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THE BEDELL LECTURES 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/worldlogosOOthom 
 
BEDELL LECTURES on the Evidences 
 of Religion. 
 
 I. The World’s Testimony to Jesus Christ ; 
 
 or, The Power of Christianity in Developing 
 Modern Civilization. By the Rt. Rev. John 
 Williams, D.D., Bishop of Connecticut. Svo, cloth 
 extra ....... $1.00 
 
 “Contains more than can often be found in ten 
 times the space . . . An historical argument, 
 
 so clear and so powerful that nothing beyond the 
 stating of it is needed.”— The Churchman . 
 
 “The argument is massive and simple.”— Stand¬ 
 ard of the Cross. 
 
 II. Revealed Religion Expounded by its 
 
 Relations to the Moral Being of God. By 
 the Rt. Rev. Henry Cotterill, D.D., Bishop of 
 Edinburgh. Svo, cloth extra . . . $1.00 
 
 “Dr. Cotterill is a profound theologian, a ripe 
 scholar, and an eminent preacher. His lecture con¬ 
 denses the highest results of ancient and modern 
 thought on the subject, and is the best argument 
 possible against the spirit of unbelief which is so 
 rapidly spreading over the Christian world.”— Com¬ 
 mercial Advertiser. 
 
 III. The World and the Logos. By the Rt. 
 Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, D.D., Asst. Bishop 
 of Mississippi. 8 vo, cloth . . . $1.00 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, Publishers, New York. 
 
THE BEDELL LECTURES, 1885 
 
 THE 
 
 World and the Logos 
 
 HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, S.T.D., LL.D. 
 
 Assistant Bishop of Mississippi 
 
 NEW YORK & LONDON 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
 
 ^nicKerbocktr |)rtss 
 1886 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
 1886 
 
 Press of 
 
 G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
 New York 
 
EXTRACTS 
 
 From the communication of the donors to the 
 Board of Trustees of the Theological Semi¬ 
 nary of the Diocese of Ohio and Kenyon Col¬ 
 lege. 
 
 Cleveland, June 21, 1880. 
 
 Gentlemen: 
 
 We have consecrated and set apart for the service 
 of God the sum of $5,000, to be devoted to the estab¬ 
 lishment of a lecture or lectures in the Institutions 
 at Gambier on the Evidences of Natural and Re¬ 
 vealed Religion; or the Relations of Science and 
 Religion. 
 
 We ask permission of the Trustees to establish the 
 lecture immediately, with the following provisions: 
 
 The lecture or lectures shall be delivered bien¬ 
 nially on Founders’ Day (if such a day shall be 
 established), or other appropriate time. During our 
 lifetime, or the lifetime of either of us, the nomination 
 of the lectureship shall rest with us. 
 
 The interest for two years on the fund, less the sum 
 necessary to pay for the publication, shall be paid to 
 the Lecturer. 
 
 The Lecturer shall also have one half of the net 
 profits of the publication during the first two years 
 after the date of publication. All other profits shall 
 
EXTRACTS. 
 
 be the property of the Board, and shall be added to 
 the capital of the lectureship. 
 
 We express our preference that the lecture or 
 lectures shall be delivered in the Church of the 
 Holy Spirit, if such building be in existence; and shall 
 be delivered in the presence of all the members of 
 the Institutions under the authority of the Board. 
 
 We ask that the day on which the lecture or the 
 first of each series of lectures shall be delivered, shall 
 be declared a holiday. 
 
 We wish that the nomination to this lectureship 
 shall be restricted by no other consideration than the 
 ability of the appointee to discharge the duty to the 
 highest glory of God in the completest presentation 
 of the subject. We desire that the lectures shall be 
 published in uniform shape, and that a copy of each 
 shall be placed in the libraries of Bexley Hall, Ken¬ 
 yon College and of the Philomethesian and the Nu 
 Pi Kappa Society. Asking the favorable consider¬ 
 ation of the Board of Trustees, 
 
 We remain with great respect, 
 
 G. T. Bedell, 
 Julia Bedell. 
 
 The Board accepted the gift, approved the 
 terms, named All Saints’ Day, November the 
 first, as Founders’ Day, and made it a holi¬ 
 day. 
 
LECTURE FIRST. 
 
 “ IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD.” 
 
 St. John’s Gospel, i., i. 
 
 The New Testament, like the Old, begins 
 with beginnings. Both, also, begin with Rea¬ 
 son . T Each introduces us into an ordered 
 universe—a kosmos, forming or formed out 
 of a chaos. In each, also, this kosmos is 
 crowned, as by the highest creative activity of 
 the Eternal Logos, by a rational being, a finite 
 Logos, breathed out from the Infinite One, 
 and made in the image and the likeness of 
 that. 
 
 And for this finite Logos all the kosmos 
 exists. He is, in a sense, its lord, the viceroy 
 over it, and has it in charge to render it more 
 
 1 Whatever we may conclude with regard to the Mosaic account of 
 creation, so-called, this is to be said for it : that it is plain, coherent, 
 logical in itself, accounting for all the facts,—and that, so far, it is 
 the only cosmogony of which this can be said. 
 
 The mythical cosmogonies of India or Scandinavia, with their sup¬ 
 porting Tortoises or Life-Trees, are clearly poetical escapes from 
 difficulties. The doctrine of evolution, so-called, does not deal with 
 the question of creation at all—dodges, that is, all the difficulties. 
 
 I 
 
2 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 orderly, more cosmical, more rational during 
 its continuance. 
 
 There are voices called scientific, which deny 
 all this and more. How profoundly contra¬ 
 dictory to the utterance of St. John in the 
 fourth gospel, these voices are, few have per¬ 
 haps considered. That science is opposed in 
 some way to the first chapter of Genesis, is 
 more or less clear in the minds of intelligent 
 believers. But that it is, in its latest reaches, 
 opposed quite as irreconcilably, and on pro¬ 
 founder philosophy, to the Gospel of St. John, 
 is not so commonly understood. 
 
 For in this first chapter there is a method of 
 creation stated, and a philosophy of creation as 
 well. 
 
 The philosophy is this : Eternal Reason 
 existed antecedent to all else. This Eternal 
 Reason was with God, was God, and created all 
 things. In this Reason was life, independent 
 existence, and light, all illumination material 
 and immaterial, and the Eternal Reason made 
 a reasonable, rational world, a kosmos. 
 
 The purpose of this making was so definite, 
 had so clear an end and meaning, that to carry 
 it out fully when due time came, the Eternal 
 Reason put Himself under the conditions of 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 3 
 
 humanity, which He had made in His own 
 image : “ The Word became flesh and tented 2 
 among us.” 
 
 Now the latest voices of science join issue 
 with all this. They declare that there are no 
 beginnings, that beginnings are “ unthinkable.” 
 They tell us that nothing was made, that all 
 things have just grown. They insist that 
 there was no reason in the making, and that 
 there is no reason in the continuance, that 
 there is no purpose anywhere, no end for 
 which any thing exists, and that a purposeless 
 world glimmers upon its little road for a few 
 years, more or less, with its little population 
 of insects and fishes, birds and reptiles, worms 
 and men, till it swings back into the fire-mist 
 and weltering chaos out of which it was once 
 shot, red-hot, by some accident, some where, 
 and at some time, of which when and where 
 we are and must be entirely ignorant . 3 
 
 2 e(dktjvgo6ey. 
 
 3 Evolution necessarily begins with something already existing. It 
 leaves the question of creation and its purposes untouched as insolu¬ 
 ble. In the philosophy of Mr. Spencer, matter is self-existent, and 
 the universe, or parts of it, vibrate forth from the fire-mist of the 
 supposed nebulae into plants, animals, men, governments, religions, 
 and philosophies, and then back into fire-mist again. Mr. S. says : 
 “The absolute commencement (Anglice, beginning) of organic life on 
 the globe I distinctly deny. The affirmation of universal evolution is, 
 in itself, the negative of an absolute commencement of any thing.” 
 
4 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 Between these two conceptions of the world’s 
 cause and meaning no reconciliation is possi¬ 
 ble. I want you to understand this at the 
 threshold. 
 
 There is a vague idea that “science,” as it is 
 called, is opposed to religion, that it has en¬ 
 dangered our faith, and that religion needs to 
 be reconciled with it. There is a notion com¬ 
 mon, too, that the reconciliation is possible, 
 that we only need to find some new explana¬ 
 tion for some chapters in Genesis, make some 
 trifling changes of readings in our Bibles, and 
 a reconciliation between science and religion 
 will follow. 
 
 To effect this desirable end many simple- 
 minded and honest men are at work on both 
 sides, with various results. 
 
 But let us understand at the beginning, that 
 what arrogates for itself to-day the name of 
 science as its special own—the theory of evo¬ 
 lution, namely, and, in biology, the theory of 
 descent—prides itself on a denial of any begin¬ 
 nings, a denial of any rational continuance or 
 intelligent purpose, a denial of any making, 
 and a denial of any intended end. 
 
 It is not a dealing with the Mosaic account 
 of the creation. It is a theory which denies all 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 5 
 
 creation and compels you to assert that there 
 is not, and never was, a Logos at all, and that 
 Jesus Christ was, like all other men as well as 
 all organized things, an outcome of Bathybi- 
 an slime ! Across the iron working of me¬ 
 chanic fatalism can come no reason, either of 
 God or men, either finite or infinite. One act 
 of self-centred will, one stroke of resolute self¬ 
 organizing purpose would annihilate the entire 
 philosophy of evolution, as the discovery of a 
 star whose motion is upon right angles, would 
 destroy the Newtonian theory. 
 
 That science and revealed religion are not 
 antagonistic, we are fond here of believing. 
 That seeming contentions can be reconciled, 
 we feel certain. But let us understand what 
 we say. Here, as in so many cases, we need 
 definitions. 
 
 If by science we mean theories based, not 
 on demonstration, but on assumptions made a 
 priori , on inferences, not from facts, but from 
 words and formulas ; if, in short, we allow a 
 metaphysics to be imposed upon us as natural 
 science, we shall find the reconciliation impos¬ 
 sible, and useless, if it were not impossible. 
 
 Let us define science. If we understand by 
 science ordered human knowledge, we shall 
 not be far wrong. 
 
6 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 In science, therefore, are two things : the 
 facts, and the ordering of the facts. 
 
 There is a possibility of error about both. 
 
 1. The fact may not be truly ascertained. 
 
 2. The inference drawn from the fact, the 
 meaning we find in it, the story it tells us, may 
 be mistaken/* 
 
 The collector of facts exercises one set of 
 human faculties. The organizer of the facts 
 into their place in a logical science, exercises 
 quite another and a higher. The first needs, 
 mainly, quick, correct perceptions. The other 
 requires a trained, logical intellect. 
 
 Farther still. The fact-collector may be of 
 the highest excellence in his department, and 
 
 a Sir Charles Lyell (“Antiquity of Man”) has some discussions 
 upon a human pelvic bone, found in Mississippi mud near Natchez* 
 and on a human skeleton found in the same mud near New Orleans, 
 sixteen feet below the surface. Dr. Dowling, a New Orleans physi¬ 
 cian of some note, assigned to this skeleton, from calculations of the 
 mud deposit of the Delta, an antiquity of 50,000 years ; other geolo¬ 
 gists give it 100,000. 
 
 Sir Charles gives 100,000 years to the formation of the Delta, 
 from a calculation of the annual mud deposit. 
 
 During this autumn (1885) while sinking an artesian well for a “ Cold 
 Storage Warehouse ” in New Orleans, the head of a child's china 
 doll was brought up from a depth of tzventy-five feet below the sur¬ 
 face of the most solid ground, on which heavy buildings stand in the 
 city of New Orleans ( New Orleans' Picayune, Sept. 18, 1885). 
 What has been said of medicine may be said of other sciences, espe¬ 
 cially geology. “ There is nothing so uncertain as scientific theories, 
 except scientific facts." 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 7 
 
 quite useless in the logical dealing with his 
 discoveries. And the intellect best trained 
 and fitted to see the meaning, bearing, and 
 classification of facts may really never have 
 discovered one ! 
 
 There can be, in true science, also, no 
 authorities. Names in science have no weight. 
 The facts themselves are sacred. Being genu¬ 
 ine facts, no denial, no ignorance, no sophistry 
 touches them. But the uses made of them in 
 any theory, the conclusions drawn from them, 
 and the place, in any system, assigned them, 
 are always subject to revision ; because, while 
 the fact itself is infallible, the reasoning about 
 it is always fallible, and often, as the event has 
 shown, very fallible and blundering indeed . 4 
 
 In the widest sense we are compelled to say 
 that, the facts set aside, science has in it that 
 element of human fallibility which makes it 
 quite impossible to assert that any of its con¬ 
 clusions may not require re-examination. 
 
 4 The history of the various editions of Sir Charles Lyell’s “ Prin¬ 
 ciples of Geology ” is a striking illustration. The amiable naturalist 
 with precisely the same facts before him, through eight editions 
 taught the permanency of species and the doctrine of specific crea¬ 
 tion. In the tenth, without a solitary new fact, he proclaims his 
 adherence to the theory of evolution. The change was subjective, 
 and accidentally shows a man’s responsibility for his faith—how en¬ 
 tirely his scientific faith even is of his own making. 
 
8 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 It is no presumption, on the part of any 
 thinking man, to take the sceptical position 
 with regard to even the best-established con¬ 
 clusion of science, and call upon it again to 
 give a reason for its existence. 
 
 We understand, of course, that, in the larger 
 definition of science, theories must come in, 
 working hypotheses, which are understood to 
 be tentative, although assumed for the time as 
 certain. But how effectual a theory may be 
 as working hypothesis, and how absurdly false 
 in fact, is shown in this, that the Ptolemaic 
 theory served for ages for the working of all 
 problems in practical astronomy. But a “ work¬ 
 ing hypothesis ” is not a part of science, though 
 it may explain many things, and help in the 
 discovery of genuine fact. 
 
 From what I have said, you will perceive 
 that I decline to be overawed by names in 
 science, and I decline also to accept conclusions, 
 derived from facts, the validity of which de¬ 
 pends upon the correctness of human reason, 
 as being necessarily infallible or not amenable 
 to my own re-examination, and to be accepted 
 or rejected by my own judgment. 
 
