iilijll liiii jillliipni:: I. 1 1 ! 1 ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ! ! 1 ' 1 Shelf BL 239 .M3 1890 MacColl, Malcolm, 1831-1907 Christianity in relation to science and morals i CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO SCIENCE AND MORALS C H R I S r I A N I T \ IN RELATION TO SCIENCE AND MORALS MALCOLM ^MacCOLL, M.A. CANON RE'^IDENTIARY OF RIPON ANIl RECTOR OF ST. CEORGE's, CITY OF LONDON JAMKS POTT .\: CO. 14 AND 16 ASTOR PLACE ilcto r>orfe M DCCCXC \_ThirJ Edition] TO MY DEAR FRIEND A. S. I DEDICATE THE THIRD EDITION OF THIS LITTLE BOOK, IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF VALUABLE SUGGESIIONS AND CRITICISMS. PREFACE A FEW words are needed to explain the Imper- fections in style and in other respects of the followinor Lectures. At the commencement of my term of residence at Ripon, in the beginning of this year, I was asked by some of the con- gregation w'ho assemble in the Cathedral to eive them a regular course of instruction on some points of Christian doctrine. I gladly agreed, and chose the NIcene Creed as a subject of exposition. Expecting only some forty or fifty persons to be present, I intended to give the instructions at my private residence. The number, however, who Intimated their intention to attend was so laree that I was obliged to meet them in the nave of the Cathedral. What was meant to be mere b ^iii PREFACE. informal and catechetical Instructions thus grew into a set of formal Lectures. They were delivered extempore, and were reported in several newspapers, thus reaching a mudi wider circle than those for whom they were originally intended. Letters have reached me from all parts of the kingdom, and also from the Con- tinent, urging me to publish the Lectures in a volume. Some of these letters are from working men, and others from persons whose abilities and judgment command my respect. I have therefore corrected, and In some cases expanded, the reports of the Lectures which appeared in the press at the time. But they are reproduced here mostly as they were delivered, with the exception of the notes and nearly all the quotations ; for I had hardly any books with me at Ripon to refer to. I am so conscious of the many defects of style and reasoning which disfigure the Lectures, that I should not offer them to the public at all were it not for the many intimations that have reached me, especially from working men all PREFACE. ix over the country, that the Lectures would be useful to persons who have not leisure to study for themselves the questions with which I have dealt. The last Lecture was delivered in Ripon Cathedral in the summer of 1887, and is re- produced from a report of it at the time in the Ripon Gazette. MALCOLM MacCOLL. London, August, 1SS9. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION The second edition of this volume was called for so quickly that I was unable to make any alteration beyond the republication, in an Appendix, of a review of The Unseen Universe, which I wrote on the appearance of that remarkable book fourteen years ago. I have republished that article now in order to show that the views which I have expressed on the subject of creation rest on high authority, both scientific and theological. In this edition I have made a few verbal corrections, but the substance of the volume remains unchanged. On one point only have I seen cause to modify any of the opinions and arguments to which I have committed myself. That point is the permanence of sex in the spiritual world. I am convinced that tlnj xii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. opinion which I have expressed on page 120 cannot be sustained. It is evident, I think, that when our Lord declared that human beings in the spiritual world will be " equal to the angels," '' neither marrying nor giving in marriage," He meant no more than that the union of the sexes for a specific and temporary purpose — the propagation of life — will naturally have ceased.^ There is nothing in His words to imply that the psychological distinction of the two sexes will ever cease ; and reason and analogy would seem to demand their continu- ance. I quote the following from the criticism of a very able friend — one of several whose opinions I have asked : " To me it seems that, for those who believe in a future life, there are 1 Cornelius k Lapide explains the passage in this sense : "Equales enim angelis sunt in caelibatri, in immortalitate, in gloria : sicut ergo angeli non nubunt, non generant, si nee beati, quia ipsi per se immortales et gloriosi, in omne asvum perennabunt ; generatio enim in hac vita quaeJ^tur ob mortem, ut pater moriens in filio quern vivum relinquit quasi superstes vivat et perennet. Unde S. Cyrillus : Siciit angeli., inquit, non sunt per generationem propagati^ ita his qui resurgunt non est opus nuptiis. Et S. Chrysostomus in Matt. c. xx. : Hie ducimtur uxores., inquit, ut nasceiido S2ippleatur quod moriendo minuitur; illic autem mors ?ton erit et co?iseque?itiir nee nuptice nee uxores, nee getter atio.^^ PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xiii onh' two possible ways of looking at the matter : either that sex goes deeper and beyond mere physical differences, and will therefore persist spiritually through • all eternity ; or that sex, with all the difference of character observable in men and women, is dependent on physical conditions alone ; and that, therefore, when the material passes away, the spirit — the human nature left — will be unisexual in its attributes. Of course, sex in its physical sense would in no case outlast the body. But may we not believe in the man soul and the woman soul existing separately, completing each other, persisting eternally, the eternal difference making eternal harmony ? And there is much to support this view, for the difference underlies all nature ; it is the very life of the material world. In spite of the one or two exceptions you quote. Nature on the whole is bisexual. If one may believe that this world shadows forth faintly the unseen universe, would there not seem to be some deeper meaning in the law of Nature than the mere reproduction of physical life ? Docs it not point to some enduring difference, some eternal duality ? " xiv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. This reasoning seems to me as sound as it is well expressed. But close observers of human nature have urged, on the other side, that men who are constitutionally weak, delicate, effemi- nate, who have no physical stamina, have many of the spiritual failings and qualities of women, their physical organism thus apparently unsex- ing their souls. This would not necessarily imply an ethical change, making souls virtuous which were naturally vicious, or the reverse ; but only a sexual modification of qualities, good qualities as well as evil ones being more feminine than masculine. This would obviously make the quality of the soul dependent on Its physical framework. But surely this is against the analogy of Nature, where the rule is that the spiritual essence fashions its material covering, not that the material shall mould its spiritual tenant. I say " spiritual " tenant because. In the last analysis, every form of life is rooted in a spiritual cause which eludes the scrutiny of science. The oyster shapes its shell, not the shell the oyster. The development, the formative process, is from within outward, not contrariwise. The PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xv emotions of the soul arc mirrored in the coun- tenance, and it is possible that a sufficiently microscopic vision might be able to detect, not only in the features, but in the whole structure of the body, the history of the soul which built and shaped it, as surely as the geologist spells out the history of our planet in the strata of its crust. To such vision each body would be the legible autobiography of the soul which energised within it. It may indeed be said with truth that the body too leaves its impress on the soul — marks its own character upon its spiritual partner. But this it does as the instrument of the soul. The originating force was in the soul, and the scars indicted on it by the body are thus its own as truly as a self-inflicted wound on the body is not the work of the bullet, but of the hand that pulled the trigger. But the view which I am combating supposes that a pJiysiqiie imperfect ab initio renders the soul imperfect also. Yet even if this were the case, would not the logical inference be that a normal physique would likewise impress its own character on the soul, and that consequently xvi PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. the distinction of sex must survive the body and remain permanent in the soul ? But man's physical organism, as I have already said, is itself the product of a non-material essence. The mere matter of the body is but a con- solidation of gases, which necessarily take their shape from the organizing principle that works unseen. The abortive result must therefore be due to some flaw deeper than mere physique, and consequently it is more reasonable to infer imperfection oi physiqiieixova defective psychical organization than abnormal spiritual qualities from imperfection of physique. Martensen, in his profound work on Christian Ethics, observes: ''The sexual difference embraces the whole individuality ; for man and woman are differently organized, as well in a psychical as in a bodily point of view. Each of them is destined to represent humanity, yet with such limitation that only both together present the whole human being. . . . He is related to her as the spirit is related to the soul, and while man has to develop his spirit's life to the psychical, woman has to develop her psychical to the spiritual. . . . Woman, again, is adapted PREFACE TO THE THIRD ED IT I OX. xvii for the harmonious unity of nature and spirit. In her knowledge she embraces all things intuitively, and thereby is able in many cases to know the true and right where the man, through his very reflection, is hindered from seeing this." And in answer to the question, *'Will the distinction of male and female continue " in the world unseen ? Martensen replies : " We certainly cannot doubt that it will, seeing that it has so comprehensive an influence upon the whole individuality of the spirit." ^ Having submitted the question to Mr. Glad- stone's consideration, together with che criticism of one of my correspondents, I have his per- mission to quote the following from his reply : — ** I have never examined books of authority as to the permanence of sex. Your corre- spondent, I think, states the matter with great ability, though I hardly travel with him all the way. The question is interesting — I should call it seductive ; for my inclination and judg- ment are rather to this eflect : that, knowing nothing, so to speak, of the thousands upon ^ Martcnsen's Christian Ethics^ ii. pp. 11-13. xviii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. thousands of the conditions of the new existence in the world unseen, I ask of myself why this also should not be allowed to remain un- examined, and whether it is not best to leave the solution in the hands of the great Father. I am not, then, keen upon the scent. *' I admit that some arguments against the permanence of gender may seem to arise from its original absence, and from the Darwinian incidents pointing to an original unity. " But in the actual development is included a distinction of moral and spiritual type. The man and the woman are not, ought not to be, the same ; and the law of nature for each is to be built up and corroborated, by the vast power of habit, in its own type. The more character is opened and matured, therefore, the more I should expect it to be differentiated and the distinctness of the form of existence to harden. At the same time, not only is each the supple- ment of the other, but each may borrow and appropriate from the other. " I cannot, from the defect of the man's physique, and consequent approach to feminine- ness, be ready to draw a broad conclusion, for PREFACE TO THE 'IHIRD EDJTIOX. xix it would rest on a ground not normal, but abnormal. '' All this seems to lie In the region of meta- physics. If divinity is taken in, one can conceive that questions may arise as to the office and character of the Blessed Virgin Mary ; questions which may readily enough become dangerous. " The loneer I live the more does human nature seem to me profound and wonderful, and the less able I am to arrive at definite solutions respecting it. I own, therefore, to being much out of my depth, and indisposed to push any observation or inference which the matter suggests to a logical conclusion." I do not think that the question could be summed up more tersely than in this statement, and I am content to leave it where Mr. Glad- stone has left it. He touches, however, upon one point which requires some consideration. Amone multitudes of sincere Christians the Blessed Virgin Mary has been exalted, if not dogmatically, at least in popular devotions, to the position of a second Eve, bearing her share with the second Adam in the regeneration of the human race. " Co-redcmptrcss " is one ot XX PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. similar titles applied to her, and the late Father Faber went so far as to claim for her a quasi- real presence in the Eucharist. This undue exaltation of her whom '' all nations " should call "blessed" — and whom the Puritan Bishop Hall did not hesitate to apostrophize in the words, " O Mary ! he cannot honour thee too much who deifieth thee not " — is doubtless due to an imperfect apprehension of the fact that our Lord includes in His humanity the totality of human attributes, the permanent properties of both sexes — woman's tenderness and delicate sensibility, together with those qualities to which we naturally give the name of '' manly." ^ 1 "We discriminate between masculine and feminine charac- ters. But though in Christ we must acknowledge the highest pre-eminence of manly character, the world-contesting, world- subduing heroism, which at the same time has here this peculi- arity, that it bears the consciousness that it must give way for a time, but accepts suffering and death as moments \jnoinetitd\ in its work, certain of victory at last ; yet we cannot call Him a masculine character, as in contradistinction to the feminine. For the highest characteristics of womanly virtue are found also in Him — infinite devotion and singleness of purpose, the un- ruffled serenity of a calm and gentle spirit, pure and modest feeling in the maintenance of the finest moral distinctions ; and the power peculiar to women of passive obedience, power to bear, to suffer, to forego, in unspeakable loyalty." — Martensen's Christian Ethics^ i. p. 252. