
 some strange but blessed law, the tyrant is often 
 compelled to serve as a slave—to be, as it were, 
 the minister of good—how the curse is capable 
 of being turned into a blessing. We will 
 further mark how, though by slow and painful 
 steps, the empire of the enemy is being narrowed 
 down and weakened; remembering also that 
 the tenure by which that empire is held is not 
 in perpetuity, but such as may, for the most 
 part, be, even in this world, cancelled and 
 broken. We will bethink us how the prince of 
 that empire received his deadly wound at Cal- 
 vary, where his head was fatally bruised by the 
 heel of the woman’s seed. We will contemplate 
 the course of the Captain of our Salvation as for 
 eighteen centuries He has gone forth “ conquer- 
 ing and to conquer.” We will learn more and 
 more to recognize in Him a Leader whom we 
 may serve with unquestioning, unreserved obe- 
 dience, We will by faith look up to the throne 
 of the universe, to the great white throne itself, 
 E 2 
 
52 RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES ARISING FROM THE 
 
 and behold thereon the awful yet benignant form 
 of Justice, Equity, Truth. We will remember 
 that the world, time, eternity, the lower and 
 higher creations, the good, the bad, are all alike 
 in the hands of a faithful Creator, of a Judge 
 that will assuredly do right, of One who will 
 never ignore the fair claims of His meanest or 
 most sinful creature. Finally, we will remember 
 the end. Amid the clouds and darkness of the 
 last tremendous shock between the hosts of 
 light and of evil—in the crisis when “ Satan 
 shall go out to gather the nations together to 
 battle, that they may compass the camp of the 
 saints about and the beloved city,” till their inso- 
 lence is avenged by the “ fire which shall come 
 down from God out of heaven and devour them ” 
 —yea, amid the ineffable terrors of the last great 
 day—we will see the glorious promise shining 
 steadily forth, which tells that “ald things 
 shall be put under His feet ”—that God, even 
 our God, the God whose mercy is over all His 
 works, shall be “all in all.” 
 
 What is left for us but to make our own in 
 heart and life the sublime resolution of the 
 Hebrew seer,— 
 
 “ Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, 
 neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of 
 the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no 
 
EXISTENCE OF PHYSICAL AND MORAL EVIL. 53 
 
 meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, 
 and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I 
 will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of 
 
 my salvation.” § 
 
 8 Habakkuk iii. 17, 18. 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST THE EFFICIENT 
 REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 
 
 “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin 
 of the world.”—Joun i. 29, 
 
 To find a remedy for moral evil is a problem 
 which every system of law and philosophy and 
 religion has proposed to itself. More or less 
 incompletely in design, more or less imperfectly 
 in execution, they have all striven to effect this 
 
 object. To say, then, that Christianity promises 
 a remedy for moral evil is but to make for it a 
 claim shared by every system—legal, philoso- 
 phical, religious—which the world has ever 
 known. Nor can it be said that they have been 
 wholly unsuccessful. Laws have been imper- 
 fect or bad ; philosophies and religions have been 
 false; all these have been justly chargeable with 
 moral faults which they have originated or ag- 
 
THE WORK OF CHRIST, ETC. 5d 
 CA ie A REE OP RE Eee a 
 gravated ; and yet, perhaps, the greater number 
 of them may claim to have done more good than 
 harm. If, therefore, the Christian Religion 
 would establish its superiority in this matter, it 
 must be by the nature of the remedy which it 
 has proposed, not by the mere fact that it has 
 proposed w remedy ; nor even by the further fact 
 that the proposed remedy has been tried, and has 
 attained a certain measure of success. 
 - In making the comparison which I have in- 
 dicated, I pass by the remedies for moral evil 
 proposed by systems of law or systems of 
 philosophy. Law is, I think, excluded from 
 competition by the narrowness of its purpose, 
 whole classes of moral faults being, as you know, 
 designedly, and indeed necessarily, removed from 
 its operation. And philosophy is equally ex- 
 cluded by the limited extent of its field. Those 
 whom a philosophic remedy can reach are so few, 
 that such a remedy, be it never so excellent, 
 would necessarily leave the great mass of moral 
 evil untouched. | 
 It remains, then, that we seek to compare the 
 remedy for moral evil proposed by Christianity 
 with those which have come from other religious 
 systems; that we may discover whether the supe- 
 riority claimed for the former be real, and wherein 
 it consists. 
 
56 . THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 There is a general resemblance among the 
 methods by which religious systems have sought 
 to solve this problem. The agency employed has 
 in general been hope or fear. The approval or 
 anger of the gods—happiness or misery in this, 
 or another, life awarded by their authority— 
 these sanctions have been, with more or less 
 effect, called to the aid of conscience by nearly 
 every religion in the world. 
 
 These deities did not, indeed, always present 
 in their own persons a very exalted type of mo- 
 rality. Sins, which Christianity stamps with 
 the\ deepest dye, they committed quite freely ; 
 still, that which the conscience or the fashion of 
 the age condemned, the gods were supposed to 
 condemn too. Endowed with a moral nature no 
 higher than the moral nature of their worship- 
 pers, they were supposed to be the guardians of 
 morality such as it was. And if their sanctions 
 lacked brilliancy they certainly did not lack 
 terror. Whatever could be done—whatever de- 
 terrent effect could be exercised by mere dread of 
 physical suffering—that many forms of heathen- 
 ism were capable of effecting. To say then of 
 Christianity that it seeks to extirpate moral evil 
 by the agency of terror—to save or to secure men 
 from vice by threats of the infliction of suffering, 
 is to say no more than might be said with per- 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 57 
 
 fect truth of many a false religion, It is not 
 here that we are to look for the superiority of 
 the religion of Christ. 
 
 But, looking generally at the agencies by 
 which other religions have sought to stay the 
 growth of moral evil, we may say of the motives 
 which they employ that they are xon-moral. Hope 
 and fear both terminating in self—these motives 
 have in themselves nothing which merits moral 
 approval ; nor have they in themselves anything 
 tending to elevate our moral nature. They may 
 be, and indeed generally are, purely selfish. The 
 happiness we desire, the misery we dread, are our 
 own. Indirectly, indeed, these motives have a 
 certain moral effect when abstinence from vice 
 and practice of virtue are made conditions, by 
 the observance of which the dreaded misery may 
 be avoided or the coveted happiness obtained. 
 And it is quite possible that virtue, practised at 
 first only for the sake of reward, may come to 
 be loved and followed for its own sake. But, I 
 repeat, these motives have in themselves nothing 
 deserving of moral approbation; and even their 
 indirect effect should be regarded as only prepa- 
 ratory. No mancan be regarded as truly vir- 
 tuous who continues during his whole life the 
 practice of virtue, so far as he can practise it, 
 only that he may obtain admission to Elysium 
 
58 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 or Paradise, ay, or Heaven. ‘The truth is, 
 that a religion which appeals only to hope 
 and fear has no direct power,’ and may have no 
 power at all to raise its votaries in the. moral 
 scale. les hey | 
 Again, and in the same direction, such a reli- 
 gion may be said to have been based on an im- 
 perfect analysis of human nature. ‘Atleast it acts 
 as if the analysis were imperfect. It:does not 
 address itself to the whole man. Such a religion 
 has, in general, overlooked or disregarded one of 
 the most powerful influences by which the human 
 will is swayed—a motive which is often truly 
 deserving of moral approbation—and whose pre- 
 sence does exalt the nature:in which it is found. 
 I mean the emotion of love, It is in the use 
 made of this emotion that we see the essential 
 superiority of the Christian Religion. 
 
 If I weuld bring my present subject within 
 the compass of a sermon, I must not attempt to 
 travel over the whole field, ‘To give a full account 
 of the remedies which the work of Christ applies 
 to moral evil, would be to! give a complete 
 analysis of Christianity. Through the whole 
 of the teaching of Christ Himself—as through 
 the teaching of those to whom He. bequeathed 
 its completion ; through all the ordinances which 
 He or they established for the guidance of His 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 59 
 
 Church shines steadily the same purpose—the 
 elevation of man in the moral scale. 
 
 But, on the present occasion, I pass over those 
 agencies which, in kind at least, Christianity 
 may be said to share with other religions, and 
 come to those which are her monopoly—agencies 
 to which no other religion can show a parallel ; 
 and by which the defects already noticed as 
 existing in other religions are fully supplied. 
 Pre-eminent among these, and distinctly pointed 
 to in the words by which my subject is ex- 
 pressed, is the doctrine of the Atonement. 
 
 You will understand, my brethren, that I here 
 speak of the work of Christ itself, not of the 
 many theoretic edifices which men, disregard- 
 ing the wise counsel of Butler, have been ready 
 to build upon it. Theories of the Atonement 
 have been freely proposed, so repulsive to the 
 moral sense that their moral effect is more than 
 questionable. When men are told that justice 
 required a victim, careless apparently whether it 
 strikes the offender or some one else, the reply is 
 obvious. No: justice can punish only the guilty. 
 Guilt is, like every other part of each man’s 
 identity, essentially intransferable. The suffer- 
 ing which guilt entails may be, and often 
 is, endured by an innocent person; but that a 
 Just being should transfer his moral indignation 
 
60 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 (an essential part of the idea of punishment as 
 distinguished from mere sufferzg) to any one 
 but the offender is, I do not hesitate to say, 
 absolutely inconceivable. 
 
 However, my present purpose does not re- 
 quire that I should examine minutely into these 
 theories, their truth or falsehood. Happily for 
 man, the effect of the great work of Christ as a 
 remedy for moral evil, depends, not upon theories 
 of the Atonement, which have divided us widely 
 enough, but upon the Atonement itself; upon a 
 truth which the word itself expresses, and upon 
 which Christians are generally agreed, namely, 
 that the remission of human sin, and the conse- 
 quent reconciliation of man with God, was pro- 
 cured for us by the suffering of Christ. How the’ 
 suffering of Christ had the power of procuring 
 this remission, or whether it might not have been 
 procured in some other way—these are questions 
 with which we have at present no concern. 
 Enough for our present purpose—possibly for 
 every purpose—to know that it was so procured ; 
 that He “died that we might live.” 
 
 The moral effect of the doctrine of the 
 Atonement may be regarded in two lights: as 
 it acts in aid of the power of conscience, and as 
 it does that which conscience cannot do. 
 
 Regarded in the first light, the doctrine of 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. ° 61 
 
 the Atonement is free from the defect which, as 
 we have seen, attaches to any religion which 
 acts only by means of rewards and punishments. 
 These supplement the power of conscience by 
 the non-moral motives of hope and fear; this 
 supplements the power of conscience by the 
 essentially moral motive of gratitude. I do 
 not of course mean to say that the Christian 
 religion makes vo use of the motives of hope 
 and fear. But the use of these motives Chris- 
 tianity shares with other religions—it is not 
 distinctive, and I do not therefore dwell upon 
 it. 
 
 Gratitude of any kind has in it this morally 
 ennobling quality that it carries man outside 
 himself. It is, I fear, not difficult for us to be 
 selfish at any time; but if there be a time when 
 it is hard to live wholly for ourselves, it is when 
 our hearts are filled with the image of one who 
 has not lived wholly for himself. Shut your 
 ears at such a time to the cry of misery—try to 
 defend, and deceive, yourself by the poor excuses 
 that “you want what you have for yourself,” 
 that “you must think of yourself first,’ and so 
 on. At another time you may succeed, but 
 then, will there not arise within you a whisper— 
 a whisper which you cannot silence? What if 
 you had been treated so? 
 
62 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 But Christian gratitude—gratitude to our 
 Divine Master for that which He has done for 
 us—has a more distinctive effect upon the moral 
 nature of man. When we are grateful to Him for 
 that which He has done, can we forget what it 
 is that He has done. He suffered and died, for 
 what? Was it not to save us from sin—to set 
 us free, not only from its consequences, but as 
 much as may be from its power too. And 
 when we are tempted to sin, and feel that our 
 strength is giving way, what thought more pre- 
 servative than—“ Is this your gratitude?” You 
 thank Him for that which He has done—you 
 thank him for the sacrifice by which He would 
 save you from sin. Are you now going to do 
 what in you lies to make that sacrifice unavail- 
 ing? You are grateful to One who loved you as 
 He loved you. Are you going to grieve Him? 
 You are grateful for that He has done. Are 
 you going to undo it ? 
 
 So far I have spoken of the doctrine of the 
 Atonement as aiding the law of conscience, as 
 aiding conscience to do that which, but that it 
 is too weak, conscience might do for itself. I 
 pass on now to a part of the field which con- 
 science does not pretend to occupy. 
 
 We are all, I suppose, ready to admit that 
 any conception of man which leaves out of sight 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 63 
 
 the emotional part of his nature is inadequate. 
 Man is not a being of pure reason ; neither is he a 
 being of reason and conscience only. Both’ these 
 are parts—but only parts-—-of human nature; 
 and so intimately are these several parts con- 
 nected with each other, that any system which 
 neglects one will dwarf or distort the rest. 
 Thus, if your system treat man as a purely in- 
 tellectual being, ignoring the moral and emo- 
 tional parts of his nature, you will not injure his 
 nature only in those parts which you neglect; 
 your system will make him a hard man—perhaps 
 a bad man—but it will do more. It will dwarf 
 his intellect too. The engine is there, but what 
 avails it if the motive power be wanting ? 
 
 So, too, if you treat man merely asamoral being, 
 as one who bears a law written in his heart enjoin- 
 ing or forbidding certain actions ; if your system 
 aim only at the enforcement of the law of con- 
 science, taking no thought of such emotions as 
 love, gratitude, pity, your system will tend to 
 produce a being imperfect, not only in the emo- 
 tional part of his nature, but also in his obedience 
 to the moral law itself. 
 
 Here, again, the superiority of the Christian 
 system, and more especially of that part of it 
 which we are now discussing becomes manifest ; 
 for Christianity overlooks no part of man’s 
 
; 
 
 64 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 nature; Christianity looks on man as a being 
 not swayed by reason alone, nor by reason and 
 conscience alone, but by reason and conscience, 
 and (most powerfully) by emotion. 
 
 Christianity does not teach, as some systems 
 have done, that it is man’s duty to destroy, so 
 far as that may be, the emotional part of his 
 nature.. She does not seek the highest type of 
 humanity in a nature where all emotion is 
 quenched. But the Gospel of Christ has laid 
 hold of the greatest—the most powerful of human 
 emotions—the emotion of love, and strives to 
 elevate man’s moral nature by giving to that 
 emotion the noblest possible object. The Gospel 
 of Christ, and more especially that part of it 
 which we are now considering, tends, and not 
 vainly, to evoke in the heart of man the deepest 
 love, directed to One who is at the same time the 
 most perfect moral example. 1 need hardly ex- 
 plain to you how powerful is this combination. 
 You know that the example of one whom we 
 esteem and love will often succeed in producing 
 imitation, where the example of one whom we 
 only esteem would wholly fail. There is, per- 
 haps, among men no rarer combination than a 
 being coldly good ; one who passes through life 
 obedient to a strong sense of duty; calmly con- 
 sidering as each case arises what he ought to do, 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 65 
 
 and as calmly doing it; taking an active part 
 in all that concerns the welfare of his fellow- 
 creatures, but only because it is his duty so to 
 do; relieving distress for which he does not feel ; 
 giving to misery all he has, but not a tear. 
 Such men there may have been, but they are rare 
 indeed. Men have emotions, and will continue 
 to have them; and no moral system is complete 
 which does not propose to enlist these emotions 
 - on the side of good. 
 
 All religions do, as we have seen, avail them- 
 selves of hope and fear; and no doubt much 
 good has been done in this way. But we have 
 seen also that these emotions, regarded as moral 
 agents, have this defect, that they terminate in 
 self, and that they have no direct tendency to 
 elevate man’s moral nature. Christianity, by 
 the life and death of Christ, has laid hold of the 
 nobler emotion of love, and given to its power 
 a breadth of operation which it never had 
 before. 
 
 I do not, of course, mean that Christianity gave 
 to the emotion of love all its moral power ; much 
 of that power is inherent in itself. The pre- 
 sence of this emotion is always beneficial to the 
 mind, and there are certain active virtues which 
 it directly stimulates. 
 
 But the work of Christ has made the moral 
 
 ¥ 
 
66 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 power of the emotion of love coextensive with 
 the whole of man’s actions. 
 
 Do right and avoid wrong in everything, says 
 conscience, because they are right and wrong. 
 Conscience gives no reasons. 
 
 Do, right and avoid wrong, say all religions, 
 that you may obtain happiness and escape misery. 
 
 Do right and avoid wrong, says Christianity 
 alone, as you would not grieve Him who suffered 
 as He suffered for you—as you would give for 
 that great love the only return which you can 
 give—as you would not undo the work for 
 which He lived and died. 
 