 And just here all of us have the right, and I 
 believe it is our duty, to protest respectfully 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 9 
 
 but firmly against the tone assumed by some 
 scientific men. That tone is thoroughly un¬ 
 scientific, dogmatic, and intolerant. There is, 
 for instance, no measure to the contempt and 
 scorn which such a writer as the German Os¬ 
 car Schmidt treats those who hold to the doc¬ 
 trine of design, who claim to see any purpose 
 or meaning in any thing whatever in the 
 universe . 5 
 
 Such a temper unfits a man for scientific dis¬ 
 cussion, and its manifestation puts him outside 
 the bounds of that comity which is the law be¬ 
 tween thinking and serious men. 
 
 And yet, though this writer is peculiarly of¬ 
 fensive, he only goes a little beyond what is 
 the common attitude of many '‘scientific” 
 men, so-called, towards believers in God, and 
 especially believers in revelation. Dogma¬ 
 tism, intolerance of contradiction, assertion to 
 be taken without reasoning, sneers at religion 
 and religious ideas as blindness, childishness, 
 and superstition, the assumption that a Chris¬ 
 tian believer cannot understand science, and is 
 ruled out of scientific discussion,—all this is il¬ 
 lustrated in the writings of men of a certain 
 school, too commonly to need citations here in 
 
 6 “ The Doctrine of Descent, and Darwinism,” by Oscar Schmidt. 
 
IO 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 proof, and this, in the face of that bede-roll of 
 splendid names which have adorned science 
 and religion equally. 
 
 We owe it to ourselves to resent this un¬ 
 scientific and even insulting attitude. 
 
 No attainments in science make a man in¬ 
 fallible. No name, in that field at least, is 
 sacred. No work done within it but lies open 
 to the cold irreverent criticism, and the passion¬ 
 less judgment, of any man who insists on doing 
 his own thinking and is competent to the 
 doing it. 
 
 Because “ I believe in God the Father Al¬ 
 mighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all 
 things visible and invisible,” I shall not allow 
 myself to be warned off the study of that Fath¬ 
 er’s works and worlds, because some modern 
 scientist has concluded, since he finds not that 
 Maker in his crucible nor under his microscope, 
 that therefore there is no Maker at all, or, if 
 there be, that, as Mr. Spencer majestically in¬ 
 forms me, nobody can know any thing about 
 Him. 
 
 One is tempted to put together just here 
 the names of the scientific thinkers, beginning 
 with Bacon, who have been and are Christians, 
 and the names of those who hold that the 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. I1 
 
 world has no maker, and ask the latter if they 
 rule Bacon and Newton out. 
 
 One, at all events, can well afford to sit in 
 their unscientific and superstitious company. 
 But I have set myself to call no man Rabbi 
 here, and to bring no authority from a name. 
 
 There is nothing in the history of science, 
 considering its theories and hypotheses as a 
 part of science, which entitles it to stand upon 
 the certainty of any theory of to-day. 
 
 When one considers the theories that have 
 perished in chemistry, until the new chemistry, 
 with the hypothesis of unitary structure, has 
 seated itself amid the ruins of the old; in 
 geology, from the theories of the Plutonists 
 and Neptunists to the evolutionary,—a man 
 like Sir Charles Lyell going through them all 
 in his own lifetime, and the successive editions 
 of one book ; in biology, the corpuscular, the 
 fluid, the chemical theories, and now the con¬ 
 tending material and psychical ; the emission 
 and undulatory theories of light, the vortices 
 of Descartes, and the attraction of Newton ; 
 the Ptolemaic “cyclesand epicycles, orb in orb,” 
 and the Copernican central sun in astronomy; 
 the phlogistic, caloric, and molecular theories 
 of heat ; in view, in short, of explanatory 
 
12 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 theories painfully wrought out, painfully de¬ 
 fended, universally accepted as sufficient, and 
 universally exploded at last, he is a very rash 
 man who will dare to assert that any existing 
 theory is a finality, and a very irrational and 
 impertinent man who, assuming its infallibility, 
 will insist that I must deny the existence of 
 God, because his personal scientific theory 
 does not need a God ! 
 
 But if one goes behind the theory, be it 
 what it may, to the very facts on which the 
 theory is supposed to be founded, he finds 
 himself in a mist of uncertainty. This Pro¬ 
 teus matter, with which natural science deals, 
 and which alone, some wise men say, is worth 
 our study, is not to be measured, weighed, 
 seen, nor bounded. It forever eludes us. We 
 have no instruments to gauge it. There is no 
 absolute measure or weight in nature. There 
 is a variable in all our calculations. Never 
 yet had we an exact pound, an exact foot, or 
 yard ; and no man, with most perfect instru¬ 
 ments, ever drew an exact circle, or an exact 
 square. Keplers laws are ideal, not actual. 
 Newton’s calculations are true in the heavens 
 of the intellect, and not in the heavens of our 
 stars. There is no perfect ellipse, no exact 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 13 
 
 orbit, no equal movements among the stars in 
 their courses. 
 
 On matter everywhere, and all its doings, is 
 the stamp of uncertainty, and an allowance for 
 error must come into every experiment, and 
 be admitted in our best tested and most 
 assured fact. No man knows, better than the 
 scientific man, the element of error which 
 underlies our most careful and conscientious 
 dealing with matter. It plays us tricks con¬ 
 tinually, and at last modern science, in despair 
 of it, has relegated it, under the name of atom, 
 (if it really admit of existence at all), into the 
 infinite dark of blank agnosticism, where no 
 sense can test it, no microscope detect it, but 
 where, at all events, it has the certainty of an 
 ideal. 
 
 For, as a matter of fact, when it comes to the 
 last issue, the only real things, the only true 
 and abiding things, the only measurable and 
 weighable things, are things ideal. 
 
 The mathematical line of Euclid is straight. 
 No line drawn by man ever was. Euclid’s 
 point existed and forever exists, but only in 
 the thought of the thinker. The line, the 
 point, the angle are abiding and eternal, for 
 they belong to thought. But we must tell our 
 
14 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 naturalists they cannot play fast and loose 
 with us in this business of atoms. One in¬ 
 genious scientist 6 has told us, to explain how 
 small they are, that if a drop of water were 
 made as large as the earth, the atoms compos¬ 
 ing it would be larger than marbles, but not 
 quite as large as cricket-balls ! And these 
 atoms are the ultimate and indivisible. We 
 must really recall our atomistic friends to 
 clear thinking. Just as long as the atom can 
 be conceived at all, whether as ‘‘marbles” or 
 “ cricket-balls,” it must be conceived capable 
 of division into halves, quarters, or any num¬ 
 ber of fractions. Just as long as the atom is 
 that protean thing, matter, at all, just so long 
 will it play them the tricks of matter. 
 
 They must put the atom, as the last result, 
 into the realm of the ideal,—a thing which be¬ 
 longs to the pure intellect; so only can they be 
 certain of keeping it an atom, in that great 
 day when a drop of water becomes as large as 
 a world ! 
 
 But why should I dwell upon the uncertain¬ 
 ties of material science, when its latest teachers 
 themselves are uncertain whether matter exists 
 at all, when, at all events, even granting its 
 
 6 Sir William Thompson. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 15 
 
 existence, it is out of our power to know any 
 thing about it or even its qualities ; for are we 
 not in a world where we can have only sensa¬ 
 tions, where all we know are our sensations, 
 and where, at best, we have only a faint sort of 
 right to infer that there may be some thing 
 outside answering to those sensations ?—a 
 “ permanent possibility of sensation ” at best ? 
 Indeed, in the elaboration of the latest think¬ 
 ing in this direction, the distinguished author 7 
 seems to be uncertain whether he himself 
 exists, or rather is quite certain he does not. 
 The only thing he is sure of, appears to be, 
 that “ the Power behind phenomena is in¬ 
 scrutable.” 
 
 One therefore may come, I think, without 
 any restraining awe, certainly without any con¬ 
 ceited presumption, to ask again of a theory 
 that leads to such uncertain results—whether 
 it is absolutely true, and covers and accounts 
 for all the facts, so that the world just made 
 itself, and keeps on making and unmaking 
 itself, without any maker, and without any 
 reason ? For this, as I said at the beginning is 
 what now claims to be regarded as science: 
 that is, that something which is known. 
 
 7 Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
 
16 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 It is called evolution in physics, and nat¬ 
 ural selection, or “ survival of the fittest,” in 
 biology. 
 
 Now let me say just here that it is folly, and 
 worse, to speak lightly or disrespectfully of 
 Mr. Darwin, the keen, careful observer, the 
 delightful reporter of discoveries, the amiable, 
 kindly gentleman. That Mr. Spencer, who 
 is the author of a philosophy which under¬ 
 takes to explain the universe by evolution, 
 and who has formulated a series of “ laws ” by 
 which the universe makes and unmakes itself, 
 is the peer of any man living for abstruse 
 thinking and metaphysic speculation, goes 
 without saying. How inconclusive I believe 
 Mr. Darwin’s reasoning from his facts, how 
 wide the gaps he leaves unexplained, how gal¬ 
 lantly he imagines where facts fail him, and 
 how easily he gives up his theory in later edi¬ 
 tions, or bolsters it with new inventions, do 
 not, in the slightest, lesson my admiration for 
 the enthusiastic student of orchids and pigeons, 
 and the delightful naturalist of the Beagle. 
 That Mr. Spencer reasons most perversely, 
 as it seems to me ; is confused and confusing, 
 invents a new language, and gives new mean¬ 
 ings to old English words ; that his conclusions 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 17 
 
 are irrational and sometimes “ unthinkable ” 
 (to use a word of his own) ; that he deals 
 freely in “ pseud-ideas,” and facts which are 
 not facts, does not make him any the less a 
 man of great ability, honest, and honestly 
 working, according to his lights, at explaining, 
 after his fashion, a theory of the universe 
 which he is trying to make coherent, and 
 which will have its day, and pass away among 
 other equally fantastic theories of the universe, 
 which have faded into Prof. Tyndall’s “ infi¬ 
 nite azure of the past.” 
 
 We have no disrespect for either of these 
 gentlemen when we decline to accept their 
 theories as science, and we beg to say that 
 when their names are mentioned, as they 
 sometimes are, as if that should end all dis¬ 
 cussion, our awe is not awakened at the sound, 
 nor our opinion of the intellectual capacity of 
 the namers greatly elevated. 
 
 The question simply is, Does the theory of 
 evolution account for all the facts ? There is 
 not a man among you, trained to any clear 
 logical thinking, who is not as capable of an¬ 
 swering that question as either of these gentle¬ 
 men. They have no data which you do not 
 possess. The dealing with the data is just 
 
1 8 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 a matter of sound thinking—belongs entirely 
 to the realm of logic. 
 
 But what is the theory ? Not merely evolu¬ 
 tion. In an evolution in nature all students of 
 nature recognize a familiar fact. Every sprout¬ 
 ing seed reveals it. But such evolution is from 
 the potential to the actual. Every acorn is 
 an oak in germ. The evolution is by a fixed 
 law towards a fixed end, according to a fixed 
 purpose. On definite lines clearly settled by 
 some intelligence, all things develop or evolve 
 from the germ. The germ contains the prod¬ 
 uct in potency—contains it perhaps, in fact, 
 had we eyes to see it. 
 
 Under the idea that this is what is meant by 
 evolution, many Christian men have the no¬ 
 tion that they may be evolutionists and Chris¬ 
 tians also. If God made the world a living 
 world, a seminarium and seed-bed of things, in 
 which all things were potentially and to appear 
 actually in their time, it is about what St. Au¬ 
 gustine held, and a goodly catena of the Schol¬ 
 astics, including Aquinas. If this were the 
 reconcilement meant, it might not seem hard 
 to reconcile science and religion. As the late 
 Charles Kingsley put it : “ We knew of old 
 that God was so wise that He could make all 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 19 
 
 things, but behold He is so much wiser than 
 even that, that He can make all things make 
 themselves.” 
 
 But the doctrine of evolution, as “ science ” 
 puts it before us, is another thing altogether. 
 According to this, which now calls itself sci¬ 
 ence, and is so understood as an unassaila¬ 
 ble, determinate conclusion by most ignorant 
 readers, we are required to hold that there 
 is no God to begin with, that there is no Rea¬ 
 son and no Will, that no operation in nature 
 has any intelligence or any purpose, that all 
 these makings, and evolutions, so-called, and 
 developments, are merely the surgings and 
 rhythmical heavings of brute matter and brute 
 force, signifying nothing. 
 
 The human eye, while being far from per¬ 
 fect, is yet a wonderful and admirable instru¬ 
 ment, in comparison with which the most per¬ 
 fect telescope or microscope is a poor clumsy 
 contrivance. But how came the human eye, 
 and for what purpose was it intended ? You 
 and I would say, the eye was constructed for 
 the purpose of seeing. That seems to be the 
 only conclusion for sane common-sense, and 
 the healthy action of non-crazy human think¬ 
 ing. But the system which insists upon itself 
 
20 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 as “ science,” which demands that we shall ac¬ 
 cept more wonders than all the miracles of all 
 religions, true and false, ancient or modern, 
 upon the word of one Englishman, tells us 
 no ! The eye was not made to see by ! 
 There was no purpose of the sort governing 
 its development ! Matter, in an infinite num¬ 
 ber of trillions of years, by infinite trillions of 
 happy chances, preserving the beneficial varia¬ 
 tions, and letting the unbeneficial die, gradu¬ 
 ally kept on developing, not knowing what 
 it wanted, having no sense more than any 
 lump of mud, until it developed—never mean¬ 
 ing to do so—the eye of a philosopher or the 
 eye of an eagle ! 
 
