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 BL 200 ,V68 1894 
 Voysey, Charles. 
 Theism, or. The religion of 
 common sense 
 
 No,, 
 
THEISM 
 
 THE RELIGION OF COMMON SENSE. 
 
THEISM: 
 
 THE RELIGION OF COMMON SENSE, 
 
 REV. CHARLES VOYSEY, B.A., 
 
 St. Edmund ILdl^ Oxford ; formerly Vicar 
 of ITealnngh. 
 
 1894. 
 
 LONDON: 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 
 
 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON 
 AND 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 
 
 Price Half -a- Crown . 
 
LOxnoN : 
 
 PKINTED BY WEllTHKIilER, LEA AND CO., 
 CIRCUrf PLACE, LOXDON WALL 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 I OFFER THIS BOOK, IN THE FIRST PLACE, WITH 
 HUMILITY, RESPECT, AND CHARITY TO ALL REALLY 
 RELIGIOUS AND DEVOUT SOULS OF EVERY CREED. 
 
 In the next place, I offer it to those who 
 
 HAVE ANY MISGIVINGS THAT THEIR CREED MAY NOT 
 BE TRUE, OR WHO MAY HAVE BEGUN TO DOUBT 
 
 THE Divine origin and infallibility of 
 " Revelation." 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The intrinsic value of this little book will not 
 depend on the notice that may l)e taken of it, 
 or on the silent contempt that may be shown 
 to it by the public Press. Although I am 
 far from satisfied with it myself, and deeply 
 bewail its shortcomings, I am nevertheless certain 
 that, if any spoken or written words are of 
 importance at all, what is written here is of 
 vital importance to all truly religious souls, and 
 through them to the world at large. 
 
 This book is a statement, more or less true and 
 accurate, of what may thoroughly be believed and 
 gladly embraced (concerning the sublime themes 
 of God, and man, and destiny), without the 
 least violence to reason, conscience, and love, 
 which are the common properties of human 
 nature. What is here alleged is the natural 
 outcome of the exercise of those faculties which 
 
Yin PREFACE. 
 
 God has given us for the discovery o£ truth 
 concerning Himself. Of course, it is in deadly 
 conflict with so-called '^ Revelation," most of 
 all Avitli the " Christian Revelation," although it is 
 in harmony with much that the Bible contains, 
 especially with the religious thought and feeling 
 expressed by tlie psalmists and prophets of Israel. 
 
 The question now, not only for critics and 
 Christian advocates, but for every one who has 
 any sense of responsibility, is this: Which is the 
 more true — Theism or Christianity ? I do not 
 claim for Theism that it is the uihole truth ; on 
 the contrary, I thank God that honest and earnest 
 men will always be discovering better and higher 
 truths about Him and His dealings as the ages 
 roll on. All I claim is that whereinsoever Theism 
 conflicts with the " Christian Revelation," Theism 
 is true and Christian Revelation is false. This 
 is my challenge, and I demand a patient hearing 
 and a fair encounter. 
 
 Christian advocates may be unwilling to meet 
 me in the open held. If so, the day will surely 
 come when their reluctance will be discovered to 
 l)e due to their inability to refute my arguments 
 and to defend themselves. 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 My little ])ook contains a few simple truths 
 upon which I have been preaching for over twenty- 
 two years. The themes are inexhaustible and 
 ever growing in interest, the more they are 
 studied. 
 
 Some Theists, far more able than I am, have 
 written on the same themes, ])ut I stand alone 
 in one respect. I have founded a Church and 
 constructed a form of worship of the one living 
 and true God, which has proved, and is still 
 proving more and more, a si)iritual help and 
 comfort to many souls. Theism is not only a 
 theology, but a religion. We Theists, one and all, 
 say and feel that mere intellectual assent to the 
 truths of Theism is of little or no value without 
 o-ivino' our whole hearts to God in trust, love, 
 and obedience. 
 
 We sow the seed : it may be only a grain here 
 and there, but who can tell the mighty power 
 of even one grain of truth ? Who can foretell 
 what the harvest shall be ? 
 
 The following pages were written at the request 
 of the Editor of the Weekly Times and EcJto. I 
 have therefore republished them as they originally 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 appeared, thinking it would l)e very ungracious 
 to conceal or to ignore help which I then regarded, 
 and still regard, as an act of kindness and goodwill 
 to our cause. 
 
 CHAELES YOYSEY. 
 
 St. Valery, Finchley Road, 
 Hampstead, 
 
 January^ 1894. 
 