 I pass to another moral power of this great 
 doctrine. 
 
 A system of mere rewards and punishments, 
 even a system of mere moral law, has in it this 
 element of mischief—it is, and must be to many 
 a heart, the death-knell of hope. ‘“ This do, and 
 thou shalt live,” is not written on its enactments 
 more clearly than “ This do, and thou shalt die.” 
 And to him who puts himself in the grasp of 
 that sentence what avails it that you preach re- 
 pentance and amendment? “ Repentance!” he 
 will answer bitterly ; “will that undo the past? 
 Amendment! will that cancel the sentence 
 which is already registered against me?” Bid 
 him, in the words of the apostle Paul, “ Forget 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL Evin. 67 
 Be ee EE RR 8 | SLRS DE Deen ed le 
 those things that are behind,” and can you not 
 anticipate his answer? “ Forget them! Would 
 God I could! Would God that any power could 
 take from me that ‘fatal remembrance’ which 
 lies like ice upon my heart! Forget them! Is 
 it not a mockery to tell me so ?” 
 
 Yes, my brethren, under such a system it 
 would be a mockery, or perhaps worse. For 
 there 7s a way in which he may forget for a 
 time, and there is but one way; and that i is, the 
 continual degradation of his moral nature. 
 Only by plunging more deeply into sin—only by 
 resolutely shutting his eyes and his heart against 
 all that is ae thus can he exorcise for a 
 time the fearful spectre of past guilt which 
 haunts all his past thoughts. There is no one 
 of the powers of evil so utterly demoralizing as 
 despair. 
 
 It is here that the doctrine of Christ’s Atone- 
 ment comes to the aid of the despairing sinner. 
 It cannot, indeed, cancel the past; it cannot 
 make that undone which has once been done ; 
 but it can and does give the otherwise deeaiune 
 sinner ground to hope that his sin has been for- 
 given him; it can and does tell him that “ the 
 blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from add sin,” 
 and in that sentence it tells him that neither he 
 nor any other need despair, 
 
 E 2 
 
 a 
 
65 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 But some, perhaps, will say, To what purpose 
 is this waste? Might not the same end have 
 been attained at a much less cost, and in a man- 
 ner, too, more consistent with the attributes of 
 God? Does not Natural Religion teach us to 
 expect from an All-merciful Being pardon to 
 those who truly repent? Does not our con- 
 science tell us that we should do so with our 
 fellow-men? And may we not expect the same 
 from God? Ina word, Will not Natural Rehi- 
 gion save us from despair as effectually and 
 more simply than Christianity ? 
 
 Natural Religion bids us hope for pardon con- 
 ditioned only by repentance. Does it? Let me 
 ask any one who thinks so to consider the case 
 which I am now going to describe. Let his 
 imagination, or it may be his memory, draw for 
 him the picture of one who finds his conscience 
 loaded with an irreparable sin. What if it can 
 be said with truth that he has, so far as in him 
 lay, destroyed a human soul? What if, through 
 him, a brother or sister have perished? What 
 if his conscience tell him, in tones not to be 
 mistaken, that their blood is on his head? I do 
 not speak wholly, or even principally, of the worst 
 cases. ‘The power which we have over the des- 
 tinies of each other is so great that the fatal 
 effect may be produced by a very small thing— 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 69 
 
 a trifling neglect, a careless action, perhaps a 
 chance word. But, however produced, let a man 
 be convinced of its reality. He knows that the 
 effect is real, and his conscience tells him that 
 the guilt rests with him. And then let him go 
 to Natural Religion for comfort. Let him re- 
 pent truly, bitterly, of that which he has done ; 
 let him earnestly resolve to amend his life. And 
 when he has doneall this, let him ask of Natural 
 Religion whether he may not hope for pardon 
 from God. What will be the answer? Natural 
 Religion will reply by another question. What 
 right has God to forgive you? The sin is not 
 against Him; the sin is against your fellow- 
 man. What right has He to forgive that? 
 
 That, I say without hesitation, is the answer 
 which Natural Religion must give, and it is an 
 answer which sends man away in despair. 
 
 It is in such a case as this that we derive 
 comfort from the very mystery which hangs 
 round the doctrine of the Atonement. The vast- 
 ness—superfluous vastness some may think—of 
 the means employed, becomes to us the strongest 
 element of hope, when our eyes are opened to 
 some of the tremendous difficulties which oppose 
 themselves to a system of free pardon. Such a 
 difficulty is that of which I have just now spoken. 
 We do not see how these difficulties are removed 
 
70 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 by the death of Christ, but Revelation tells us 
 that they ave removed, and the more inconceiv- 
 ably vast that sacrifice was, the more readily can 
 we believe that no difficulty is beyond its power. 
 
 But it may be said, this view of the doctrine 
 of the Atonement and of the purposes which it 
 is intended to serve, is applicable at most to the 
 ease of sins against man. Does it, in the case 
 of sins against God, contrast favourably with a 
 system of free forgiveness? Here, at least, there 
 can be no doubt as to the right of God to pardon. 
 Would not the moral effect of such pardon, freely 
 given to the repentant sinner, be higher than 
 the moral effect of pardon which is procured by 
 the suffering of another ? 
 
 In reply to this objection, I do not dwell upon 
 the obvious answer that, remembering Who the 
 Sufferer was, we can say that the pardon was free. 
 But I ask you to observe that a system of free 
 pardon is, and especially in the case of sins 
 against God, open to an objection regarding its 
 moral effect, from which the doctrine of the 
 Atonement is free. It is true that, in the case 
 of man’s forgiveness, we think that it cannot be 
 too free. We think that not only the moral 
 quality, but the moral effect of the act of forgive- 
 ness is enhanced by its perfect freeness. I wish 
 to point out to you how the analogy fails. 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 71 
 
 Man pardons an injury, but bis pardon does 
 not make the injury less; that remains uncan- 
 celled, to excite remorse in the mind of the offen- 
 der, and to deter him from a repetition: of the 
 offence ; and therefore the mental effect of per- 
 fectly free forgiveness may quite well be beneficial 
 not only to the mind of him who forgives, but to 
 the mind of him who is forgiven. But if acom- 
 plete divorce were effected between offence and 
 sufferine—if, by some change in the laws of 
 nature, men were rendered absolutely incapable 
 of injuring each other, it may reasonably be 
 doubted whether the moral effect of a perfectly 
 free forgiveness of offences which were necessarily 
 harmless would be beneficial. Recollection of 
 an offence which did no mischief, and was at 
 once forgiven, would probably exercise little 
 effect in checking its repetition. 
 
 Now this is obviously the case with man’s 
 offences against God. They are, necessarily, so 
 far as He is concerned, harmless—they can do 
 no injury to Him against whom they are com- 
 mitted, and if they were freely and at once for- 
 given, little would remain to hold back the 
 offender from a like act. This defect in moral 
 power, resulting from the divorce which it effects 
 between sin and suffering, necessarily attaches 
 to any system of absolutely free forgiveness. 
 
12 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 It does not attach to the Christian system. The 
 doctrine of the Atonement says, in effect, to the 
 repentant sinner, Your sins are forgiven—freely, 
 as far as you are concerned—but do not think 
 that they caused no suffering. Before that par- 
 don, freely given to you was given, suffering 
 was undergone—suffering the most bitter—by 
 One who died that you might live. And, before 
 you sin again, think of the suffering which your 
 sin has caused; and think, too, Who was the 
 Sufferer. 
 
 The limits of a sermon have compelled me to 
 choose a part only of the great subject to which 
 this afternoon is devoted. I have chosen that 
 part which may be said to be peculiar to the 
 Christian religion not in degree, but in kind. 
 I have made this choice (among other reasons) 
 because there seems to be some tendency, even 
 among some who believe the doctrine of the 
 Atonement to be true, to keep it somewhat in 
 the background, insisting far more upon that 
 view of gospel truth which presents to us Christ 
 as a moral teacher and as a moral example, than 
 upon that which presents Him as an Atoning 
 Sacrifice. To those who disbelieve the doctrine 
 I have, of course, nothing to say. No considera- 
 tion of beneficial moral effect could, with any 
 propriety, be addressed to them. But I speak 
 
THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVII. 79 
 
 to those who, believing this doctrine to be true— 
 believing, that is to say, that the remission of 
 man’s sin was obtained through the suffering 
 and death of Christ—yet think it expedient to 
 keep this doctrine, comparatively at least, in the 
 background; and to them I say,—It is not 
 expedient: for by so doing, as I have tried to 
 show, you cripple the Christian religion in that 
 which is the most important function of any 
 religious system. You cripple its power regarded 
 as a remedy for moral evil, for you deprive it of 
 its distinctive power. Whatever may be done 
 to check the power of sin by the purest moral 
 teaching or the brightest moral example—that 
 you leave it still. Whatever may be done by a 
 system of rewards and punishments—that you 
 leave it also. 
 
 But you take from Christianity the great and 
 quite distinctive powers which the atoning work 
 of Christ has given it—the power of enlisting 
 man’s noblest emotions against moral evil, and 
 the power of saving the repentant sinner from 
 the complete moral ruin caused by despair. 
 
 If you would not deprive Christianity of those 
 great powers—if at least you would not weaken 
 their effect, you must give a prominent place in 
 the Christian system to the doctrine of the 
 Atonement. 
 
74 THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 There is another error, not very uncommon, 
 which also robs Christianity of much of its dis- 
 tinctive moral power. It is the error which 
 speaks of and preaches Christianity almost 
 wholly as a system of rewards and punishments 
 —as a means of avoiding endless misery and 
 obtaining endless happiness. Now Christianity 
 is such a means, and neither reason nor Scrip- 
 ture permits us to ignore this as one of its great 
 functions. But if we speak of it as no more 
 than this—if we describe it merely as a series 
 of conditions, by the performance of which we 
 shall obtain eternal life—then we deprive 
 Christianity of its distinctive moral power; 
 making it, so far, not different in kind from 
 many other religious systems. The hopes and 
 fears which the Christian Religion calls forth 
 in the mind of man are, as motives, perfectly 
 lawful; and we are fully justified in using them 
 to win men to Christ. But they are not the 
 highest motives, nor does Christianity make 
 them such. The great purpose of the Christian 
 Religion is to evoke and ennoble—by directing it 
 to the highest objects—the emotion oflove. It 
 is this which gives it its distinctive moral power, 
 —it is in the full development of this emotion 
 that Christ Himself bids us seek the complete 
 fulfilment of Divine law ; and this too is indicated 
 
Ld 
 
 THE EFFICIENT REMEDY FOR MORAL EVIL. 15 
 
 not obscurely by St. Paul when he gives to love 
 the highest place among Christian virtues. 
 
 It is in the development of this emotion that 
 we must seek the great power of Christianity 
 as the remedy for moral evil. Christianity has 
 sought that remedy by the recognition of the 
 undoubted truth, that as sin takes its rise in the 
 emotional part of our nature, only by an emotion 
 can it be successfully resisted. Abandoning as 
 hopeless, to say the least of it, the idea of 
 making men coldly good, Christianity has 
 sought to check the growth of moral evil by 
 opposing to man’s baser emotions an intensified 
 and exalted love. And if you remember how 
 and in what part of the Christian scheme this 
 emotion is most deeply stirred, you will feel the 
 truth of the words of the text, which, deseribing 
 an approaching moral reformation, tell us,— 
 not of the Great Teacher—not eveft of the Great 
 Tixample,—but of “the Lamb of God which 
 taketh away the sin of the world.” 
 
CHRIST, THE GREATEST MIRACLE OF 
 CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 “ What think ye of Christ ?”—Marrv. xxii. 42. 
 
 I am to attempt to prove here to-day that Christ 
 Himself is the greatest miracle of Christianity ; 
 that is to say, that no act was ever done by Him- 
 self or His Apostles, which so clearly implied the 
 exertion of supernatural power, as did the life 
 and characte of the Lord Jesus Himself. 
 
 Let us first, then, consider the form and 
 meaning of our Lord’s character. These, of 
 course, are to be gathered from the Holy Gospels 
 (our sole reliable authority), and although it 
 will be necessary to consider presently the ob- 
 jections of Strauss and Renan to the authen- 
 ticity of portions of these sacred records, I shall 
 assume, in the first instance, that those bio- 
 graphies of our Saviour, which pass under the 
 
CHRIST, THE GREATEST MIRACLE, EVC. ca 
 
 names of the Four Evangelists, are substantially 
 trustworthy. With those biographies I suppose 
 that all the members of this congregation are 
 well acquainted ; and it might thus appear that 
 any laboured effort to exhibit the character of 
 Christ in a new or more condensed form is as 
 needless as it must be unsatisfactory. 
 
 Since, however, all Christians do not read the 
 Gospels with equal attention, nor the majority, 
 perhaps, with a special endeavour to estimate 
 the moral meaning of our Saviour’s character, 
 it may still be desirable to lay before you cer-. 
 tain suggestive outlines, if for nothing else, at 
 least as a guide and stimulus to thought. 
 
 No one, I think, can have read the Gospels 
 at all without having been struck with the 
 calmness, the breadth, the faultless proportions 
 of our Lord’s character. It is felt to present a 
 wonderfully rich, and yet at the same time a 
 perfectly completed and harmonious unity. No 
 one would be inclined to describe it as presenting 
 any prominent or peculiar quality. It bears 
 the impress of no special nationality, creed, or 
 temperament. Born a Jew, our Lord is yet no 
 more specifically Jewish than He is Greek or 
 Roman; distinguished for depth and compre- 
 hensiveness of thought, it is not less true of 
 Him that He went about doing good ; devoting 
 
78 CHRIST, THE GRWATEST 
 
 Himself to the work of redemption with an 
 ardour so great, and a zeal so untiring, that His 
 friends once thought of putting restraint upon 
 His actions. 
 
 In most men (even in most great men), again, 
 we recognize some preponderance, either of the 
 intellect or.of the emotions; but in the Lord 
 Jesus there is nothing of the kind. In Him, 
 “those two poles-of the mental life, knowledge 
 and feeling, head and heart,’ are in the most 
 perfect unison. His thought is suffused and 
 brightened by feeling ; His feeling is ever com- 
 manded and regulated by thought. What 
 words are so touching as those of our Saviour, 
 and yet what words are so far-reaching and 
 sublime? He speaks of the grandest truths so 
 simply, with such an absence of excitement, 
 with such a tone of ease and mastery, that, as 
 Pascal observes, ‘if it were not for the clearness 
 and precision with which everything is articu- 
 lated, we might even imagine Him unconscious 
 of what He is saying.” | 
 
 The same exquisite balance and proportion is 
 observable in our Lord’s moral nature. Whether 
 He were more loving or more truthful, more 
 righteous or more merciful, more meek or more 
 majestic, more self-possessed or more enthu- 
 silastic, who shall undertake to say? He is 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 79 
 
 each by turns, and all in each: combining in 
 Himself in perfect harmony all those moral 
 qualities which show themselves simply or 
 prominently in others; so that, as Professor 
 Goldwin Smith has said,! “the mental eye, 
 though strained to aching, cannot discern 
 whether that on which it gazes be more the 
 object of reverence or of affection.” 
 
 It is this universality of our Saviour’s 
 character, this perfect embodiment therein of 
 all that is greatest and best in humanity, which 
 has given to it its immense and far-reaching in- 
 fluence, which has caused our Lord, in the 
 words of Cardinal Wiseman,’ “to be followed 
 by the Greek, though a founder of none of his 
 sects ; revered by the Brahmin, though preached 
 to him by men of the fisherman’s caste, and 
 worshipped by the red man of Canada,” though 
 belonging to that pale-faced race, which war 
 and oppression have made hateful to his soul. 
 
 Does it seem, perhaps, to any one here, that 
 I have spoken of our Lord’s character rather in 
 the language of an apologist than of a critic? 
 Let me, then, set before you the recorded 
 opinions upon this subject of some of those who, 
 
 1 « Some Supposed Consequences of the Doctrine of His- 
 torical Progress.” 
 
 * “Lectures on Science and Religion,” Lect. iy, 
 
50 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 not less for the power of their mind than for the 
 freedom of their opinions, may seem best en- 
 titled to a hearing. 
 