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xxi That exquisite power of sympathy which wc associate with woman's nature, and which was so conspicuous in His that the touch of appeal- ing suffering upon His garment thrilled through Him as with a shock of spiritual magnetism, may have been due, viewed on its human side, to the f^ict that He derived His humanity entirely from the female channel. But His humanity being thus complete and unique, embracing the imperishable attributes of both sexes, we cannot argue from it as to the future relation of humanity to sex. Indeed, the fact that His perfect humanity required a unique method of derivation would seem to imply that, apart from such exceptional experience, humanity will retain in the spiritual world the duality which distinguishes it here. And there is this further observation to be made, namely, that, inasmuch as Christ is " the second Adam," the second Head of mankind, who are to be regenerated in Him, it was necessary that He should possess human nature in its fulness. The natural man is descended from two progenitors, male and female. Humanity is regenerated by being brought into xxii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. communication with a single source of life, our Incarnate Lord, but without erasing in any way the difference of sex. In this connection I may venture to quote the following protest from Martensen against any attempt to regard our Lord's celibate life as the ideal at which He would have mankind to aim : — - " With regard to the celibacy of Christ, this is entirely unique, and must be regarded from its own point of view. It cannot, for instance, be explained by the fact that He was one among a multitude of the above angelic natures,^ which are nevertheless, in many other respects, in- cluded under sin. And as little does it find its explanation in the impossibility of His finding, as a falsely aesthetic notion supposes, any like- minded individual who was fitted for Him. He never could have sought such an individual, who must indeed, in a certain sense, have been His equal in birth ; for as the Saviour of the world, the Son of God, and the second Adam, He was utterly incommensurable with any 1 z.ears innuiucniblc traces »>t' liavinf]^ come from one designing and ordering Mint I. In tlie relations of lier parts to oacli other slie is governed hy a uniform system of laws. The law of gravitation prevails tlirougliout the whole planetary and sidereal system, and so perfect is the mutual adjustment, so regular the movements of these vast hodies, that their relative positions may be calculated years in advance. ^loreover, the spectroscope has i-evealed the fact that the constituent elements of the planets and distant stars are the same as those of our earth. That surely is another clear indication that the universe is the product of one creative Mind. So, again, if you survey life in the multitudinous forms in which it appears on our planet, you see plain evidences of the same great truth. To take one example. Under the immensely varied forms of insect life you find a wonderful community of struc- ture, irrespective of the size of the insect. The elongated body of the dragon-fly, the contracted form of the lady -bird, the different kinds of butter- llics and moths, and tiny insects like the ilea, havr all one characteristic in connnon ; their bodies consist of twenty primary segments. The same structural peculiarit}^ prevails throughout the whole tribe (^f the Crustacea — the crab, the lobster, the squilla, and all 24 FACTS WHICH DARWINISM the rest. How shall we account for this fundamental identity of type among hundreds of thousands of different species of insect life, if we reject the belief that they all came originally from one intelligent creative Will operative in and presiding over the realm of Nature ? The doctrine of chances entirely excludes the possibility of such a result otherwise than as the outcome of a designing will. Darwin's explanation merely states facts; it does not account for them. The fact that insects, birds, quadrupeds, are aided in " the struggle for existence " by adapting themselves to their surroundings does not explain their power of so adapting themselves. Why does the ptarmigan, without any effort on its own part, become white as snow in v\'inter and mottled, like the ground which it haunts, in autumn ? To say that these changes of plumage help it in the struggle for existence is a truism, not an explanation. The neuters, which constitute the majority of every bee com- munity, are sexually inchoate and barren. But if the queen should be destroyed or removed, the bees choose one of the neuter eggs that have been deposited in their appropriate cells, and form a " royal cell " by the demolition of several ordinary cells. The selected grub is then fed with "royal jelly," a pungent, stimu- latinof aliment of a different nature from the '"' bee- DOES NOT EX PL A I y. 2$ l)iviul " which is stored U]) i'or the ccjiiiiiiunity. The grub thus treated comes forth a perfect queen, differ- ino- from tlie neuter into which it would otherwise have developed, not only in its sexual completeness, hut also in the form of the body, in the length of the wings, in the shape of the tongue, jaws, and sting, in the absence of the hollow on the thighs in which pollen is carried, in its inability to secrete wax, and in its general instincts. Here we have an obvious proof of design which cannot be explained away by plausible phrases like "natural selection," "survival of the fittest," and " struggle for existence." The instinct of the bees denotes a Power behind the instinct working intelligently towards a definite and foreseen end. " For the ' fittest ' to have survived, they must have come to possess the structure that made them the fittest,"^ and neither Darwin nor his disciples have explained that secret. Surely the rational con- clusion is that the Almighty Maker, with that comprehensive skill of which we observe analogies in master minds among ourselves, has selected the fittest plan for a certain class of bodily forms, and then adapted it with infinite variations according to the requirements of each case ; just as in the composition of some great master of music your ' Dr. Carpenter's Nature and Man^ p. 130. 26 MAN'S HAPPINESS ear may catch a simple melody running through all the variations and intricacies of the piece; or as a great architect or a great painter, through all his creations, has one style which marks him off from all others. And the loftier the genius is, the more characteristic and separate is the style of its produc- tions. If, therefore, this world is the product of one .supreme Architect and Painter, we should naturally expect His work to bear this characteristic of style ; the adaptation of a comparatively few primary ideas to an infinite variet}^ of results. And this is precisely what we find throughout the works of Nature. But man demands not only satisfaction for the intellect in the postulate of a First Cause, from which all things proceed ; he demands satisfaction for his affections and conscience as well. For man is not an intellectual being only ; he is a being endowed with affections and a sense of rigrht and wron^j- He bestows love, and he demands it in return. It is one of our temptations to imagine that the great secret of human happiness lies in being independent, in being under no control, in being allowed to follow our bent and to have our own way in all things. This is a grievous fallacy. There is one Being in the whole universe, and one only, who can afford to be independent, and that is Almighty God, the ever-blessed Three in One. NOT SECURED BY IXDEFENDENCE. 27 Mo is perfectly iii pass. Here again the creed meets one of the irrepressible •lemands of human nature— the demand of a certain relationship towards its Creator, the relation of a child to its father. We believe therefore not only that God is the First Cause, that He is an eternal, living, Personal Energy, pervading all creation, yet above the creation and independent of it, and that He is a Trinity of Persons in one undivided essence ; but further that this one God and Creator stands in the relation of Father to the creatures of His omnipo- tent will. And yet, viewing the Nvorld at large, is that the relation in which it seems to stand towards its Maker ? Arc the attributes of a Divine Fatherhood those that 32 SUFFERING IN NATURE chiefly arrest our attention in our examination of nature ? Does not Nature wear a cruel, heartless, relentless, almost mocking face, when man tries to read her purposes in her acts ? Was there not some justification for Mr. John Stuart Mill when he retorted on those who lauded the benignity and bene- ficence of Nature, that if any man were to act as Nature was acting every day, he would in any civilized community be hanged ? Look abroad upon the world. Where do you see the features of an Almiglity Father ? Is not the world like the Prophet's scroll — "full, within and without, of lamentation, and mourning, and woe ? " Do we not feel with the Apostle that " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now " ? That is the first impression which the study of Nature is calculated to make on a reflective mind. The world is full of misery and pain, and this apparently anterior to the entrance of sin and inde- pendent of it. Geology has deciphered for us the testimony of the rocks and of the everlasting hills, and there we find ample evidence of conflict and carnage long before the apparition of man upon the scene. Timorous flight and fierce pursuit; animals fleet of foot and strong of limb, with claws to rend and teeth to grind ; whole tribes living on the violent death of creatures weaker than themselves — this is APART FROM SIX. 33 wlmt we find written on the unerring- records o£ tlic time when man was not as yet. How aro wc to reconcile it witli our belief in an Almighty Creator Wlio is the Father of a world which is one vast arena of carna<]fe ? One view is that there is a great interval between the first verse of Genesis and tiie second: the first describing this earth as it came from the liands of ( Jod ; the second describing it as ruined by Satan. Accordinc^ to that view, the chief of the fallen annrels and his host ruled this planet and involved it in their own ruin. Tliis would of course make sufierinor the consequence of sin from the very beginning. But it can only be a matter of more or less probable specu- lation, and we need not dwell upon it. It is better to seek for an explanation in regions which we can tread with firmer foot. Wc are now considerinc: suflfering as apart from sin — the existence of pain in the animal world. In this connection it is important to bear in mind the view which St. Paul ffives us of the world in relation to tlie Mediator. In a passage already quoted he represents the whole creation as sharing not only in man's misery, but likewise in his redemption. And in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Colossians he tells us that Christ's Atonement embraced the universe ; not only the human race, but D 34 THE MEEK INHERIT THE EARTH. the whole intelligent and sentient creation, visible and invisible. I understand this to mean that the Incar- nation of the Eternal Son of God is the copula that bridofes over the chasm which had divided the Creator from the creature, thus making them in a manner at one with each other, the creation through all its series becoming a partaker of the Divine Nature by means of the Incarnation. Now, if this be so, may not the moral discipline of man, his perfection through suffer- inof, find its analo^rue in the animal creation ? At first, brute force seems to have it all its own way. It is not a survival of the fittest that we behold, but rather of the strongest, the most ruthless, the most cruel. But wait a little, and you shall see that even in the animal kingdom "the meek," in spite of all appearances, *' shall inherit the earth." It is in the nature of violence to defeat itself, partly by the recoil of its own force and partly by raising up against it forces that shall eventually destroy it. It is so among men. Power created and sustained by violence is doomed. The old dominions that relied on force alone were short-lived, chasing each other like breakers on a beach. It is so also in the animal world. The animals that rely on violence alone for their existence are disappearing, and the meek and useful are taking their place. Nor is this all. The THE SUFFERING OF ANIMALS. 35 very qualities which seemed to make the meek easy victims are precisely the qualities which have con- duced to their survival — social qualities which have been developed by the discipline of suffering, and have made them more than a match for their oppressors. Thus we see that even in the animal world the battle is not in the long-run to the swift and strong, l)ut to the gentle and long-suftering. The meek shall inherit the earth ; the Cross shall overcome the sword. The law of vicarious sacrilice has thus its place in the lower creation, which exhibits its martyrs dying for the amelioration of the race. The suffering of the animal world may therefore be less purposeless and arbitrary and cruel than it seems at first sight. But there is another consideration which may enable us to reconcile still more clearly the existence of suffering with belief in an Almighty Father. Is it certain that the suffering of animals is anything like as great as it seems ? The real seat of pain is in the soul. In the excitement of battle soldiers often feel neither the weight of armour nor the pain of wounds : the intellectual and emotional part of man being otherwise intensely occupied, it does not feel the twitching of bodily nerves. It is so also in the case of any sudden mental shock : for a time the pain of bodily ills has ceased to be felt. What makes pain so 36 DR. LIVINGSTONE'S OPINION. trying to us is our power of generalizing ; our faculty of memory, of reflection, of anticipation. We store up in our memory the pains that we have endured, and feel vividly beforehand the pains that we expect. Animals have very little of this. With them each shock of pain, for the most part, begins and ends in itself. There is no prolonged agony. No doubt some of the animals which have come under the rule and discipline of man do in a slight degree remember and anticipate pain. But w^e are now speaking of animals in the wild state, and it may be doubted whether their suffering is really very great. A short chase and swift stroke, and there is an end of life. In this connection we may recall a very interesting suggestion thrown out by Dr. Livingstone in his account of his travels in Central Africa. He was attacked by a lion, which seized him by the arm shook liim violently (breaking his arm), dropped him and watched him for awhile, and then left him. Livinofstone retained his entire consciousness unim- paired under the paw of the lion, but the shock deprived him of all pain and fear, and he says that he watched the lion with calm curiosity, wondering when the brute would begin to eat him. Eeflecting on this incident afterwards, the great traveller came to the conclusion that, by a merciful provision of Providence, ALSO DARIVLVS AXD WALLACE'S. 37 the attacks of beasts of prey paralyze the nerves <>i' sensation in their victims and destroy all fear. Foi- these reasons then we may trust that there is com- paratively little suftering in the animal world, as we know and understand suffering.^ The higher, the * " I am bewildered. I liad no iutcntiou to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot sec as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of desij^u and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichncnmonida) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." — Letter from Darwin to Asa Gray in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. ii. pp. 311, 312. But what evidence is there that the caterpillar feels any pain while being devoured ? For all we know, the sensation may be pleasurable, if (which is unlikely) so low an organization is susceptible of cither pleasure or pain. And does it not stand to reason that if Dr. Livingstone lost all pain and fear after the lion had shaken him, a cat playing with mice may mean no misery at all ? The fact is, we know far too little of the animal world to be justified in dogmatizing on this subject. Darwin himself, in this very letter, goes on to add : *' A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton." After these addresses were in typo I received, through the kindness of Messrs. !Macmillan, a copy of ^Ir. Wallace's book on Darwinism, just published, and I am delighted to find tliat my view ou this subject is covered by his great authority. Curiously enough, he too quotes the story of Dr. Livingstone and the lion ; and he also quotes the following passage from the Origin of Species, which shows that Darwin had not made up his mind on the subject of pain among animals : " When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of Nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the hapjiv survive and multiply." Darwinism, pp. 3G-10, by Alfred Kusscll Wallace, LL.D. 38 DUTY OF KINDNESS TO ANIMALS. more refined the nature, the more sensitive it is to pain. In this way alone our Lord suffered as no other man ever suffered or can suffer. A refined, well- disciplined man suffers pain much more keenly than a rude, uneducated man of rougher fibre, although the latter will probably sliow the pain a great deal more. And inasmuch as animals are far lower in the scale of feeling than man, it is reasonable to suppose that their sensitiveness to pain is far less, however startling the outward manifestation of it may be. This, of course, is no excuse for inflicting unnecessary pain vTpon them. The Incarnation has invested the whole of the material creation with some degree of sanctity, and has laid on Christians especially the obligation of being considerate and tender to the lower animals, many of which are so useful to man, and so faithful and uncomplaining. III. "Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all Things vlsible and invisible." god as creator. So far I have been consideriiii^ the creed as the answer of Christianity to the instinctive demands of human nature — man's intellect, affections, and con- science. The intellect forces us back to belief in a First Cause, which is an eternal, living, personal In- telligence, from which all things proceed. Our affec- tions demand further that we should be able to stand towards this Supreme Being in an attitude of perfect trust — the attitude of a child towards its parent. And the creed responds to this universal craving of liumanity by telling us that the one God is an Almighty Father, Whose care and loving-kindness, therefore, are over all His works, and "Whuni we can love and trust with absolute confidence, in spite of all appearances to the contrary. Clouds and darkness may be round about Him obscuring, and it may even be distorting, His features ; yet righteousness and 40 PANTHEISM NO SOLUTION judgment are ever the habitation of His seat. An Almighty Father, we feel instinctively, can never do or sanction wrong to His children. AVe now approach another aspect of this great Beincr. He is the " Maker of heaven and earth, and o of all things visible and invisible." We have already considered Him, in the language of Mr. Herbert Spencer, as " an eternal living Energy, from which all things proceed." But how do they proceed from Him ? Is it by way of organic development, like an oak from an acorn, the material universe being but the visible robe of an all-pervading, impersonal, unin- telligent life ? That is the answer of Pantheism, which thus confounds and identifies the Creator with the creation, or rather excludes altogether the idea of creation. A diffused mindless Presence permeating the universe evidently offers no satisfaction to the deep-rooted desires of humanity ; on the contrary, it flatly contradicts them all. We observe order and design in the universe ; but order and design imply mind so evidently that our reason refuses to associate them with any cause short of mind. To suppose the contrary would be like supposing that this cathedral could have been designed by a jelly-fish, or that Handel's " Messiah " could have been composed by an accidental combination of sounds. Water cannot rise OF THE PROBLEMS OF EXISTENCE. 