 The Theutic Churchy Swallow Street^ PiccadiUy^ 
 is open for Divine Service on Sundays at 11 a.m. 
 and 7 p.m. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Fart I. — Outline of Tiieistic Beliefs 
 
 „ II. — (rt.) Why " Revelation " is not to be 
 TRUSTED ..... 
 
 {b.) Proofs of the Existence of God 
 
 „ III. — Proofs of the Goodness and Love op 
 God 
 
 „ IV. — Influence of Theism on the Life 
 
 „ v.— On Prayer 
 
 ,, VI. — On Anthropomorphism 
 
 „ VII. — On Moral Evil 
 
 ., VIII. — The true "Fall of jVIa 
 
 ., IX. — Ox Fain and Sorrow 
 
 ,, X. — The Life after Death 
 
 ,, XI. — The Moral Value of Theism 
 
 „ XII. — Theism Contrasted with Christianit 
 
 16 
 25 
 33 
 41 
 51 
 60 
 68 
 77 
 86 
 92 
 
Theism; or, the Religion of 
 Common Sense, 
 
 PAET I. 
 
 Outline of Theistic Beliefs. 
 
 It is a great privilege, for which I am duly 
 thankful, to write or speak to my fellow-men on 
 the subject of religion. I bear in mind— and I ask 
 my readers to bear in mind — the fact that the 
 Weekly Times and Eclw is read by many different 
 sections of the community, by people in very 
 varied conditions of life, of culture, of pre- 
 possessions, and of natural ability for calm 
 thinking. I must therefore write so as to be 
 understood by all, and it may require a little 
 patience and generosity on the part of the wiser 
 and more advanced readers whenever I deem it 
 needful to give explanations which they do not 
 themselves require. It will be my object in this 
 series of papers to state as concisely and clearly 
 as I can what Theism is, and to lead on, step by 
 step, so as to avoid, if possible, any subsequent 
 explanations. 
 
 B 
 
I._WHAT IS EELIGTON ? 
 
 Very vague ideas on this subject prevail, even 
 among educated people. Religion is frequently 
 confounded with certain things which are only 
 adjuncts to it, or the results of its influence. For 
 example : Religion is not theology, nor morality, 
 although no real religion can exist without both 
 theology and morality. Religion is a conscious 
 relation to God. But the very word " God " 
 involves a theology. It will depend on our theo- 
 logy whether we are afraid of God, or trust and 
 love Him. False theology teaches us a false 
 religion. True theology teaches us to trust and 
 love God, and so teaches a true religion. 
 
 Again, religion is not morality, but is intimately 
 bound up with it. Morality is the chief basis on 
 which religion is built, the root out of which it grows. 
 Moreover, religion without morality is a sham and 
 even a contradiction in terms. And although true 
 religion cannot exist without bearing some fruits 
 of morality, yet God has so constituted human 
 nature that some people can be very moral and 
 yet have no ^'religion," as above defined. (N.B. — 
 Never be afraid of any facts, or of admitting 
 them.) 
 
 True religion, then, is not only a state of mind 
 in which some theological propositions are accepted 
 as true ; but it is a state of the heart, a sense of 
 the reality and constant presence of God, a sure 
 trust in His power, wisdom and goodness, a 
 
personal conviction of His friendliness and fatherly 
 love, which inspires us with grateful love in return, 
 and a strong desire to do His blessed will. This, 
 then, is the subject before us. And it will be my 
 duty and privilege to set before you the theology 
 of this true religion, the grounds of reason or 
 common sense on which it stands, and the means 
 by which this religion may be acquired and main- 
 tained. In doing this, I shall be compelled to 
 contrast the true theology with much false theology 
 hitherto accepted in Christendom, and to show 
 cause for its rejection. 
 
 Yet one word of caution. When I call Theism 
 a "true" theology, I do not mean that it is ab- 
 solutely and completely true ; but only that it is 
 relatively and partially true. It is true so far as it 
 contradicts and annuls detected error ; but it is 
 not the whole truth ^ which will some day be gra- 
 dually discovered and embraced. Even Theism, 
 pure and high as it is above the prevailing theology, 
 has, we are sure, some blemishes, some errors or 
 disproportions of statement, which succeeding ages 
 of Theists will correct; and even if Theism con- 
 tained no errors at all, still the light of God's love 
 will one day shine with so much greater radiance 
 as to throw our present conceptions of Him into 
 the shade. But all this frank disclaimer of in- 
 fallibility and finality is consistent with the claim 
 that our Theistic faith is unspeakably better, more 
 true, more reasonable, more elevating and more 
 consoling than any form of the Christian faith. 
 
 r2 
 
The Theistic belief about God and His pur- 
 poses WITH MANKIND IS ONE WHICH EVERYBODY IN THE 
 WORLD WOULD BE GLAD TO HOLD IF ONLY IT BE TRUE. 
 