 I might be willing to grant Mr. Darwin’s 
 theory as sufficient for the eye of a philoso¬ 
 pher, if his theory be philosophy, but I decline 
 to accept it for the eye of the eagle . 8 
 
 I have not misrepresented nor exaggerated. 
 The theory of evolution which insists that it is 
 “ science ” has to face, among other things, the 
 question of the eye. It is not by any means 
 its most puzzling question. But such is the 
 way it meets it : the eye was not made for 
 
 8 See Mr. Darwin’s account of the origin of the eye, “Origin of 
 Species,” pp. 222, 226. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 21 
 
 the purpose of seeing. That would concede 
 reason, purpose, a brain, and sense in the 
 making of the world, and would annihilate the 
 whole “ science,” which requires us to believe 
 that in matter alone is the power, potency, and 
 sufficiency of all life and all thought . 9 
 
 I cannot here quote, our time is too short. 
 I just state what is familiar to all readers of 
 what calls itself “ science,” that the dogma 
 taken for granted, insisted upon as needing 
 no proof, offered for our acceptance as the first 
 step in wisdom, is that there is no meaning, no 
 purpose, no aim, and no end—in short, no sense 
 in the universe ! The whole system of Mr. 
 Spencer, for instance, formally drawn out and 
 stated, only pretends, in its long-winded Greek 
 compounds, to register what is. For myself I 
 do not believe, of course, that it does that, nor 
 anywhere near that. But its foundation prin¬ 
 ciple is that; at its best, that is all it can do. 
 It is precluded from undertaking to tell us the 
 by whom and the why ! undertakes to tell us 
 of the how only, and blunders and stutters 
 about that, because it fetters its movement 
 with the two balls and chains of its slavery— 
 there is no who, and there is no Why ! 
 
 9 Mr. Darwin, again and again, admits that if any purpose were 
 discoverable—if, for instance, even flowers were intended to be beau¬ 
 tiful, it would destroy his theory. 
 
22 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 Let us clearly understand that before we go 
 one step farther. The thing that calls itself 
 “science,” that arrogates that magnificent 
 name in our day, begins with the magisterial 
 assertion that the how alone is within our 
 power, and bounds the limit of our thought. 
 H ow the thing is, it is “ scientific ” to enquire. 
 Who made it, what is it, and why it is what it 
 is, we are told are illegitimate questions. It is 
 a waste of time to ask them. They lead to the 
 inscrutable. That is the only thing certain. 
 
 Now with the utmost required and becoming 
 respect for Mr. Spencer, am I to be shut up to 
 the bounds he arbitrarily assigns to human 
 thinking ? The very questions which he puts 
 aside as impossible and senseless—the “ from 
 what ” and the “ why ” of things—have been 
 the central questions of thinkers (compared to 
 whom, with all respect to him, he is a babe in 
 arms) since the dawn of recorded thought, and 
 are the central and main questions yet. The 
 how is the question of the artist, the arranger, 
 the tabulator, the “ scientist ” at best; the 
 “by what ” and the “ for what ” are the ques¬ 
 tions of the common heart, and the common 
 sense, and the common need, as they are of the 
 deepest philosophy. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 23 
 
 But here we touch a very strange fact. The 
 system of evolution, like every other system 
 of philosophy, is an attempt to explain the 
 rationale of things. It arises, as all do, from 
 an innate and ever-present demand of the in¬ 
 tellect for reasons, for causes, for an order. 
 The principle of causality is imperative in 
 human thinking. There is nothing more so. 
 Consciously or unconsciously it is at work. 
 The boor’s mind asserts it, as does the phil¬ 
 osopher’s. There is no difference, in the begin¬ 
 ning, between them. The only difference is in 
 the rationality and sense of the conclusions 
 reached. The crudest human thinking turns 
 to the universe about it, and to itself and its 
 life, and demands a whence, a why, and a how. 
 A cause for an effect. The constitution of 
 man is such that he requires a reason for 
 things, and it is to that imperative requirement 
 that he owes all his advancement in knowledge. 
 It is the parent of all his philosophies, sciences, 
 and theologies. The apple falls. But why 
 does it fall ? Not merely, mark you how? for 
 the answer then would simply register a pro¬ 
 cess without satisfactory reason. But why ? 
 by what cause, and for what purpose ? 
 
 And here is the great and fatal lack in the 
 
24 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 entire system of evolution as a philosophy . 10 
 In England alone, possibly, and in shop-keep¬ 
 ing England, not the England of Bacon or 
 Shakespeare, but the England of Cobden and 
 Bright, could such a system have ventured to 
 assume the name of philosophy. True or false, 
 it is a mere registering of the how —the man¬ 
 ner of the process. It scornfully scouts the 
 idea that we can know the whence or the why, 
 the cause and the meaning. There is that sort 
 of shallow practicality about it which belongs 
 to buyers and sellers, to the men of cotton- 
 mills and spinning-jennies, and a farthing bet¬ 
 ter on a bolt of calico and a farthing less on a 
 cotton bale, to whom no thinking which does not 
 think out profit is of any use. 
 
 And yet, though the master of the system 
 tells us that there is nothing so certain as that 
 the by what and the why are utterly inscruta¬ 
 ble, and the pupils tell us that to inquire about 
 them is a childish waste of time, we are here 
 met by the curious fact (for human nature is a 
 
 10 The evolution philosophy is like the philosophy of the locomotive 
 which would tabulate the revolution of the wheels, the pressure of 
 the steam, the consumption of the coal, the number of pieces in the 
 machinery, while resolutely insisting that the questions “ Who made 
 it?” and “ What was it made for?” are quite impractical—in fact, 
 “unthinkable.” There is no doubt but a very practical knowledge 
 —sufficient to run the engine—would be thus acquired. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 25 
 
 persistent affair, and cannot be choked by- 
 philosophers), that still the old questions 
 are put; that even they themselves, whether 
 or no, must put them; and that their en¬ 
 tire philosophies are attempts to make the 
 universe an ordered kosmos, to make it 
 respectably sensible and rational to human 
 thought. 
 
 And first of all, if the philosophy be true ; 
 if, by the blind working of blind force, man 
 and man’s brain and man’s sense and reason 
 come out of slime without any purpose ; if in 
 all the infinite ages past there was no sense 
 and no aim, but only an infinite set of chances ; 
 how comes it that this senseless and purpose¬ 
 less power evolves a being who turns round 
 and demands of it how it came to do this, 
 and by what power and for what end ? How 
 came a senseless force to evolve a sensible 
 man ? An irrational brute movement to create 
 a reason ? A thing that cannot put two and two 
 together to evolve a creature who turns round 
 on this thing, criticises its action, blames its 
 processes, demands to know its meaning, 
 writes “ First Principles ” and other philo¬ 
 sophic books about it, drags it bound to his 
 bar of judgment, and when its workings do 
 
26 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 not suit him, checks or upsets those workings 
 at his will ? 
 
 For you understand, of course, that by this 
 philosophy there is but one force in heaven 
 above or earth beneath ; that it is the same 
 force driving on to mad ruin in the cyclone of 
 the western prairie, and in the mother’s voice 
 singing her babe to sleep in the cottage in its 
 path ; that in the rotting swamp that breeds 
 the pestilence, where foul things twist and 
 crawl, and the heavy air bears poisonous death, 
 the force is just the same as that which weaves 
 the lofty measures of “ The Idyls of the 
 King,” or writes Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “ First 
 Principles,”—as much sense and purpose in it 
 at one time as another. 
 
 I fail to see how the rational can come out 
 of the irrational. To me the conception is 
 “ unthinkable ”—an utterly “ pseud-idea,” to 
 use pet phrases. I simply cannot commit the 
 intellectual suicide which requires me to believe 
 that a thing like the eye of an eagle was not 
 made, but produced through trillions of years 
 by millions of happy chances, which chanced 
 to survive, and that it was not intended in any 
 of those millions of years as a thing to see by. 
 I must decline to be scolded out of my com¬ 
 mon-sense in the name of “ science.” 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 27 
 
 If I find a piece of chipped flint, a poor, 
 clumsy little bit of stone hacked into a rude 
 triangular form, there is not a living scientist 
 that will not tell me “ that was made by a man, 
 a rational man, and it had a final end ; it was 
 meant for shooting with.” Yet I find so mar¬ 
 vellous a structure as the human eye, and a 
 great scientist has a great intellect so twisted 
 by the worship of his “ idols of the cave,” 
 that he tells me it was never made, and it 
 certainly was not evolved for the purpose of 
 seeing ! 
 
 I think no reflecting man can fail to be 
 struck with the position man occupies upon 
 the earth in regard to this matter. He de¬ 
 mands that the world shall give an account of 
 itself—shall be a sane world. By his mental 
 constitution he is compelled to believe there is 
 a cause for what he sees and a purpose in 
 things. The world is not a mad-house. 
 Things go by rule. And on that conviction 
 man masters the world. For, when he finds 
 things unreasonable, he sets to work rationaliz¬ 
 ing them. He dikes in the river; he drains 
 the marsh ; he fells the forest; he walls out 
 the sea. He blasts the hills open and bursts 
 his way into the mine. He removes moun- 
 
28 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 tains, as was promised, by faith—faith in his 
 own sense, and in the world’s sense also. He 
 has modified the face of the earth in the his¬ 
 toric period—that is, in the time in which we 
 know any thing about him, or the world either 
 —more than all blind forces, tides, winds, 
 earthquakes, together . 11 
 
 Every step he takes is based upon the 
 conviction that there is sense in things which 
 will answer to his sense, that the world made 
 by a Logos will respond to the dealings of a 
 Logos, that brains somehow fit in with the 
 management of the world, and that its force, 
 in any shape, can be understood by brains, 
 managed and even mastered by brains. 
 
 The poets, who express the inmost heart 
 and root of things, by that insight which makes 
 them seers, and with the central truth which 
 makes them teachers and sages, have never 
 doubted about a world with sense, a world 
 made for something, good for something. 
 
 In every drama of Shakespeare the scene is 
 in a world where the laws are laws with a 
 meaning and laws with an end. From Sopho¬ 
 cles and Euripides to Alfred Tennyson, the 
 
 11 See “ The Earth as Modified by Human Action,” by George 
 P. Marsh. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 2 9 
 
 poets, like the real philosophers, do not fear 
 to tell us of a world that has a meaning. 
 
 That “ one increasing purpose runs 
 Through all the circles of the suns,” 
 
 has been the faith of all the intellectual guides 
 of men. The mind rejects the teachers of 
 blindness, senselessness, and chaos coming 
 again. 
 
 I stand in amazement, at times, before the 
 attitude of these men, who demand of me 
 intellectual suicide in this matter of final 
 causes. Such a man as Sir Henry Thompson, 
 for instance, is so paralyzed by the temporary 
 scientific fashion, so stands in awe of a form 
 of words, that he feels compelled to apologize, 
 because, in a late article, he ventures to 
 suggest that the decay of the teeth in old age 
 might signify that the old man need not eat so 
 much beef and mutton as formerly ! 
 
 Here, in an institution of liberal learning, I 
 may surely plead for intellectual liberty, against 
 the fetters of a system which would impose 
 itself under the name of science without scien¬ 
 tific proof. 
 
 Mr. Darwin finds that under domestication 
 and the care of men, plants and animals, pi- 
 
30 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 geons especially, will take on peculiar forms. 
 At the same time the pigeons are always 
 pigeons, never become eagles, nor even geese. 
 Also, as soon as this intelligent oversight is 
 removed, the evidence is, that, left to his own 
 devices, all the peculiarities will disappear, and 
 tumbler and fantail and pouter will become 
 rock pigeons like their grandmothers. So far 
 science . That much we know . 
 
 But from this, to assume that, without in¬ 
 telligent control, by happy-go-lucky chance, 
 which happened to fit, and happened to stay, 
 not the varieties of species, but the infinite 
 varieties of all known things, animal and vege¬ 
 table, the toad-stool and the toad, the sage- 
 bush and the sage, the blind-worm and William 
 Shakespeare, all came from the same grand¬ 
 father, and evolved themselves somehow— 
 nobody knows how, in some place—nobody 
 knows where, in some time—nobody knows 
 when, and by the power of a formula, namely, 
 '‘survival of the fittest,” from the same origi¬ 
 nal mud-bath, I humbly beg to believe is not 
 science, and scarce a rational guess, to the 
 thought of men whose brains are yet normal. 
 
 For there is not in all the historic period, in 
 all the records of all the past wherein men 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 31 
 
 lived, nor in any bones dug up in any place, a 
 single case in evidence where a cat became a 
 dog, an oyster ever became a clam, or an oak 
 tree became a chestnut tree. So far are we 
 from evidence that a sponge was the kosmic 
 grandfather of Plato. 
 
 I am not concerned to dwell here upon the 
 enormous difficulties, the unbridged gaps, the 
 wild guesses, and bald assumptions with 
 which the amiable naturalist weaves his ro¬ 
 mance, nor even to call attention to the fact 
 that in his last editions he has practically 
 given up the position of the first. These 
 things are all treated of abundantly by scien¬ 
 tific men, and will be hereafter. 
 
 I am dealing here with the central idea of 
 Mr. Darwin, organized into his philosophy by 
 Mr. Spencer, that in all these changes there 
 is no sense. The logical lapse is enormous. 
 The only changes, marked and striking (but 
 within the bounds of species), are of animals 
 and plants in domestication , under control of 
 reason and will, modifying and even opposing 
 nature ; and Mr. Darwin’s logical conclusion 
 is, that when he finds changes, not under do¬ 
 mestication, he is to assume there is no reason 
 and no will in the case ! 
 
32 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 The pouter pigeon, in so far as he differs 
 from the other pigeons, does so because a 
 rational will and purpose controls him and 
 keeps him a pouter, indeed made him a 
 pouter in the first place for reasons of its own. 
 Mr. Darwin hence concludes that the pigeon 
 himself was made without any rational will or 
 intention, and stays a pigeon for no reason or 
 end whatever. You may call this ‘‘science,” 
 for people talk very loosely nowadays ; but, 
 gentlemen, you have studied logic—is it 
 logic ? 
 