41 higlier than its source. It is an axiom in pliilosopliy that the effect cannot contain more tluui tlicre is in its cause. Our reason, if we <;ive it fair play, rebels against the supposition of a Shakespeare or a Newton l^eing the product of a formless, unintelligent ocean of l)eing into which they have been reabsorbed like rain-drops into the sea. On such an hypothesis the Avorld would be the offspring of mere chance, " a mighty maze w^ithout a plan," as the poet has it. But tliat is a conclusion Avhich the doctrine of chances precludes. Chance may produce some extraordinary results ; but these results lie within very narrow and calculable limits, and throw no light at all on the phenomena of the universe. Pantheism, therefore, fails to offer any solution of the origin of things, or on their permanence and order. And it fails still more conspicuously to satisfy the heart and con- science. When man's heart is crushed with sorrow, or his conscience outraged by a sense of wrong, it is sheer mockery to send him to an impersonal force for consolation. What he needs and cries for is a person, a being who can understand liim, enter into his thoughts, sympathize witli hlin and help him. And to that need Pantheism can make no answer ; man might a.s well appeal to the voiceless waves or the nnhearing winds. 42 ANSWER OF KICENE CREED: Here, then, the Nieene Creed supplies a universal want. It tells us that the universe is not an eternal evolution, but a free creation ; not an unconscious development from an unconscious force existing- eternally, but a coming into being in obedience to the fiat of a supreme personal Will. The one God and Father Almighty is therefore further described as the " Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." And this additional defini- tion is no mere surplusage. It was needed to mark the absolute separation of the Creator from His work, and His perfect independence of it. In our experience of Nature the relation of parent to off*- spring is not that of creation but of development — the evolution of life from preceding life of the same kind by way of natural process. In no case do parents originate life : they pass on what they have received through a process whose interior secret no human skill can penetrate. It was not thus that the universe came from its Creator. It derives its origin from Him and is the product of His self-conscious enero-izinof will. We are not now concerned with the mode of its production — with the infinite ramifications of its order and development ; that is a fit subject for man's research and speculation, and it in no way touches the question of creation. What the creed CKEATIOX, NOT ETERXAI. KVOLUTIOX. 43 teaches is tliat the universe is not a part of Ahniglity God ; no evolution out of Him like a forest from an jicorn, like heat from the sun, like rain-drops from tlie ocean — transient forms of beinir eternall}' ciiierg- \\vs, out of a mindless and heartless soul of the universe, and then falling hack into the fonnless mass of universal life and losing- their individuality. To an intellectual being this of course would mean anni- hilation. A universally diffused impersonal formless life is an hypothesis for wliich there is not a shred of evidence. We know nothing of life apart from its individual manifestations. What we learn from the creed, then, is that the universe came from the volition of an unmipotent creative personal Will ; the universe, and not merely its cosmical arrangements; "heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible ; " all unseen forces and occult essences as well as whatever is apparent to the bodily senses or discoverable by the reason. To the Almighty Father the universe thus owes its being, its preservation, its movements, its beauty. Apart from Him it is nothing. AVere He to with- draw Himself from it for an instant, as its im- manent Life and personal Ruk'r, the universe wouM innnediately collapse and there would be a uni- versal silence of the spheres. Now of course tlie idea 44 CREATION OUT OF NOTHING. of creation out of nothing is one which our minds cannot fully embrace, although reason seems to force us to that conclusion. But what does creation out of nothing imply ? Does it mean that God Almighty, in the perfection of His triple Personality, lived alone through an untold eternity ; no universe to fill infinite space; no sound to break infinite silence; no angels to render loyal service ; no men or animals to live in the light of the sun and fulfil their brief span of mortal life ? That is one view ; but is it the view which best accords with reason and with the teaching of Holy Scripture? If God is an Eternal Personal Energy, must we not think of Him as always working ? Can we regard Him as existing through timeless ages in a state of self-contemplating repose,^ and then passing into a condition of creative activity ? Is it not both more reasonable and more Scriptural to think of Him as eternally creating — Eternal Love everlastingly ^ This seems to have been Aristotle's notion ; for, after defining vovs as " the most godlike of objective existences [ruv (paiyofiiuwi BeioTaTuv)," he goes on to argue that the more the mind is abstracted from phenomena and becomes independent of them, the nearer it approaches to perfection, which, according to him, consists in pure self-contemplation : koi icrnv ij v6r](ns vorjaews vorjcris {Metaph,., lib. xi. 0. 9). This is Aristotle's highest conception of mind — in other words, of the Deity. It is obviously antagonistic to the Christian idea, which represents God as an ever-active Persou. MEANING OF THE FI/RASE. 45 pouring Himself out into the spliere of clurivtitivcj life? "My Father worketh liithcrto," says our Lord, •and I work." " Worketh hitherto : " it is the present tense, implying that God's work has no relation to time, but belongs to the perfection of the Creator, with Whom is no past or future, but an eternal present. And when we speak of creation out of nothing, do we mean by nothing an absolute vacuum ? Omnipotence, of course, can do anything. Yet we do not tliink of the Omnipotent God as existing from all eternity in a blank void, and then surrounding Himself with created beauty ; and certainly that is not the view of Him which the Bible gives us. Three things — prol >- ably different names for one attribute — arc predi- cated of Almighty God in the Bible : " light," " glory," " beauty," all implying objective reality. The Psalmisi; speaks of God " covering Himself with light as with a garment," evidently meaning that the garment is eternal. St. Paul puts the matter more plainly when he describes God as "dwelling in unapproachable light." This light is spoken of elsewhere as " glory." In Ezekiel viii. 4 ; ix. 3 ; x. 10 ; xliii. 2, 4, " the glory of the God of Israel " is described as a visible token of His presence. In like manner " the glory of the Lord shone round about " the shepherds of Betldchem on the night of our Lord's Nativity. And in Rev. 46 GOnS ETERNAL VESTURE, XV. 8 we read : " And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God." This Shechinah, or visible manifestation of the Divine Presence, accom- panied the Israelites through their forty years' wander- ings, and " dwelt between the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercy-seat," until the destruction of Solomon's Temple. The " light " or " glory " in which God is thus eternally arrayed is sometimes described as "beauty " (Job xl. 10 ; Ps. xxvii. 4 ; xc. 17 ; Isa. xxxiii. 17). Of this Divine glory, this vesture of the in- visible God, the universe is said to be the manifesta- tion (Ps. xix. 1). It is represented as something anterior to time, and as shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, before the Avorld — the determined uni- verse — was. Within the Triune Godhead are doubt- less the conditions for pure love. The Persons of tlie Trinity may be thought of as loving each other in timeless peace and blessedness. But in this self-con- templation there would be no fertility or variety : and absolute love is surely more than mere complacency ; it is ever active, ever producing. Undoubtedly we must regard the universe as a free creation, and not a pro- cess metaphysically necessary. But if we must at the same time regard the Divine Being as loving, and therefore necessarily active, can we avoid thinking of a universe as eternally issuing, not by absolute ALL ORIGIN IS IXKXPLICABLE. 47 necessity, but l>y (umI's free determination ? In otlicr words, is not love, tliougli free, self-necessitated to create, and is not tliis self-determination the highest form of freedom ; just as, in the language of one of our collects, God's " service " is described as " perfect freedom " ? This certainly seems to have been St. Auerustine's view of the relation of the Eternal Creator to the universe. But in truth all origin is inexplicable, and the connection between the creation and the Creator is one of those antinomies of faith which the human reason cannot comprehend.^ ' Somo sensation was made in tho religious world a few years ago by a book called The Unseen Universe, in which it was argued, both on scientific and Christian grounds, that tho visible universe is a development from an unseen spiritual universe, into which it is being gradually reabsorbed. The uArf (if I may use tho expression), out of which the visible universe has been thus developed, tho distinguished authors regard as a subtle aether existing from eternity, but not independent of God — on the contrary, the robe in which tho Invisible is self-clothed from all eternity. Tho authors insist strongly on tho doctrines of tho Trinity and Incarnation, assigning to tho Second Person of tho Trinity tho office of developing tho energy of tho unseen universe, and to the Third, as "the Lord and Giver of life," that of developing and distributing tlio principle of life. The doctrine of creation out of nothing is enveloped in such impenetrable mystery, that theologians ought surely to deal tolerantly with reverent speculations on tho subject, so long as such specula- tions allow that the whole creation, visible and invisible, is dependent on and subject to tho will of tho Almighty Creator. Among tho Scriptural passages which the authors of The Unseen Unirerse quote in support of their view is St. Paul's saying, that *' tho things 48 CREATION THE CHIEF MIRACLE. Some people talk about the incredibility of miracles. What miracle can be compared to that of creation, however you view it ? The wonderful thing is not that there should be an occasional counteraction of the ordinary movements of natural forces, but that these forces should have come into existence. The ffreat miracle is the beorinninor of thino^s. Once admit this, as the constitution of the human mind obliges us to do, and the question of miracles becomes a mere question of evidence ; antecedent objection there can be none. The Being Who made the universe is neces- sarily free to manipulate its processes at His discretion ; and to doubt either His ability to do so, or His willing- ness for adequate reasons, is an impertinence on the part of man. But I am not going into the question of miracles at present, though I may have occasion to do so later on. And now let us o-o back for a moment to the idea which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." "Eternal" may here, however, mean endless. A moro apposite passage, as I have tried, to show in the text, is that in which God the Father is described as " dwelling in light unapproach- able ; Whom no man hath seen or can see." We are evidently to understand this "unapproachable light" as an eternal vesture of God, coeval with Himself. Physical science does not yet appear to have said its last word on the nature and attributes of light, and there can surely be nothing inconsistent with the true Christian temper in such devout exercise of the human reason as we find in The Unseen Universe. See Appendix, p. 324. CREATIONS BY MAN. 49 of creation out of notliing It is clou])tless a be- wildering idea, one that our reason cannot comptiss. I mean creation in the sense in which I have just explained it. Is it absolutely unthinkable ? Have we anything at all analogous to it in our own experience ? Can man be said in any sense to create out of nothing ? Surely he may, though not in the absolute sense in which we predicate creation of God. What is a great poem, a great painting, a great statue, a great musical composition, but a creation out of nothing beyond the human mind and its experiences ? Creation is not necessarily confined to what we call matter; the word embraces moral and intellectual existences. Take a play of Shakespeare — " Hamlet," for example. The Prince of Denmark is a real creation, and so are the other characters in the play. They leave vivid impressions on the mind. They interest us like real men and women. We can study their actions, analyze their motives, feel resentment or pity at the development of the plot — in short, they exercise our imaginations, feelings, and reasoning faculty like ordinary human beings : they are cha- racters evolved out of the poet's creative mind, and are as distinct possessions of the understanding as any historical chararacters. A masterpiece of music or painting is likewise a creation of the same 50 GENERIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN kind, a fact in the world of ideas, in the sphere of intellect, which previously had no existence. Of course, there is this fundamental difference between Divine and human creations, that human creations cannot pass beyond the stage of ideas, cannot become actualized, without the aid of pre-existing materials. Man is, therefore, in a subordinate sense, a creator — " a kind of god," as Bacon calls him ; and this he is in virtue of his having been made originally in the imaofe of his Maker. And as this attribute makes man in a manner a sharer of Divine Power, so it differentiates him by an impassable gulf from the animal world. There is nothing among the animals which corresponds to the creative power of man. Animals are ruled by instincts, which vary in- definitely, and which sometimes — especially in the case of animals brought under the civilizing influence of man — approach the confines of reason. Animal instinct is, in its own way and within its own limits, more perfect than the reason of man. Human reason is a faculty which is gradually developed. It is dormant in the child, and is educated by teaching and experience. But the instinct of the animal is perfect from the beginning ; it requires no education and no experience to develop it. The bee constructs its hive on the most perfect mathematical principles HUMAN REASON AND ANIMAL INSTINCTS. 