 It is not opposed to a single fact of science. It is 
 not opposed to a single rational conclusion. It 
 satisfies the keenest moral sense. It floods our life 
 with peace, and joy, and hope, turning all our e^il 
 into good, and solving the mystery of pain and sin 
 and death. In all this it stands out in marked supe- 
 riority to Christian creeds and dogmas. Let me 
 here state the Theistic belief in a simple common- 
 sense way, and you can judge for yourselves 
 whether or not my claim for its superiority be true. 
 We believe in only one Supreme Kuler of the world, 
 whom we call "God our Father," whose sole purpose 
 throu2:hout eternitv is o:oodness or love, o:oodness 
 chosen and delighted in for its own sake and for the 
 sake of the objects of His care. We believe that 
 all the pains and sins and sorrows of the world are 
 means by which God has raised and is ever raising 
 us from a merely animal or savage state into a 
 moral and spiritual state ; that everything is work- 
 ing for the best, and must issue at length in the final 
 welfare (well-being and well-doing) of every soul 
 which He has called into existence ; that we men 
 and women ai^e souls and not bodies, immortal 
 souls and not the mere houses of clay in which we 
 dwell ; that God loves eternally ns and not our 
 perishing bodies, albeit He has made us capable of 
 great enjoyment and usefulness through them. Of 
 course we believe in a future life, and will give our 
 
reasons for it, altiiougli we disclaim and even 
 denounce any attempt to speculate upon the details 
 of it, or on the mode of our existence after death. 
 It is enough for us that we shall never be separated 
 from God. That changeless love of God to us, in 
 which we believe and rest, inspires us with love to 
 Him, and the desire to be as He wishes us to be ; 
 and so hatred of sin and selfishness comes in, and 
 in their place we begin to love goodness, good 
 actions, good motives, and good thoughts, and to 
 love our fellow-men, and try to be to them some- 
 thing like what God is to us ; we long to befriend 
 them. We believe that God ordains that sin 
 should work misery ; that it is a blessed thing for 
 us to be punished, especially to be tormented by 
 remorse and shame. But all His punishments are 
 remedial, to correct and not merely to requite. 
 We do not ascribe to God either anger or hatred, 
 much less revenge. But (to use human metaphor) 
 He chastises us only in love as a good father on 
 earth chastises his children, to amend their faults, 
 and not to gratify displeasure. So, Avhether in this 
 life or the next, we cannot afford to lose any of 
 God's punishments for our sins, because the only 
 object of punishment is our own improvement of 
 character. 
 
 We believe in the fact of true communion with 
 God in prayer and praise and meditation ; that it is 
 easier for us to speak thus in our hearts with God 
 than to commune with each other. God, as Spirit, 
 is nearer and closer to us than we can be to our 
 
fellow-men, with w^liom our bodies are the only 
 means of communication. And we believe that it 
 is the greatest of all privileges to commune with 
 God directly as our Father and Friend. Mediators 
 and intercessors are an outrage upon His love. 
 Not only do we need none, but they are an imper- 
 tinence and an insult. 
 
 And any one may say just Avhat he pleases to 
 God. We have no right to dictate to each other 
 what our prayers shall or shall not be. Everyone 
 has a child's right to go to his Father and tell Him 
 all that is in his heart, and pour out every sorrow 
 and every fear according to his need. But we 
 believe God is too wise and too kind to grant any 
 prayer that would not be a real blessing. As in a 
 family there may be sons and daughters grown-up, 
 and little children in the nursery, so in God's 
 family there are souls of various degrees of de- 
 velopment, and, therefore, some will be foolish and 
 childish in their prayers, and others will be wise 
 and more manly. But all may claim the Father's 
 patient ear and loving smile and hopeful bene- 
 diction ; all may give Him the earnest thanks of a 
 grateful heart. 
 
 We believe, too, in repentance ; in true and deep 
 sorrow before God for having done amiss. We 
 know that God no more requires atonement or 
 bloody sacrifices for sin than an ordinary good 
 father on earth would. Therefore, the true con- 
 dition of our regaining peace of soul and the sense 
 of reconciliation with Him is that we are heartily 
 
sorry for our sin, and have turned our backs upon 
 it, and will not do it again. 
 