 Years and generations of careful training 
 with a specific purpose, by a rational will, has 
 succeeded in making a setter dog. It has not 
 made a horse of him, and the idea that it 
 could, even if carried to the end of time, would 
 be considered a very “pseud-idea” indeed. 
 The dog has not shown the slightest tendency 
 even to become a fox or a wolf. He is still a 
 dog. But he is a particular type of dog, with 
 particular tendencies and capacities, which are 
 kept cultivated and intended for a specific 
 purpose. Let him go his own way, and, in a 
 few generations, left to nature, your highbred 
 setter is a mongrel cur, making night hideous 
 with the dogs of Constantinople. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 33 
 
 Now shall I be told that while it requires 
 reason, fixed purpose, and the sensible man¬ 
 agement of a controlling will, to keep and 
 preserve the small variation which makes the 
 setter, since it will disappear if the setter is 
 turned loose to nature’s care, yet the enor¬ 
 mous variation, which differentiates the entire 
 dog from a dogwood blossom, was brought 
 about without any reason, or any sense, or any 
 will, and for no purpose ? 
 
 Mind, this is not even questioning that the 
 dog may be the product of Bathybius. It is 
 only asking, if it takes some sense, will, and 
 purpose to make a setter out of a cur, and keep 
 him setter, whether it is rational, logical, and 
 highly scientific to conclude that it took no 
 will, no purpose, no rational sense to make a 
 dog out of Bathybius, and keep him a dog ? 
 
 The scientific people have their own work 
 in this business, and some of them are attend¬ 
 ing to it as they ought to do. They are show¬ 
 ing the facts distorted, the theories assumed as 
 facts, the staring facts put aside, the evidence 
 built on guesses and a priori assumptions 
 which have no place in natural science, and 
 which every man has the inherent right to 
 make for himself, and every other man has the 
 inherent right to deny ! 
 
34 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 But here we have only time to point to the 
 perversions of logic, which are perhaps not to 
 be wondered at in a system which begins by 
 denying any logic in the universe. 
 
 Take the very definition of evolution as ap¬ 
 plied to biology : natural selection—survival of 
 the fittest. Selection of what ? Survival of what? 
 
 Mr. Darwin holds that man’s immediate an¬ 
 cestor was a monkey, arboreal in his habits 
 (lived in trees, that is), was covered with 
 hair, and had a tail. Now, some monkey of 
 this breed took a step some time toward be¬ 
 coming a man. What was it ? He must have 
 come down out of the trees ! He must have 
 determined to stop being monkey to the de¬ 
 gree of walking on his hind legs! He must 
 have taken some method to gradually get rid 
 of his tail ! 
 
 Now, notice, the long forearms, the claws, 
 the prehensile tail, had been, by Mr. Darwin’s 
 theory, developed to enable the creature to 
 live in trees. He and his survived, according 
 to Mr. Spencer, because, having such tails, 
 claws, four feet, which were not hands and not 
 feet either, thick skulls, little brain, and conse¬ 
 quently light heads, and hairy bodies, they 
 were best fitted to live in trees. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 35 
 
 And now the first adventurous monkey who 
 has the ambition to become a man, foregoes 
 all these advantages, insists on tottering on 
 his hinder legs and disusing his tail; insists on 
 coming down out of the trees where he could 
 gather nuts, escape stronger animals, swing by 
 his tail, and curl up warm in his fur; insists 
 on throwing away his advantages as a quite 
 admirable monkey, and becoming a very imbe¬ 
 cile, idiotic, and helpless man. Why, such a 
 monkey would have been torn limb from limb 
 the first day by some wildcat. He would have 
 starved to death because he would not climb 
 for nuts. He would have been pelted to death 
 in derision of his folly by his own companions. 
 In some one of a hundred wretched ways our 
 supposed ambitious ancestor would have per¬ 
 ished—when he had given up all his advan¬ 
 tages as a monkey, and had not acquired a 
 single advantage as a man ! 
 
 Seriously, I mean, that just here is a logical 
 gulf which is impassable. What the developing 
 monkey gained, to enable him to survive as 
 the fittest, must have been in the direction of 
 making him a complete monkey—never in 
 the direction of making him like a fish or 
 like a man. 
 
3 6 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 What enables the dog to survive on the 
 principle, if it be a principle, of survival of the 
 fittest, must be that he becomes in some direc¬ 
 tion more of a dog. No possible development 
 of a trout, in the direction of survival of the 
 fittest, would ever make the trout successful 
 on dry land. If the theory of some modern 
 biologists, that birds are the descendants of 
 snakes, were true (which I do not, of course, 
 believe), it surely must find it hard to place 
 itself under the laws of development. The 
 snake, whose prey is to be seized by gliding 
 noiselessly upon it, without disturbance of leaf 
 or branch or dry twig (if he be a tree-climbing 
 snake), must have strangely embarrassed his 
 proceedings by fluttering and plunging about 
 with his useless embryo wings, to the alarm of 
 the whole forest—wings he could not fly with 
 yet, and which spoiled his shape for creeping. 
 He lost his advantage of fitness as a snake, 
 and had acquired no advantage yet as a 
 bird ! 
 
 And that is the difficulty in the combination 
 of these two theories, which are strangely con¬ 
 founded, while they are totally separate and 
 even mutually destructive. 
 
 “ Survival of the fittest ” has nothing to do 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 37 
 
 with creation of species. Indeed, its operation, 
 if one examine, would be to render mutation 
 of species impossible. Each soldier in the 
 struggle for existence handles his own weapon 
 best. The eagle survives as the fittest eagle. 
 No fitness as an eagle makes him likely to sur¬ 
 vive as a swan. That which makes the horse 
 survive is the excellence of the qualities which 
 make him a horse—a lion’s claws, an eagle’s 
 wings, a whale’s fins, would not help him. And 
 that which makes the monkey survive, is that 
 he is a capable, shrewd, cunning, flexible¬ 
 handed, and flexible-spined monkey. He 
 survives because his development is on the 
 line of monkey-development, and he is the 
 * fittest monkey to exist. Any attempt to imi¬ 
 tate a man, to put clothes upon himself, to 
 walk on two hands, to stand erect, to do with¬ 
 out those big jaws which crack the nuts, or to 
 get a bigger brain which would make him 
 giddy,—all this would not help him to be a 
 man, and would be his utter ruin as a 
 monkey. 
 
 So enormous is the gap to be bridged that 
 Mr. Wallace (who wrought out the theory of 
 natural selection about the same time as Mr. 
 Darwin, and quite independently) cannot 
 
38 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 bring himself to include man in its working. 
 Mr. Darwin, however, more logically, includes 
 him,—and, indeed, if the blind chances of 
 matter vibrating from homogeneous to hetero¬ 
 geneous is able to account for all the rest 
 of the universe, one need not stop at man ! 
 
 Yet man is the completion—the crown of 
 all the selection, and all the survival, accord¬ 
 ing to the theory. And there is this curious 
 consequence. Not only his existence, but his 
 life, his words, his works, his thoughts, his 
 affections, must all be accounted for by the 
 action of force. You must look to weigh his 
 love and hate by foot-pounds, as you weigh any 
 other manifestation of force. His patriotism, 
 his sense of justice, his benevolence, must be 
 expressible in the units of the metric system. 
 His most elevated religious feeling, his ten- 
 derest human sentiment, must be expressible 
 in measures of force. You must be prepared 
 to accept the thought of a Shakespeare or a 
 Bacon, as the equivalent of the force, that fats 
 a swine or makes a dunghill rot! 
 
 It is necessary at times to take matters out 
 of the veil of learned phrases in which they 
 are concealed, and put them in simple Eng¬ 
 lish, that we may understand. The result I 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 39 
 
 have mentioned is accepted by the philosophy 
 of evolution, on its so-called law of the 
 correlation and conservation of force: a 
 Principia manifests the same force which fats 
 a bullock ; and a Hamlet, the force that rots 
 him by the roadside should you leave him 
 there. All is from molecular motion, and 
 there is as much sense in one set of vibrations 
 as in another ! But here again comes in the 
 I of man,—the will, the personality, the 
 self-assertion. Define him as you will, and 
 theorize about his coming as you will, here 
 man is, with a reason, and he demands that 
 nature must be rational. He declines to sub¬ 
 mit to any thing he judges irrational. If 
 matter has developed him by any rule of 
 thumb, like survival of the fittest, he acts 
 very strangely toward his Creator. 
 
 He turns right about on nature, and says, I, 
 and not you, shall decide what and who is 
 fittest. You say weeds, I say corn. You say 
 cockle, I say wheat. You say wolves, I say 
 sheep. You say hawks, I say doves. What I 
 consider fittest, shall survive in spite of you ; 
 and your fittest, which you are trying with all 
 your powers to preserve, shall perish at my 
 word. You have used your utmost to make 
 
40 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 the swamp survive. Lo, I say it shall perish ! 
 To make the tangled forest survive, and, lo I 
 destroy it, and the fair geen meadow survives 
 it its stead. 
 
 Has survival of the fittest developed then its 
 own master ? It would seem so. There is no 
 way to explain these things away and leave 
 the universal common-sense of men existing. 
 
 Mr. Huxley is compelled to admit that our 
 “ will counts for something in the course of 
 events.” If it counts for any thing, it traverses 
 fatally the philosophy of development. But 
 men’s common sense, and common eyesight, 
 and common consciousness, tell them it counts 
 for more on the face of this world than all 
 other forces whatever. It dares to dash itself 
 right up against the bucklers of blind force, 
 and demand a reason. It compels an explana¬ 
 tion, and asserts the mastery of the will and the 
 Logos, the Light and the Life, by breaking 
 the blind forces into harness, and driving them 
 by that will. 
 
 All other creatures seem parts of nature, 
 live dumbly in accord with its dumb forces, 
 question nothing either in life or in death. 
 This last strange creature, in passionate protest 
 against mere force, against disorder, confusion, 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 41 
 
 and unreason, stands defying the universe, 
 and insisting that if it be not rational, he is 
 bound to make it rational, and will make it so, 
 or die protesting and armed upon the field. 
 
 “ Survival of the fittest,” is it ? Who are 
 fittest ? What does nature know about it; or 
 “ natural selection,” when it comes to man ? 
 He shall decide, I say. His hunch-back child 
 shall survive as Alexander Pope, and write 
 Dunciads and Essays on Man. His poor puny 
 offspring shall survive as Isaac Newton, to tell 
 the world how its Maker hangs the stars in 
 order, and rolls the systems in harmony. His 
 purblind scrufulous son shall be Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson. His blind men shall see Iliads and 
 Odyssies arise from the many-sounding sea, or 
 their sightless eyes shall pierce the heavens 
 with Milton, and scan the secrets of the abyss. 
 His weakling, doomed to perish by your blind 
 law of survival, shall stand upon the quarter¬ 
 deck of the Victory and guide the thunders of 
 Trafalgar. Man shall measure, by his own 
 judgment of fitness, his own children ; and the 
 weakest of them, physically, shall be his heroes 
 and his leaders, his lords of men and shakers 
 of the world. 
 
 For here when we have scanned the field, 
 
42 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 we are brought back to the old proclamation 
 of reason : “In the beginning was the Logos, 
 all things were made by Him, and without Him 
 was not any thing made that was made.” 
 
 And man, the image of the Logos, finite, 
 shadow of the Eternal and Infinite Reason, 
 stands facing nature on his royal right to ques¬ 
 tion, to order, to modify, to control ; stands 
 to vindicate, by his position of reason, the 
 universe as no Devil’s phantasmagoria, no 
 beastly lair of Setebos and Caliban, but a 
 world of order and of law, where all is reason¬ 
 able as far as we have yet seen, and in which 
 our human instinct keeps time and touch so 
 true to the Nature of Things, that we stride 
 forward as if under an overpowering com¬ 
 mand, to demand that it shall be rational, and 
 that we must make it rational whereinsoever 
 it fails. 
 
 I hold that the attitude of humanity, in this 
 respect, upon the earth has no logical basis, and 
 no sufficient scientific basis, save that, being a 
 world of reason, will, and purpose, this creature 
 of reason, will, and purpose feels it is his own, 
 that it fits him and answers to him, and that 
 every step in the process of making it a human 
 world, is another step in the making it divine. 
 
LECTURE SECOND. 
 
 “ They fought from Heaven. 
 
 The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” 
 
 —Judges, v., 20. 
 
 A cry from a woman’s lips—a triumphant 
 cry for a great national deliverance. The 
 right cause and the wrong had met, as they 
 have met so often on the world’s battle-fields, 
 and, on this field at least, the wrong went 
 down, while, to outward seeming, the right 
 was feeble and the wrong was strong. 
 
 Cruelty, oppression, brute power, with its 
 chariots of iron and its serried ranks of spears, 
 met a hastily gathered band who fought for 
 home and freedom and order and right, and as 
 at Platea and Marathon, and on many a smit¬ 
 ten field beside, the right was victor, to the 
 lasting joy of men. 
 
 And this strange woman, prophetess and 
 poet, judge and leader, who had summoned 
 the army of the defenders, sang to the listen¬ 
 ing sky her song of triumph for her people. 
 
 43 
 
44 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 The victory was so complete, the defeat was 
 so overwhelming, that, praise as she might, as 
 they well deserved, Barak ben Abinoam and 
 his ten thousand, the event was not thus 
 explainable. 
 
 Merely human forces were not sufficient. 
 The victory came from the unseen powers. The 
 eternal righteousness that stands behind the 
 shadow of every temporal wrong had taken the 
 cause into his own hands. “ They fought from 
 heaven. The stars in their courses fought 
 against Sisera.” The awful powers of nature 
 were against this evil man and the brutally 
 selfish kingdom he defended. “ The nature 
 of things ” showed itself on the side of right¬ 
 eousness. 
 
 Is this the rhapsody of an excited poetical 
 imagination only ? Consider that the poet’s 
 truth is always the highest human truth. For 
 he sees the heart of things, the unchanging 
 reality under the ever-changing show. The 
 truest human book in the English tongue is 
 that which contains the poems of Shakespeare. 
 Newton’s Principia is not truer than Macbeth. 
 
 But this woman was seer and poet in one. 
 She had not only sight, but insight. She sang 
 that the stars might hear. She sang for all 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 45 
 
 the ages. And because her utterance was true 
 forever, the utterance in Hebrew speech of an 
 everlasting law, her song could not die as a 
 song of mere patriotic rejoicing ; but echoes 
 under all the skies and surges up to all the 
 stars, a world’s proclamation : “The stars in 
 their courses fought against Sisera.” 
 