51 without any previous training; but it cannot apply its mathematics to any other purpose. The bird builds its nest and the beaver its dam without any previous apprenticeship, and they will go on building them when there is no occasion. Bees, moreover, and squirrels, and other insects and animals, make pnj- vision for the winter, storing up the necessary food against the time when it cannot otherwise be pro- cured; and this they will do without any previous experience of fruitful and unfruitful seasons. A certain kind of wasp stings a spider in the main nerve, paralysing but not killing it ; and then deposits it in its nest, where it remains motionless and fresh for the young wasps to feed on when they are hatched. Where did the wasp learn its knowledge of anatomy and physiology to sting always in the necessary place, and to inject just enough poison to paralyse but not to kill ? How, too, does it select the proper food for its young offspring — food on which it does not itself feed ? There is no reason here, any more than in tlie insectivorous plant which clutches and devours its prey, or in the sprig of ivy which unfailingly detects the crevice in the wall. It is in both cases a blind instinct working for an end which it does not foresee. It is a mechanical movement impelled and guided by an external force, not a self -originating power like 52 MAN A PROGRESSIVE CREATURE, man's self-conscious rational will, intending what it does and using the appropriate means. Another g-eneric difference between man and the in- f erior animals is that he is capable of indefinite self- improvement, of which there is not a trace in them. Under man's controlling skill and discipline, indeed, both vegetable and animal life is susceptible of extraordinary improvement. Man, who is a kind of god to the lower creation, takes plants and animals in hand and raises them far above their unaided natural capacities. But the moment he withdraws his developing and regulating mind a process of degeneration immediately sets in, and the animal or plant lapses to its primitive condition, and there remains. This tendency of reversion to original type is admitted by Darwin, as in the case of the different varieties of pigeons, which, if left to themselves, will invariably return to the parent type of the rock pigeon. In this fact we note a serious flaw in the theory of the transmutation of species — a theory for which there is as yet no evidence, and which is not necessarily convertible with evolution. But with- out going further into that point now, we see clearly that both plants and animals are under mechanical guidance which suffices for their needs, but bars progress. The range of choice is bounded by the THE LOWER CREATION NON-PROGRESSIVE. 53 limitations of tlie instinct under which the animal is compelled to do its work. It acts from an irresistible impulse without any independent power to do or to forbear. This fundamental distinction between man and the animal creation is vividly expressed by the Psalmist when he speaks of the lower creation as held in the fetters of an inflexible law, in contrast with man, who is not in the grip of a mechanical necessity, but under the guidance of a moral law. Horse and mule must be " held with bit and bridle because they have no understanding;" but man is free, and to him therefore it is said, " I will guide thee with Mine eye." The story of Moses and the Burning Bush on Horeb is another illustration of the same truth. Why was Moses urgently warned not to approach the wonderful sight, and to treat even the precincts of the Divine Presence with reverence as " holy ground " ? Because God is a consuming fire to all that is antagonistic to Him. Nature is not antagonistic. She obeys the laws imposed upon her in the beginning. She can therefore bear unscathed the flame of the Divine Presence. But man was made in the ima^re of His Maker, and in virtue of that endowment enjoys the awful prerogative of free will, whereby he can successfully resist the will of Omnipotence. There are some things which — we 54 1^0 W MAN CAN' KNOW GOD. may say it with reverence — Almighty God cannot do. He cannot lie. He cannot contradict any of His own attributes. He cannot violate the harmony of His being. He cannot defeat, like erring man, any of His own purposes. Having dowered man with free will, He must leave him free to choose. And man often chooses to oppose the will of Him Who made him. Even the best of men are not altogether free in this world from the evil bias of self-will, and being thus in a state of antagonism to the Divine will, God is necessarily a consuming fire to them. Now what is the faculty by means of which man is enabled to know God ? Does he need a penetrating intellect, a soaring imagination, or great learning ? If he did, the knowledge would of necessity be confined to comparatively few, and, moreover, we should expect to find that knowledge of the spiritual world increased according to man's intellectual power and learning. But this is far from being the case. " What sages would have died to learn is taught by cottage dames." " Mysteries," says the wise man, "are revealed unto the meek." The faculty which enables man to apprehend God is described in Holy Scripture sometimes as faith and sometimes as purity of heart. " Blessed are the pure m heart, for they shall see God." What did our Lord mean by ILLUSTRATIONS FROM NATURE. 55 tliat benediction and promise? Consider the world around you, and you will find, in fact, a series of worlds enfolded one within the other; and it requires in all cases trained faculties, and, in some, special faculties, to descry "the mystic heaven and earth within, clear as the sea and sky " to him who possesses the educated eye or the special faculty. In the confiofuration of mountains and the formation of rocks the uneducated eye sees nothing more than appears upon the surface. The geoloi^ist surveys the same scene and spells out the complex history of extinct worlds. The uneducated eye looks up into the vault of heaven when the sky is cloudless and the firmament thick -set with stars, and sees nothing but tiny specks of light, in parts so close together as hardly to admit the insertion of a finger's point between star and star. The astronomer gazes on the same scene, and beholds another vision — interstellar spaces so vast that it takes years for a ray of light, travelling with lightning speed, to pass from one star to another ; while the stars themselves, that seem so small, are immeasurably larger than our earth. But Nature has secrets wdiich scientific knowledge alone can never discover— special faculties are needed. The man of science sees the glory of the dawn, the pensive beauty of sunset, the gracefulness of waving forests, 56 PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE OF EVIL the sublime forms of lofty mountains, the majesty of the ocean, the form of " the human face divine," and he can tell us much that is interesting about them all. The artist sees the same things, and discovers in them much that had escaped the vision of the man of science. The poet follows both, and finds yet another world which neither artist nor man of science beheld, and he embodies his vision in immortal song. Multi- tudes of human beings had for years watched the agony' of dying gladiators in the arena, and made of it a Roman holiday. The pathos of the scene one day appealed to the pity of an artist. He saw more than the brutal throng, and embodied his vision in imperishable marble. Centuries passed, and a great English poet looked on that dumb yet speaking marble, and he saw in those dying eyes more, prob- ably, than the artist had consciously put into them — a Dacian captive, oblivious of the present scene, but mindful of a distant home, and a loved wdfe, with " his young barbarians all at play," far away by the shining Danube. The promise of Christ carries us a step further. It tells of a world not far away, but underlying the world of sense — a world of beauty beyond the ken of science and beyond the dreams of poet or of artist; and it says that this world too needs a special faculty to see it, but a faculty. AXD A fyESEFICENT CREATOR. 57 within tlie reacli of all — a pure lieart and a docile spirit. But if the Fatlior Ahnii^hty is also " the Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible," are we not confronted by a formidable difficulty ? How shall we reconcile this article of faith with the origin and continuance of evil, with the unmerited suffering of innocence and the frequent triumph of wrong ? The moral world is full of enigmas which seem insoluble on the hypothesis of a righteous Creator and Governor of the universe. Well, but are they soluble on any other hypothesis ? What has Agnosticism got to say to them ? Nothing, as the word implies. And Pantheism ? It too is dumb. The difficulties are not caused by Chris- tianity ; they preceded it and are independent of it. They exist and must be reckoned with. Christianity, at all events, faces them and offers an explanation and a solution, although it does not promise to explain every difficulty. In the first place, we must re- member that we are here in a very small corner of a vast system, and are therefore not qualified to pass judgment on the system as a whole. A man, born and immured all his life in a narrow room in a huge ]ialace of many stories and endless chambers, is no fit judge of the architecture and internal arrange- 58 ST. AUGUSTINE ON THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. ments of the building. He must traverse its interior in all its parts, and must also go outside and walk round about it, as the Psalmist walked round the Temple on Mount Sion, before he can appreciate its architectural lines and harmonious proportions. Now we are inside God's system of government ; occupying a tiny portion of it. Does it not stand to reason that multitudes of things which now perplex and baffle us, as we examine them from the little skylight of our limited and fallible understanding, would appear plain enough if we could only see them from outside ? Let us then in this spirit glance at the origin and prevalence of evil. God is not the author of it ; and yet the possibility of evil is latent in the possibility of virtue or moral goodness.^ Moral goodness is im- * Afriend, to whose stimulating and acute raind these Lectures are much indebted, has called my attention to another aspect of the question, as suggested in the following passages from St. Augustine's " Confessions " — especially the following — as apposite here : — " And it became clear to me that those things are good which yet are cor- rupted ; for if supremely good, they would be incorruptible ; if not good at all, there would be nothing to be corrupted. For corruption damages ; biit unless it lessened goodness, it could not damage. Either then corruption does not damage, which cannot be ; or, which is most certain, all things which are corrupted are thereby deprived of some good. But if they are deprived of all good, they must alto- gether cease to exist ; for if they continued to exist and were no longer able to be corrupted, they would be better than they were before, because they would remain in a state of incorruptibility. But what more monstrous than to afl^m that a thing has become EVIL THE CORRELATIVE OF FREE WILL. 59 possible, or evil is possible. For virtue or goodness implies freedom of choice — that belongs to its essence; freedom of choice implies the possibility of making a wrong choice ; and a wrong choice persevered in may harden into an inflexible character which even heathen philosophy could see might become incorri- gible. God could doubtless have created beings who should follow the rule of right under the pressure of an irresistible force. But such beings would not be free agents, and therefore could not be the subjects of a moral law. Morality, goodness, holiness, could not be predicated of them ; for these are qualities which are inseparable from free w411. Neither plants nor animals can possess them. These you may call beautiful and useful ; but you cannot call them good in the strict sense of the word ; for goodness implies self-determined effort, and that necessitates free will. So far we can see, but no further. God having resolved to create beings capable of offering Him a better by losing all the pood it possessed ? Therefore thinj^s deprived of all good cease to exist ; and, consequently, as long as they exist they are good ; and further, therefore, whatever is is good. That evil then, the origin of which I had been searching out, had no being of its own ; for had it a being, it would be good " (Bk. vii. ch. 12). Evil has thus no substantial existence : it is simply the absence of good. Aquinas develops the thought into (1) negative— mere absence of good ; (2) privative— the taking away of goodness from something that had enjoyed it; (3) oasequently the iutruaion of a positive element of corruption- 6o POSSIBLE SOLUTION HEREAFTER. free and willing service, the possibility of going wrong seems to follow as a logical consequence. We can thus see the two terms of the problem, but not their point of union. It may be that a more elevated vision would enable us to solve the riddle, and perhaps we shall find that there is no riddle at all to solve " when the day breaks and the shadows flee away." Of one thing at least we may be sure, namely, that the more we cultivate purity of heart, singleness of aim, and unselfishness in all things, the less likely are we to be troubled by any of the moral and intellectual difficulties which are more or less inseparable from our present life, and are probably a necessary element in our moral discipline. IV. "The Father AL>HGnTY." PERSONALITY OF GOD. We have got so far as this, that the Universe came into existence by the creative will of a Personal Being, Who is eternal, infinite, almighty, and the Father of all. We are now to consider this great Being in Himself ; that is to say, in the way in which He has been pleased to reveal Himself to us. But here we are challenged by an objection on the threshold of the argument. It is said that there is no such revela- tion of Almighty God as I have described ; that nature reveals to us only an impersonal force ; and that the God of the Old Testament is not represented there as a Personal Being at all, but merely as a stream of tendencies. I have already dealt with the evidence which nature presents to the human luiiid of bcini^ the product of an almighty Personal Creator, an scribed in that highly dramatic poem and suppose ihat Job and his would-lje comforters did not believe in a Personal Governor of tlu; universe ? Why, the redeeming (juality of some of the Old Testament saints — men of mixed character — was their intense realization of the spiritual world and its Personal Ruler, AVhom they believed to be supreme over the forces of Xatui'e and the destinies of men. Jacob was a man of craft and gr.ile, mingled with tender and persistent affections; but he was also a man who could look through the world of sense into tlio 68 OLD TESTAMENT DESCRIPTIONS spiritual world beyond, with its angelic inhabitants and Supreme Ruler ; and this spiritual insight enabled him gradually to purge his character of all that was mean and false. And why is David called so em- phatically " a man after God's heart " ? His life was stained by atrocious crimes — treachery, adultery, murder. Yet still, and spite of all, he is called a man after God's heart. Why ? Because he too had the root of the matter in him ; because, with all his sins, he had vivid faith in a spiritual world that was governed by a righteous Ruler, with Whom he, the- shepherd boy of Bethlehem and King of Israel, had personal relations. There is always hope for a man who believes in that great truth, however grievous may be his falls, and it was David's extraordinarily clear perception of it that enabled him to recover so quickly his spiritual integrity, and made him a man after God's own heart. Then think of some of the Old Testament descrip- tions of the God of Israel, and you will find nothing in any literature surpassing them in the exquisite tenderness of their pathos. In one place we find Him compared to an eagle teaching her young how to fiy ; flinging them out of the nest into the air that they may practise their pinions, and then, when they are exhausted and fallincr to the earth, darting under OF GOD IMPLY A PERSON. 