 “JT esteem the four Gospels,” says Goethe, 
 “to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth 
 from them the reflected splendour of a sublimity 
 proceeding from the person of Christ, and of as 
 divine a kindas was ever manifesteduponearth.’’* 
 “ He walked over the earth,” says De Wette, 
 “like some nobler being, who scarce touched it 
 with his feet.’”* Our inquiry concerns Him, 
 “Who,” to speak with Richter, “being holiest 
 among the mighty, and mightiest amone the 
 holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off 
 their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of 
 its channel, and still governs the ages.”* “Tf, 
 again,’ says Rousseau, “the life and death of 
 Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death 
 of Jesus are those of a God.” °® And to quote no 
 more, how remarkable are those words of the 
 great Napoleon in his exile, “I think I under- 
 stand somewhat of human nature, and I tell 
 
 3 Luthardt’s ‘Fundamental Truths of Christianity,’ 
 p. 298. Goethe’s “ Gespriiche mit Eckermann,” iii. 371. 
 
 4 Ullmann’s “ Sinlessness of Jesus,” p. 79. 
 
 > Luthardt, p. 288. Jean Paul Richter’s Werke, vol. xxv. 
 p. 59, Ed. 1842. 
 
 6 “ Qui, sila vie et la mort de Socrate sont d’un sage, 
 la vie et la mort de Jésus sont d’un Dieu.” 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. Sl 
 
 you all these (the heroes of antiquity) were men, 
 and I am a man, but notoneis like Him. Jesus 
 Christ was more than a man.” ’ 
 
 What shall we say then, my brethren, of such 
 a character, of such a personality as this? One 
 which has made so profound an impression upon 
 the greatest memMBERS and the most intelligent 
 RACES of our common humanity; one which, so 
 far as we can see, is without a fault or an imper- 
 fection, which presents to us so rich a union 
 of all various greatness, so deep a harmony of 
 all possible good? If it ever ewisted, how did 
 it come into being? How did it succeed in 
 escaping those common errors and vices, which 
 we know to our cost to be natural and instinc- 
 tive? How did it succeed in gathering into its 
 own individuality all that wealth of wisdom and 
 virtue? Is there any natural process by which 
 you can account for it? Any theory of merely 
 human derivation and development which can 
 assign to such results their adequate antece- 
 dents ? 
 
 Suppose that like the Apostles you had been 
 privileged to witness the actual unfolding of 
 such a life: that day by day you had stood in 
 the light of that unclouded holiness, that day 
 by day (in common conversation, or in public 
 
 7 Luthardt, p. 330. 
 G 
 
82 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 discourses) you had listened to the outpouring 
 of that astonishing inexhaustible wisdom— what 
 must have been the cmpression that 1t produced 
 upon you? “Conceive,” as one has strikingly 
 put it,’ “this voice (the voice of conscience) 
 not merely within you, but without you, conceive 
 it speaking to you in human tones, penetrating 
 you with human eyes, awing you by human 
 acts, present with you, not merely in the re- 
 cesses of your souls, but as a living human 
 companion; in one word, conceive yourself in 
 the presence of a conscience Incarnate,” and 
 then try to realize the solemn, the perplexing 
 impression which such a moral miracle must 
 have produced upon your mind. Could you 
 possibly keep away in such circumstances those 
 deep thoughts of heart, those eager, awful ques- 
 tionings with which the Apostles strove to 
 explain to themselves the meaning of what they 
 saw; or could you receive with anything but 
 the most grateful and reverent attention what- 
 ever explanation of JZimse/f so wonderful a 
 Person might vouchsafe ? 
 
 Such a life and character demand some expla- 
 nation, and from the very nature of the case 
 none could be able to furnish it but He who was 
 
 S Wace, “ Boyle Lectures,” p. 254. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 83 
 
 conscious of their secret and their source. What 
 then, let us ask in the next place, is the nature 
 of our Lord’s testimony concerning Himself? 
 
 First in respect to His moral character, He 
 declares that it is without fault. “Which of 
 you,” He demanded of His adversaries, “con- 
 vinceth Me of sin?” in what part of My life 
 can you point to the minutest indication of 
 moral transgression? It was impossible that 
 such signs should appear in His Zife, because 
 they had no ground or point of departure in His 
 character. ‘My meat,’ He says, “is to do the 
 will of Him that sent Me,”® and again, “I do 
 always those things that please Him.” ! 
 
 Secondly, in respect of His relation to man- 
 kind, our Lord testifies, “Iam that Bread of 
 life . . . if any man eat of this bread, he shall 
 live for ever.”” “Tam the Light of the world: 
 he that followeth Me shall not walk in dark- 
 ness.”* “T am the True Vine... as the 
 branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide 
 in the Vine; no more can ye, except ye abide 
 in Me.” * 
 
 And lastly, the Lord bears witness in respect 
 of His relation to God, “I and My Father are 
 
 9 John iv. 34. } John viii. 29. 
 2 John vi. 48, 51. 3 John viii. 12. 
 * John xy. 1. 4; see also John viii. 51, and ch. vii. 37, 88. 
 
 G 2 
 
84: CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 one.’?*® “He that hath seen Me, hath seen the 
 Father.” *® ‘ As the Father hath life in Him- 
 self, so hath He given to the Son to have life in 
 Himself.”* “ Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
 Before Abraham was, I am.” * 
 
 Now what shall we say of this witness? 
 Does it not present to us a self-assertion abso- 
 lutely tremendous? Must not He who affirms 
 Himself to be sinless be either better or worse 
 than all men? etter, if His testimony be true; 
 and if it be rejected, worse, inasmuch as dewmg 
 sinful, His moral ‘sensibility was too obtuse 
 to discover it? Again, must not the Lord 
 Jesus be great above all measure of greatness 
 if, as He says, He be indeed the source of spiri- 
 tual Light and Life to all men; or on the other 
 hand, vain and self-presumptuous beyond all ex- 
 ample of arrogance, if His witness be disallowed? 
 
 Or what, in fine, are we to make of His un- 
 equivocal claim to be one with God in essence 
 and honour? Must He not either de that which 
 He affirms, or as the Jews declare Him, frenzied 
 or possessed, madman or blasphemer ? 
 
 Any way, if the testimony of the Evangelists 
 is to be believed, we are here brought face to 
 face with the miracle of miracles. Either on the 
 
 5 John x. 30. 6. John xiv. 9. 
 7 John y. 26. $8 John viii. 58. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 85 
 
 one hand we must bow with adoration before 
 sinless man and Incarnate God; or on the other, 
 we must conclude of a Person, who by His moral 
 greatness has changed the face of the world, and 
 commanded the homage of the greatest of man- 
 _ kind, that He was the blindest of self-deceivers, 
 and the most frantic and arrogant of fanatics. 
 I know not which were the greater miracle ; 
 but of one thing I am certain, that either is 
 greater than the walking on the sea, or the 
 raising of the dead. 
 
 It must not be concealed, however, that these 
 testimonies of our Lord to His own nature and 
 character are taken entirely from the Gospel ac- 
 cording to St. John ; and that some have sought 
 to escape from the dilemma in which they place 
 us, either by denying with Baur and Strauss that 
 St. John was their author, or by affirming with 
 Renan that they were written by the Apostle 
 “when his mind had been bewildered by the 
 theosophy of Asia Minor.” 
 
 I must here affirm my own conviction that 
 in face of that closer examination of St. John’s 
 Gospel, which these theories have stimulated, it 
 is daily becoming more impossible for a reason- 
 able man to believe them.’ 
 
 9 I venture to go further, and to say with Mr. LI. 
 Davies (“ Manifestation of the Son of God,’ p. xxi), “I 
 
86 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 _ The difficulties which they involve are strik- 
 ingly suggested by the diversity of result to 
 which they lead their ingeniousauthors. Thus, 
 in sketching the scene between Jesus and the 
 Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, Strauss de- 
 clares that the author of St. John’s Gospel was 
 “as much conscious that he was inventing freely, 
 as was Homer when he described the interview 
 between Ulysses and Calypso ;”* whereas, in the 
 opinion of Renan, he was not only reporting the 
 words of Jesus, but precisely those sublimest 
 words in which our Lord founded “ the absolute 
 religion ;”” so that (to let Renan speak for him- 
 self) “if other planets have inhabitants gifted 
 with reason and morality, THEIR religion can- 
 not be different from that which Jesus proclaimed 
 near the well of Jacob.” ? | 
 Diversity of conclusion is no ean to be ex- 
 _ pected when expositors start from varying hypo- 
 theses, but hardly diversity so extreme as this. 
 
 find it difficult to preserve a decent respect even for the 
 intellect of the man who does not recognize in the writings 
 of St. John the sublimest and yet the most human theology 
 which has ever found expression in words, and an account 
 of the nature and thoughts of Christ, at once the most 
 utterly unworldly and the most profoundly and intensely 
 consistent.” 
 
 1 “New Life of Jesus,” vol. i. p. 208, 
 
 2 “Life of Jesus,” p. 176. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 87 
 
 For what can we think of the sagacity of the 
 extremer rationalistie criticism, when one of its’ 
 most famous representatives sees in a certain pas- 
 sage, the free invention of an anonymous writer 
 of the second century; while another, equally 
 famous, recognizes therein those sublimest of the 
 sayings of Jesus, in virtue of which He became 
 the Founder of the absolute religion? Truly 
 may we say with Rousseau in the face of such a 
 contradiction, that if any one could have invented 
 such a scene as that at the well of Jacob, “the 
 inventor would have been a more astounding 
 person than the hero.” 
 
 It is not, however, only, or even principally 
 by the diversity of their results, that the ratio- 
 nalistic critics of the Gospel of St. John are dis- 
 credited, but rather by the necessary consequence 
 of their admissions. 
 
 Thus Strauss admits that, “in these speeches 
 _ of the Johannine Christ about Himself, there 
 remains at last, as what may be genuine, and 
 possible for a human being, only so much as is 
 common to the Fourth Gospel with the three 
 others.” ° 
 
 But how much, then, is common to these 
 several authorities? Strauss presently finds 
 
 3 “New Life of Jesus,” vol. i. p. 274. 
 
88 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 himself obliged to deal with that saying reported 
 by St. Matthew and St. Luke: “ All things are 
 delivered unto Me of My Father, and no man 
 knoweththeSon, but the Father; neither knoweth 
 any man the Father, save the Son, and he to 
 whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.”* And 
 again, when Renan is called upon to produce the 
 proofs of his assertion, that at a certain period of 
 our Lord’s life “the admiration of His disciples 
 carried Him away,” and led Him to attribute to 
 Himself “ the position of a superhuman being,” 
 it is principally to the Synoptics that he appeals. 
 The following references, for instance, are all to 
 the three first Evangelists: “His Father had 
 given Him all power. No one knew the Father 
 except through Him. Nature obeyed Him. He 
 pardoned sin. He was superior to David, to 
 Abraham, to Solomon, and to the prophets.” * 
 
 Can it be said in the face of such references 
 as these, that our Lord’s claim to an unique 
 Divine relationship is peculiar to the Gospel 
 according to St.John? Is it not rather evident 
 that the larger reports of the fourth Evangelist 
 were necessary to give to such statements a 
 rational ground and connexion ¢° 
 
 4 Matt. xi. 27, and Luke x. 22. 
 ° “Tife of Jesus,” p. 182. 
 5 For a careful and candid examination of this point sce 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 89 
 
 We saw that the statements in St. John’s 
 Gospel had reference not only to our Lord’s 
 Divinity, but also to His human sinlessness. 
 Now, Strauss professes to give an account of our 
 Lord’s religious consciousness, derived from such 
 passages of the three first Evangelists as he finds 
 to be authentic. And what is the result of his 
 examination? “In all those natures,” he tells 
 us, “which were not purified till they had gone 
 through struggles and violent disruption (think 
 only of a Paul, an Augustine, and a Luther), the 
 shadowy colours of this exist for ever, and some- 
 thing harsh, severe and gloomy clings to them 
 all their lives. But of this in Jesus no trace is 
 found. Jesus appears as a beautiful nature from 
 the first, which had only to develope itself out of 
 itself; .... but not to change and begin a 
 new life.”? 
 
 Now let any one only recall what he knows 
 of the outward frame and inward consciousness 
 of the most saintly characters in human history 
 —of those who have developed most calmly and 
 gradually, with the least possible disturbance 
 from sinful excitement, and then let him say 
 whether a life without so much as the shadow 
 
 Mr. Sanday’s “‘ Authorship and Historical Character of the 
 Fourth Gospel.” See especially pp. 106—115. 
 7 “ New Life of Jesus,’ vol. i. p. 282. 
 
90 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 of evil upon it, must not be purer than any of 
 those—must not, in a word, be sinless, and 
 require for its explanation, just such a self- 
 disclosure as we find in the Gospel according to 
 St. John! 
 
 I am quite aware that as soon as any state- 
 ment of the Synoptics becomes inconvenient 
 Strauss has a most summary and convenient 
 way of disposing of it. When, for instance, he 
 finds in the Synoptical statement of our Lord’s 
 relation to the Father, an unequivocal declara- 
 tion of the supernatural character of His being, 
 —he rejects it unceremoniously, as “ referring 
 to a principle resembling that of the Fourth 
 Gospel.”* Certainly his rule is a very simple 
 one. If any passage in the Gospels agrees with 
 his theoryz-well; if not—so much the worse 
 for the passage. The question however remains, 
 whether this method of criticism be as sound as 
 it is simple; and more especially whether it will 
 enable him to give a satisfactory account of 
 the evangelical phenomena with which he is 
 confronted. 
 
 For the passages which he desires to reject 
 as mythical (all those, viz. which affirm the 
 working of miracles, or contain the element of 
 
 8 “ Life of Jesus,” vol. i. p. 276. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 91 
 
 prophecy, or ascribe to our Saviour properties 
 which are superhuman) are found to harmonize 
 so perfectly with those which rationalistic critics 
 accept, that they describe, together with them, a 
 character of perfect unity and moral beauty. 
 How then are we to account for this fact ?— 
 that the several parts of this picture (including 
 those which involve the supernatural, and 
 where, therefore, the perils of exaggeration 
 were greatest) blend together naturally, and 
 make up a whole, of which it is difficult to say, 
 whether the richness, or the unity 1s the more 
 remarkable. How was this miracle of spiritual 
 portraiture achieved? If the supernatural por- 
 tions be untrustworthy ;—when and by whom 
 were they created? What consummate artist 
 was it, who, taking the prophecies of the Old 
 Testament and the scanty traditions of the 
 Christian Scriptures for his materials or guides, 
 “freely invented” a supernatural character 
 of such perfect consistency, and unblemished 
 moral beauty, that while his handiwork has 
 succeeded in ¢mposing upon the wisest, it has 
 never failed to command the loving homage and 
 adoration, of the foliest of mankind? Greater 
 even than the subject of his imagination (could 
 we only believe in his existence) were this 
 unapproachable artist. 
 
92 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 Will it be believed then, that Strauss requires 
 from us a still greater effort of faith ;—that he 
 requires us to accept, as the creative7cause of 
 this matchless character, not any single artist, 
 nor even the members of the Apostolic college ; 
 but a multitude of obscure and unknown be- 
 lievers, living in different periods of the first 
 two centuries, and creating, each as he was 
 able (to be afterwards modified by the popular 
 feeling), such miraculous stories about the Lord 
 Jesus, as the prophecies of the Old Testament 
 seemed to him to demand or suggest? What? 
 you may well exclaim; conceive for a moment 
 that this glorious kingly form of the divinest 
 man, was nothing better than an image, like 
 that of the monarch’s vision, whose head was of 
 gold, and its feet of clay ?—conceive that that 
 simplest unity of all grand and gracious attri- 
 butes was some mere mosaic of saintly thoughts, 
 fused into a kind of unity by the fervid temper 
 of a superstitious age? Who could believe 
 this, that knows anything either of the popular 
 Messianic expectations of that age, or of the 
 puerile efforts of its apocryphal authors to 
 enlarge the sacred Biography? That such a 
 result indeed, should have been produced by 
 such a cause, would be a greater miracle than 
 any of the recorded acts or sayings of our 
 
9 
 
 MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 93 
 
 Divine Master. The former would contradict 
 
 our experience, whereas the latter does no more 
 than transcend it. 
 
 About the attempted explanation of Renan I 
 have said but little. And little indeed at this 
 time of day needs to be said. For his idea of a 
 sentimental hero beginning with the zmprac- 
 ticable, only to descend into the immoral, is so 
 utterly contradictory of the Evangelical accounts, 
 and so utterly repugnant to our moral instincts, 
 that it is already generally discredited. If indeed 
 
 as Renan declares “ Jesus will never be sur- , 
 passed ”—that “a thousand times more loving \ 
 
 and a thousand times more loved since His death / 
 
 than during his life, He will become to such a | 
 
 degree the corner-stone of humanity, that to 
 
 tear His Name from this world would be to | 
 
 shake it to its foundations;”* then it must be 
 for ever impossible to believe in that senti- 
 mental figure which is not only “ carried away 
 by the fearful progress of enthusiasm,” and 
 “ degraded by contact with men to their level,” 
 but can even be conceived of, in the last agony, 
 as dreaming of the fruits and “ clear fountains 
 of Galilee” and “of the young maidens who 
 perhaps would have consented to love Him.” 
 