 One cannot help remembering the lonely 
 soul, gnawing his heart in pain, grimly wrest¬ 
 ling with sickness of body and that sceva, in- 
 dignatio that tortured the soul of Swift—the 
 scorn and hatred against a mean, cowardly, and 
 stupid world,—who has just passed from among 
 us, and how passionately he clung to this, 
 when there was nothing else to cling to; how 
 he made himself its prophet, and proclaimed it 
 fiercely sometimes, sometimes pathetically and 
 mournfully, that the “ eternal veracities,” at 
 least, were always on the side of right and 
 armed against wrong ;—Thomas Carlyle from 
 Scottish hill-side or crowded London street 
 proclaiming, as best he might, the law that 
 burned upon the lips of Deborah four thou¬ 
 sand years ago ! 
 
 I asked in my first lecture, Is the world a 
 rational world ? I ask now, Is it moral ? First, 
 Is there any sense in the nature of things, any 
 
4 6 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 intelligence, any purpose or meaning ? And 
 now I ask, Is there any right in the nature of 
 things or any wrong ? 
 
 Deborah's cry is the answer of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment. It is no discord there. The universal 
 utterance of seer and prophet, psalmist and his¬ 
 torian, is in accord with the voice of her “ who 
 dwelt beneath the palm-tree.” “ The nature 
 of things,” the awful powers seen and unseen, 
 are against wrong. The blood of a murdered 
 brother cries from the ground. The earth will 
 not hide the murder. The heavens will become 
 brass and the earth iron when men turn to 
 evil. The burden of the ancient book from 
 first to last is a proclamation that the forces of 
 nature avenge the poor and the unjustly 
 oppressed, and are armed against the tyrant 
 and the evil-doer, and the end is certain in due 
 time. These Hebrew words of threatened 
 vengeance against lies, hypocrisy, cowardice, 
 selfishness, and wrong, are, when you examine 
 them, in their most terrific denunciations, but 
 the proclamation that the world is moral, the 
 kosmos is on the side of righteousness, the 
 stars and spaces and abysses above, below, are 
 against the evil, are forever rolling the right 
 into light and victory. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 47 
 
 The view of material nature in the New 
 Testament is, as we might expect, an illumina¬ 
 tion and revelation of the Old. 
 
 In our Lord’s parables nature puts on a 
 diviner dress. I wonder shall we ever dare in 
 our theologies to think of nature as our Lord 
 saw her ? With Him the world is spiritual. 
 Matter is translucent with the light divine. 
 The grass at His feet grows in its way, as the 
 archangels grow in theirs. The sparrow’s 
 law is a concentric circle with the laws that 
 bind Orion and the Pleiads. The country 
 laborer scattering seed in the furrow, the 
 philosopher that sows thought, the preacher 
 that scatters principles among men,—even the 
 eternal Logos and Son of Man Himself who 
 drops living words into the seed-bed of men’s 
 souls, work on a continuous line, under one 
 law, whose circuit sweeps the infinite. 
 
 Facing this doctrine of Revelation stands 
 the doctrine of what is called “ Science.” Here 
 again there is absolutely no reconciliation. 
 Evolution, as a system of ethics, declares the 
 universe not z'wmoral indeed, for that would 
 be to give it some spiritual value, but abso¬ 
 lutely amoral. The moral qualities of men, 
 like the intellect of men, are the result of 
 
48 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 molecular vibrations. By a law of fatal neces¬ 
 sity, the same force that acts in the brain and 
 arm of the murderer, acts also in the brain and 
 heart of the tenderest mother that watches 
 over her baby’s cradle. The action in each 
 case is, in the last analysis, absolutely indif¬ 
 ferent, even absolutely the same. 
 
 What we call morality is only the result of 
 inherited molecular movement in the brain. 
 There is no absolute right or wrong in the 
 case, none in the world, no ultimate “ I ought,” 
 anywhere, and the whole kosmos which has 
 been evolved by the rhythmic vibrations of the 
 atoms is absolutely indifferent to rights and 
 wrongs. 
 
 You will observe that the system does not 
 deny that there are such words as right and 
 wrong, and that they represent something. 
 But what they represent is purely conventional 
 —the notions that have been formed by hered¬ 
 ity, by the law of the survival of the fittest, in 
 men trying to live together in a social order. 
 
 They have no value, I mean, outside of the 
 environment. They are not of the essence or 
 necessity of things—these ideas of right and 
 wrong. There is nothing answering to them 
 in the universe. They have been evolved out 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 49 
 
 of matter and will fall back like every thing 
 else into the homogeneity of the world-mist 
 again, the weltering chaos of gases, which is 
 the same stuff out of which are made all virtues 
 and all goodnesses, all lovelinesses and tender¬ 
 nesses, as well as all lusts and all beastlinesses, 
 all swine and all sties for swine. 
 
 I desire to put the conclusion which is 
 accepted, and even gloried in, by the masters 
 in this school, into the plainest English, that 
 we see it for what it is—something that is apt 
 to escape us when left in the large and learn¬ 
 edly sounding syllables of “ science ! ” 
 
 Now let us observe here that no matter 
 what may be the explanation of, the origin of, 
 the ideas of right and wrong, the fact of their 
 existence in man is admitted of necessity. 
 The doctrine of evolution requires that they 
 shall have been evolved from the original cell 
 like all else, and were latent and potential in 
 the hypothetical fire-mist of the nebular 
 theory. But the theorist is bound to admit 
 their present existence as much as you or I. 
 H e is of course also bound to show how they 
 gradually grew to be what they are in a 
 Christian man, in the saintliest soul that ever 
 blessed the world, in our Lord Himself (let us 
 
5o 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 state the conclusion without a word of the 
 horror it inspires), through crawling worm, 
 lemur, and ape and brutal savage—the same 
 in all, and in their activity in all just the same 
 —the blind quiverings, the attractions and 
 repulsions of matter! 
 
 But the fact is that here is a being who has 
 a conscience, as we call it, as well as a con¬ 
 sciousness. Barbarous or civilized, in the 
 Feejee Islands or in London, it is all the 
 same : this unique being has the sense of right 
 and wrong, goodness and badness, differ as he 
 may about his classification of those qualities. 
 
 It is the power to make a moral judgment 
 I am speaking of, not at all the manner in 
 which such judgment acts. The lameness of 
 the explanation of evolution is that it misses 
 the real point here, or ignores. From animal 
 instincts and from hereditary influences after 
 the beast developed into a man, from the blind 
 gropings of a creature trying to survive in his 
 environment, it might be not a vagary of the 
 scientific imagination to hold that a notion of 
 certain things as bad and certain things as 
 good might arise. As one of our wisest has 
 said: “The ox, if he could think, would call 
 the grazier a good man because he feeds oxen, 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 51 
 
 and the butcher a bad man because he 
 slaughters them.” 
 
 Therefore it is that evolution must deny any 
 absolute morality at all. Moral notions are 
 the growth of the struggle for existence, like 
 all else. In themselves they have no moral 
 value. If we attribute such value, it is a de¬ 
 lusion which also comes from pure selfishness 
 on our part, because the good man’s acts are 
 profitable to us. Altruism, which is the high¬ 
 est test of evolutionary morality, is only good 
 because civilized man cannot survive in the 
 struggle for existence unless he gives others a 
 chance. Pleasure, therefore, is, after all, the 
 necessary root of all morality. Pleasure is the 
 only absolutely good thing, and pain the only 
 absolutely evil. It is of course impossible to 
 found absolute morality on a sensation. But, 
 indeed, I need scarcely dwell so long on this, 
 since the theory denies that there is any thing 
 absolute except matter and force—if indeed 
 they be two and not one—and both are alike 
 unknowable . 1 
 
 1 I have avoided speaking of the very ugly practical consequences 
 which grow out of the doctrine of evolution, when it is applied to 
 ethics. I may quote a Scotchman and a German to show the fruit¬ 
 fulness of the doctrine and the nature of the fruit. 
 
 The Scotch professor, Alexander Bain, in a lecture on the 
 
52 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 But we have to face a fact which I hesitate 
 not to say is universal in man, and which makes 
 him unique among living beings on the earth, 
 —the fact, namely, that he has the power of 
 exercising moral judgments, and that he 
 habitually exercises them ; that this power is 
 just as plainly his as the power of sight or the 
 power of reflection ; that its habitual exercise is 
 one of his most ordinary activities ; that he is a 
 
 “Correlation of Nervous and Mental Forces,” reprinted in a volume 
 of Appleton’s “ Scientific Series,” remarks of excitement : “ It is not 
 a final end of our being, as pleasure is.” The equivalent of this 
 is repeated more than once. Prof. Bain does not seem to be aware 
 that there is any doubt that pain is the sole evil and pleasure the 
 sole good. 
 
 But the most curious result of his medley of matter and mind 
 occurs in this sentence. He is speaking of the consumption of 
 Force in “ moral acquisitions ” : 
 
 “ The carefully poised estimate of good and evil for self, the ever¬ 
 present sense of the interests of others, and the ready obedience to 
 all the special ordinances that make up the morality of the time, 
 however truly expressed in terms of high and abstract spiritu¬ 
 ality, have their counterpart in the physical organism. They have 
 used up a large and definite amount of nutriment, and had they been 
 less developed there would have been a gain of power to some other 
 department, mental or physical.” 
 
 That is, the man without a conscience has an advantage mentally 
 or physically! He is much more likely to “succeed”! And 
 benevolence, conscientiousness, piety uses up a “ definite amount of 
 nutriment (measurable in foot-pounds) which might have gone to 
 making a fortune or winning a prize-fight. 
 
 When “ moral philosophy ” lands us here, the end of that species of 
 it is not far off. 
 
 Prof. Ed. V. Hartmann in his “ Philosophy of the Unknown ” has 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 53 
 
 moral being as plainly as he is a seeing or re¬ 
 flecting being. 
 
 The question is not how came he to have 
 such and such moral opinions—they may be 
 right or wrong,—but how came he to have 
 moral insight at all ? Whence, in a blind 
 world of mere atomic quiverings, came a be¬ 
 ing who, apart from all questions of force and 
 all questions of pleasure, in addition to all other 
 
 a more cynical frankness than his Scotch brother of the same school. 
 He says : “ It is important to make beast life better known to youth 
 as being the truest source of pure nature, wherein they may learn to 
 understand their true being in its simplest form, and, in it, rest and 
 refresh themselves , after the artificiality and deformity of our social 
 condition.” 
 
 Again : “ Let us only think how agreeably an ox or a hog lives, 
 almost as if he had learned to do so from Aristotle ! ” 
 
 And why not ? As long as he has enough to eat, and a good place 
 to wallow, he is “ in harmony with his own environment ”—Mr. 
 Spencer’s idea of a perfect condition,—and is seeking faithfully what 
 Mr. Bain teaches is the.true end, not only of the hog’s existence, but 
 of the existence of the hog’s Darwinian cousins, for whom Mr. B. 
 lectures,—pleasure ! Queer doctrine in the Scotland of John Knox ! 
 
 To clear the atmosphere after this, let us have a blast of fresh air 
 from the heather. Let “ true Thomas,” the one Scottish writing- 
 man of our time, say his say : 
 
 “Has the word * Duty ’ no meaning ? Is what we call Duty no 
 Divine messenger and guide, but a false earthly phantasm made up 
 of desire and fear ? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue, but 
 some passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction 
 others profit by ? [altruism of Mr. Spencer]. I know not, only this 
 I know : If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are 
 we all astray. Behold thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe 
 is— the Devils .” 
 
54 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 decisions, has that in him which decides a thing 
 to be right or wrong ? 
 
 There is here a question to which I may say 
 in all calmness no proximately adequate answer 
 has been attempted by our science. I say this 
 in the face of Mr. Spencer’s “ Psychology,” 
 Mr. Darwin’s “ Descent of Man,” and Prof. 
 Bain on “ The Emotions and the Will.” 
 
 For the idea of the right and the idea of the 
 useful are fundamentally distinct. Indeed, 
 the moral judgment requires for its highest 
 commendation of an action that it should not 
 be useful nor pleasurable, nor in any way of 
 benefit to the doer. Mr. Darwin teaches that 
 the moral sense comes from the development 
 of such instincts as are possessed by brutes— 
 by natural selection. The entire school of 
 sensationalists tell us that right and wrong are 
 only, in last analysis, pleasure and pain, advan¬ 
 tages and disadvantages. 
 
 Yet Mr. John Stuart Mill does not hesitate 
 to write : “ If I am informed that the world is 
 ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, 
 but what they are we cannot learn, nor what 
 the principles of his government, except that 
 the highest human morality which we are 
 capable of conceiving does not sanction them, 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 55 
 
 convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I 
 may. But when I am told I must believe this, 
 and at the same time call this being by the 
 names which express and affirm the highest 
 human morality, I say, in plain terms, that I 
 will not. Whatever power such a being may 
 have over me, there is one thing which he 
 shall not do, he shall not compel me to worship 
 him. I will call no being good who is not 
 what I mean when I apply that epithet to my 
 fellow-creatures, and if such a being can sen¬ 
 tence me to hell, to hell I will go.” 
 
 The sentiment of the believer in absolute 
 right and wrong could not be more strongly 
 or better expressed. It is not a question of 
 profit, or pleasure, or advantage. The human 
 soul stands upon its moral dignity and declares 
 that no power shall make it surrender itself to 
 be the slave of the evil, and no inducement 
 make it lie to its own nature and call that evil 
 good. 
 