69 them with outspread wings and bearing tlieni aloft in safety. In otlicr places He is pictured as a tender shepherd watching over His liock, guiding them to green pastures and refreshing streams, bearing tlie lambs in His bosom and gently leading the sheep that are with young. And then again we find His relations to Israel imaged under those that unite bridegroom and bride. Is it conceivable that a people whoso imaginations were fed on such teaching as this, whose whole character was steeped in the doctrine of personal relations with Jehovah, never thought of Him as a Person at all, but merely as a stream of tendencies ? The marvel is that any one capable of critical ex- amination and reflection should over have thought so. It is much nearer the truth to say, with Arthur Hallam,^ that those old Hebrews loved their God witli a personal passionate devotion so ardent as to bo almost " erotic " in its fervour. It was a love pure, unmercenary, and elevating. The God of the Hebrews was neither a cold abstraction dwelling apart from His creatures in Epicurean unconcern, nor a caprici(nis divinity who must be kept in good humour by an elaborate system of bribes; but a Being of tender affections, Who watched over the fatherless and defended the cause of the widow ; Wlio loved justice » J2e7natn.s-, pp. 277, 278. yo THE OLD TESTAMENT and mercy and would "by no means clear the guilty;" Whose " mercy was over all His works," forbidding to "muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn," or to " seethe the kid in its mother's milk," or to carry oft the dam bird while nursing her brood. It was this combination of almighty power with loving-kindness that melted the heart of the ancient Heljrew and weaned him at la-st from the corrupting influences of the nations around liim. His God was not far away, but very near him — "about his path and about his bed, and spying out all his ways." He "put" the penitent's " tears into His bottle," and " in His book were all his members written." From His Presence there was no escape. "If I climb up into heaven. Thou art there ; if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." And this all-embracing Presence, while it precluded all possibility of escape to the sinner, was a Presence of love and joy and protection to the righteous, and a Presence, moreover, which yearned for human affection. I think then that we may dismiss from our minds once for all the idea that the God of the Old Testament was not regarded by the Jews as a AXD DOCTRINE OF THE TRIXITY. -ji Porsonal Deity. But did they believe in Him as jl Trinity of Persons ? It must bo admitted that tlie • locti-ine of the Trinity is not phiinly taught — is not taught at all in fact, except T>y implication and casual tokens — in tlio Old Testament Scriptures. And the reason is plain. The world was overrun with polytheism and all the idolatrous pollutions that were inseparable from the gods many and lords many tliat mankind worshipped. There was therefore a terrible danger that a premature revelation of tlu^ doctrine of the Trinity would encourage the spread of polytheism, even among the chosen people whom God Avas training to be the teachers and regenerators of the human race. Consequently we only find imperfect and cursory glimpses of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Old Testament ; enough to indicate the truth, but not to propagate or sanction error. Let us take a few examples. Most of you arc aware that one of the names by which God is known in the Old Testament is the Hebrew name Elohim. Now Elohim is a plural noun ; yet in the Old Testament it is associated with singular verbs and adjectives, thus indicating plurality in unity. Airain, if you lor)k at the account of creation in the ilrst chapter of Genesis, you will find that after the cmerfrcnce of order out of chaos, there is a deliberative 72 DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY pause when the frontier is reached which separates man from all below him. "And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness." There, again, you have the Creator represented as a plurality of Persons. And when man fell through disobedience, we read : " And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of Us." The same significant phrase- ology is used in describing the confusion of tongues at Babel : — '' Let Us go down, and there confound their lanofuaofe." It would take too lono; to trace these fore- gleams of the truth throughout the Old Testament ; I am merely giving samples, and shall conclude with a reference to the sixth chapter of Isaiah. In the first place you find a triple ascription, by the Seraphim, of holiness to the Lord of Hosts; after which the prophet in vision " heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall / send, and who will go for TJsV A clearer intimation you could hardly have of a plurality of Persons in the Divine unity. Another fact which points in the same direction is the description of God as a Being of overflowing love — love personified. But love necessarily implies plu- rality — a subject and an object ; and in a perfect Being love implies possession of its object. I have already shown that since man is a being endowed with love, there must of necessity be satisfaction for that uni- IMPLIED, BUT NOT REVEALED. 73 vcrsal craving, because even the most thorougli-goin;; <.'Volutionists agree that every universal instinct im- plies a corresponding satisfaction; and experience proves that human love cannot rest in any object short of its own kind at least The same argument applies to Divine love. God being love eternally, it follows that He must from all eternity have been conscious of i-eciprocal love — in other words, that the perfection of the Godhead lies in a unity of Essence embracing a plurality of Persons. Thus you see the doctrine of ii Trinity is implied in that attribute of God which is the most encouraging and most consoling to man — the attribute of love. Love implies duality, and in its fulness trinity. We see it in its perfection in tlie family : bridegroom and bride united in a bond indissoluble, with offspring proceeding from both. This is no mere idle fancy ; it is the image under which the Incarnate Son represents His sacramental relation to His Church. I remarked a while ago on the fact that tlie i^Q-eat peril of polytheism made it necessary tliat tlie doctrine of the Trinity should be very gradually icvcaled. Did it ever strike you how wonderfully this process of gradual revelation characterizes God's discipline of man adown the ages in secular as well iViJ in reliiiious matters. Look at the vast 74 ALL TRUTHS REVEALED GRADUALLY. interval which separates the proclamation of the moral law from the modern discoveries of physical science. Thus viewed, what a different meaning physical science must have for those who suppose it to be the puzzling out of a riddle of which no human being has the key — to which, indeed, for aught we know, there may be no key — and for those who suppose physical science to be the knowledge of natural laws, which had been providentially withheld from us till the far more important knowledge of moral laws had been thoroughly' impressed on us. If the revela- tions of physical science had preceded those of moral law, what a pandemonium this world would have become. In the old days of Paganism, when the chronic relation of nation with nation, tribe with tribe, almost family with family, was a relation of antagonism and self-seeking, the knowledge of the hidden forces of Nature, which man now enjoys, would have placed an instrument in man's power which w^ould have tempted and enabled the race to destroy itself in internecine carnage. Therefore the moral law was proclaimed amidst the thunderings and light- nino-s of Sinai ao'es before man was allowed to learn the secret of the terrific forces which lay, like the spirits of Eastern fable, imprisoned around him. Man's con- science had to be educated, his afiections purified, his ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES. 75 (lomlnaiit selfishness to be subdued, before it could be safe to trust hiin with the knowledf]^(; and control of Nature's laboratory. Surely the remarkable fact that a law like the Decalogue far preceded a sound knowledrre of the laws and forces of Nature shows that Nature is under the government of a moral Being Who reveals her forces in the degree in which the knowledge of them would be safe for man. It is in Christendom, where the law of the Cross on the whole prevails, that man has been uHowcmI the knowledge of the potent forces of destruction which modern science has disclosed. How striking, too, is the coincidence of the discovery of the gold fields with the acceptance of free trade l)y the greatest commercial empire in the world. Had either of these events preceded the other, the commerce < )f the workl -svould have been disorganized, and there would have been universal confusion and ruin. Not till man was able, so to speak, to bridge over the ocean, and to furnish a ((uick transit for the exchange of international products, was the precious metal discovered in such unexpected abundance. But there would have been a Mut of m^V\ in the market and chaos on every Exchange indess the free trade of Great Britain ha* Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my iirst-born for my transgi'ession, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ?"- Humnu sacrifices came * Ucrod. ii. 39. ' Micah vi. G-7. 92 WHAT SACRIFICE IMPLIES. thus to be offered by the leading nations of antiquity — by the Phoenicians, Arabians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, as well as by the Mexicans. They were known in bright philosophic Athens in the noonday of her glory, and had not become obsolete in Rome for some time after the Christian era. Carthage, in the height of her commercial splendour, sacrificed children in crowds, and drowned their screams by the sound of music as they were flung into the flames. Perhaps the most striking evidence of man's yearning for expiatory cleansing is furnished by the extraordinary pre- valence of the Avorship of Isis at the dawn of the Christian dispensation. The religions of Greece and Rome had lost their hold on those nations, mainly from their failure to meet man's craving for peace of mind and holiness of life. The worship of Isis offered what classic Paganism, on the whole, declined — expiatory cleansing of man's guilty conscience. Hence its rapid triumphs in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and even in Britain, till Christianity dis- possessed it by actually supplying what the ritual of Isis had only promised. Thus we see that deep down in the heart of man there lies the ineradicable instinct of guilt and retri- bution with the consequent need of expiation and cleansing. Man has an intuitive sense of right and jV.lv S THIRST FOR KiWOWfJlDGE. 93 wrono", aiul an internal monitor to w;ini him when lie is tempted to prefer wrong to riglit. Nor is it of any avail to retort the various and sometimes contra- dictory notions of right and wrong which different nations and tribes and individuals may have. The answer is that all men agree in the fact tliat there are such tilings as right and wrong, though they may go astray in particulars. All accept the major pro- position, that it is wrong to do certain things and right to do others, and only differ as to the minor — namely, what tilings arc right and ^v]lat wrong. The proverbial literature of nations is the concentrated essence of their experience and reflection, and every nation that has a literature has embodied its ex- perience in some adage like our own " Murder will out " — meaning not so much tliat Nemesis will eventually overtake the criminal, as that an uneasy conscience will, as a rule, force him sooner or later to " make a clean breast of it." Shakespeare has given tragic expression to this instinct in the sleep- walking scene in " Macbeth," especially in the pathetic wail of the guilty Queen, that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand ;" the truth, of course, being that the indelible stain was not on the hand, but on the self-accusing conscience. Another of the universal instincts of Immanity is 94 DIFFERENCE OF LOVE OF BEAUTY man's irrepressible thirst for knowledge — knowledge for its own sake. This love of knowledge on the part of man has been at the root of nearly all great dis- coveries and many noble achievements. What is it that has sent men in all ages across forbidding deserts and over inhospitable seas, or made them to pass toil- some days and sleepless nights in search of truth ? Not the sordid love of money, nor even the nobler love of fame, but an unquenchable thirst for know- ledge — the insatiable curiosity which differentiates man from the brute; that reluctance, in short, to accept the despairing conclusion of Agnosticism — man's individual annihilation at death — as the final portion of our race. But there is no satisfaction for that consuming love of knowledge here. The more man learns, the vaster looms in the distant haze the outlines of the fields of truth which still lie undis- covered before him. And then one day he dies, perhaps suddenly while still in quest of knowledge and but a very short way on his journey. If Nature be a true prophetess there is a future life for man in which his thirst for knowledge will be satisfied. And what are we to say of man's love of beauty ? That, too, is a dividing gulf between man and the lower animals. They appear to have no sense of beauty for its own sake. I say " for its own sake," because ly MA.V AND ANIMALS. 95 there arc undoubtedly some Lirds and other animals wliicli oxhihit a certain sense and love of beauty. But it' you inspect it closely you will find that it is only an unreasoning instinct, given for a special purpose, and never passing beyond that purpose. It is an instinct specific in its scope, utilitarian in its aim, and temporary in its purpose. What animal has ever shown any sign of admiration of beautiful scenery, or beauty of any kind apart from one specific animal pui-pose ? But man has a love of beauty for the mere sake of beauty. What is beauty ? Where does it reside ? In the perceived object or in the perceiving mind ? A sunset makes precisely the same impression on the retina of the brute as on the human eye. But how different the result. When the image touches the eye of man it passes quickly through the optic nerve to the brain, and through the brain to the soul, and immediately a picture is presented to the mind which gives exquisite delight. Does not this clearly show, among other things, that this world is a sort of message to man from an intelligent Creator — a parable to teach him that the evanescent beauty of earth beckons him to a world where beauty does not fade. The existence in Nature of something that excites the sensation of beauty in man, and In liim only, is surely a proof that Nature is the product oi 96 SORROW FOR THE DEAD. an intelligent mind addressing itself to an intelligence that can understand the appeal and can recognize in the broken reflections of earthly beauty the love of One Who is the uncreated source of beauty. Man's love of beauty, however, finds no satisfaction here The beauty of earth blooms but to decay. Sorrow for the dead is also an instinct which no animal shares with man. Animals will fight and even die in defence of their young, but only while the offspring is growing and needs protection. When it has reached maturity it is no more to its parent than any other of its tribe, and when it dies the parent makes no lamentation over it. Not so man. When he has lost his beloved he does not resign himself to the parting as if it were eternal. A secret instinct whispers to him that it is but temporary ; and his unquenchable hope finds expres- sion in visible symbols. He raises monuments over the place where he has laid his dead, and places im- mortelles — unfading flowers — over their graves ; for he believes that the treasure he has lost is garnered up elsewhere and that he will find it again. Man- kind is thus typified by Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not. The refusal to be comforted is a protest against annihilation; it is the unreasoned wail of MAX NEEDS A MEDIATOR, 97 an un.lyini; instinct that the niis.sin*,^ cliiMrcn \\\\\ one day be restored. Man soon learns to reconcile himself to the inevitable; but huiuanity luis never acquiesced in death as its eternal doom. Of all the spiritual instincts of man, however, perhaps the strongest is that which cries aloud for a Mediator. Man feels that the world morally is all awry; wrong unpunished and triumphant; right and innocence outraged and unavenged. We have a striking instance of this in the Book of Job. Some of Job's friends came to comfort him, and they ur^-ed him to confess that his calamity was a judo-ment u^jon him for some known or forgotten sin. They plied him with their platitudes and conventional morality. " Remember, I pray thee," said one of them, " who ever perished, being innocent ? or where were the righteous cutoff?" Job repels their accusations and rejects their reasoning with indignation, and he appeals to the experience of mankind. If his friends were right, let them tell him, "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power ? Tlieir seed is established in their siglit with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of GckI upon them. Their bull gendereth, and faileth not ; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send H 98 JOB'S CRY FOR A DAYSMAN. forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ." Job did not deny that he was a sinner or that sin merited punishment. But he did deny that he was a sinner above all