 9 “Tife of Jesus,” p. 291. 
 
 ce 
 
94, CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 The imagination which could conceive such 
 a possibility, is by that fact alone shown to be 
 unfit to handle such a subject; and perhaps no 
 better criticism has been pronounced upon the 
 whole general result of Renan than that of 
 Strauss himself. ‘Baur knew,’ he says, “as 
 well as any one, that with a personality of such 
 immeasurable historical effect as that of Jesus, 
 there cannot be a question of adaptation, or of 
 playing a part . . . . that with such a person- 
 ality every item must have been conviction.” 
 
 But, my brethren, if we have found these, and 
 all similar rationalistic explanations of the Gos- 
 pel records to be impossible; what then shall we 
 make of those records? Ifthe Lord Jesus were 
 indeed such as they represent Him; and His tes- 
 timony about Himself were no other than that 
 which they report: what, let me ask, is implied 
 therein? If with a character so perfect and a 
 truthfulness so simple and absolute, Jesus de- 
 clared Himself to be sinless and Divine; is it 
 possible to withhold from Him our whole un- 
 divided love and adoration—or, giving Him 
 that, to question any longer the existence of 
 miracle? What miracle is comparable to the 
 Incarnation of God? or what, excepting that, to 
 the existence of sinlessness in man ? 
 
 1 “New Life of Jesus,”’ vol. i. p. 312. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY, 93 
 
 —-- 
 
 If at the birth of Jesus, the Infinite came 
 into bounds, should we not have esteemed it 
 strange and even suspicious, had the Divine glory 
 never broken through the veil of appearance, 
 had the Divine pity never come to the succour 
 of infirmity, nor the Divine Power into conflict 
 with disorder and death? If Christ be indeed 
 that which the Evangelists represent Him, He 
 is beyond contradiction the greatest miracle of 
 Christianity, and such a miracle moreover as 
 demands atid pre-supposes the existence of 
 others. 
 
 What then, upon the whole, is your con- 
 clusion, dear brethren, upon this momentous 
 subject? What think ye of Christ? Compei 
 yourself to give some definite answer to this great 
 question of our age. If you cannot believe 
 Strauss or Renan, and yet hesitate to give your 
 assent to St Matthew or St John, construct, I 
 pray you, some better theory for yourself :—and 
 do it straightway. For this is a matter which 
 does not admit of delay or doubtfulness. It 
 touches your very life. 
 
 It is not only the Lord Jesus who says, “ If 
 ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your 
 sins:”’—Baur of Tibingen comes to a con- 
 clusion substantially the same. For having 
 affirmed ‘itis only in Christianity that man 
 
96 CHRIST, THE GREATEST 
 
 ean feel himself lifted up into the sphere of 
 the Spirit”? he tells us elsewhere :* “It is the 
 fundamental and ever-recurring thought of the 
 Apostle, that only in union with Christ can the 
 Christian be what he is, and ought to be, asa 
 Christian.” 
 
 What then think ye of Christ? I repeat 
 —what is the nature of that wonderful Person 
 who realizing in Himself all the best thoughts 
 and aspirations of the past, is thus felt to pass 
 on as a living and quickening Principle through 
 all the hearts and ages of the world? 
 
 Who is He? my brethren, this glorious Liv- 
 ing Lord, who (all the armies of His faithful 
 being witness) can dwell in myriads of hearts at 
 the same instant, equally present to the con- 
 sciousness of each, as the power of his life and 
 the source of his happiness? Is 1t a mere man 
 ~ who can thus gather up into one all the ages? 
 who can thus bind into a single body (conscious 
 of the same Head, and quickened by the same 
 impulse) earth and Heaven, saints militant and 
 saints triumphant ; those who are still fighting 
 the battle, and those who have won the crown ? 
 
 May God give you no rest, my brethren, till 
 you have found for yourself a satisfactory an- 
 
 2 * Paul and his Works,” vol. ii. p. 212. 
 3 Ibid. p. 176. 
 
MIRACLE OF CHRISTIANITY. 9/ 
 swer to that question :—and may He grant it to 
 you of His mercy, that when you find it, it may 
 be no other than that of St Thomas, “My 
 Lord and my God,” the great miracle of mira- 
 cles—the one life of the world, and the one 
 satisfying revelation of the Father. 
 
INFIDELITY REFUTED BY ITS 
 OWN CONCESSIONS,’ 
 
 Ir is but too clear that there is one form of un- 
 belief among us, not unlikely, if we judge of the 
 future by the past, to become more and more 
 
 1 The necessities of the case have compelled me to 
 speak in this Lecture of many living writers, for whose 
 abilities and earnestness I entertain a very true respect, as 
 teachers or representatives of this or that form of infidelity. 
 I have done so with some reluctance, knowing how keenly 
 some of them resent the application of the word “infidel” 
 to themselves, how often it has been used by ignorance and 
 prejudice as a mere term of opprobrium. I have not so 
 used it, and disclaim attaching to the term anything more 
 than the meaning which makes it a convenient description 
 of the position of those who reject the claims of the faith 
 which all Christians—from the Romanist to the Unitarian 
 —hold in common as haying its ground in a revelation of 
 God through Christ. I know not why those who do reject 
 those claims should shrink from a word which thus used is 
 the simple affirmation of a fact. Nor will they, I think, 
 blame me for abandoning the easy task of slaying over 
 
INYIDELITY REFUTE), ETC. 99 
 dominant, which does not fall within the range 
 of the argument I have undertaken to maintain. 
 It simply makes no concessions. Obstinate and 
 unyielding, as seen in its most conspicuous repre- 
 sentatives, it recognizes in the faith of Christians 
 no claim on the respect or gratitude of mankind, 
 no civilizing influence, no restraining power. The 
 Bible and the Church are to Secularism, pure and 
 simple, nothing but the inventions of kings and 
 priests to keep in check the freedom and the 
 passions of the people. The natural, inevitable 
 language of mankind in shadowing forth the 
 greatness of Him they worship in anthropomor- 
 phic speech, which, because it is such, is of the 
 nature of the highest poetry, is to them simply 
 the suggestion of a caricature, and incites them 
 to the jesting which is “ not convenient.” They 
 have no reverence binding them to the past, no 
 yearnings or fears stretching beyond the grave. 
 Their hope for the future of mankind is, at the 
 highest, one of sharpened intellect and higher 
 wages, free trade and free love, a good time 
 coming when the policeman and the priest shall 
 no longer irritate and oppress, and churches 
 
 again the dead giants of the unbelief of the past, and meet- 
 ing, as far as lay in my power, that which the power and 
 character of its living champions commend to the minds of 
 their disciples. 
 
 Hee 
 
100 INFIVELITY REFUTE) 
 
 and chapels shall, as the property of the nation, 
 be turned into halls of science, where the 
 working man of the future can exult in that 
 autolatry which is to be his only possible re- 
 ligion. 
 
 I do not see what opening an infidelity such 
 as this presents for any appeal to the admissions 
 which it has made in the past or may make in 
 the future. It is hard, indeed, to see from the 
 merely critical stand-point how it is to be 
 dealt with at all. You cannct reason in mathe- 
 matics with men who reject your axioms and 
 postulates as the inventions of pedagogues 
 and professors. You cannot win to physical 
 truths those who blot out the history of the past, 
 and start, without any teaching from its expe- 
 rience, on new experiments and explorations of 
 their own. You cannot lead to spiritual truth 
 those who seem to have fallen back into the 
 negation of its possibility. Practically, I believe, 
 those who are brought into contact with this 
 form of denial will be taught how to deal with 
 it, and gain the wisdom which they will so greatly 
 need. The rabid and rampant unbelief may give 
 way under the most unlikely agencies. Some 
 revivalist sermon of the Moody and Sankey type 
 may rouse the fear of the slumbering conscience 
 in those who have not cauterized it into actual 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 101 
 
 callousness, and make the blasphemer grasp as 
 for very life at the assurance of personal salva- 
 tion. Some ritualistic mission-service may im- 
 press even more vividly on his mind the glory and 
 the wonder of the Cross of Christ as working for 
 something more than that assurance, uniting in 
 one great family the divided races and classes of 
 mankind, that visible Church being, in all its 
 historic greatness, but the pledge and earnest of 
 the yet wider unity of the Church which is in- 
 visible. Some living example, such as may be 
 found, thank God, in every community calling 
 itself Christian, of Christ-like tolerance and 
 sympathy and long-enduring kindness, may 
 make its way through the outer crust of brutality 
 to the true heart of the man, and finding there 
 the long-buried humanity, may win it to better 
 things by the impulsive power of a new affection, 
 until, learning faith by virtue, or virtue by faith 
 (God works, we find, in either way) the thick 
 darkness is permeated with a marvellous light, 
 and the trembling prayer of hope takes the place 
 of the railings and ravings of despair. 
 Meanwhile, this extremest and almost hope- 
 less form of unbelief may not be without its 
 lesson. The secularist, drunk, though not with 
 wine, mad with the delirium tremens that comes 
 from over-deep draughts of wind-bag eloquence, 
 
102 _ INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 may serve, if the figure be not too trite, as the 
 Helot of that Sparta which we have inherited 
 and should seek to cherish. Here we see the 
 issue to which, it may be, we too are drifting. 
 That absolute negation of all that differentiates 
 man from brute threatens to be the outcome of 
 the philosophy calling itself “ positive.” To that 
 complexion may come at last the scepticism in- 
 tellectual, cultivated and refined, that looks with 
 compassionate scorn on the prejudices of the 
 Philistines. In this denial “ pure and simple” we 
 find at least one manifestation of that “ spirit ”’ of 
 the age which, as such, belongs to the rhetoric 
 of the penny papers of the provinces, and re- 
 appears, as the “ Zezt- Geist,” as the last word of 
 philosophy. The Girondists of free thought, if 
 history teaches anything, are but preparing the 
 way for its Jacobins and sans-culottes, and as in 
 the days of the Terror, the polished disciple 
 of the Encyclopédists might be seen jostled on 
 the same tumbril by the squalid ruffians from 
 whom yesterday he would have shrunk with 
 loathing; so even the apostles of sweetness 
 and light, walking delicately, may come to be 
 in the same condemnation with the Marat 
 and the Hebert (whoever they may be in the 
 present or the future) of the new Revolution. 
 
 I do not say that there are not signs of 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 103 
 
 hope that this peril may be averted, but I 
 cannot conceal from myself or others that it 
 exists. An abrupt break in the continuity of 
 our national and religious life, the destruction 
 of all influences that have hitherto civilized and 
 restrained the passions of mankind, with nothing 
 to take their place but charms and spells that 
 have proved powerless before and will prove 
 powerless again, the growth of brute life in all 
 its strength in the masses of our people, and the 
 denial of any higher life or wider hope by the 
 priests of science and the prophets of culture— 
 all these things suggest, in those moments of 
 pessimism that at times creep over all of us, 
 the possibility that, after all, the ultimate issue 
 of the long process of evolution in the history 
 of mankind may be but a relapse into the fierce- 
 ness of the brute made more formidable by the 
 subtlety of the serpent, and that the final stage 
 of the conflict between light and darkness, know- 
 ledge and ignorance, may be represented by the 
 struggle for existence between a cohort of scien- 
 tific experimentalists and thelegions of thedange- 
 rous classes, half-brutalized and half-demonized, 
 to end in the survival of the fittest for such en- 
 vironment as they may then find around them. 
 We are, however, persuaded better things, 
 though we thus speak, both of the men of science 
 
104 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 and the men of culture, and I trust I shall not 
 be treading on too sacred ground in speaking of 
 that which, when I witnessed it, seemed to me, 
 in spite of all the sorrow and sadness that were 
 mingled with it, as an augury for good. Buta 
 few weeks have passed since I stood, as doubt- 
 less many of you did, within the walls of that 
 venerable abbey which takes its place as the one 
 building in this great city that represents fully 
 the life of the English people as a Church and 
 as a nation, and binds together the past and 
 present phases of the history of that life. Never, 
 perhaps, had it witnessed a scene so unique at 
 once in its solemnity and its pathos. There 
 were to be seen, marching onward in slow and 
 measured pace, the representatives of well-nigh 
 every school of thought that men call religious 
 or irreligious ;—statesmen who cling with a 
 filial loyalty to the Catholic traditions of the 
 English Church, or seek to reconcile the claims’ 
 of the reign of law with the supremacy of an 
 enlightened faith—prelates of the Establishment, 
 ministers of Nonconformist bodies of every 
 shade of belief—artists and poets and historians 
 and critics—the great thinker who has influ- 
 enced the minds of men for well-nigh two gene- 
 rations —men pre-eminently of culture, men 
 pre-eminently of science. One could not help 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 105 
 
 feeling, as they stood by that open grave, what 
 a wonderful variety of discordant creeds or ne- 
 gations of creeds was gathered there, what an 
 irreconcilable conflict, but for that “one touch 
 of nature”? that “makes the whole world kin,” 
 there must have been in the thoughts with which 
 they looked on the mysteries of life and death 
 that were then pressed home onthem. Had that 
 goodly and gracious life come utterly to an end 
 for evermore? Was it, after all, as a dream 
 when one awaketh, passing away as the re- 
 membrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day? 
 Had it left nothing but the influence of its ex- 
 ample and the memory of its sweetness to be 
 cherished in the calmness of despair, as the 
 only substitute of hope, or had the spirit passed 
 into a fresh stage of education and of growth? 
 Was it resting as in the calm of Paradise, wait- 
 ing for the resurrection unto life, or sleeping the 
 eternal sleep, or quickened into new activities 1a 
 the service of its Father and its God? How 
 different, according to the answer which they 
 returned to these questions, must have been the 
 feelings with which men listened to words of 
 Psalmist and Apostle as bringing hope and com- 
 fort, or as mocking men with their worn-out 
 counterfeits! At what antipodes of height and 
 depth must men have stood as they heard the 
 
106 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 SEEPS neLemme MCSE. SOU 2 DRNPMUMBIR C55 57, RR 
 solemn words of blessing, in tones that sKowed 
 the speaker felt their reality, hut which to many 
 must have seemed only as the hollow language 
 of a conventional religion or if of a real hope, of 
 a hope destined to be disappointed ! 
 
 Yet this at least those who stood far off, as 
 on the extremest left, had in common with 
 those who continue faithful to what they have 
 inherited from their fathers, and who hope to 
 hand it on to those that come after them—not, 
 indeed, it may be, as they received it, but 
 purified and brightened. They acknowledged a 
 profound reverence for goodness, formed and 
 fashioned upon the groundwork of Christian 
 Truth and after the type of the Christ-like 
 character. They felt that that goodness, widely 
 as they were separated, many of them, from the 
 convictions on which it rested, had not shut 
 them out from its sympathy and esteern—and 
 they, in their turn, paid a willing homage to 
 the sweetness and light of which it had been an 
 almost representative expression. That fact 
 alone might well give a different tone from that 
 of the mere controversialist to one who has 
 undertaken the task—far from self-chosen—of 
 appearing as an apologist for the faith which is 
 dear to Christians against those who seem to 
 most men to have attacked it. The work before 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 107 
 Lean ee So) 01 eh CAMP Ona ATE: oe Near 
 us is something more than a forensic struggle, 
 in which one may make the most of one’s own 
 case and hit the weak points of an opponent, 
 browbeating witnesses or declaiming against 
 the counsel on the other side. The true tone 
 and temper of an apologist under such condi- 
 tions is rather that of the Apostle who stood 
 on Mars’ Hill and said to seekers after The 
 Unknown God, “whom therefore ye worship, 
 not knowing, Him declare I unto you;’* or 
 that of the saint of God who was restrained 
 in his better moments from all hard and bitter 
 words against the heretics with whom he him- 
 self had once been identified.* 
 
 I say, then, that it is a hopeful sign, even 
 though it bring with it a special peril of its 
 own, to which I am not blind, that the leaders 
 of the schools of thought, who at the present 
 moment reject historical Christianity so far as it 
 claims to have its groundwork in the will of 
 God, acknowledge the existence and therefore 
 the claims of that element in man’s life which, 
 for want of some better word, we call “ religion ;” 
 that instinctive tendency of the soul to throw 
 itself, in uttered or unuttered emotions of praise, 
 
 2 Acts xvii. 23. 
 % Compare the noble words of Augustine, Epist. cont. 
 Manich., c. 2. 
 
108 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 or love, or trust, or hope, on some Power external 
 to itself, or to shrink back (for the tendency has, 
 of course, its negative as well as positive pole) 
 from the thought of such a Power, in its infinite 
 Righteousness and Power, with terror or dismay. 
 The sensualism, pure and simple, of the Ency- 
 clopédists, the absence of any higher standard 
 of life than a maximum of pleasure or of profit, 
 the teaching of a naked utilitarianism, are no 
 longer characteristic even of those among our 
 men of science who are most emphatically non- 
 Christian. They are Epicureans rather on the 
 scientific than the ethical side of the teaching 
 of that school; sharers in the grand despair of 
 Lucretius amid the crash of decaying faith, and 
 haunted by the nightmare spectres that have 
 weighed on men’s intellect and heart, rather 
 than in the calm and joyous serenity attributed, 
 truly or falsely, to the Athenian sage. 
 