 Mr. Mill bears witness to the rooted intui¬ 
 tion which no false theories can destroy out of 
 humanity. He bears witness as well to the 
 identity and permanence of that intuition as a 
 part of human nature, when he, the English¬ 
 man, repeats in English what was a Roman 
 
56 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 utterance centuries ago : “ Victrix causa placuit 
 diis sed victa Catoni.” Nay, no sophistries, no 
 theorizing, no juggle of long words, and no 
 explaining away will rid us of this persistent 
 fact, that among men in all lands and times 
 there has been this gift of moral judgment, 
 this prompt readiness to make it about one’s 
 self and others, this conviction that, when 
 made, men would understand it, and if true 
 would accept it, and that such judgment has 
 appealed to an absolute morality which stands 
 apart from pleasure or pain, from profit or 
 loss. “ Fiat justitia ruat ccelum ,” is a maxim 
 that the moral sense accepts universally, and 
 the loftiest and grandest right act is the act 
 out of which only sorrow, pain, and loss must 
 come to the doer. 
 
 Here again man turns to nature and asserts 
 his sovereignty. Produced from matter and 
 force like the beast or the grass-blade, accord¬ 
 ing to the evolution hypothesis, he turns on 
 the power that produced him and demands its 
 meaning, orders it to the bar of his causality 
 and asks it for an account of itself. But, also, 
 he summons it before the court of his con¬ 
 science and demands to know whether it is 
 moral or immoral, whether its working is right 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 57 
 
 or wrong, whether it can answer for itself not 
 only to a being who asks : “ Have you any 
 sense ?” but to a being who asks also : “ Have 
 you any righteousness ? ” 
 
 Testifying to the permanence and imma¬ 
 nence of this moral conviction of an absolute 
 righteousness in the face of his own poor the¬ 
 ories, behold Mr. Mill again arraigning all 
 nature, without a thought that on his princi¬ 
 ples he is merely nature’s product, like his 
 own cabbages, and, as judge, condemning her. 
 That arraignment and that judgment, in his 
 “ Posthumous Essays,” stands a memorable 
 triumph of the existence and persistence of 
 fact over the finest-spun theories, and an ex¬ 
 ample of the kingly position the human soul 
 instinctively takes in facing all powers outside 
 itself in this realm the Father gave his chil¬ 
 dren. 
 
 “ The order of nature, so far as it is un¬ 
 modified by man, is such as no being, whose 
 attributes are justice and benevolence, would 
 have made with the intention that his rational 
 creatures should follow it as an example.” 
 
 “ The ways of nature are to be conquered, 
 not obeyed. Her powers are often toward 
 man in the position of enemies.” 
 
58 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 “ If the artificial is not better than the natu¬ 
 ral, to what end all the arts of life ? To dig, 
 to plough, to build, to wear clothes, are direct 
 infringements of the injunction to follow na¬ 
 ture. All praise of civilization, or art, or con¬ 
 trivance, is so much dispraise of nature.” 
 
 And this, a direct blow and a staggering, 
 delivered with another purpose, to be sure, 
 straight in the face of the physical fatalism of 
 Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer : “ If action could 
 at all be justified, it would only be in direct 
 obedience to instincts, since these might be 
 accounted part of the spontaneous order of 
 nature, but to do any thing with forethought 
 and purpose would be a violation of that per¬ 
 fect order.” 
 
 I may quote just here Mr. Spencer’s rejoi¬ 
 cing over the utter absence of moral freedom, 
 and his acceptance of that moral condition 
 which Mr. Mill recoils from in horror. 
 
 “ I will only further say that freedom of the 
 will, did it exist, would be at variance with the 
 beneficent necessity displayed in the evolution 
 of the correspondence between the organism 
 and the environment. * * * Were the inner 
 relations partly determined by some other 
 agency, the harmony at any moment existing 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 59 
 
 would be disturbed, and the advance to a 
 higher harmony impeded. There would be a 
 retardation of that grand progress which is 
 bearing humanity onward to a higher intelli¬ 
 gence and a nobler character.” 
 
 One moment only upon this to plumb the 
 ethical philosophy of evolution. If there were 
 free will, free moral choice, so that the man 
 tempted to murder had his “ inner relations 
 partly determined by some other agency ” 
 (conscience, for instance, instilled moral prin¬ 
 ciples, or any other check), which would “ dis¬ 
 turb the harmony” of the environment (place, 
 time, secret opportunity) which leads him to 
 murder, “ there would be a retardation of the 
 grand progress which is bearing humanity 
 onward,” etc ! 
 
 I have not quoted this to show the immo¬ 
 rality of the ethical philosophy which the evolu¬ 
 tion hypothesis necessarily evolves, and the com¬ 
 plete blindness of a virtuous man to the conse¬ 
 quences of his own theories and the meaning 
 of his own words, for certainly Mr. Spencer has 
 not the remotest idea that his philosophy is 
 immoral, and has expressed his surprise that it 
 should so appear to any. I have quoted to 
 show, as in the case of Mr. Mill, that men 
 
6o 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 never hesitate to make moral decisions, al¬ 
 though their theories require them to deny the 
 existence of any absolute morality, and even 
 the existence of any moral distinctions. 
 
 Mr. Spencer does not hesitate to call things 
 “ beneficent,” to speak of them as “ grand ” and 
 “high” and “ noble,” as if these qualities had 
 real existence, and as if man had the unques¬ 
 tionable power to decide in what they existed, 
 could recognize and define them by some stan¬ 
 dard universally acknowledged by human judg¬ 
 ment. To him the order of nature is grand, 
 noble, and beneficent. To Mr. Mill it is cruel, 
 inhuman, and to be opposed by men. Each 
 cites the order of nature to the bar of his consci¬ 
 ence as he does to the bar of his intellect, and 
 decides upon its morals as upon its rationality. 
 
 Now evidently the standard of the morality 
 must be like the standard of rationality, outside 
 nature which is tried and outside the judges 
 who try it. It must be an independent and 
 absolute standard in the minds of both, other¬ 
 wise there could be no certainty that the ethi¬ 
 cal judgment or its grounds, or even the words 
 which express it, would be understood by their 
 readers. Each is confident of an ethical judg¬ 
 ment in himself, and recognizes, by making it, 
 its existence in all other men. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 6l 
 
 But he not only does this, but holds this 
 ethical judgment in humanity to be so sovereign 
 and royal that it is capable of deciding, and by 
 right does try and decide, the moral character 
 of the universe, and its order, and, by conse¬ 
 quence, the moral character of its maker— 
 whether you call him the Father Almighty, 
 or “ the Power behind phenomena ! ” 
 
 And these writers are only doing what all 
 writers have been doing, since there were 
 writers at all; indeed, what all men have been 
 doing since we know they have been doing any 
 thing. 
 
 Take out of the world’s literatures all that 
 relates to moral questions, and the shelves of 
 our libraries would be bare indeed. I do not 
 mean the books which formally deal with ethics 
 merely. I mean that books like life are satu¬ 
 rated with the ethical principle. All great 
 writers are necessarily ethical writers. The 
 moral question, the persistent “ I ought,” is 
 as prominent in Shakespeare and Dante as if 
 they were formal moralists. 
 
 It cannot be otherwise. Nothing is so press¬ 
 ing upon men as the question of what “ ought 
 to be,” ought to be done, ought to be said, and 
 ought to be the result of the doing and saying. 
 The poets are full of it, the novelists are full 
 
62 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 of it, as well as the codes and the religions. 
 Forever in all his relations the question of the 
 duty, the thing due, the thing he ought, the 
 thing he owes in such and such circumstances, 
 is a living and pressing question among men. 
 One of the vastest sides of his intellectual ac¬ 
 tivity, of his organized intellectual occupation, 
 in government, legislation, courts, codes, 
 judges, sheriffs, jails, and gibbets, has been, 
 and is, engaged upon the question of “ the 
 ought.” And whatever the theoretical moral 
 philosopher may elaborate or teach, there is no 
 doubt in the literatures of man, no doubt in 
 the moral judging activities of men, no doubt 
 in the practical decisions of men about their 
 own acts or the acts of others, that there is an 
 independent morality beyond them, a law out¬ 
 side themselves, which takes no account of 
 profit, of survival, or non-survival, which is 
 self-contained, autocratic, final ; which, when 
 you get its utterance, gives a decision from 
 which, by men or gods, there is no appeal, 
 for duty is “ stern daughter of the voice of 
 
 2 So essentially living, human, overgrowing, is the ethical question, 
 that the natural philosopher, as we see, becomes a moralist. A 
 mechanical student discusses the question of duty, a merely physical 
 science unconsciously passes over into moral science ; and Dr. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 6 3 
 
 Conscience may mistake the utterance, as 
 the bodily ear may mistake a word. But there 
 is an eternal “ I ought,” and man recognizes its 
 existence instinctively, and confesses that it 
 binds supremely, come what may. 
 
 Thus appealing to testimony there is no in¬ 
 nate conviction so universally confessed by all 
 tongues, pens, and processes of life as that 
 right and wrong are eternal, and that man 
 owes himself to the right. 
 
 The grandeur and the nobleness of human 
 character stand, by universal consent, on this 
 loyalty. The iron crown of duty is the im¬ 
 perial crown of human nature. The highest 
 character is that so faithful to the “ ought ” 
 that all one has, all one is, estate, honors, 
 peace, comfort, name, fame, life itself, shall be 
 surrendered rather than the right be shamed. 
 “ Integrity” we call this loyalty to righteous¬ 
 ness, and testify, by the word, that it is the 
 wholeness and completeness of human nature. 
 In our ideal of true manhood we demand it : 
 that all shall perish, rather than that right and 
 
 Huxley in his lecture on “ The Physical Basis of Life,” while sneer¬ 
 ing at all the metaphysical and ethical philosophies, as well as at all 
 religions, as vain and useless, proceeds to lay down an ethical science 
 himself, and tell mankind what they “ ought ” to do, and what " is 
 their plain duty,” with all the authority of a Scribe or Pharisee. 
 
64 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 truth shall fail. In slavery, in bonds, in the 
 dungeon, in disease and rags, in writhing tor¬ 
 ture, no man is ruined, no man is shamed or 
 lost, who stands to the thing that is just and 
 right. He keeps his “ integrity,” his whole¬ 
 ness of manhood, his worth and virtue as a 
 man, while loyal to righteousness. 
 
 The two wonders that filled the soul of 
 Kant, “ the starry heavens above and the 
 moral law within,” were each to him real 
 alike. I must accept the universal conviction 
 that they are alike real to all thinking men— 
 and almost alike independent of one’s self—in 
 the thinking. 
 
 Now this moral law within, this moral judg¬ 
 ment and ethical faculty in man, call it what 
 one may, has never been satisfactorily traced 
 to any physical origin, notwithstanding the 
 strange attempts so to trace it. It remains 
 a strange portent on the earth, without suffi¬ 
 cient cause, an unexplained, and I think the 
 more one examines it an unexplainable, phe¬ 
 nomenon, by any process of what calls itself 
 science. 
 
 But its independence of the world, and of 
 all the world holds, is boldly assumed and as¬ 
 serted, by its deliberate turning about upon 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 65 
 
 nature and demanding that nature shall answer 
 to it for its character. 
 
 I have cited two great names in science, in 
 the act of summoning the world to be judged 
 at the bar of human conscience. Mr. Mill 
 condemns nature as cruel and inhuman. But 
 equally St. Paul, though with a larger as well 
 as wiser and more hopeful thought, long since 
 declared that “ the whole creation groans and 
 travails together” and “the creation is made 
 subject to vanity.” Mr. Spencer, compelled 
 by the fatal necessities of his narrow material¬ 
 ism, declares nature at every instant to be ab¬ 
 solutely beneficent, and every possible act of 
 man to be equally good. 
 
 St. Paul sees the evil in xiature which any 
 man can see who does not shut his eyes, but 
 sees also the meaning, and is the one rational 
 philosopher of the three, and the one whose 
 philosophy is that of progress, genuine evo¬ 
 lution, and therefore hope. 
 
 Creation is at the bar of his moral judgment 
 as at that of Mr. Mill, full of vanity and in¬ 
 consequence, full of pain and apparent unrea¬ 
 son, and in bondage and corruption. But it 
 waits. The years are moving on. The sons 
 of God are revealing. The light breaks the 
 
66 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 darkness. The world is imperfect. But it is 
 not mad, nor bad, nor accursed, nor vile. A 
 good world, but capable of being made far 
 better, is St. Paul’s judgment. Just as human 
 nature is good but imperfect, and therefore un¬ 
 der strain of toil and pain, so the kosmos in 
 which it lives is good but imperfect, laboring 
 under stress and strain for the day of its 
 perfection. 
 
 Therefore St. Paul’s moral judgment of the 
 nature of things is an echo far down the centu- 
 ries of the voice from the palm-tree of De¬ 
 borah. The creature is, notwithstanding all 
 temporary triumphs of evils, all successes of 
 wrong and injustice, but struggling onward to 
 “ the glorious liberty.” The supreme law is 
 good. The stars in their courses fight against 
 Sisera. The fight is bitter, the battle sore, 
 and sometimes long time doubtful, and many 
 a good knight of God is trampled down, and 
 many a white banner trailed in the dust, but 
 there can be but one end—the unswerving 
 stars, the awful dim powers that are so in¬ 
 scrutable to science, are on the side of right, 
 the kosmos is moral as well as rational, and 
 though right be on the scaffold and wrong be 
 on the throne, 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 67 
 
 “ Yet that scaffold sways the future, 
 
 And God stands within the shadow, 
 
 Keeping watch upon his own.” 
 
 And now which of these views best answers 
 to the facts ? Which of these decisions is the 
 most “ scientific ” in the true sense of that 
 word ? 
 
 First of all we may appeal to the testimony 
 of mankind, the witness of their universal con¬ 
 viction, that there is an eternal and absolute 
 right, and that the ordered world is upon its 
 side, under whatever stress and pain ; and this 
 conviction is just the clearest and most per¬ 
 sistent, where men have learned most about 
 the world and the action of what people call 
 nature’s laws, and where they are most earn¬ 
 estly endeavoring themselves for the better¬ 
 ment of men. 
 
 The savage may stand in terror of nature, 
 as revengeful, unjust, malignant, or evil in 
 some of its powers. We have no such terror. 
 We do not seek to placate a power of which 
 the more we know the more we know it is 
 on our side. Mr. Spencer declares “ the power 
 that lies behind phenomena” inscrutable, Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold is sure that this inscruta¬ 
 ble power “ makes for righteousness ” at all 
 events. That much is as clear to the dainty 
 
68 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES . 
 