men, and he rejected with scorn the comfortable doctrine of those who were not afflicted, namely, that prosperity meant innocence and suffering guilt. But how could he clear himself? It seemed to him that he had no chance. Nothing should destroy his trust in God; "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." But how could he plead with a Being in Whose eyes the very heavens were not pure, and Who could charge even His angels with folly ? Job throws his argument into the form of a judicial trial, for the purpose of showing on what unequal terms the controversy must be conducted. Look at the end of the ninth chapter, and see how vividly this idea is brought out. " If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean ; yet shalt Thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come to- gether in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both." There lay Job's difficulty and perplexity. There was no avenue of communion between himself and his THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS 99 Almii^lity Jiidi^e. If, iiidocd, God liiid a human side; to His nature, then Job might have a chance of being understood. Or since tliat could not be, if some days- man could be found, some arbitrator, a mediator " that nnght lay his hand upon us both," one who could span tlie chasm that divided the creature from the Creator, and with one hand touch human nature, -with the other the Divine, thus brintrini^ them to^T^ether to interpret and explain them to each other — then, too, Job felt that it might be well with him. Job is here the representative of the ancient world, feeling its alienation from God, sinking beneath its accumulateze your own thoughts, you will find that you cannot dissociate the idea of causation from will ; and it is this impossibility which lias made men personify the forces of Nature under the name of laws, as if they were themselves causes. riant a seed in the earth ; after a time it strikes rootij 104 THE LAWS OF NATURE downwards and pushes a sprout above the ground. What is the cause ? It never occurs to you to believe that the earth caused it. Do you say that it was caused by a law of Nature ? But what do you mean by that? Nothing more than that one fact has followed another fact in a certain order, and has always done so as far as human experience can testify. The fact is, physical science knows nothing of causation, nothing of the relation of cause and effect; what it knows is antecedent and consequent — a very different matter. It is an axiom in science that there is an exact equivalence between the effect and its cause, that there can be nothing in the effect which was not previously in its cause. You fire a bullet through the air, and you know that it will not go on for ever ; that it will fall to the ground at the precise point where the force that expelled it from the gun has become exhausted ; it cannot go a hair's breadth further ; there is an exact equivalence between the expelling force and the result. But if you see a bullet hitting the bull's-eye of a target repeatedly, your reason tells you that there is no equivalence between the effect and the apparent cause : you see that there is more in the repeated accuracy of aim than the explosion will account for ; that an accidental explosion of a bundle of cartridges would not send MERELY OBSERVED SEQUENCES. 105 bullet after bullet into the bull's-eye. You conclude, therefore, that tlie bullets were fired from a gun, and that the gun was directed by an intelligent will ; and then you find an exact equivalence between effect and cause. You place a magnet and a piece of iron on a table, and you observe the iron moving towards the magnet. Why ? You know that the iron does not move of itself like a slave obeying a master's look, and you know also that the magnet is as uncon- scious and senseless as the iron which it pulls. How then does it pull the iron ? There is no visible or tangible connection. You say that the cause is attraction. But you explain nothing by saying that. Your explanation merely means that magnet and iron always act in that way towards each other. You feel therefore that there is more in the effect than the magnet will account for. There is no equivalence until you reach will. The constitution of your own mind tells you so. And so with regard to all the so-called laws of Nature. They are not causes at all in the scientific meaning of the word ; they are simply observed sequences. In the strict sense of the word law has no self-executive force; it always implies a will behind it. It is the law of England that a murderer shall be hanjred ; but the law cannot enforce itself; apart from intelligent will it is lo6 NATURE IMPLIES CREATIVE WILL. nothing. Similarly the laws of Nature require belief in a will behind them to account for them. Once admit the existence of such a will, and you cannot object to a miracle on the simple ground that it is a violation of natural law. For natural law is simply the expression of a Divine Will energizing in Nature. Take the origin of life, for example. None of the so-called laws of Nature will account for it. The doctrine of Biogenesis — that is, life from preceding life — is, by the admission of Professor Huxley, " victorious along the whole line." Professor Tyndall has demonstrated this conclusion by experimental evidence, and he has affirmed that to seek for " tlie promise and potency of all terrestrial life in matter " is to " cross the boundary of the experimental evidence," and fall back on the imagination. In other words, if we rely on scientific evidence we are forced back to a creative will as the explanation of the phenomena of life. But if there is such a cause behind the forces of Nature, an ever-present Will of which they are merely the expression, surely it stands to reason that such a Power can manipulate His own forces — can vary their direction and their results. Antecedent objection is out of the question. It is a matter of evidence pure and simple in each given case. A miracle, bear in AfAN RULES PHYSICAL FORCES, 107 iniiKl, does not mean a violation, or even a suspension, of any natural law. I throw a stone into the air, and it goes up against the law of gi'avitation. But I do not thereby suspend, much less violate, the law of gravitation. It goes on all the same in its silent might and majesty. I force the stone against it for a short distance by my will acting through muscular energy. But I do not stop the law of gravity for an instant, any more than I stop for an instant the current of a river when I drive a boat against it by oar or steam. Now the question with regard to miracles is: Can will or spirit so act upon natural forces as to brin^r about results different from, and it may be contrary to, what would otherwise have liappened ? I have said on a previous occasion that man is a kind of god, a creator in a subordinate sense, "a creature, yet a cause." Can he do anything analojrous to what we call a miracle ? Let us think. A man imbibes poison. Leave the laws of Nature to take their course, and the man will die. But human will interposes, and applies an antidote which coun- teracts the action of the poison. No law of Nature is violated, but one natural force is made to correct tht^ otherwise fatal effect of another. A ship is deserted and dismantled on the ocean. Left to the uncon- trolled action of the laws of Nature, it will be engulfed io8 AND HAS POWER OVER NATURE. by the waves or dashed against the rocks. Again a human will intervenes, and by an arrangement of sails and rudder saves the ship by means of the very forces which, left to themselves, would have destroyed it. Electricity is a powerful force diffused in the air, and latent in various substances. Left to itself it acts blindly, and sometimes destructively. Man lays hold of it, imprisons it, lights his houses and streets with it, uses it like a beast of burden, and makes it a medium of communication in a moment of time between himself and his fellow-man on the other side of the globe. You read in history of districts whicli were formerly fertile and now are barren. What is the explanation ? That men wantonly or ignorantly destroyed the woods which attracted the rain that fertilized the land. The influence of forests on climate is now one of the commonplaces of natural science. A suggestion was made some years ago to let the sea into the great desert of Sahara. Scientific men immediately sounded an alarm because, they said, the flooding of the Sahara would certainly alter com- pletely the climate of Europe, and probably bring back the glacial period. Take another illustration — that of a man, nearly drowned, rescued in a state of unconsciousness. Leave him to the uncontrolled ■Bction of the laws of Nature, and he will inevitably ACTION AT A DISTANCE. 109 perish. But human will comes in, and restores Hi'e by manipulating forces which, left to their natural course, would destroy it. It is the same in the case of any bodily illness. Leave the sick man to the mercy of the forces of Nature and he will die. But the physician takes him in hand and reverses the {)rocess of dissolution. In all these and similar ways man can so manipulate the laws of Nature as to produce results other than would have followed from the laws of Nature left to themselves. As Bacon says, "Man obtains mastery over Nature by obeying Nature.'* But if the laws of Nature are nothing but the o expression of a supreme Will pervading and ruling Nature, obviously such a power may at discretion act directly — that is, without using any intermediate agency. That leads to the question whether will can really act upon matter directly. Undoubtedly it can. I raise my arm, and I do so by my will — by tlio direct action of spirit on matter. I may be told that the movement of my arm is really caused by the displacement of certain particles in my brain. Yes, but the change in my brain was itself caused by my volition. Moreover, will can act upon will, as the indisputable phenomena of animal magnetism show. J]ut can will act at a distance, without contact ? Not only can it do so, but in matter of fact all action is no ALL ACTION IS really action at a distance. That is a comparatively modern discovery. Sir Isaac Newton, in his own line perhaps the greatest philosopher the world has seen, pronounced the suggestion of action at a distance, when first made, an " absurdity so great that no man, who has in philosophical matters a faculty of think- ing, can ever fall into it." Twenty -five years after- wards the great philosopher, with fuller knowledge and a juster appreciation of the limits of human science, preached the very doctrine which he had in his rashness denounced as an absurdity. " Have not then small particles of bodies," he asked, " certain powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance ? " We are now all familiar with action at a distance in the influence of the moon on the tides, and of the heavenly bodies on each other, as well as with magnetic and other forces of attraction. But in the last analysis, as I have said, all action is action at a distance ; there is no direct contact between bodies, great or small, that act upon each other. Go into the fields on a still sultry day in summer, when there is not a breath of wind to stir the air about you. All Nature seems asleep ; the cattle lie slumbering in the shade ; the birds are silent in the groves ; not a leaf flutters in the woods ; not a blade of grass waves in the meadow ; there is apparently an entire absence of ACTION AT A DISTANCE. Ill life and mo\'oinent. But if you had eyes that could penetrate through leaf and stem, through blade of grass, and soil, and rock, and if you had ears that coukl catch the secret harmonies of Nature, you would he amazed at the multitude of sights and sounds that would be suddenly revealed to you. You would find that there was no stillness at all in the landscape that erstwhile appeared to be so fast asleep. There is movement everywhere. The tree, whose leaves droop motionless in the noonday heat, and whose trunk stands erect against the sky, is throbbing with currents of life rushing through every pore. A stream of sap is coursing between bark and tissue, and millions of vesicles empty themselves every moment through all its leaves. There is not a blade of grass in the fields which is not palpitating with the life that is incessantly circulating through it. The earth beneath your feet, too, is being rapidly ploughed by numberless worms to make it fit for the husbandry of man. And not only so, but the most solid parts of the earth are in a state of perpetual unrest. I do not mean their motion through space together with our ])lanet, although that also is sufiiciently wond(irful, when you reflect that we who are assembled just now in this building are — building and all — rusliing through space at the rate of some nineteen miles a ii2 HO IV MAN'S WILL INFLUENCES second. What I mean is that there is not a stone in the Cathedral which is not in a state of constant internal agitation. Each stone is a conglomeration of innumerable atoms, all in vibration, and not one of them touching another. Even a polished bar of steel is composed of minute atoms permeated by currents of ether, and when you hear of steel and iron con- tracting or expanding according to the temperature, what is meant is that the component atoms recede from or approach each other. Touch they never do. Talk of the mysteries of faith ! Why, we cannot move a step without stumbling against some mystery of science. But can man's will set God's will in motion, as in prayer ? Certainly. There is a Latin proverb which says that " to labour is to pray," and, like most proverbs, it concentrates a volume of wisdom into a phrase. There is a close analogy between prayer and labour. You ask if man's will can set God's in motion. All the good we do or can enjoy comes really from God. "Every good gift," says St. James, "and every perfect gift, is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights." Our bountiful harvests come from God. But how do they come from Him ? Not like the manna in the wilder- ness, without the co-operation of man. The earth will not yield her increase, will not yield the good TIIK WILL OF COD. II5 things wliicli CJoil has storcMl within Ikt for man's use, unless man sets God's will in motion by his own labour. He must plough, and weed, and plant seed, and reap the golden liarvest, else God's will on his behalf will not aet. God has laid up in the bowels of the earth coal to give light and heat to man. But man must search for it, ancial creations I do not understand the special creation of each individual by a miraculous interposition of Divine power; I mean the creation of the type in each case, the descent being by evolution or development. But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the doctrine of evolution in the sense of the transmutation of species is true. We are then confronted by two views of man's origin — the Mosaic account and the Evolutionist account. Tlie Mo.saic account of creation does not profess to be a scientific exposition. Its purpose is moral, and its references to the subject-matter of physical science are purely subordinate and subsidiary. At tlie same it is well to remember that eminent men of science, including ii8 CHRIST'S MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION BufFon, have declared that man's creation as described by Moses is in substantial accordance with the facts of Nature. Now, if you look at Gen. i. 2, you will find that the process there described is that of creation in the order of separate species — a type of each kind in its maturity, with reproductive power — " whose seed is in itself." And as a matter of fact that order is in accordance with the laws of thought. Logically the parent comes before the offspring. You must think of an oak before you get the idea of an acorn. Ac- cording to the Mosaic account, the different species, man included, were created in their types, with power to reproduce their kind. And humanity is represented as unisexual at first, or rather as embracing the attributes of both sexes in a single personality. Adam had apparently the qualities of both sexes included in himself at his creation. The separation into two sexes took place afterwards. It is a curious fact that Plato suggests the same idea in one of his speculations on the origin of man. Was this an intuition of genius ? or a primeval tradition floating down the stream of time ? But let us see what the doctrine of evolution has to say on this subject. According to that doctrine, life started on its various peregrina- tions from a single germ, which gradually developed AO VIOLATJOX OF NATURAL LAW. 119 into an ori^ani/cd l)cini^, male and t'oniah'. TluTe was tlierefore a loni;- period of time dnrino' wliicli life was propafi^ated by a unisexual process ; when the repro- ductive power energized and multiplied tlirough a single stem. So far, then, the Mosaic account of man's origin and the Evolutionist account are in agreement. They difier as to the period at which the life which man shares with the brutes became bisexual ; but they agree that at a stage in the de- velopment the reproductive power, which had included the properties of both sexes in one indix idual, parted into two sexes. But if that is so, what is there against reason or natural lavr in the belief that at another critical period in the evolution of the Divine will life should be transmitted through a single parent ; that a new Head of humanity should be produced in a new way ; that the moral entail of descent from Adam should in Him be broken ; while the connection should remain intact through the female line in all that appertained to the essentials of humanit}* ; the fecundating element being supplied direct by " the Lord and Giver of life " ? Grant that God can dis- pense with means when He wills ; that all life comes from Him ; that the propagation of life was once unisexual : and you will see, I think, that there is nothing in our Lords miraculous concrption that need 120 VIRGIN BIRTHS NOW. offend our reason or that implies any violation of natural law. And, in truth, we have even at the present day, in the lower forms of life, instances of virgin births. We have it both in the vegetable kingdom and in the animal. I need only refer to working bees, which are now known to be the off- spring of the female alone. It is hard that we should be put to the proof in this way in defence of one of the most sacred articles of our faith ; but since we are put on our defence, it is well that we should be pro- vided with an answer. Even Haeckel, a very aggres- sive evolutionist, who would probably not resent the designation of atheist, frankly admits the phenomenon •of virgin births as an incontestable fact in the animal kingdom.