 That this is so with most of those to whom I 
 have referred we have, I imagine, evidence that 
 is not far to seek. It was so certainly with the 
 thinker whom most of them acknowledge as 
 in some ‘sense their teacher and their guide. 
 You have been moved, most of you, I cannot 
 doubt, almost to tears, by the infinite sadness of 
 the confessions of Mr. John Stuart Mill’s “ Auto- 
 biography.” You remember how one trained 
 
after the straitest sect of the Pharisaism of 
 utility, making the greater happiness of man- 
 kind his chief object in life, because mm so doing 
 he would also attain that happiness for himself, 
 found after a while that a horror of great dark- 
 ness fell on him— 
 
 “A grief without a pang, dark, void, and drear ;”’ 
 
 how he came to look “upon the habit of end- 
 less analysis as a perpetual worm at the root 
 both of the passions and the virtues,”* and 
 asked, in the bitterness of despair, “ What good 
 shall my lifedo me?” The fabric of his hap- 
 piness was ruined, and seeing that the happi- 
 ness of others rested on the same foundations 
 as his own, that ruin seemed to involve them 
 also in the fatal doom. Out of that wretched- 
 ness he was led, I cannot, of course, say to the 
 clearness of faith, but at least to one of the 
 stepping-stones of faith, by the teaching of the 
 poet who, above all other poets of our time, was 
 essentially and profoundly religious. Through 
 that teaching his mind was opened to take in 
 the sweet influences of the beauty and the 
 mystery of Nature. He learnt to sympathize 
 with the reverence, the purity, the fellowship 
 
 4 Mill, “ Autobiography,” pp. 1384—149. 
 
110 INFIDELITY REFUTAD 
 
 with the “common feelings and the common 
 destiny of human beings,” of which Words- 
 worth was the exponent. If the scholar did 
 not follow the master of the new school on the 
 path on which he had himself travelled from a 
 Pantheistic sense of fellowship with Nature as 
 
 ‘“‘ Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting sun, 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things ”— 
 
 to that trust in God as One who wills and 
 knows, who judges and who loves, to the faith 
 in God as revealed in Christ, which came as the 
 worthy crown and consummation of the poet’s 
 noble life, we who believe that our hfe on earth 
 is an education begun but not completed may 
 well make allowances for the fetters which 
 bound his spirit with the influences of early 
 training, and rejoice that he was led so far out of 
 the thick darkness, where there was no voice, 
 nor answer, nor any that regarded, into the 
 twilight, through which there came some echoes, 
 however faint or feeble, of Eternal Truth. In 
 the posthumous writings which contain the 
 fullest confession of his creed we may trace the 
 further workings of that better leaven, waking 
 in him a yearning after life and immortality as 
 the only adequate satisfaction for man’s reli- 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. Tit 
 gious aspirations which was altogether foreign 
 to the mood and temper in which his life began. 
 That he was compelled even then to relegate 
 that satisfaction to the dreamland of imagi- 
 nation—that he was, as it were, constrained to 
 narcotize his intellect and blindfold his eyes in 
 order that he might taste even that hope and 
 the joy which it brought with it—was, of 
 course, a proof that he had not accepted the 
 belief which brings hope to others. The appa- 
 rent outcome of his life was that he had sought 
 and had not found. There is no evidence that 
 I know of that he had ever seriously weighed 
 the claims which the religion of Christ has upon 
 the intellect and heart of man. He had been 
 trained to look on it as an obsolescent supersti- 
 tion, the instrument of the tyranny of kings and 
 priests, and as such he continued to regard it to 
 the end. He identified it with the errors which 
 have grown round it in its progress through 
 the ages. With a noble defiance, he would 
 endure anything, even hell itself, rather than 
 accept such of those errors as seemed to him to 
 obscure the goodness of the Eternal God and 
 make Him like unto man in injustice and in 
 cruelty.” But the last lesson which his wisdom 
 bequeathed to mankind was, after all, this :— 
 
 > Mill, “Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Phildsephy 
 p-. 183. 
 
122 INFIDEILYY REFUTED 
 
 “Religion is essential to your happiness, and 
 belongs to the imagination ; therefore cultivate 
 your imagination and try to be religious.” It 
 may be questioned whether that will be accepted 
 as an evangel by the millions who toil and suffer, 
 or by the few who think and strugele. 
 
 The same witness to the indestructibility of 
 the religious instinct of man, the same effort to 
 satisfy that instinct, are found in the system of 
 the French thinker at whose feet Mill was con- 
 tent at one period to sit as an admiring though 
 not an unquestioning disciple. Comte, too, 
 after assigning the religions of mankind to the 
 earliest and most rudimentary stage of human 
 progress, having no higher source than the 
 fetich-worship of the savage, found himself 
 constrained at last, in the Positive System 
 which was to satisfy all elements of man’s 
 nature, to offer men a religion of some kind, 
 and he found the object of that religion in the 
 abstract idea of humanity. Around that idea 
 were to be organized a dominant hierarchy and 
 an elaborate ritual. Extremes meet; and if 
 the insanity of the founder were to take root in 
 the credulity of the disciples we might have a 
 calendar of Positivism as complicated as that 
 of Latin or Greek Christendom, and a relic- 
 worship as senseless as that of the most degraded 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. ES 
 
 forms of Christianity. It is, I suppose, true that 
 this ritual exists in some form even among our- 
 selves, and that the priests of humanity conduct 
 worship and preach sermons. There are fol- 
 lowers of Auguste Comte, as there are, or were 
 till recently, followers of Joanna Southcote, but 
 we can hardly look in that quarter for the reli- 
 gion of the future. Ail that we can do is to 
 claim Comte also as a witness that the future 
 must have its religion. 
 
 The two master-minds of English science (if 
 I exaggerate their prominence above their fel- 
 lows you must pardon the admiration which 
 springs from ignorance) tell us in their turns 
 what that religion is to be. One of the twin 
 prophets resents the charge of “ material 
 atheism,” and must be supposed, therefore, to 
 accept the position of a theist believing in some 
 non-material power. He could only take refuge 
 in the Atheism which has been falsely imputed 
 to him, if for him, as for Lucretius, there were 
 no other refuge from the dark and debasing 
 aspects which Christianity has at times pre- 
 sented. To him “the facts of religious feeling 
 are as certain as the facts of physics.”° He, 
 
 too, like Mull, has felt the power of Words- 
 
 6 Tyndall, “‘ Belfast Address,” p. vi. 
 ii 
 
114 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 worth’s spiritualizing view of Nature. “It is 
 not in hours of clearness and of vigour that the 
 doctrine of Material Atheism commends itself 
 to his mind. In the presence of stronger and 
 healthier thought it ever dissolves and disap- 
 pears, as offering no solution of the mystery in 
 which we dwell.”’? He quotes with manifest 
 sympathy the confession of another great thinker 
 that “unless he could believe that there was an 
 Intelligence at the heart of things, his life on 
 earth would be intolerable.”* True it is that he 
 cannot bring himself to clothe that Intelligence 
 with the attributes of personality. He sees in 
 it ‘not a creative power, but a cosmical life,?® 
 and yet he feels that the understanding is not 
 all in man, nor the culture of the understanding 
 sufficient for his perfection. ‘ There is a region 
 for the creative as well as for the knowing 
 faculties of man.” *? All that is needed is “ an 
 enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of 
 conception is here unattainable.” How far the 
 too famous words which spoke of teacher and 
 hearers alike “melting away, like streaks of 
 morning cloud, in the infinite azure of the 
 past ”* implied the negation of any continued 
 ’ Tyndall, “ Belfast Address,” p. vii. 
 
 S Tyndall, oid: p17. ® Tyndall, Ibid., p. 58. 
 10 Tyndall, [bid., p. 68. 1 Tyndall, [bid., p. 65. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 115 
 
 being after the body in which we live and move 
 is resolved into its elements, I dare not under- 
 take to judge. It sounds hike the funeral knell 
 of hope; it may be only a paraphrase of familiar 
 words, “ We are such stuff as dreams are made 
 of,” or even of sacred words which certainly co- 
 existed with hope and faith: “Thou carriest 
 them away as with a flood ; they are as a sleep ; 
 
 in the morning they are like grass that groweth 
 33 
 
 up. | 
 
 From the other representative of scientific 
 thought we have a more distinct statement as 
 to the form of the religion of the future. He, 
 too, feels that a religion of some kind there 
 must be, and he has too deep a sense of the 
 great work that has been done by the books 
 which Christendom holds sacred, to wish to 
 break off at once the continuity of their in- 
 fluence. He is content with “breaking in 
 pieces the idols built up of books and tradi- 
 tions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs,” and 
 cherishing “the noblestand most human of man’s 
 emotions, by worship, ‘ for the most part of the 
 silent sort,’ at the altar of the Unknown and 
 Unknowable.”* I do not complain of this 
 language as wanting in reverence for the past 
 
 * Huxley’s “Lay Sermons,” p. 20. 
 See, 
 
116 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 of Christendom. There are idols of the market- 
 place and of the den which it is well that we 
 should sweep away, and this confession of the 
 limits of man’s knowledge is at any rate in- 
 finitely better than the shallow ompiscience 
 which characterized the Deism of the last cen- 
 tury. The most devout of all Christian thinkers 
 has taught us that “ our soundest knowledge of 
 God is to know that we know Him not as in- 
 deed He is, neither can know Him, and that 
 our safest eloquence concerning Him is our 
 silence.” * But it is, to say the least, a sad 
 outcome of the victories of Science, that we 
 should now once more be erecting altars to the 
 Unknown God, to the God who never can be 
 known in His purpose, His character, His 
 relation to the noblest of man’s emotions. Such 
 words imply the negation of any revelation of 
 this Divine Will not only in hooks or traditions, 
 but in the works of Nature, or the reason 
 and conscience of mankind. ‘They assume 
 that there has been no witness borne from 
 without or from within, in the rain from 
 Heaven and fruitful seasons, or in the laws 
 of duty written on the hearts of men. And the 
 worship they suggest as sufficient for the wants 
 
 3’ Hooker, Book i. chap. ii. sect. 3. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 117 
 of men, as the ultimate goal of all other worship, 
 is one which is at once sadly and ludicrously 
 insufficient for those emotions which it is meant 
 to satisfy. What kind of ritual can we imagine 
 in which the suffering and working millions of 
 the world can join, constructed on the plan of a 
 silent adoration of the Unknown and Unknow- 
 able. If that is all you have to offer them we 
 may be sure, if History is more than an old 
 almanack, that they will fall back upon the 
 most debasing fetich-worship rather than bear 
 their part in that liturgy of Agnosticism com- 
 pared with which a Quakers’ meeting would be 
 impressive and inspiriting. It can hardly sur- 
 prise us that the tendency of mind which this 
 proposal betrays should carry it yet further to 
 the doubt whether, after all, even “human 
 nature possesses any truly anthropomorphic 
 element.”* The question, how far it is legitimate 
 to think of God as inany sense even such an one 
 as ourselves, is of course open to discussion, and 
 I have endeavoured elsewhere*® to express my 
 own convictions on it; but the question, whether 
 man is anthropomorphic might surely have 
 seemed superfluous, if the writer who propounds 
 it had not added his belief that to the end of 
 
 + Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” p. 180. 
 ® The ‘ Expositor,” i. p. 44. 
 
118 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 time it will be a drawn battle whether man is 
 more than the cunningest of Nature’s clocks. 
 The noblest emotions, the worship of the silent 
 sort—these after all are but functions of a 
 mechanism. We hear the ticking of the clock 
 and can, in part, explain the action of its wheels 
 and springs ; but we cannot know who wound 
 it up. We think of it as self-evolved, showing 
 no trace of a designing mind, and we abandon 
 the attempt to regulate it so as to make it 
 keep time in harmony with the motion of the 
 heavens. 
 
 Yet another prophet of our own appears to 
 offer his guidance through the labyrinth of 
 crumbling systems. He recognizes the ludicrous 
 inadequacy of such attempts as these to meet 
 the wants of that element in men’s nature 
 which they yet look upon as the noblest. He 
 sees that men can only worship what in some 
 sense they know—that clearness of thought, if 
 it keeps within the limits which check an “in- 
 sane licence of affirmation,” is an indispensable 
 condition of the reality of worship. And he 
 goes further than the others have done in the 
 way of concession to the thoughts or feelings 
 of Christendom. ‘To him the Bible is the most 
 precious of all books, or rather the noblest of 
 all literatures. He has spoken true and noble 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 119 
 
 words of the sweet reasonableness of the human 
 character of Jesus, of the secret of His power 
 over the hearts of men and the destinies of the 
 race, as found in His perpetual recognition of 
 the law of sacrifice. He tears to pieces the 
 theories of the Tubingen school as to the late 
 origin of the Gospel records. He puts forth all 
 his mastery of scorn against the vulgarity of 
 secularism and the Philistinism of dissent. He 
 rebukes with a righteous indignation the sense- 
 Jess clamour which indicts Christianity for 
 having destroyed two such civilizations as those 
 which were decaying into a putrescent foulness, 
 at the time when it won its first victories and 
 took its place as a power in the history of the 
 world.’ He offers sympathy, approval, counsel 
 to the Church of England as a great society for 
 the organization of goodness, doing a work 
 which the nation cannot afford to lose, and 
 which no non-estalblished society can do half so 
 well.’ We are almost tempted to welcome such 
 an one as a new defender of the faith, and to 
 make an anthology of edifying extracts from 
 his writings for the use of schools, did not the 
 
 6° Arnold M., “Literature and Dogma—God and the 
 Bible,” passim. 
 
 7 Arnold, M., “Lecture on the Church of England.”— 
 MacMillan’s Magazine for April, 1876. 
 
120 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 thought cross our minds that the architect who 
 offers his assistance to strengthen the buttresses 
 of the fabric-in which we dwell, and tells us to 
 use paint and whitewash freely so as not to 
 offend the culture of the Time-spirit, is at the 
 same time undermining our foundations. 
 
 For that which he offers us as the ground- 
 work of faith and worship, adequate as a law of 
 conduct, is after all, to use again a phrase which 
 we may thank him for having taught us, 
 ‘comically insufficient.” I do not complain of 
 his warnings against that wild licence of affir- 
 mation of which he accuses popular religion, 
 for the indictment, as every Christian com- 
 munity will acknowledge as regards all other 
 communities, is in part, at least, true. I am 
 willing to accept his protest against the anthro- 
 pomorphism that prevails among us as con- 
 veying a warning which we cannot afford to 
 slight, though the protest has too often assumed 
 the form of a railing accusation, and needs to 
 be traversed by the question whether man’s 
 thoughts of the Divine Nature must not neces- 
 sarily be in some measure evolved from his 
 consciousness of his own. ven the word 
 “ righteousness,” as the subtlest thinker of our 
 time has pointed out, is as unmeaning as an 
 algebraic symbol unless we assume that it 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 121 
 os Sc RO IR pon I LS 
 connotes what we admire as righteous and just 
 in man, unless i.e. it is an anthropomorphic 
 righteousness.’ That which makes. the weak- 
 ness of his system is that he offers to men a 
 new thought of God, of which it must be said 
 that more than all thoughts of God that have 
 been offered to mankind it has no form or come- 
 liness, and that when we see it there is no 
 beauty that we should desire it. The “ Power, 
 not ourselves, that makes for righteousness ” 
 sounds noble and sublime, until we hear that it 
 is a Power which neither wills, nor thinks, nor 
 plans, nor governs, which neither hears nor 
 answers, neither loves nor punishes. The wor- 
 ship of “a drift or tendency of things” is at 
 least as impossible to represent to our thoughts, 
 as embodied in articulate speech or symbolic 
 act, as that of the Unknown and Unknowable 
 —is as certain to drift into the limbo of vanities 
 as the phantasy of an individual mind, as any 
 cultus or superstition of the dreamers of the 
 past. Nothing in the history of thought or 
 religion answers to it but the picture which 
 Milton has drawn :— 
 
 “Of that other shape, 
 If shape it might be called, that shape had none 
 
 Se Mill Essay on Sir W. Hamilton,” ut supra. 
 