 English scholar as it was to the wise old 
 Hebrew seeress. On that same conviction 
 we are all acting, we who think or speak or 
 work for the good of men. 
 
 There is no progress possible, no real evolv¬ 
 ing, if the world be diabolic. There is none, if 
 it be indifferent. If the nature of things be 
 evil, then destruction and not evolution is the 
 only hope. If it be indifferent, why should 
 men work for the enlightenment or betterment 
 of men in a kosmos stupid to good or ill ? 
 
 Our hands and tongues are paralyzed for 
 any human, reasonable, or beneficent uses. 
 We are men without good in the present and 
 utterly without hope in the future. Swift 
 sweeping out of being of such a universe, 
 would be the only thing left to desire,—the 
 only cry of any prayer. 
 
 We must leave unsolved the mystery of the 
 struggle. That certainly is inscrutable. The 
 origin of evil is an enigma of science. Of 
 science, I say, because evil exists—that is a fact 
 known. How it exists and why it exists be¬ 
 longs to science, if any fact belongs to it. But 
 its beginning is as inscrutable as all beginnings. 
 Certainly the evolution hypothesis does not ex¬ 
 plain the fact by denying it or ignoring it. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 69 
 
 We find the fact and accept it unexplained, 
 though if we should clear it of our confusions 
 it would be well. Pain, suffering, death even, 
 are not parts of the evil in question. The 
 shallowest of all points of view of the nature 
 or meaning of evil, is that of the Hedonist. 
 Bitterest pain, sorest sorrow, anguish, torment, 
 and death do not touch man’s well-being, nor 
 are they his real terrors when he is a man and 
 proposes to stay one. As a bright writer puts 
 it: “ The pleasant, little, perpetual, intellectual, 
 and scientific tea-party of the evolutionist’s para¬ 
 dise is not much loftier than Mohammed’s, and 
 would become in time something of a dreary 
 bore.” 
 
 After all, if we grasped the idea that the 
 essential evil for a man lies in his not being as 
 much of a man as he ought to be , we might find 
 the problem simplified even to science. 
 
 But taking the fact of the struggle which all 
 men see, I say it is unexplainable by any physi¬ 
 cal theories, how men come to have universally 
 the judgment as to which side is the right side, 
 and also how they universally decide that na¬ 
 ture is on that side and works with them, 
 fights for them, and for it, and that in the long 
 run both they and it will be victorious. 
 
yo BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 The cruel, sensual, Midianitish power per¬ 
 ished. The evil Canaanitish powers one by 
 one were swept away. On the walls of Nine¬ 
 veh and Babylon were written the same judg¬ 
 ment and the same condemnation. One by 
 one sure ruin comes upon the strongest and 
 richest of the great unrighteous, greedy, sen¬ 
 sual powers. The heavens condemn them. 
 The earth casts them out. The kingdoms of 
 righteousness alone stand, and stand while 
 they stay righteous. The ages have a moral 
 judgment, and pronounce moral sentences, and 
 the sentences are somehow executed. Rome 
 falls ; and even Gibbon sees that the causes 
 of the fall are moral. The nature of things 
 has pronounced judgment. Jerusalem perishes 
 because it has opposed the moral law of nature, 
 and the law vindicates itself. So continuous 
 is the experience, that it requires no gift of 
 prophecy to foretell a nation’s ruin, and yet 
 the nation may be strong and wise and pru¬ 
 dent in all things but righteousness. Philo¬ 
 sophic history fails not to attribute national 
 ruin to national wrong. 
 
 In the long run and, of course, in an imper¬ 
 fect world, with exceptions that prove the rule, 
 it is with families and individuals as with na- 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON . 
 
 7 1 
 
 tions. In the ethical realm there is, as in the 
 natural, a law of the survival of the fittest. 
 Temporary success may postpone, but does 
 not avert, the issue. Fraud, cruelty, selfish¬ 
 ness, sensuality, cowardice, lying—do these 
 prosper ? Do the families or the individuals 
 that trust in them stand in this world ? If 
 you can pronounce any thing a law, you can 
 pronounce this a law of nature—that they 
 perish, that the sins of the fathers are visited 
 upon the children, and that nature in due time 
 spews them out. A wise and beneficent law 
 is ever working to exterminate the vile, the 
 cowardly, the bad. 
 
 And here, and by no means in Mr. Darwin’s 
 theory of the descent of man, do I find expla¬ 
 nation of the existence of degraded and decay¬ 
 ing races. They are not types of the primitive 
 shape and state of men at all, as far as ascer¬ 
 tained facts go to show. They are, historically 
 and by sure paleontological facts, in many 
 cases at least, merely races of degraded men 
 perishing by the working of a righteous law. 
 The American Indian was found living on the 
 ruins of a civilization which had perished, and 
 so rapidly going to destruction by his own 
 vices, that, if a white man had never landed 
 
72 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 here, it is doubtful whether there would have 
 been many more Indians in the country than 
 there are to-day. This decaying and degraded 
 race were specimens of a people on which the 
 beneficent, eternal law was working ; and it was 
 rapidly killing, scalping, and burning itself off 
 the face of the earth. 
 
 In many groups of the South Sea Islands 
 the facts are the same. The Central American 
 tribes were living on the ruins of a forgotten 
 civilization. It is better to stand by facts as 
 they are, than to be misled by the romances of 
 Mr. Cooper about the Indians, or the romance 
 of Mr. Darwin about primitive man. The 
 best physiologists tell us that even “ the 
 Neanderthal man,” judging by his skull, had 
 as good a brain as the average Frenchman ; 
 and if the Eskimos be survivals of the mythi¬ 
 cal “ Miocene men,” they have survived be¬ 
 cause of many most admirable traits, which, 
 Captain Parry emphatically thought, might be 
 well imitated by Europeans. They are far 
 enough from Mr. Darwin’s imaginary ape who 
 first insisted on dispensing with his tail. 
 
 Nay, it is not development of the tooth and 
 claw of brute force that has caused survival in 
 this world. A great law, working steadily, 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 73 
 
 has been forgotten. Nature has had a moral 
 quality in her. Even the geological records 
 hand in their testimony. The ravening mon¬ 
 sters of the primal slime are stranded wrecks 
 upon the shores of the theoretic geologic ages. 
 Armed and furnished to survive by destruction 
 of all else, nature has cast them out. She has 
 ever been working out the man, while ape and 
 tiger die. 
 
 He was no Christian who sang : 
 
 “ Gentleness, wisdom, virtue, and endurance, 
 
 These are the seals of that most firm assurance 
 That bars the pit over destruction’s strength.” 
 
 The gentle powers, the ordered, sweetly 
 reasonable, and kindly gifts of humanity, are 
 the strong gifts in a nation, or in a man. It 
 would seem as if nature was the enemy, when 
 it comes to him at least, of mere force. 
 
 “ God is on the side of the heaviest artillery,” 
 was the notion of one, than whom no man 
 blundered worse in his understanding of the 
 world and nature. Faith in force and destiny, 
 that was all. And on the sea-washed rock of 
 St. Helena his faith left him stranded, because, 
 as Carlyle would say, “ the eternal veracities 
 were against his lie.” 
 
 A materialistic fatalism which has no place 
 
74 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 for morals—which knows no right and no 
 wrong, is working itself into the thought of 
 the time. It will work itself still more deeply 
 as time passes. Its issue, when accepted by 
 any people, can be, if there be any thing sure in 
 experience,—that is in genuine scientia —only 
 ruin soon or late. Blind pride and blind trust 
 in mere force have a persistent result. 
 
 And this fatalism challenges for itself the 
 name of science, and sets itself out as the 
 one true thing. If it be so, then we must 
 accept the consequences. No matter what the 
 fact be in science, we must face the fact. The 
 consequences must take care of themselves. 
 
 But I must decline to call it science, must 
 decline to accept it because it does not explain 
 all the facts nor satisfy most essential condi¬ 
 tions. It is not that it is opposed to religion, 
 or needs to be reconciled with religion. It is, 
 that it requires me to believe the unbelievable, 
 and accept the unthinkable, results without 
 causes, ends without purpose. 
 
 A creature stamped moral, with the “ I 
 ought ” uttering itself in him, in some dialect, 
 wherever found ; with the sense of duty and 
 right, whatever he may mean by them, sov¬ 
 ereign over his nature though he may rebel ; 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 75 
 
 with this overbearing moral conviction of “ the 
 thing he ought,” in the best types of the race 
 in all ages, driving him to endure misery, 
 hunger, pain, death, binding him in the dun¬ 
 geon, chaining him to the stake, sharpening 
 the axe for him at the block; with the moral 
 judgment of the race powerless to imitate him 
 in its millions, still by its millions uttering 
 itself in “Well done! this becomes a man”; 
 such a creature comes out, I am asked to 
 believe, from the blind working of blind matter, 
 is evolved and descended from mere “ stoff” ! 
 
 Again, this being has the living conviction 
 that not only ought he to be righteous, but 
 that whatever claims his reverence and regard 
 or manly fear should be righteous also ; that 
 his God, if he have a god, must be at least as 
 good as a good man, that the world in which 
 he lives must be a world that makes for right¬ 
 eousness—shall not be a brutal nor a devilish 
 thing. With that persistent instinct he turns 
 upon the world, as we have seen, and ques¬ 
 tions it about its morals and its meaning, hesi¬ 
 tates not to measure it by his human moral 
 judgment, and condemn it, if he think it wrong, 
 with scorn and defiance. And I am asked to 
 believe that blind force and blind matter 
 
;6 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 evolved this being, who insists on turning 
 upon them and judging them both by the 
 moral law that flames within him ! Force 
 binds Prometheus to the rock of matter, but 
 Prometheus defies them both, even with the 
 vulture at his liver,—defies them, and holds him¬ 
 self a man. The old myth is truer to the fact 
 than the new science. 
 
 So I am driven, as the vast mass of men 
 have been driven in all ages, and as the high¬ 
 est, best, and wisest have been glad to confess 
 themselves driven, to hold the kosmos, with all 
 the difficulties of the case, not only reasonable 
 but moral. This, at all events : no matter how 
 inscrutable the power behind phenomena, the 
 facts assure me that He is righteous and works 
 out righteousness in its time. 
 
 So only can I account for any moral law at 
 all in man ; that the world was made and is 
 sustained by a moral power outside man, to 
 which the moral law inside answers ; that here 
 there is the objective law to answer to the sub¬ 
 jective conviction ; that the “ I ought” in man 
 has an eternal “ I ought,” which is beyond cir¬ 
 cumstance and beyond time ; that the con¬ 
 science of man postulates a God of righteous¬ 
 
 ness. 
 
HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 
 
 77 
 
 So I and my kind, in this blind clash of force 
 and stuff can stand secure. It is no blind clash 
 or brute whirl of iron wheels, but a world roll¬ 
 ing daily out into the fairer day—eternal rea¬ 
 son working hitherto, and eternal right evolv¬ 
 ing all things well, crushing as it rolls the 
 bestial and the bad, and wheeling into triumph 
 the manly and the good. 
 
 And we can work and we can suffer, we can 
 fight and, if need be, fall. We can be trampled 
 under the iron hoofs of force and triumphant 
 wrong, and still, with sure conviction, turn 
 dying eyes to the eternal watching stars, and 
 hear the cry come down uttering the conviction 
 of saint and sage, of patriot and hero, of the 
 deliverers of men and the shepherds of the 
 people, in the hour when they fought and fell 
 or conquered, “ The stars in their courses 
 fight against Sisera.” 
 
 Part VI. of Herbert Spencer’s “ Principles of Sociology,” after more 
 than three years since the issue of the preceding volume, has been 
 published under the title “ Ecclesiastical Institutions ” (D. Appleton 
 & Co.). It discusses the origin and development of the religious idea, 
 the rise of a priesthood, with its civil and military functions, and moral 
 influences, and concludes with a religious retrospect and prospect. Mr. 
 Spencer believes that with the transition from theism to agnosticism 
 “ all observances implying the thought of propriation maybe expected 
 to lapse.” But there will still remain a need for qualifying the prosaic 
 form of life with observances “tending to keep alive a consciousness 
 
78 
 
 BEDELL LECTURES. 
 
 of the relation in which we stand to the Unknown Cause.” And in 
 future evolved intelligences this religious feeling will grow deeper and 
 broader. To the man of the future “ there will remain the one abso¬ 
 lute certainty that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
 Energy, from which all things proceed.” 
 
1885 . 
 
 FOUNDER’S DAY 
 
 AT 
 
 Gambier. 
 
FOUNDERS’ DAY 
 
 ORDER OF SERVICE 
 
 November 3, 1885, 
 
 AS ON 
 
 THE FESTIVAL OF ALL SAINTS. 
 
 OFFICIATING PERSONS: 
 
 The Te Deum . 
 Ante-Communion . . j 
 
 The Epistle j 
 
 The Gospel | 
 
 The Creed 
 
 Founders' Memorial . j 
 
 Doxology. 
 
 Prayer for the Institutions. 
 Hymn 232 at 3D Verse. 
 
 Tpie First Lecture. 
 
 . . Kenyon College Choir. 
 
 Rt. Rev. Dr. Knickerbocker, 
 Bishop of Indiana. 
 
 Rt. Rev. Dr. Whitehead, Bishop 
 of Pittsburgh, 
 
 Rt. Rev. Dr. Thompson, Assistant 
 Bishop of Mississippi. 
 
 The Bishop of Pittsburgh. 
 
 Rt. Rev. Dr. Bedell, Bishop of 
 Ohio. 
 
 \ Rt. Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, 
 \ D.D, 
 
 Hymn 494. 
 
 Offertory for Founders’ Scholarship. 
 Matriculation of the Theological Seminary. 
 Matriculation of Kenyon College. 
 
 The Holy Communion— The Bishops Present. 
 
 81 
 
FOUNDERS’ DAY 
 
 THE SECOND LECTURE. 
 
 ORDER OF SERVICE 
 
 AS FOR THK 
 
 MEETING OF THE 
 
 CENTRAL CONVOCATION OF THE DIOCESE. 
 