^ If God then deviates occasionally even now from the ordinary process of propagating life, why should it be thouofht a thins: incredible that He did so on SO momentous an occasion as the Incarnation of the Eternal Word? Judging by the history of man's ■original creation, by our Lord's life, and by what we are told of man's life in heaven, it would seem that the perfection of human nature lies in this union of the spiritual properties of both sexes in a single personality ; ^ Weismann also, in the Hercditij and Kindred Biological Prohlemts, deals at length with parthenogenesis (see pp. 225-24-8). 7JrO yJTi'KES AV CHRIST, 121 the scpanitlon l)C'iiii;- only ijrovisloiuil iuirfect, and therefore far more sensitive and sympathetic. The purer the nature, the more exquisite is its sensitiveness, the more responsive its sympathy. Another proof that our Lord's humanity was more 134 H^ ^^^ ^O SPECIAL CHARACTER. perfect than ours is the absence in Him of what we call character. All men and women have some special characteristic ; one is brave, another humble, another patient, and so forth. Moses was the meekest of men, Solomon the wisest, Job the most patient. What does that mean ? It means that those qualities predominated over the rest of the character in their respective possessors. But the predominance of any special quality is a mark of imperfection. The per- fection of man's constitution is to ha\e its qualities in equipoise ; each in its proper place ; each coming to the front when required ; but none overshadowing the rest. Read the history of Christ as you find it in the Gospels, and you will see that one of the most wonderful things about it is the absence of any special characteristic. All His intellectual and moral faculties are in perfect equilibrium. Each was in its proper place, each asserted itself when necessary, just to the extent required, and not a jot beyond. He was the bravest of men when bravery was required ; the meekest when meekness was needed ; the most indio-nant when the occasion demanded indignation ; the most merciful where mercy was deserved. But there Avas no special quality whicli distinguished Him ; no particular attribute which dominated the rest of His human nature. Another SIGXIFICAXCE OF " SOX OF MAX." 135 tlilu'.;- Worthy oi' notice; is the tith', "Son ot Man," whicli our Lor']' THE A TO XE mi: XT. 1S3 them to "sin no more," — Ho tautrht us to recognize and reverence the Divine iniao^c in its most repulsi\-e lunnan embodiments, and indeed to love it all the more on that account. He has glorified suffering in all its forms by precept and example: — "The best of men That e'er wore earth about Ilim was a Sufferer — A soft, meek, patient, liumble, trauquil Si)irit — The lirst true Gentleman that ever breathed.' Xo sufiV'ring, indeed, ever was or can be lilcc His ; for in Him human nature was summed up and concen- trated. " In Thee is the well of life." As the Second Adam, the New ^lan. He was at the centre of hu- manity, and was tlius in touch with eveiy pulsation of its sorrows, and — still worse — of its ingratitude, at all points of the circumference. The purer, the deeper, the stronger a man's love is, tlie more keenly does it feel the lack of any appreciative response. Disappointment passes lightly over shallow natures which have little power of sympathy and do not feel deeply the need of fellowship. What pathos, what Resurrection (1 Cor. XV.) ho points out tho two tendencies and principles in human nature to which I have just referred. The human body, he says, " is sown a natural i.ody ; it is raised a spiritual hody. Tliere is a natural l.ody, and there is a spiritual Itody. And so it is written, Tlie first man Adam was made a living soul; the Last Adam was made a (|uickeninf]j spirit." The word translated "natural" here is literally "psychical," that is, under the dominion of the animal soul. In other words, man became through Adam's fall sul)ject to the dominion of the animal part of his nature. But the Second Adam triumphed over the animal nature and asserted and established the supremacy of spirit. We have now to make our choice, and it is a very- serious one, for it may be irrevocable. Once you deliberately place yourself on the down-grade of sin you have no security that you can ever retrace your steps. IX. ^And the third Day He rose again accord- ing TO the Scriptures." CHRIST MUST HAVE RISEN. To-day we are to consider the question of Christ's Resurrection from the dead. To the Christian that question admits of only one ansAver : Jesus must have risen from the dead; "it was not possible/' as St. Peter declared on the Day of Pentecost, "that He should be holden " of death. Why was it impossible ? First, because of the Hypostatic Union — the union, that is, of the Divine nature and the human in His single Person. In virtue of that union the human nature of our Lord was never separated for an instant, and could not be, from His Person — that is, from the Godhead. Our Lord's Divine Person was with His soul in Hades and with His Body in the tomb. It was thus im- possible that death should have had dominion over Him. What was inseparably united with God could not be the prey of corruption and the helpless victim of death. He " drank of the brook in the way," but METArilYSICAL NECESSITY. 1S9 only in the way, only as an incident ni His triuni- ])hant progress. He "tasted death for every man." Humanity, summed up in Him, uny his passionate apostrophe to " those who died at IMarathon." It is also seen in those legends of many lands which represent some hero or national benefactor as only reposing for a time in the many mansions of the dead : our own Arthur still w^aiting in the Vale of Avalon, or the mighty Barl)arossa sleeping in his mystic cave till his country shall again need his trusty sword. And allied with this feeling of invincible reluctance to surrender our iK'hjved to annihilation is the instinct which whispers to us that the good cannot die. We }iave no such instinct about evil, even when evil is personified in human lives. Death seems no more than tlie fitting and lasting portion of men who live sensual, selfish, brutish lives, and who go dow^n into the pit with characters matured and rendered incor- rigible by long habit. But w^e instinctively rebel ajiainst the doctrine which would teach as that the true, the noble, the unselfish shall be vanquished for good and all by death. Our moral sense refuses to believe that lives which in their day have been full of 192 THE ORDER OF NATURE. loving service, or brave in the defence and promotion of righteousness, shall themselves descend, never ta return, into " the land where all things are forgotten." Consider Jesus of Nazareth for a moment only as man; a homeless wanderer in Judaea, p'oinir about doing good without thought of reward ; healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, curing the insane, com- forting the mourners, raising the dead, weeping over the grave of His friend before restoring him to his sisters ; or, on the other hand, confronting and de- nouncing hypocrisy, lying, impurity, cowardice, op- pression, and cruelty. That such a Life should be holden permanently by death we feel to be such a moral contradiction that our natural impulse is to reject it as impossible. And physical science comes forward to ratify this dictate of our moral sense when it tells us that the fittest must survive. Is there any kind of life in the whole universe of being- fitter to survive than His ? Well might the Apostle say that "it was not possible" that such a Life "' should be holden of " death, even apart from the Divinity which encompassed it. But we are told that a resurrection from tlie dead, and consequently Christ's Kesurrection, is unworthy of credit : first, because it is opposed to the order of Nature ; secondly, because it is not attested by suflScient ECCLESIASTICAL MIRACLES. 193 cvidcMice. Lot ur nrlanco, during the short time at our disposal, at these two objections. 1. The first is an attack on the belief in miracles in general, and I have dealt with it on a former occasion. Something, however, may profitably be added here, and I will begin by disengaging the defence of miracles from an argument which seems to me at once unten- able and mischievous ; I mean the distinction sought to be established betw^een the miracles of Scripture and what are called ecclesiastical miracles. Dr. Mozley,not to mention other great names, has insisted on that distinction in one of his brilliant Bampton Lectures. Now I have no objection to the rejection of any or all of the ecclesiastical miracles after sufficient examination of them on their merits. What I object to, as utterly inadmissible in logic and ruinous as a matter of controversial tactics, is the setting up of an arbitrary line, on one side of w^hich miracles are freely accepted, on the other rigidly excluded. Dr. Mozlcy lays down a number of tests by which, as he thinks, the miracles of Scripture may l>e distinguished from all others. But these tests break down the moment they are confronted with facts. For instance, " wildness," "puerile extrava- gance," " grotesqueness and absurdity," mark, Dr. Mozley says, the class of non-Scriptural miracles. O 194 ^^- MOZ ley's view UNTENABLE This is true of many, perhaps of most, of the ecclesiastical miracles ; but it is by no means true of all. On the other hand. Dr. Mozley's tests have been used by sceptical writers against the miracles of the Bible; such as the speaking of the serpent to Eve, and of the ass to Balaam; the transformation of Moses's rod into a serpent which devoured the serpent- rods of the Egyptians and then became a rod again ; the destruction of the children who mocked Elisha; and the resurrection of a corpse which had after- wards accidentally touched that prophet's lifeless bones. It is clear, therefore, that what looks like extravagance or absurdity cannot be admitted as a valid test, since it proves too much. Dr. Mozley, indeed, endeavours to get rid of this objection by contrasting "the quantity and proportion" of "mira- cles of an eccentric type" recorded in ecclesiastical history with those of the same class related in the Bible. But this is to forget that the Bible miracles are in reality a selection out of a large mass of allef>-ed miracles. Not to dwell on the miracles of o the Apocryphal Gospels, which are wild and ex- travagant enough, the author of the fourth Gospel states explicitly that the miracles recorded by him- self are but a fractional part of those which Jesus had wrought. On the other hand, a selection might I\ REASON AND POLICY. 195 easily be made of post- Apostolic miracles wliich would stand all Dr. ^lozlcy's tests. It would be difficult, for example, to summon a witness moi*e competent in every way to give satisfactory evi- dence as to any matter which fell within the ran*.,^' of his own observation or investigation than 8t. Augustine of Hippo. Now St. Augustine bears witness to the reality of several miracles which were alleged to have occurred in his neighbourhood during liis lifetime ; and he declares, in particular, that he beheld one of those miracles with his own eyes. Ambrose, Irenaeus, and other great names, bear similar testi- mony ; and if we summarily reject their evidence, not on its merits, but merely because the alleged miracle comes into collision with some arbitrary assumption of our own, we shall find it rather difficult to make any effiictive answer to the sceptic who proposes to apply our canon of criticism to the miracles of tlie Bible. I am not now expressing any opinion on the credibility of ecclesiastical miracles ; I am only point- ing out the danger of rejecting them in the lump without investiiration, in obedience to an arbitrarv test which proves a great deal too much for believers in the inspiration of the Bible. It is proverbially dangerous to play with edged tools, and it is better to admit frankly the impossibility of laying down any 196 MIRACLES POSTULATE criteria which shall include all the Biblical miracles and exclude all the ecclesiastical. I have said on a previous occasion that miracles are not in any way a violation or suspension of the laws or order of Nature ; and I will now add that, on the contrary, a miracle postulates the order of Nature as its correlate. The turning of water into wine is but the acceleration of a natural process wrought by a Will that has power over Nature. The juice of the grape is water transmuted mysteriously into the raw material of wine. There is an absence of apparent means in the ordinary process as well as in the miracle of Cana ; the difference is only one of degree. Both transcend the skill of man, and both rest on Nature as a basis. To turn stones into bread would have been a violation of natural order. To turn water into wine was in harmony with natural order. St. Mark,^ for instance, tells us that our Lord " could do no mighty work " in " His own country," because the people were not in a receptive mood. Does not that show that His miracles were wrought on the basis of the existinof order of Nature ? He neither over- powered nor suspended the ordinary laws of human nature, and the free will of man could thus effectually bar the miraculous energy of God Incarnate. When » yi. 5. THE ORDER OF NATURE, 197 human nature, on the other hand, was not only passive, but energetically susceptible of spiritual intluences, as in the case of the woman with an issue of blood, it attracted healing virtue from the Body of our Lord. Dr. Carpenter, the late eminent physiologist, in the course of an elaborate argument against the evidential credibility of miracles, gives the following illustration, which seems to me to tell strongly against his thesis : — "Every medical man of large experience is well aware how strongly the patient's undoubting faith in the efficacy of a particular remedy or mode of treat- ment assists its action ; and when the doctor is himself animated by such a faith, he has the more power of exciting it in others. A simple prediction, without any remedial measure, will sometimes work its own fulfilment. Thus Sir James Paget tells of a case in which he strongly impressed a woman having a sluggish, non-malignant tumour in the breast, that this tumour would disperse within a month or six weeks ; and so it did. He perceived this patient's nature to be one on which the assurance would act favourably; and no one could more earnestly and effectively enforce it. On the other hand, a fixed belief on the part of the patient that a mortal disease has seized upon the frame, or that a particular opera- tion or system of treatment will prove unsuccessful. 