}22. ; INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 Distinguishable in member, joint or limb, 
 Or substance might be call’d, that shadow seem’d 
 And each seem’d either.’ 
 
 2 
 
 And the name of that shape was Death, and 
 from its embraces with Sin there sprang a foul 
 and loathsome brood of howling monsters. So 
 far as one can forecast the future, the apostle of 
 culture has put weapons into the hands of the 
 howling savages whom he scorns, and furnishes 
 them with new war-cries; but they are not 
 likely to look to him as the Orpheus who is to 
 tame their wildness with the harmony of sweet 
 musie. 
 
 There remains for us, however, over and 
 above the assertion that men must have a reli- 
 gion, and that of all books the world has seen 
 the Bible is the best, perhaps the only pos- 
 sible foundation for it, the further concession 
 made by this thinker, as by others,—rather, 
 I would say, the witness freely borne by them, 
 as in contrast with the more vulgar forms of 
 denials,—as to the unsurpassed glory and 
 greatness, the sweetness and beauty, of the 
 character of Christ. So Mill is impressed with 
 it as something absolutely unique in the his- 
 tory of the world, beyond the power of any 
 such writers as the Evangelists to have imagined 
 for themselves, perfect in its truthfulness, and 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 13 
 
 devotion, and self-sacrificing love.? So Renan, 
 followed almost verbally by the Author of 
 “ Supernatural Religion,” * when he passes from 
 the faith that had satisfied his childhood, and 
 the negations that had not satisfied his man- 
 hood, to the study of the actual life of Christ, 
 declares his conviction that there has never 
 been child of man (with the possible exception 
 of the founder of Buddhism) who has exhibited 
 so noble a heroism of will, who has so trampled 
 under foot all worldly joys, all temporal cares. 
 “ Before such a demi-god as this, we, in our 
 feebleness, may well fall down and worship.” 
 «“ Whatever may be the unlooked-for phenomena 
 of the future, Jesus will not be surpassed.” So 
 the thoughtful and reverential seeker after 
 truth, who had laid before us the Enigmas of 
 Life, in all their mystery, owns that He was 
 “the first and noblest of all the sons of men 
 whom God has raised up with special gifts and 
 for a special work.” * Even Strauss, after sweep- 
 ing away, as it would seem, every element of 
 credibility from the records of His life, speaks 
 of the Jesus of history as He in whom “the 
 
 9 Mill, “ Essays on Religion,” pp. 253-4. 
 
 1 Renan, “ Vie de Jésus,” chap. xxvii. ad fin. “ Super- 
 natural Religion,” ii. p. 487. 
 
 2 Greg, “ Enigmas of Life,” p. 202. 
 
124 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 deeper consciousness of humanity, the Divine 
 wisdom, first developed itself as a power deter- 
 mining his whole life and being,” in whose 
 character were found a charity, a sweetness, 
 and an all-embracing love which have been as 
 the germ out of which all that we now call 
 humanity has been developed.’ 
 
 Here, then, we have this admitted, that the 
 books which we call Gospels do present us, in 
 adequate distinctness, a character that we can 
 reverence and love. Amid all the Babel discord 
 of theories as to origin and date, and sources and 
 tendencies, they are received so far as credible wit- 
 nesses. Their very poverty of culture and assumed 
 mistakes and mythical additions are made to en- 
 hance the greatness of the character which so im- 
 pressed them that, in spite of their weakness, they 
 were compelled to give a fairly adequate represen- 
 tation of it. They were neither willing to mock 
 the world with the ideal portrait of such a charac- 
 ter, nor able, if they had been willing. But then 
 these records also testify that the teacher whom 
 they call Lord and Master claimed for Himself 
 an exceptional greatness—spoke of His Father in 
 Heaven in another sense than that in which all 
 men may call God their Father—spoke of His 
 own Being in the far-off past, of His own work 
 
 * Strauss, ‘“ Leben Jesu,’’ ed. 1864, p. 625. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 125 
 
 as King and Judge in the far-off future. They 
 testify, one and all of them, whatever dif- 
 ferences you discern and imagine as to ten- 
 dencies and schools of thought, that He wrought 
 signs and wonders that others could not work, 
 and that these, though He did not appeal to 
 them as the only grounds of belief in Him, were 
 yet accepted as evidence that He was indeed 
 what He thus claimed to be. They are at least 
 incomplete, if not altogether inexplicable, if this 
 supernatural element be excluded. But it is 
 precisely that supernatural element which the 
 thinkers of whom I have spoken, following what 
 they believe to be the informing spirit of the age, 
 reject, as with one consent. Here, therefore, the 
 treatment of the witnesses is altered for the worse. 
 They were capable of recording faithfully what 
 their Master did and said so as to leave an image 
 on the mind that has power to draw to it the 
 hearts of all men, but now they are put out of 
 court as credulous or fraudulent, in any case as 
 unworthy of belief; and we are told, after much 
 victorious analysis, that we see “ legend in the 
 making ” and have myths and not facts to deal 
 with. Words are cited as spoken by the great 
 Teacher, or as the additions of later superstition, 
 according to a law of inner consciousness which 
 leaves on one’s mind the impression that the 
 
126 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 eritic’s standard was simply this: “So would I 
 have spoken, or not have spoken, had I been 
 Christ.” Or the preacher of the Gospel of de- 
 spair takes, with Renan, a bolder line, and the 
 perfect ideal of humanity becomes a teacher who 
 plays upon the credulity of his followers, conde- 
 scends to poor deceits, assumes deliberately 
 the character of a thaumaturgist.* The Prophet 
 of Nazareth becomes as the sorcerer of Samaria 
 giving out that He himself is some great one, 
 even the Great Power of God. 
 
 Such is the lame and impotent conclusion to 
 which they are drifting, who endeavour to unite 
 their admiration and reverence for the character 
 of the Lord Jesus, with their denial of anything 
 outside the adamantine limits of evolution and 
 the succession of phenomena. The authorof“ Su- 
 pernatural Religion ’’ has, in this respect, taken 
 up a safer and more consistent position. To him 
 it is a very small matter whether men lose an 
 ideal of humanity, or a character they have 
 adored and loved. He is content to destroy 
 without caring to build up, and instead of seek- 
 ing to provide for the religious element of man’s 
 nature seeks to lead it, as Lucretius of old, to 
 the serenity of the clearer region from which the 
 panic-stricken religions of the world have been 
 
 + Renan, “ Vie de Jésus,” chaps. xvi. and xxii. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. Toy 
 
 driven in flight. Yet even he makes, consciously 
 or unconsciously, an admission which implies 
 that he feels he is only partially successful. He 
 conducts his assault on the faith of Christen- 
 dom by attacks from opposite quarters, each 
 of which implies a lurking suspicion of the in- 
 sufficiency of the other. He will not avowedly 
 postulate the impossibility of the supernatural as 
 seen in miracles ; for in that he would be going 
 beyond the scepticism even of Hume and Mill. 
 He will simply contend that, admitting the 
 possibility, we have no sufficient evidence of 
 those which Christendom has accepted. With 
 that view the greater part of his somewhat 
 bulky work is occupied with a discussion of the 
 old questions as to the date of the Gospels, the tes- 
 timony borne to them by early Christian or non- 
 Christian writers; their internal discrepancies, 
 and the like. I do not now enter into the field 
 of inquiry in which one of our great scholars 
 and theologians has done good service in detect- 
 ing grave inaccuracies, under the show of elabo- 
 rate completeness. What I wish to point out 
 is first, the feeling that never leaves one as one 
 reads on and on, through pages bristling with 
 references and quotations, that, after all, the 
 writer is only making that argument the super- 
 
 5 «Supernatural Religion,” i. p. 93. 
 
128 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 structure, and that the foundation is found in 
 tacitly assuming the negation of the supernatu- 
 ral,° and second, the practical admission which 
 the form of his argument implies, that in propor- 
 tion as we prove that we have in the Gospels the 
 evidence of contemporary witnesses, we are 
 establishing the credibility of facts admitted to 
 be supernatural. That we have such evidence, 
 though not in equal measure, for the four Gos- 
 pels, that it isan arbitrary and groundless asser- 
 tion to say, that there are ‘‘no notes by which the 
 identity of their writers may be established,” ’ is 
 a conviction which, though I cannot now enter 
 into the grounds on which it rests, grows with 
 me stronger and stronger every day. Lastly, 
 Tam bold to ask what the upshot of the great 
 argument is, even on the assumption that it 
 proves its point. The writer takes, let us say, 
 a writer like Justin,’ who overflows with quo- 
 tations from the teaching and references to the 
 works of Christ, to His passion, resurrection, 
 and ascension. He dwells on verbal variations 
 as showing, not that the quotations were made 
 from memory, as we may quote Shakspeare or 
 the Bible, which would seem a natural expla- 
 
 6 “ Supernatural Religion,” ii. p. 480. 
 7 Tbid., ii. p. 481. 
 8 Ibid., Part li. c. 3. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 129 
 NAT ASA ERRATIC i Se SUA eS 
 nation of them, but as proving that the Gospels 
 which we recognize were not Justin’s Gospels ; 
 that he either did not know them, or preferred 
 to follow the guidance of another. But if this 
 were so, what follows but the conclusion, that 
 the critic has in this way disinterred from 
 the obscurity of the past yet a fifth Gospel, 
 identical in substance and harmonious in its 
 details with those we call canonical. Ifsuch a 
 Gospel, indisputably earlier than Justin’s, had 
 been discovered in the recesses of some monas- 
 tic library in Syria or Egypt, we should wel-. 
 come it, I suppose, as an additional element of 
 evidence, instead of dreading it as a weapon of 
 attack. Why should we think of it as other 
 than this, even when it meets us as developed only 
 out of the inner consciousness of a controver- 
 sialist? May we not welcome the opponent 
 who subpenas a fifth witness, and brings him 
 into court to confirm the testimony of the four 
 whom he attacks ? ° 
 It would be easy to carry this line of inquiry 
 further, and to name some of those who, being 
 by general acknowledgment among the freest 
 and boldest of critics, have acknowledged, in 
 
 9 Since I wrote the above the same line of argument has, 
 I find, been taken by the Rey. M. F. Sadler in his “ Lost 
 Gospel.” 
 K 
 
130 INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 ED Senses ORAM 210 AE RM AIO Noe ele Sie ae) 
 direct antagonism to the Tubingen school, now 
 practically obsolescent in its influence on Ger- 
 man thought, and the author of “Supernatual 
 Religion,’ who follows it, that our Gospels, as 
 they are, belong to the first century-and not the 
 second. Thus Ewald and Renan maintain the 
 Apostolic authorship of the Gospel of St. John, 
 and Keim fixes the date of St. Matthew, in its 
 present form, at a.p. 60—70. Keim, again, 
 with Renan, assigns the Gospel that bears 
 St. Luke’s name to the beloved physician who 
 was the companion of St. Paul; and though 
 he does not admit the Johannine authorship 
 of the fourth Gospel, assigns it to the jirst 
 decade of the second century; and Ewald and 
 Schenkel look to St. Mark’s record as the most 
 primitive of all the Gospels. Even the most ex- 
 treme of the Tubingen School admit, that at least 
 four or five Epistles that bear St. Paul’s name 
 —and these, those in which we find the fullest 
 testimony to the great central facts of the Gos- 
 pel—were really written by him. Each writer 
 has, of course, his own idiosyncrasies of denial ; 
 but it is the idlest of all boasts to say, that 
 there is anything like a consensus of criticism 
 unfavourable to the genuineness of the records 
 which are to us the chief, though not the sole, 
 ground-work of the faith which we profess. 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. ies 
 
 I am not able now, even if I had the incli- 
 nation, to gather more completely the votes of 
 that company of critics in whose presence the 
 inquirer finds himself. I prefer to end with the 
 expression of the hope that the partial truth 
 which each holds may germinate and grow; 
 that the yearning after truth and righteous- 
 ness, which are common to most of them, may 
 here or hereafter find its full satisfaction ; that the 
 admiration which all alike profess for the human 
 character of the Prophet of Nazareth may pass 
 into the adoration of the Son of God. This 
 hope is already not without its partial fulfl- 
 ments, the earnest of a more abundant future. 
 Some, at least, of those commonly reckoned 
 among the opponents of the faith of Christians 
 have gone further, and have been led to speak 
 with almost prophetic clearness of the things 
 that lie behind the veil, with no “ insane licence 
 of affirmation,” but in words of reverential truth 
 and soberness. Let those who see in the doubts 
 and denials, the discords and divisions of our 
 time, a reason for levity and indifference, for 
 licence and self-indulgence, listen to the teaching 
 of one on whom the Enigmas of Life weighed 
 heavily, and who has been led as— 
 
 “On the world’s great altar-stairs 
 
 That slope through darkness up to God.” 
 
 eae 
 
oe INFIDELITY REFUTED 
 
 To him the judgment of the future is a 
 thing which it is impossible to disbelieve, if we 
 admit existence after death at all; for that 
 judgment is found in no superadded arbitrary 
 torments, but in the necessary consequence of 
 the things that we have formed on earth. Then 
 we “shall see all things as they really are—our- 
 selves and our sins among the number.” Then, 
 all sensual desires and appetites utterly extinct, 
 we shall look with loathing on the sins of sense 
 which, it may be, passed into sins of malice and 
 brutalized and debased us. We shall judge 
 ourselves as God has always judged us.” “ The 
 secrets of our souls will be revealed to those 
 from whose loving breasts we have sought to 
 hide them, and whom we have succeeded in de- 
 ceiving. We shall watch them receding to a 
 bright distance, where they may indeed mourn 
 over us, yet will not need us; and then we shall 
 turn inward and downward, and realize our lot, 
 and feel our desolation, and reflect that we have 
 earned it.” No picture that Theology or Poetry 
 has ever drawn could compare with the misery 
 of that Gehenna; no discipline could be more 
 effectively penal or purgatorial. 
 
 Not less clear and vivid are the outlines 
 which the same hand has sketched of that 
 brighter future which awaits those who have 
 
BY ITS OWN CONCESSIONS. 13 
 
 hungered and thirsted after righteousness. Our 
 childish conceptions and popular imagery fade, 
 as into a dim obscurity, when we turn to that 
 clearer vision. “ Not a dead uniformity of beati- 
 tude, suppressing all individualities of thought 
 or character; but a house in which there are 
 many abiding-places, each prepared for its 
 inmate. And that world can scarcely be pic- 
 tured as an idle one. Work for the just not yet 
 made perfect, for the hero, the prophet, the 
 priests of Nature and the martyrs of Know- 
 ledge, the thousands of pious and perplexed 
 inquirers, the loving and the tender—this will 
 be one element of happiness.” And above all 
 and for all, there will be the beatific vision of 
 those who see God. In that glory which shall 
 be revealed, there will be the satisfaction of all 
 desires and hopes. “In a true sense, if not in 
 our sense, Heaven will be a scene of serene 
 felicity, the end of evil, the end of strife, the 
 end of grief, the end of doubt: a Temple, a 
 Haven, and a Home.” * 
 “That strain we heard was of a higher mood.” 
 
 I dare not place this among the concessions 
 which Infidelity has made, and by which it is 
 to be confuted. I welcome it rather as the 
 witness borne by one who has passed from the 
 
 1 Greg, ‘ Enigmas of Life,” pp. 260—287. 
 
134 INFIDELITY REFUTED, ETC. 
 
 dreariness and darkness of negation within the 
 borderland of faith, and is not far from the 
 Kingdom of God, and I cherish the hope that 
 one who has advanced thus far may be but as 
 the forerunner of others who at present lag 
 behind, but who are animated, I venture to 
 believe, by the same earnestness, the same 
 sincerity, in some measure, at least, by the 
 same reverence. That hope holds out a brighter 
 and nobler prospect even than that of confuting 
 Infidelity. It reminds the teachers of Christen- 
 dom that they, too, have something to learn 
 from those whom they regard as champions of 
 the armies of the aliens—even as the Jewish 
 king of old would have done wisely to listen to 
 the words which were spoken by Pharaoh, yet 
 came as from the mouth of God.* They, also, 
 have to confess that they have too often been 
 wise above that which is written, and added 
 imaginations of their own to the Truth of God, 
 and made sad the hearts of those whom He has 
 not made sad. In that temper of willingness 
 to learn, and sympathy with the wanderings or 
 doubts, even of those who have strayed furthest 
 from the fold of which they are shepherds, there 
 may yet be found the last and greatest triumph 
 of the Faith that overcomes the world. 
 
 2 2 Chron. xxxy. 22. 
 
THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE 
 DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 
 
 “aving no hope and without God in the world.’— 
 Epa. i. 12. 
 