 I Rev. Sherlock A. Bronson, D.D., 
 The Litany -j Rector of Grace Church, Mans- 
 
 ( field, Ohio. 
 
 Hymn. 
 
 i Rt. Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, 
 The Second Lecture . < D.D., Assistant Bishop of Mis- 
 
 ( sissippi. 
 
 ( Rt. Rev. David Buel Knicker- 
 Benediction . . . -j bocker, D.D., Bishop of In- 
 
 ( diana. 
 
 82 
 
FOUNDERS’ DAY AT GAMBIER, 1883. 
 
 We remember before God this day the Founders of 
 these Institutions : Philander Chase, the first Bishop 
 of Ohio, clarum et venerabile nomen, whose foresight, zeal, 
 unwearied patience, and indomitable energy devised these 
 foundations, and established them temporarily at Worth¬ 
 ington, but permanently at Gambier; he was the Foun¬ 
 der of the Theological Seminary, Kenyon College, and of 
 the Grammar School ;— Charles Pettit McIlvaine, 
 the second Bishop of Ohio, rightly known as the second 
 Founder of these Institutions, whose decision of charac¬ 
 ter and self-devoted labors saved them at two distinct 
 crises of difficulty ; he builded Bexley Hall for the use of 
 the Theological Seminary, Ascension Hall for the use of 
 Kenyon College, Milnor Hall for the use of the Grammar 
 School, and he completed Rosse Chapel on the founda¬ 
 tions laid by Bishop Chase. 
 
 We remember before God this day pious and generous 
 persons, contributors, whose gifts enabled the Bishops of 
 Ohio to lay those foundations, and who are therefore to 
 be named among the Founders. We make mention only 
 of those who have departed to be with Christ, and now 
 rest in Paradise. 
 
 83 
 
8 4 
 
 FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAM BIER. 
 
 Among the many, we name only a few whose gifts are 
 noticeable because of the influence of their character and 
 position : 
 
 Henry Clay, whose introduction of Bishop Chase to 
 the Admiral Lord Gambier, of England, initiated the 
 movement in 1823 ; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the 
 Lord Bishops of London, Durham, St. Davids, Chester, 
 Lichfield; the Deans of Canterbury and Salisbury; 
 Lords Kenyon, Gambier, Bexley, Sir Thomas Acland ; 
 Reverend Edward Bickersteth, Henry Hoare, Marriott, 
 Pratt, William Wilberforce, Thomas Wiggin, Thomas 
 Bates ; the Dowager Countess of Rosse, who aided 
 liberally the Chapel which afterward bore her name ; 
 Hannah More, who also bequeathed a Scholarship 
 which bears her name ; and five hundred and thirty 
 others whose names are recorded in the memorial pre¬ 
 pared by the Rev. Dr. Bronson at the order of the 
 Trustees. 
 
 We remember before God the liberality of William 
 Hogg, from whom this domain was purchased under the 
 advice of Henry B. Curtis and Daniel S. Norton, with the 
 consent of Henry Clay ; the grantor contributing one 
 fourth of its market value. 
 
 In 1838, John Quincy Adams, the President of the 
 United States ; Mrs. Sigourney ; Arthur Tappan, who 
 originated the Milnor Professorship ; St. George’s 
 Church, New York, which established a Scholarship ; 
 Rev. Drs. Milnor, Tyng, Bedell, Sparrow, Keith, Rev. I. 
 
FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAM BIER. 
 
 85 
 
 Morse, Dudley Chase, Albert Barnes, John Trimble, 
 William Jay, Abbott and Amos Lawrence, Peter Stuy- 
 vesant, Richard Varick, and nine hundred and ninety 
 others whose names are recorded. 
 
 These were the first Founders of these Institutions. 
 
 Among those who aided Bishop Mcllvaine we men¬ 
 tion before God to-day,—in 1832, Bishop White, Rev. 
 Manton Eastburn and the Ascension Church, the Rev. 
 Dr. Cutler and St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn, the Rev. 
 Drs. Muhlenberg and Wing, Peter A. Jay, James Len¬ 
 nox, Robert Minturn, Henry Codman, Robert Carter, 
 Matthew Clarkson, Charles Hoyt, I. N. Whiting, and 
 four hundred and sixty others whose names are re¬ 
 corded. 
 
 And in 1835, in England, Daniel Wilson, Bishop of 
 Calcutta; the Bishops of London, Winchester, Salis¬ 
 bury, and Lichfield ; the Duchess of Kent, the Duch¬ 
 ess of Gloucester, the Princess Augusta, the Duchess 
 of Beaufort, the Earl of Carnarvon, Rev. Thomas 
 Hartwell Horne, Charles Brydges, John Fox, Jerram, 
 Jowett, Baptist Noel, Dr. Plumtre, Charles Simeon, 
 Henry Thornton, Sir Thomas Baring, Henry Roberts, 
 architect, who gave the plan and working model for 
 Bexley Hall ; with four hundred and eighty-three others 
 whose names are recorded. 
 
 These are the second Founders of these Institutions. 
 
 We mention before God to-day the gifts of Bishop 
 Gadsden, Bishop Johns, Colonel Pendleton, John Kil- 
 
86 
 
 FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAMBIER. 
 
 gour, the Kinneys, Dr. Doddridge, Charles D. Betts, 
 who founded a fund for the purchase of theological 
 books ; Rev. C. C. Pinkney, who contributed for fit¬ 
 ting up a Laboratory; J. D. Wolfe, who contributed to 
 found the Lorillard and Wolfe Professorships; John 
 Johns, M.D., of Baltimore, who left a valuable legacy 
 to the Institutions ; Stewart Brown, William H. Aspin- 
 wall, and others who contributed to the building of 
 Ascension Hall ; Thomas H. Powers, Lewis S. Ashurst, 
 John Bohlen and sister, and others who founded 
 a Professorship in memory of the late Dr. Bedell of 
 Philadelphia ; Mrs. Spencer, Mrs. Lewis, who partly 
 founded a Professorship, Rev. Dr. Brooke ; Rev. Messrs. 
 Lounsberry and E. A. Strong, whose efforts brought 
 many valuable contributions to these Institutions ; W. 
 W. Corcoran, President Andrews, Rev. Alfred Blake, 
 and nine hundred and forty others who are also to 
 be counted among the Founders of these Institutions. 
 
 And last, the Philanthropist, George Peabody, the 
 intimate friend of Bishop Mcllvaine, who, in token of 
 that friendship founded a Professorship that bears his 
 name. 
 
 We mention before God to-day, with reasons that none 
 can better appreciate than this community, which mourns 
 their loss, three of our citizens, recorded among the 
 Founders : Rev. Marcus T. C. Wing, D.D., who, besides 
 being a Professor in the Theological Seminary, was for 
 thirty years financial agent and book-keeper. More than 
 
FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAMBIER. 
 
 87 
 
 7,000 acres of our land was sold by him, at fair profit, 
 and under his direction, $100,000 economically expended 
 in buildings for these Institutions ; R. S. French, who, with 
 the assistance of friends in Gambier and Mount Vernon, 
 provided the full set of nine bells and the clock, and 
 placed them in the tower, with power to ring the Canter¬ 
 bury chimes : Martinbro White, who was for twenty years 
 Agent and Treasurer of these Institutions, a man of sin¬ 
 gular probity and purity, whose character and work, 
 whose fidelity to his trust, whose honesty as well as 
 honorable dealing during difficult times when these 
 foundations were being laid, entitle him not only to a 
 place in our grateful recollection, but to a place among 
 the chief Founders of these Institutions. 
 
 Among the donors who are living we mention with 
 gratitude William E. Gladstone, Member of Parlia¬ 
 ment (at present Prime-Minister), Rev. Canon Carus, and 
 J. Pye Smith ;—of the United States, Rev. Drs. Dyer 
 and Burr, Professor Francis Wharton, A. H. Moss, M. M. 
 Granger, John Gardiner ; Rev. Archibald M. Morrison, 
 who founded the Griswold Professorship ; Peter Neff, Jr., 
 who gave the Telescope and Transit Instrument ; the 
 Rev. Drs. Muenscher and Bronson, and several hundred 
 others whose names are recorded. 
 
 The third Bishop of Ohio, with the aid of William H. 
 and John Aspinwall, James M. Brown, Samuel D. Bab¬ 
 cock, William B. Astor, and other members of the Ascen¬ 
 sion Church of New York, builded the Church of the 
 
88 
 
 FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAMBIER . 
 
 Holy Spirit for the use of all the Institutions ; through 
 him Mrs. Bowler founded the Professorship which bears 
 her husband’s name, R. B. Bowler, who gave a philosophi¬ 
 cal apparatus, and who, with Larz Anderson, Henry Pro- 
 basco, William Proctor, and others, founded the Mcll- 
 vaine Professorship ; Jay Cooke founded the Professor¬ 
 ship which bears his father’s name ; Frank E. Richmond 
 founded the Hoffman Library Fund ; Stewart Brown 
 builded the tower of the Church, to bear the name of his 
 son, Abbott Brown. By the same Bishop and his wife 
 the Organ was placed in the Church as a memorial of the 
 second Bishop of the Diocese, and the Episcopal chair 
 as a memorial of the great Founder; members of the 
 Church in Philadelphia completed the endowment of 
 the Bedell Professorship, among them chiefly William 
 Welsh, John Bohlen and his sister, and Thomas H. Pow¬ 
 ers, who also left a Fund in the hands of the Vestry of 
 Christ Church, Germantown, for a perpetual supply of 
 specified books for students in Bexley Hall ; and Robert 
 H. Ives and his wife, who stated that, desiring not to 
 trammel the Trustees, they placed their fund in the Treas¬ 
 ury without conditions. 
 
 In 1875 the Trustees determined to found a “ Trustees’ 
 Professorship,” which is partially completed. 
 
 All these, and seventy others, are also to be ^counted 
 among the Founders. 
 
 We mention with gratitude the successful efforts of the 
 present President of Kenyon College to complete the en- 
 
FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAM BIER. 89 
 
 dowments, and the gifts which have resulted therefrom, 
 namely, from R. B. Hayes, President of the United 
 States, Peter Hadyen, Dr. I. T. Hobbs, Rev. William 
 Horton, Thomas McCulloch, Samuel L. Mather, William 
 J. Boardman, A. C. Armstrong, H. P. Baldwin ; from 
 John W. Andrews a donation in lands for the founding 
 of Scholarships in memory of his son ; from Mrs. Alfred 
 Blake donations for the purpose of founding a Scholar¬ 
 ship to bear her husband’s name ; from Columbus De¬ 
 lano the Hall which bears his name ; from Mrs. Ezra 
 Bliss a Library Building, which bears the name of “ Hub¬ 
 bard Hall,” in memory of her brother; and from Henry 
 B. Curtis Scholarships which from generation to genera¬ 
 tion will foster sound learning. These also, with thirty 
 others, the latest givers to our Institutions, are to be 
 counted among the Founders. 
 
 The congi'egation rising. 
 
 For all these generous gifts of the living, and for the 
 memory of the dead who were the Founders of these 
 Institutions, we give hearty thanks to God this day ; 
 ascribing the praise of their benefactions to His almighty 
 grace, and the glory of His most holy Name, who is the 
 God of our fathers and our God, the Father, the Son, 
 and the Holy Ghost, one adorable Trinity for ever 
 and ever. Amen. 
 
 prayer for the institutions. 
 
 O God the Holy Ghost, fountain of all wisdom, source 
 of all grace, be present always, we beseech Thee, with 
 
90 
 
 FOUNDERS' DAY AT GAMEIER. 
 
 these Institutions to direct and bless. Established in the 
 faith of the Gospel, endowed for the service of divine 
 truth, may they ever rest under Thy gracious benediction. 
 We pray Thee to use them for the glory of Christ in His 
 Church, and to make them pure fountains of heavenly 
 knowledge, holy principles, and godly learning. We be¬ 
 seech Thee to give to those who teach in them wisdom 
 and patience, discreetness and zeal for God ; and to those 
 who are taught, aptness to learn, docility, submission 
 without servility, and manly gentleness. O Holy Spirit, 
 make these Thy servants studious, truthful, pure, obedient 
 to all who are in authority, and temperate in all things ; 
 so that, by Thy grace, the same mind may be in them 
 which was in Christ Jesus our Lord, and their character 
 be formed in his holy likeness. Prosper Thou, O Lord, 
 the work of our hands upon us ! Give to Thy people a 
 liberal heart toward these Institutions. May the memory 
 of those whose gifts have enriched us be ever precious in 
 our sight, as it is blessed of God ! And may the good 
 name of these Institutions be handed down from genera¬ 
 tion to generation for the comfort of Thy Church, and 
 the glory of Thy Majesty, Who art, with the Father and 
 the Son, the One God whom we adore for ever and ever. 
 Amen. 
 
FOUNDERS' DAY AT GA MEIER. 
 
 9 l 
 
 THE PRAYER OF LORD BACON. 
 
 ADAPTED FOR STUDENTS. 
 
 To Cxod the Father, God the Word, and God the Holy- 
 Spirit, we pour forth most humble and hearty supplica¬ 
 tions ; that He, remembering the infirmities of our minds, 
 the limits of our knowledge, and the pilgrimage of this 
 our life, in which we wear out days few and evil, would 
 please to open to us new refreshments out of the fountain 
 of His goodness and wisdom. This also we humbly and 
 earnestly beg, that human things may not prejudice 
 such as are divine ; neither that from the unlocking of the 
 gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, 
 any thing of incredulity or intellectual night may arise 
 in our minds toward divine mysteries. But rather that 
 by the cleansing of them through the study of truth, and 
 the purging them from fancy and vanities by the entrance 
 of wisdom, yet subject and perfectly given up to the 
 Divine oracles, there may be given unto our faith the 
 things that are faith’s ; through Him whom truly to know 
 is everlasting life ; and to whom, with Thee O Father, and 
 Thee enlightening Spirit, we ascribe glory and praise world 
 without end. Amen. 
 
Date Due 
 
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 PRINTED 
 
 IN U. S. A.