198 DR. carpenter's OBJECTION- seems in numerous instances to have been the real occasion of the fatal result." ^ Is not this somewhat akin to what we usually mean by a miracle ? We have here a strong will, instinct with faith, acting on a w^eaker will, and through that weaker will on the tissues of the body, and either arresting and reversing the process of decomposition or accelerating the process of recovery. Is this different in kind or only in degree from the miracle performed by St. Peter when he said to the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, " Look on us," and then commanded him to " rise up and walk." " And immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength." If mere human will can thus act directly, as Dr. Carpenter admits, on the laws of health and disease, reversing or modifying their normal action ; nay, can even determine the issues of life and death ; may not a resurrection from the dead be only a further exemplification of the same power at a more distant stage of the process of dissolution ? It is observable that in every case of resurrection our Lord addressed imperatively the spirit that had left the body. The daughter of Jairus He " called, saying, Maid, arise." To the son of the widow of Nain He said, " Young man, I say unto thee. Arise." In raising ' Nature and Man, by William B. Carpenter, M.D., p. 257. UiXDERMIXES HIS ARGUMENT. 199 Lazarus, four days after death, " He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, conic forth." And He tells us of an liour when "all that arc in the grave shall hear His voice, and shall come forth." ^ Is it inconceivable that this final summons to the victims of dissolution is but an example on a grand scale of the power which Sir James Paget exercised on a small scale in the story related by Dr. Carpenter ? It is in both cases the action of spirit upon matter. The adult human body is but a minute cell gradually magnified. At death it is dissolved into its elements, and not a par- ticle of the body that is buried will rise again. But the vital germ remains, and will clothe itself with a spiritual body proper to it : " to every seed its own body." Why may not the gradual development from an embryonic germ to adult maturity, which is the law of the human body under its present conditions, be one day effected by a sudden transformation, like the change of water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana ? In point of mystery, the gradual develop- ment of an organism is as inexplicable as its sudden transformation. The mystery lies in the hidden cause, not in its mode of action (see 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52). It is obvious, of course, that the Will wdiich could restore life to others could resume His own when He chose. » St. John V. 28, 29. 200 MIRACLES AND EVOLUTION. And, after all, the restoration of life in any particular organism is less incomprehensible than the beginning of life, and is certainly less of an invasion of the order of Nature. The Power which has achieved the greater cannot be baffled by the less. But belief in miracles is supposed by some to be incompatible with the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution. Yet the simple truth is that the doctrine of evolution has sapped the ordinary scientific position of the denier of miracles. For the doctrine of evolu- tion implies that the Creator of the universe is energetically present through all the operations of Nature. If this world were a machine set going for a certain period of time, the result would be constant and invariable efiects following from constant me- chanical causes. But evolution has to do with living forms, and these are, ex hypothesi, infinitely variable.. Granting that protoplasm is chemically the same in the germ-cell of a man and of a fish, this only makes it all the more certain that a pre- siding Mind directs and shapes the very different results. But if we admit that a Supreme Mind is behind the framework of Nature, directing and con- troUino- her forces, we shall recognize that a miracle is only an instance of the same control charged with a more manifest purpose. The will of God acting on NO ANTECEDENT OBJECTION. 201 brute matter and coiiipclling its obedience is not different in kind from the will of man energizing through the material organism of the body ; and the one is no more than the other a violation or suspen- sion of physical law. If the process by which the loaves were multiplied or by which Lazarus was restored to life were laid bare, a man of science might be able to correlate it with the partially revealed processes which are daily going on in the laboratory of Nature. In short, scientific objection to miracles, if we are to use language with strict accuracy, there can be none, and men of science themselves, who are not wedded to a foregone conclusion, are foremost in making the admission. Dr. Carpenter, for example, in his assault on miracles, on the ground of "fal- lacies of testimony," makes the following candid admission: — " But the scientific theist who regards the so-called * laws of Nature ' as nothing else than man's expres- sions of so much of the Divine order as it lies within his power to discern, and who looks at the uninter- ruptedness of this order as the highest evidence of its original perfection, would find (as it seems to me) no abstract difficulty in the conception that the Author of Nature can, if He will, occasionally depart from it. And hence, as I deem it presumptuous to deny 202 ATTACK ON CHRIST'S RESURRECTION that there miorht be occasions which in His wisdom may require such departure, I am not conscious of any such scientij&c * prepossession ' against miracles as would prevent me from accepting them as facts, if trustworthy evidence of their reality could be adduced. The question with me, therefore, is simply : * Have we any adequate historical ground for the belief that such departure has ever taken place ? '" ^ We may accept this as a perfectly fair way of stating the problem. Let us then consider briefly the leading objections to the credibility of our Lord's Resurrection on the ground of deficiency of evidence- Dr. Carpenter's incredulity rests almost entirely on the argument of prepossession, which he illustrates mainly from epidemics of credulity, such as the various alleged phenomena of " spiritualism." This argument is also the fulcrum of the scepticism of the Squire in " Robert Elsmere." Robert Elsmere's faith gives way under the pressure of the Squire's assurance that prepossession in favour of miracles in the time of Christ "governed the work of all men of all schools." Well may Mr. Gladstone characterize this as " a most gross and palpable exaggeration. In philosophy the Epicurean school was atheistic, the Stoic school was ambiguously theistic, and doubt nestled in the * Nature and Man, p. 241. FOR ALLEGED DEEEC7IVE EVIDENCE. 203 Academy. Christianity had little direct contact with these schools, but they acted on the tone of thought in a manner not favourable but adverse to the pre- conception. . . . The age was not an age of faitli, amonnf thinkinir and rulinof classes, either in natural or in supernatural religion." ^ When " certain of the philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered " St. Paul in Athens, they derided him as a " babbler," and " a setter forth of strange gods, l)ecause he preached unto them Jesus and the Resur- rection."^ Ajid they listened attentively to his dis- course before the Areopagus till they " heard of the resurrection of the dead ; " and then " some mocked," while the more courteous veiled their scepticism in the polite or perhaps scornful promise to " hear him again concerning this." It is evident, moreover, from St. Paul's chapter on the resurrection in his first Epistle to the Corinthians that he found that doctrine to be the great stumbling-block to the acceptance of Christianity. The eulogistic biographer of Apollonius of Tyana is so well aware of this prejudice against the doctrine, that, although he credits Apollonius with superhuman endowments, he is careful to insinuate > *' Rohert E/smere and the Battle of Belief," li\neieer\ih. Century for Mtiy, 1888, p. 775. * Acta xvii. 18, 32. 204 OBJECTIONS EXAMINED. that the only case of resurrection attributed to him was probably no resurrection at all, but only a trance, " a seeming death." ^ He evidently suspected that the ascription of such a miracle to his hero would preju- dice the public mind against the rest of his narrative. So far was the disposition of the early ages of Chris- tianity from belief in a resurrection from the dead. And it is obvious that if that miracle is established, the testimony is more than sufficient to carry all the other miracles of the Gospel. But was the Jewish mind prepared for such a resurrection as that of our Lord ? Clearly not. A powerful party rejected the doctrine altogether, and those who accepted it limited their belief to a general resurrection at the Last Day. We see this in the answer of Martha to our Lord when He said, " Thy brother shall rise again." " I know that he shall rise aofain," she answered, " in the resurrection at the Last Day." And so far were our Lord's immediate followers from being in a frame of mind favourable to belief in His Resurrection, that the very opposite is the fact. He tried, but failed, to prepare their minds for it. Even after the Resurrection they were slow to believe » Cardinal Newman's Historical Sketches, pp. 325, 326. Douglas (Criterion, p. 387) observes that some heretics affirmed that our Lord rose from the dead, (pavTaaluScos, only in appearance, from an idea of the impossihility of a resurrectiOTU ALLEGED FREPOSSESSION. 205 it. The two disciples on their way to Emmaus told their unrecoirnized Master that the women who had visited the empty tomb had made the "company" of the disciples " astonished " by announcing His Resur- rection on the authority of angels. And Himself upbraided them for their unbelief : " fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken : ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory ? " And if they were not prepared for His Resurrection at all, still less were they prepared for the kind of resurrection which they immediately began to preach. It was unique. There was no precedent for it, nothing to suggest it, in their sacred writings or national tradi- tions. The few examples of previous resurrections in the Old Testament and in their own experience were simply returns to the previous life in all particulars, and they were, after all, only reprieves : the restored victims of death had to succumb again to the in- evitable doom of mortal man. But Christ rose to die no more. "Death hath no more dominion over Him" is the triumphant keynote of the Apostolic message to mankind. Nor was this all. His Body had undergone a mysterious change. It was no longer subject to the laws of matter. It appeared and disappeared suddenly, ruirardless of material barriers, and assumed dili'crent 2o6 CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. forms/ not always recognizable.^ Whether the sceptic, then, regards our Lord's disciples as deliberate deceivers or as self-deceived, in either case it is against all reason and analogy that they should have invented an entirely novel and unheard-of resurrection for their Master Their prime object was to make converts, and they would surely not have gone out of their way to make the cardinal article of the new religion harder of belief than it need have been. » St. Mark xvi. 12. * St. Luke xxiv, 16 ; St. John xxi. 4, 12. We have here a touch of nature which betokens personal knowledge on the part of the nar- rator. " And none of the disciples durst ask Him, Who art Thou ? knowing that it was the Lord." He was evidently different in out- ward form from the Jesus of other days ; yet they had an intuitive perception that it was He, though they still longed, with the pathetic nervousness of profound love, to have their lingering doubt dissipated, but were afraid to ask Him. That little detail was never the inven. tion either of fraud or of enthusiastic prepossession. See also St. Luke xxiv. 36-41. On one of His sudden apparitions to His disciples " they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And He said unto them, Why are ye troubled ? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts ? Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself : handle Me, and see ; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have. And when He had thus spoken, He showed them His hands and His feet." The evidence satisfied their reason. Nevertheless " they yet believed not for joy, and wondered." How natural this is ! The heart, from the very depth and intensity of its love, is prone to lag behind the intellect in believing what it pas- sionately longs to believe. It is incredulous from the ecstasy of its joy. This is an incident which it would not have occurred to a forger or a fanatic to invent. The impugners of the Resurrection pass by a multitude of these links of circumstantial evidence. CUMULATIVE EVIDENCE. 207 It is hardly necessary to discuss, even if there were time, other objections that have been advanced against our Lord's Resurrection, for the cumulative evidence for it is overwhehninfT. The Christian Church is a livinj; demonstration of it. Its existence is inconcciv^able apart from the Resurrection. Why the cliange fronv the last day of the week to the first, which is coeval with Christianity ? Why Easter Day, which is also as old as Christianity ? Why the celebration of the Lord's Supper always on the first day of the week ? Why the name " Lord's Day," which dates from the New Testament? It is undeniable that the first teachers of Christianity put the Resurrection of Jesus in the forefront of their preaching, and it is equally undeniable that the challenge was not taken up. Their Jewish adversaries did not seriously question the fact. Why did they make no serious attempt to substantiate the story put into the mouths of the Roman guard ? Even if we were to give up the Gospel narrative altogether as the product of a later age,^ we * The accomplished author of Supernatural Relvjion Bays boldly that he " has not found a single trace of any of those [Synoptic] Gospels during the first century and a half after the death of Christ." Tiiis is a strong statement. Let us try it by one crucial test. St. Polycarp was a disciple of St. John, and Ircnajus, who know him personally, has left us a most grapliic description of him, mentioning, among other interesting details, Polycarp's " familiar intercourse with John, as be was accustomed to tell, as also his familiaiity with 208 ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER have St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans ; and I believe that no reputable authority anywhere can be cited in favour of bringing any of these down to a date later than a.d. 60. Now in all these Epistles the literal facts of the Resurrec- tion and Ascension are either taken for granted or emphatically affirmed. And in one of them the Apostle asserts that Christ was seen after His Resurrection, not only by all the Apostles, but by "above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present." The first Epistle of St. Peter is also admitted, even by hostile those -who had seen the Lord." Now St. Poljcarp has left an Epistle, written in the early part of the second centnry, in which there are quotations from the Gospels so nearly literal that the ingenuity of the author of Supernatural Religion has failed to discredit them. Ind-aed, there is one chapter in the epistle which is simply a mosaic of quotations from several of the Pauline Epistles, from St. Peter, from the Acts of the Apostles, from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and from the Book of Psalms; but there is hardly any of the quotations verbally accurate throughout. He evidently quoted from memory, as writers of that day were wont to do, and it is uncritical to contend that the passages are not quotations at all because there are slight variations between them and the originals. Such style of criticism would make sad havoc of contemporary history even among ourselves, for accurate quotation is still a rare virtue. We have, moreover, the testimony of Irenseus, the authen- ticity of whose work the author of Supernatural Religion does not dispute, that he heard Polycarp conversing " concerning His [Christ's] miracles and His doctrine " " in consistency with the Holy Scriptures, as he (Polycarp) had received them from the eye-witnesses of the doctrine of Salvation." ox THE RESrKf:f:CT/OX. 209 critics, to be fjonuiiic, und it boiU's uiKiiu'stiuiuLljlf ti-sti- iiiony to the fact of Christ's Resurrection. We must therefore accept the evidence of St. I'iiul juhI St. Peter at least so far as tins: that lu'licf in Christ's Resurrection and Ascension -svas univt'rsal in th(i Christian Church wliile the majority of His followers and Jewish contemporaries were alivc^ and ahle to expose fraud or