 Ercutern hundred years and more have passed 
 away since these sad words were used to describe 
 the general aspect of the then heathen world.’ 
 Eighteen hundred years have passed away. 
 Christianity has been preached ; its message of 
 hope has been borne to all lands; its glad- 
 tidings of a Redeemer and a Saviour have 
 become for ages the blessed heritage of the 
 
 1 The words in the original seem studiously designed to 
 enhance the darkness of the sad picture. Those of whom the 
 Apostle is speaking had hope in no form whatever (éAida, 
 without any article); they were &eo, not merely dis- 
 believing in God, but without Him (‘sine Deo,” Vulg.) and 
 apart from Him, and that év 7@ kéouy, in the dark heathen 
 world, whither no ray of heavenly light had yet penetrated. 
 See Meyer in loc. 
 
13 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nations that now stand in the fore-front of 
 humanity—and yet, here in civilized Kurope, 
 here in Christian England, here in this centre 
 of the world’s cultivation and intelligence, the 
 sad text remains no inapt description of the 
 state of many, it may. be even of very many 
 among us, who at this time are taking no small 
 share in guiding the thoughts and opinions of 
 their fellow-men.? 
 
 But the text will be much more to us than a 
 merely apt description of those forms and phases 
 of unbelief which are now disclosing themselves 
 in this and in other Christian countries. It is 
 not only descriptively apt, but, in reference to 
 the subject which I have the responsibility of 
 bringing before you, especially instructive and 
 
 7 It is always difficult to estimate correctly, at any 
 given time, the exact amount of the prevalence of any 
 graver form of non-Christian thought. This, however, 
 may be said, that if our periodical literature can be 
 accepted in any degree as either reflecting or helping to 
 form current opinion in reference to the highest questions, 
 the conclusion seems forced upon us that modern science, 
 and especially the doctrine of Evolution, is now strongly 
 pressed by many intelligent thinkers in a manner dis- 
 tinctly hostile to the Christian doctrine of a Personal 
 God. A generation ago the current was towards Pan- 
 theism ; now it is as plainly towards Materialism. Ro- 
 ligion is banished to the changeful realm of the Emotions. 
 
 Comp. Voigt, “ Fundamentaldogmatik,” p. 65 sq. Gotha, 
 1874. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 137 
 suggestive. It indicates that with which hope- 
 lessness is ever found associated, and points to a 
 truth which is of the deepest moment for our 
 own times—this vital truth, that true hope dies 
 out in the human heart exactly in proportion to 
 the waning of the belief in the personality and 
 fatherhood of God.° 
 
 Let this, then, be our guiding thread in the 
 contrast which my subject now requires me to 
 place before you—“ the contrast between Chris- 
 tianity as the Hope of the World, and the 
 despair of Unbelief.” This contrast let us en- 
 deavour thus to bring out and to substantiate. 
 
 * The God in whom and on whom Christian Hope rests 
 is a living, and so personal, God; #Amfkauev em) @cd (v1, 
 1 Tim. iv. 10. “ Personality,’ says Van Oosterzee, “is 
 the highest form of existence, truly spiritual, and at the 
 same time concrete; no mere force, or law, or life, is a 
 being ; and only a God who is truly a being can be prayer- 
 fully approached. ‘True religion is possible only in con- 
 nexion with a supra-naturalistic Theistic conception.”’— 
 Christian Dogmatics, § 45, p. 246 (Transl.); see also 
 Rothe, “ Dogmatik,” Part i. § 9, p. 24sq. The perpetual 
 objection that the two ideas of “absoluteness ” and “ per- 
 sonality ”’ contradict each other, may be always fairly 
 met with this brief answer,—that the thought that God, 
 for love’s sake, has vouchsafed to limit His own power by 
 calling into existence a world of created beings, is not only 
 thinkable, but reasonable. As Martensen truly says, ‘“ Self- 
 limitation is inseparable from a perfect nature.” — Christian 
 Dogmatics, § 42, p. 81 (Transl.), 
 
138 - ‘THE HOPE OF CIPRISTIANITY 
 
 Let us endeavour first, by the general teaching 
 of Holy Scripture and by the inner feelings and 
 experiences of our own souls, to make out clearly 
 what that hope is which is the very soul of 
 Christianity, and which gives to Christianity 
 the title which our subject claims for it. Then, 
 in the second place, let us carefully analyze the 
 principles of the three prevalent forms of infi- 
 delity, and see if the melancholy characteristic 
 which our subject declares to be the characteristic 
 of Unbelief is not fully brought out, and if the 
 sequel be not hopelessness and despair. 
 
 I. 1. We begin, then, with the broad question 
 —What is the true nature of Christian hope, 
 both considered extensively and intensively ? 
 What first, is it in its extensive aspects? What 
 is the full amplitude of that “living hope” to 
 which the Apostle St. Peter declares that we 
 have been begotten again by the resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ ?4 Is it simply that vague hope in 
 personal immortality, that languid expectation 
 of continuance after death, which is to thousands 
 the sole sum and substance of their whole 
 Christian eschatology? Is Christian hope only 
 something that concerns ourselves and our own 
 future, or does it claim to embrace in its blessed 
 
 * See 1 Pet. i. 3. 
 
AND TIE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 139 
 
 inclusiveness the whole moral and material 
 world, the very earth we tread on, and the varied 
 realms of creation that are now longing for the 
 mystic revelation of the sons of God? 
 
 What Christian heart among us can pause in 
 its answer? Does not hope widen with our 
 sympathies; and deepen with our deepening 
 love? As we more fully realize the sins, the 
 sorrows, and the sufferings of those around us— 
 as we mark the vanity and fruitlessness that 
 mar the results of the noblest efforts, traverse, 
 as with lines of confusion, the most disinterested 
 counsels, and countervail the bravest endea- 
 vours—as we contemplate the fading loveliness 
 of all earthly things—the strange ruthlessness 
 of nature, the waste of life, the mystery of pain— 
 in one word, all the dread shadows which the 
 Christian knows have been flung by sin over 
 the whole of a once fair creation—does not 
 Christian hope claim to extend itself to the 
 furthest bound of all that is capable of restora- 
 tion, to the totality of all that now, in the lan- 
 guage of the Apostle,’ is groaning in travail 
 and suffering, 
 
 2. But, if hope be thus inclusive, if the 
 deeper feeling of every nobler heart confirms us 
 
 5 See Rom. viii. 20—22. 
 
14,0 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in this extension of the bounds of our Christian 
 sympathy—if all vital Christianity looks not 
 only to the perfection of the individual man, but 
 of the whole Militant Church, yea, and through 
 the Church, by blessed agencies as yet only dimly 
 revealed to us, of all the families of redeemed 
 humanity °—if the very material creation, this 
 world in which we sin and suffer, is itself a mute 
 sharer in that universal longing—if this be 
 Christian hope considered extensively, what is it 
 when we come to consider it cntensively ? What 
 is it that forms the ultimate object of this hope 
 whether in the race or in the individual ? 
 
 If we feel a difficulty in at once formulating 
 an answer in reference to Christian humanity 
 generally, we can hardly find much difficulty in 
 answering it in reference to each individual 
 believer.” What, for example, dear brethren, 
 does each one of you who truly loves the Lord’s 
 appearing now feel to be the real sum and sub- 
 
 6 See Martensen, “Christian Dogmatics,” § 278, p. 401 
 (Transl.). 
 
 7 The doctrine of Christian Hope, in its reference to the 
 individual, seems to hold a far more prominent place in the 
 Eastern Church than in the Western Church. In the 
 general teaching of the former Church it is regarded as the 
 sort of bond between faith and works, and as that which 
 quickens the believer to action. See Gass, “ Symbolik der 
 Griechischen Kirche,” § 128, p. 350 sq. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 141 
 stance of all the hope that is bound up with that 
 blessed manifestation? Is it simply a happy 
 immortality, a place in the white-robed company, 
 an abode in the heavenly Jerusalem? The soul 
 seems to tell us that it is more, ay, even far 
 more than that. Self, and the happiness of self, 
 even under these more sublimated aspects, is 
 not, cannot be, the ultimate object of our holiest 
 hopes. Is it then, redemption? Nay, not 
 redemption in its simplest and most general 
 sense ; for redemption has relation more to the 
 present than to that blissful future into which we 
 are now presuming to gaze. Is it everlasting 
 life? Nay, verily, it is even more than ever- 
 lasting life. It is that which makes up the 
 whole blessedness of that life, and without which 
 even that life would be weary and joyless. Is 
 it not that which the Lord Himself has declared 
 shall be the blessedness of those who have most 
 conformed themselves to His image, and “ puri- 
 fied themselves even as He is pure”? Is it not 
 that which the Apostle of love has plainly set 
 forth as the highest blessedness that the soul 
 can conceive*—seeing the face of God, seeing 
 
 8 See 1 John iii. 2. There may be some little doubt as 
 to the reference of avrdy in this passage. The fact that 
 Gebs is clearly the subject that immediately precedes, and 
 that in yer. 38 another pronoun (ékeivos) is used in connexion 
 
142 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY ~ 
 
 Him as He is, and knowing even as we are 
 known; or, in other words, restoration to God, 
 and conscious union with Him for evermore? 
 Personal union with a personal Father and God, 
 through Him who took upon Him the nature of 
 man, is alike the highest motive, the deepest 
 quietive, and the holiest and most perfected hope 
 that can be conceived by the soul of man. This 
 is the ultimate hope of redeemed humanity.” 
 This is the weight of glory that is reserved for 
 those that love and wait for the Lord’s appear- 
 ing; and when He does appear, and this hope 
 passes into fruition, then verily will the hght 
 that is inaccessible be streaming around us, and 
 God becoming all in all. 
 
 And here I will not pause to meet the objec-_ 
 tion that such a hope is really beyond the realm 
 of the thinkable; or, if thinkable, is but a mere 
 
 with the Second Person, seems to justify the reference of 
 avtov to the First Person. 
 
 9 The teaching of the Hastern Church on this point is 
 very explicit, and finds a place in the concluding section of 
 the second part of the Confessio Orthodoxa. The exact 
 words are,—‘H 5& yopa kal fh ayadAlaois Sev Ora elvat 
 dAAn mapa % Cewpia THs makaplas Tpiddos Kal 6 mvevuatinds 
 xopds mall me Tods ayyéAous, Kabds AEyer 6 *AmdcTOAOS" BAE- 
 momey yap apts SC eodmrpou ev aiviyuatt, TéTe 5E apdcwmov 
 apos mpdowmov.—Kimmel, ‘‘Monumenta Eccl. Orientalis,”. 
 vol. i. p. 202. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 143 
 
 translation into Christian language of the purer 
 aspirations of Oriental pantheism, or, on the 
 other hand, a materialized and anthropomorphic 
 adumbration of the truth that is really involved 
 in the Nirvana of Buddhist futurity,—this ob- 
 jection I will not pause here formally to answer, 
 as it would lead us too far away from the con- 
 trast which is the subject of this present address. 
 Yet, in passing, I may properly specify these 
 two momentous considerations which go far to 
 meet the objection I have alluded to, and seem 
 also to set in clearer and sharper light the ulti- 
 mate aspect of Christian hope which we are here 
 seeking to formulate. First, that the holy and 
 eternal mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery 
 of the Word becoming flesh, does at once seem 
 to dispose of the first objection, viz. that to a 
 Christian such a hope as we have shadowed 
 forth can ever be logically unthinkable. That 
 miracle of infinite love and infinite condescension 
 does at once seem, incidentally, yet no less sub- 
 stantially, to open out to our view the limitless 
 capabilities of our nature, especially when that 
 nature becomes sublimated and glorified, and 
 this body of humiliation is made like unto the 
 body of .the glory of the Lord.’ If God could 
 
 1 See Phil. iti. 21. 
 
144 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ed 
 
 tabernacle with men, then no such thoughts | 
 of personal union and communion as are now 
 before us can possibly be regarded as incon- 
 ceivable. If the Incarnation be true, if our 
 nature be verily such that it could be taken by 
 Him in whom dwells all the fulness of the 
 Godhead bodily ; if the two natures could be 
 united in one visible personality,—then, not 
 only is a future union with God a thought that 
 is legitimately thinkable, but it is one to which 
 the whole mystery of Emmanuel, the whole 
 earthly life of our Redeemer, leads us as by a 
 natural development of consistent expectation, 
 and of reasoned hope. 
 
 It has been most justly observed by a great 
 modern thinker,? that our estimate of human 
 nature is ever one-sided and deficient, when we 
 simply regard it as involving moral produc- 
 tivity. The aspect of by far the greatest prac- 
 tical and teleological importance is that of its 
 receptivity. It is on the power of human nature 
 to receive God that the possibility rests of God 
 becoming Man, and of man becoming united 
 with God. The very idea of the Kingdom of 
 God is ever that of a kingdom of individuals in 
 whom He dwells, and whom He fills with the 
 fulness of His presence. / 
 
 2 Martensen, “Christian Ethics,” § 78, p. 257 (Transl.). 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 145 
 
 Secondly, we may confidently appeal to that 
 inner witness,—the ultimate testimony of the 
 highest consciously-felt aspiration of our own 
 individual souls. My brethren, suppose for a 
 moment,—I pray God there may not be ought 
 of passing irreverence in such a thought,— 
 suppose that to any one of us this choice were 
 offered :—on the one side, an eternity of happy 
 days, accompanied with the condition that we 
 should never behold the face of God, never 
 realize the beatific vision,—and, on the other 
 side, our own individual future, as it will be 
 when this life comes to its close. Suppose that 
 such a choice could be offered, Is there one 
 higher spirit in this church who would hesitate 
 for one moment as to the decision? What 
 would that proffered eternity be to us, endowed 
 though it might be with joys unnumbered, if 
 the one crowning hope and joy were to be 
 absent? Should we not put it away from us, 
 with all its certainty of happiness, almost with- 
 out a second thought, and cling to our own 
 undecided future, because that future would not 
 be bereft of the one hope which we thus ex- 
 perientially find to be the radiance of our very 
 being and existence. 
 
 Most truly has a modern Christian writer 
 defined Evangelical hope really to be yearning 
 
 L 
 
LS 
 
 146 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 love,*—and as such we may regard it in our 
 present contrast; the yearning love of the soul 
 that clings to the one unchanging belief that 
 it will return to a Father and a God; yea, see 
 Him and adore Him, and live in His presence 
 for evermore. Poor fallen and. suffering 
 humanity—fallen so low, suffering so much, yet 
 endowed with this one hope, that, like the pro- 
 digal in the parable, it may yet arise and 
 return; that there yet may be a welcome, that 
 fatherly hands may yet receive, that the words 
 of a father’s forgiveness may yet be uttered, 
 and that angels and arehangels may yet hear, 
 as each redeemed member of the race is added 
 to the heavenly company, words that will never 
 cease to vibrate in each soul through all the 
 ages of eternity,—“ This your brother was dead, 
 and is alive again; was lost, and is found.” 
 
 II. When we turn from these high and holy 
 conceptions of Christian hope, this blessed and 
 radiant world which Christianity points to as 
 the true home of humanity, when we turn from 
 this, and let our thoughts bear us into the 
 joyless gloom of even the highest realms of non- 
 Christian thought, how vivid, how vast, nay, 
 how infinite, is the contrast. If we take, 
 
 3 Harless, “Christian Ethics,” § 20, p. 176 (Transl.). 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 147 
 
 in their highest aspects, the three systems, 
 under one or other of which modern unbelief is 
 now arraying itself,—Materialism, Pantheism, 
 and Antitheism (I know no better word; it is 
 not just to call it Atheism,*—that denial of a 
 personal, but acknowledgment of an imper- 
 sonal, Omnipotence, apart from the world of 
 phenomena, which is now occupying the fore- 
 ground of non-Christian thought),—if we take 
 these three systems at the hands of their best 
 and most thoughful exponents, and endeavour 
 to estimate, with all fairness and impartiality, 
 the nature of the hopes or expectations which 
 they hold out to suffering humanity, can we 
 possibly arrive at any other results than these ? 
 First, that though all these systems admit, 
 equally with Christianity, the presence not only 
 of the sorrows and shadows of human life, but 
 even of those sad and startling manifestations of 
 vanity, fruitlessness, and frustration of moral 
 
 4 The more exact word would, perhaps, be Paratheism, 
 a. €. a perverted Theism,—a system which cannot properly 
 be denied to be in a certain sense theistic, but which is 
 really contrary to Theism in its generally received sense, 
 viz. as implying personality in God. Nothing is more 
 calculated to antagonize those whom it should be our 
 object to convince than the careless and sweeping use of 
 such terms as Atheism. Compare Fiske, “Cosmic Philo- 
 sophy,” vol. i. p. 469. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 purpose, which ever seem so mysterious and 
 inexplicable,'—though they admit all this, and 
 though the religion of well-nigh one half of the 
 whole non-Christian world is based upon the 
 recognition of it, yet not one of these systems 
 presents the faintest indication of any attempt to 
 solve the apparently insoluble riddle. The pre- 
 sence of these saddening shadows, be it clearly 
 observed, is admitted by non-Christian thinkers 
 of every school of modern thought. It is not 
 merely the adherents of a cheerless positivism— 
 that positivism that would trample down men 
 further and further into the morass of matter, 
 and stifle every higher hope—it is not merely 
 the joyless disciples of that bleak pessimism 
 which is now stealing everywhere into modern 
 philosophic thought—it is not merely such men 
 as these who dwell upon the sad frustrations and 
 baffled hopes of mortal life. Men who stand 
 forth as the highest exponents of naturalistic 
 optimism, and of the bright and Joyous life ot 
 the world, all either distinctly avow, or indirectly 
 admit an aimlessness, vanity, and dissonance in 
 human life, which sometimes finds an expression 
 
 5 Some considerations which may, perhaps, in some 
 degree, aid the Christian thinker in reference to these 
 moral mysteries will be found in “Credentials of Chris- 
 tianity,” Lect. vi. p. 255 sq. (Hodder, Lond. 1875). 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 149 
 
 in Janguage more melancholy even than that of 
 the sad outpourings of the Book of Ecclesiastes. 
 Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Even the great 
 modern poet, who may be properly regarded as 
 the very mouthpiece of naturalistic optimism, 
 even he can tell us, in reference to his own 
 favoured and lengthened life, that its whole 
 course had been but labour and trouble,® and 
 that in his seventy-five years he had not had 
 . four weeks in which he could enjoy a life which 
 to those outside would have seemed to have 
 been, so far as this world was concerned, one of 
 golden and poetic sunshine. 
 
 But if so, why so? -Why are the fairest 
 flowers of humanity often the first to fade? 
 How can the pessimist thinker say, with any 
 semblance of truth, that we can hardly think 
 of a really noble nature without some tinge 
 of melancholy ?7 Why do the loveliest scenes 
 of the material world often awaken in the soul 
 a pensive and idyllic sadness which has been 
 again and again alluded to by all the truest 
 observers of nature?*® Why is it that— 
 
 6 Goethe, “‘ Conversations with Eckermann,” quoted by 
 Martensen, “ Christian Ethics,” p. 172. 
 
 7 Schopenhauer, ‘ Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” 
 3rd ed., vol. i. p. 468. 
 
 8 See Humboldt, “ Cosmos,” vol. ii. p. 80 (Sabine). 
 
159 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 “The mute turf we tread, 
 The solemn hills around us spread, 
 The stream that falls incessantly, , 
 The strange-scrawl’d rocks, the lonely sky,— 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice’? P 9 
 
 Why is this so? What can be the meaning of 
 all these apparent indications of some sad and 
 inexplicable mystery? Why in the realm of 
 morality itself, in the living and breathing world 
 of humanity around us, is “the present distri- 
 bution of moral forces” (to use the words of 
 a modern thinker) thus “ hopelessly chaotic ’?? 
 We ask these questions, and we have a right to 
 ask them, for Christianity has its answers; but 
 not one of the three systems professes or even 
 attempts to give even the most partial reply. 
 Neither the system that says there is no God, 
 save Matter and Force, nor the system that 
 identifies Him with the Universe, nor that 
 system which denies Him a personal existence 
 though it separates Him from phenomena,—not 
 one of these systems, nor any combination of 
 them, has ever yet even hinted at an answer to 
 any one of the deeper questions which, be it 
 observed, are absolutely irrepressible—questions 
 with which every present and future hope is 
 
 ° Matthew Arnold, “Poems” (“Resignation”). 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 151 
 entwined—questions which emerge from the very 
 depths of our personality, and which never could 
 have arisen in the soul, if they were to remain 
 unanswered for all eternity. 
 
 Secondly, and further,—not only is every one 
 of these systems thus absolutely silent as to 
 questions which are inseparable from our very 
 being and existence, but more than this,—not 
 one of them has ever suggested any ultimate 
 considerations which could supply in any degree 
 even a transitory quietive. No deeper questions 
 answered, and no quietive to still the bitterness 
 of the silence. No quietive! O, how pas- 
 sionately has the poor human soul, in every age 
 of the world’s history, sought for some Nepenthe 
 for its inscrutable sorrows. How passionately 
 and how hopelessly! It has plunged itself in 
 idealism, it has drawn contrasts between man 
 under the cold pressure of the moral law, and 
 man when in artistic harmony with the eternal 
 laws of nature,’ it has bathed in the golden light 
 of art, and sought in the realms of imagination 
 that union of the good and the beautiful, of the 
 pure and the perennial, which may have seemed 
 to bear with it some passing solace amid the 
 
 1 Compare Schiller’s poem, entitled “‘ Das Ideal und das 
 Leben,” and the comments of Merivale, “‘ Minor Poems of 
 Schiller,” p. 48. 
 
bY 
 Cr 
 2~w 
 
 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 grinding misery of mortal life; but all has, at 
 last, been felt to be, and even avowed to be, both 
 transitory and unsatisfying. The true quietive 
 has never been realized, the true Nepenthe never 
 found. 
 
 Nay, even that attempt “to attain the full 
 altitude of the Knowable,’ which a modern 
 opponent of Christianity? has declared to be 
 enough for the bounded thought of our humanity, 
 that Truth which he tells us is the only thing 
 absolutely necessary for man—even that search 
 for truth has never been found by experience 
 sufficient to still all the cravings of our moral 
 consciousness, or to prevent the soul lapsing 
 either into that dull realism, or that creedless 
 resignation, which is so often the sequel to 
 dissipated illusions, and the precursor of a 
 spiritual apathy that rarely fails to deepen into 
 moral corruption and death. What practical 
 truth there is in Schiller’s exquisite poem that 
 holds out employment as one of the substitutes 
 for the glory of lost ideals!* what suggestive 
 teaching there is in the drama of his great con- 
 temporary, in which the Faust who is first pre- 
 sented to us as having pursued after knowledge 
 
 * “Supernatural Religion,” 3rd edit., vol. ii. p. 491. 
 
 * The title is “Die Ideale ;” and the thought referred ta 
 will be found in the closing stanza. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF, 153 
 ye: Ea eM Baa tt iearaneteean eS aes ee ed 
 “like a sinking star,’ breathes out his last 
 breath, aged and outworn, amid the homely 
 realism of well-planned public works, and the 
 details of a beneficent but prosaic industry!* The 
 restless plunging into mere employment is often 
 sadly symptomatic. Yet this is not the last state. 
 When all such quietives are found, as they are 
 ever found, ultimately to fail, one refuge alone 
 remains, a refuge which it seems impossible for 
 the mind to dwell upon without instinctive 
 abhorrence, and yet a refuge to which one form 
 of modern philosophy is now actually pointing, 
 the Oriental Nirvana, the state of final renunci- 
 ation of that principle which is the very life of 
 Christianity, the principle of personality,—the 
 state in which all willing must be converted 
 into non-willing, and in which we must learn to 
 die to the very desire to live.’ 
 
 Strange and even monstrous as are such 
 
 4 “aust,” Part Il, Act v. (Goethe, “ Simmtliche 
 Werke,” vol. xii. p. 485. Stuttg. 1851). 
 
 5 This amazing and really monstrous conception forms 
 the leading practical thought of Schopenhauer’s remark- 
 able though repulsive work, ‘‘ Die Welt als Wille und Vor- 
 stellung,” and is adopted and expounded by his follower, 
 Hartmann, “ Philosophie des Unbewussten,” p. 762sq. For 
 further comments on the system of the last-mentioned 
 writer, see the notes to “‘ Credentials of Christianity,” Lec- 
 ture vi. p. 266, 269 (fodder, Lond. 1875). 
 
154 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dreadful illustrations of the hopelessness alluded 
 to in the text, yet they are not unknown to 
 current speculation. It is but the melancholy zz 
 pojus ruere of all non-Christian thought. The 
 draught of Nepenthe becomes at last the 
 draught of Lethe; the resignation which once 
 had some nobler moral features, and was often 
 found in alliance with patience and self-denial, 
 loses at last every trace of its higher manifesta- 
 tions, and is merged silently into despair. 
 Thirdly, and lastly, if the non-Christian 
 systems which we are now considering, not only 
 give no answer to the soul’s deepest questions, 
 but even minister no quietive save that which 
 ultimately leads to despair, it seems almost 
 superfiuous to add that they as utterly fail to 
 supply any really motive principle in life and 
 morality. If the future is a rayless void—if 
 the continuance of the personality rests only on 
 presumptions which we are told are at best only 
 opinionable °—if there is no rest that remaineth 
 for the weary and heavy-laden save in the ces- 
 sation of all conscious or separate existence— 
 then why should man listen to the voice of 
 duty? Is not that voice an illusion? To 
 whom is the duty due? To God? But mate- 
 
 ® See Mill, ‘Three Essays on Religion,” p*118. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 155 
 
 rialism tells us that He is not.’ “I swept the 
 heavens with my telescope,” says Lalande, 
 “but He was not there.” “I have looked for 
 Him on earth” is the practical summary of the 
 modern philosopher,® “‘amid the promises and 
 potencies of terrestrial life, but I find Him not.” 
 To whom, then, is my duty due? To Nature? 
 But Pantheism tells me of no voice, either of 
 moral prohibition or of moral command, that 
 breaks the silence of the rhythmic movement 
 of that natura naturans which animates, and 
 which itself is, the Universe. But if not to 
 Nature, still may not duty be due to a Power 
 of which Nature is the manifestation? If 
 modern philosophy tells me not only that duty 
 may be due, but that the intensest devotion 
 may be offered to the Deity of Nature,’ without 
 any perversion of the moral sentiments, may 
 I not pay my homage and my duty to this 
 Inscrutable and Unknown? May not moral 
 
 7 The fruitlessness of the attempt of Moleschott and 
 others to found any system of higher morality on Mate- 
 rialism has been briefly but satisfactorily proved by 
 Ebrard, “ Apologetik,” Part i. § 179, p.411 sq.; compare also 
 the popular and lucidly-written treatise of Janet, “Le Maté- 
 rialisme Contemporain,” p. 162 sq. Paris, 1875. 
 
 8 Cp. Tyndall, “Address delivered before the British 
 Association at Belfast,” pp. 57, 58. 
 
 9 Mill, “Three Essays on Religion,” p. 115. 
 
156 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Se Pile MOND ate RAN LL ace MRC TA i IAS Rae 
 motive be at last found here? Nay, not even 
 here. The system that bows before the Un- 
 known tells me of no link that connects the 
 personal and the impersonal, no bond that con- 
 nects the atoms of a localized existence with an 
 unknown and unknowable God. 
 
 Is there, then, absolutely no answer? Is 
 this “ought” owed to nothing? “ Far from 
 it” is the united voice of all the higher forms 
 of modern unbelief. It is due to the ever- 
 advancing interests of the race. It is due to 
 that moral development of humanity which is 
 to be the ever-growing glory of the future. It 
 is the contribution of each passing and transitory 
 existence to that final evolution of virtue and 
 morality which is to approach nearer and ever 
 nearer to the still unattainable ideal of perfec- 
 tion.’ 
 
 O baseless, O. worse than baseless dream ! 
 What! this endless moral progress in a material 
 world that bears in its very bosom the elements 
 
 ' See Fiske, “ Cosmic Philosophy,” vol. ii. p. 498, sq. The 
 end of Evolution, according to Mr. Spencer, is to be “the 
 establishment of the greatest perfection and the greatest 
 happiness.”—First Principles, Part ii. ch. 22, p. 517. It 
 is difficult, however, to conceive how such an assertion can 
 be considered to be compatible with the admission that the 
 processes everywhere going on are bearing all things 
 towards “omnipresent death ;” see p. 514. 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 157 
 
 of its own dissolution! This eternal approxima- 
 tion to the perfect under a sun that can only pour 
 on us its heat and light for a certain number of 
 almost calculable ages!? When the race will have 
 perished with its perishing environments, when 
 the continuity of the survival of the fittest is 
 closed by material and elemental change, when 
 evolution will have dug its own grave, for what 
 will morality have been developed ? Whom will 
 it ultimately profit? Whither will it be wafted 
 when the race through which it was being per- 
 fected has sunk amid the ruins of a disintegrating 
 world?’ But we need not further pursue such 
 questions. The thoughts they call up are un- 
 thinkable. The difficulties they involve are 
 insuperable. The contradictions they disclose 
 are irresolvable. We have exhausted all possi- 
 
 2 The duration of the efficiency of the Sun is, according 
 to Helmholtz, consolingly vast; still even this philosopher 
 tells us that to our own race “a long, but not an endless 
 existence” is all that is to be looked for, and that ‘‘ as each 
 one of us singly must endure the thought of his death, the 
 race must endure the same.”—Popular Scientific Lectures, 
 p. 191 (Transl.) London, 1873. See also Lange, “ Geschichte 
 des Materialismus,’”’ vol. ii. p. 226, and comp. Spencer, 
 ‘‘Wirst Principles,” Part ii. ch. 22, p. 494, sq. 
 
 3 “ The earth as a whole,” says Mr. Spencer, “must, at 
 some period beyond the utmost stretch of imagination, be 
 subject to forces sufficient to cause its complete disintegra- 
 tion.’ —First Principles, Part ii. ch, 23, p. 527. 
 
158 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 spe ea OC Oe RRO. OP aan coe da Sc 
 bilities. We have given a hearing to all answers, 
 We have heard what is the hope of Christianity ; 
 and we have analyzed, what we now at length 
 make bold to call, the hopelessness of Unbelief. 
 The contrast is now completed—and this is the 
 result. On the one side, the blessed hope ot 
 restoration, and of a return to a Father and a 
 God; on the other side, neither answer nor ex- 
 pectation, neither motive nor quietive,—nothing, 
 absolutely nothing whereon the soul can rest, 
 save a moral progress that is purposeless, and a 
 resignation that is only a thinly veiled despair. 
 Let me now at once close this necessarily 
 lengthened address with a few, a very few, 
 parting comments. Little needs to be added. 
 Sermons like these bear with them their own 
 application. Subjects such as we have meditated 
 on supply in themselves a teaching far more 
 persuasive than the counsels of any peroration. 
 One warning word is all that I will presume to 
 speak, and it is this—Remember there is some- 
 thing sadder than anything which we have yet 
 contemplated—something more utterly hope- 
 less—something more morally ruinous, and that 
 is, believing nothing, not even unbelief itself. 
 This is the real danger to the young, in the 
 perilous times in which we now are living. 
 Better anything than such a state. Better, I 
 
AND THE DESPAIR OF UNBELIEF. 159 
 
 had almost said, 2 heartwhole adherence even to 
 one of the dreary creeds on which we have been 
 meditating, than the dull apathetic indifference 
 to all belief and to all higher thought that is fast 
 becoming the characteristic of our own times, 
 and is, for the moralist no less than for the divine, 
 of the gloomiest augury for the future. All 
 higher systems even of unbelief, if fairly thought 
 out, may, by the very contradictions they may be 
 found to involve, or by the very despair to which 
 they may be observed to gravitate, bring about 
 reactions; and these, inthe boundless mercies of 
 the Holy Ghost, may at last lead back again to 
 God.4 But the dead heart of indifference,—the 
 scepticism of mere worldliness,—the disbelief 
 that neither knows nor cares what it disbelieves— 
 that has no ideal, however illusory, bends to no 
 divinity, however unreal—this verily is a deeper 
 depth than even our text points to. To have 
 no hope is frightful; but not to heed it is 
 4 As yet verifications of this implied hope are not very 
 numerous. Still, even at the present time, there is ground 
 for thinking that, in much of the higher philosophy of our — 
 own days, there are indications of a better attitude towards 
 Christianity than there was even five years ago. See, for 
 example, the concluding chapter of Fiske, “Cosmic Philo- 
 sophy,” vol. ii. p. 499 sq. (Lond. 1874). The writer of this 
 able work is an earnest disciple and follower of Mr. Her- 
 
 bert Spencer. Compare the remarks of Mivart, “Contem- 
 porary Evolution,” p. 161, sq. (Lond. 1876). 
 
 5 
 
160 THE HOPE OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 
 
 RET REN a oc COM PY ROSAS STR 
 still more appalling. To be without God is death; 
 but to live in a state of utter indifference as to 
 whether He is, or is not, is verily, in the most 
 inclusive sense of the words, not death only but 
 corruption. 
 
 O Lord of love and mercy, for Christ’s 
 sake, give us faith, give us hope, but above all 
 things give us that love which realizes Thee, and 
 realizing, adores. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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