 And we believe tliat as God is our Father, all 
 men are brethren, and that the best way to please 
 Him, and the only way by which we can possibly 
 serve Him, is to love and serve our fellow-men in 
 all the relations and conditions of life. We believe 
 that this love of men is increased by our love of 
 God ; and yet we cannot love God at all until we 
 understand what love is ; and we cannot under- 
 stand it without experience of it ; therefore we 
 must have some love already in our hearts before 
 we can understand that God is loving. That is 
 why God has endowed mankind with natural 
 human love. Hence it is that " morality " is the 
 basis of religion. Until a man knows something, 
 however little, of goodness and love, he can in 
 nowise know anything of God, except His vast 
 power and skill ; until then, he knows nothing of 
 God to make him trust or love Him. 
 
 Of course, our Theistic faith transfigures human 
 life with all its sorrows, sins and fears. It is a 
 new world, all light and no darkness ; all joy and 
 peace even amidst our tears, all hope and gladness 
 even in the shadow of death. 
 
 Not only for you, one by one, but for all dear to 
 you ; not only for those, but for all mankind ; not 
 only for those whom you call saints, but no less 
 for those whom you call sinners. One hope and 
 glory for all. Everyone shall come home at last, 
 the pathway being longer or shorter, easier or 
 
8 
 
 harder, according to the Father's divine insight 
 into each one's deserts and needs. 
 
 For to-day I have, perhaps, said enough. If you 
 care to knoAv more about Theism, I will tell you 
 next time on what our faith rests. Meantime, I 
 will encourage your curiosity by telling you that 
 our faith is built on facts, and not on any so-called 
 revelation or mythological gospels. 
 
PART 11. 
 
 {a.) WJii/ ^^ Bevelation'' is not to be Trusted, 
 (b.) Proofs of the Existence of God. 
 
 I HAVE already stated the Theistic Faith as a 
 heartfelt conviction of the perfect love, friendliness, 
 and trustworthiness of God ; and that what He is 
 to one. He is, and will be, to all mankind. My 
 present duty is to give proof of the assertion — to 
 state the facts on which it is based. But our first 
 step must be to explain our rejection of so-called 
 " Revelation." Most Christian people only believe 
 in a God at all on the ground that the Bible is 
 His written and inspired and infallible Word or 
 Revelation to men. A large number of Christians 
 put the " Church " in place of the Bible, and claim 
 that it is a Divine institution, likewise infallible, 
 to teach men what is true concerning God, and to 
 guide them in all matters of duty. Take away the 
 Bible, and many would become Atheists, and, 
 perhaps, worse. Take away the Church from the 
 other party, and they, too, would drift into Atheism 
 and immorality. Neither party have any ground, 
 so far as they can see, for believing in God or 
 
10 
 
 trying to be good, beyond the alleged Divine 
 authority of the Bible and the Church. Now it 
 has come to pass in this age that some men, 
 believing in and loving God much more than the 
 rest, have discovered serious errors in the Bible 
 and in the dogmas of the Church. These errors 
 are not merely literary, historical, scientific, but 
 moral and religious. In many places in both 
 Testaments, and even in some words ascribed to 
 Jesus Christ and his Apostles, the teaching 
 concernins: God and His dealino^s with men is 
 deeply false, because it is immoral. It attributes 
 wickedness to God, fills the mind with abject 
 slavish fears, drives out all trust and love towards 
 Him, killing true religion, and turning hope into 
 despair. And when it tries to assuage the terror 
 created by its impious threats, it only does so by 
 blackening still further the face of our Father in 
 Heaven, and by drawing our hearts' afifections away 
 from Him, to fix them upon a Saviour more 
 merciful and humane. All this is true, especially 
 of the New Testament, and the Church's dogmas. 
 
 Findino; these moral blemishes in these alleo^ed 
 *' Divine revelations," we are forced by our reason, 
 conscience, and natural aflPection to say that they 
 are not true, that God had no part nor lot in their 
 production, and that they originated solely in the 
 darkness, ignorance and vice of the lower part of 
 human nature in days long gone by. Men had 
 been not only making God in their own likeness, 
 which was inevitable, but the lower conceptions 
 
11 
 
 were clung to long after they ought to have been 
 outgrown ; and worse still, being regarded not as 
 human, but as Divine, they were placed beyond 
 reach of amendment or rejection. People were 
 afraid of disputing their Divine origin undei" the 
 threats and curses invented to maintain a belief in 
 them. It is so to this day. If the superstitions and 
 falsehoods of the Creeds and Gospels were pro- 
 pounded to-day for the first time, they would be 
 met with a howl of mocking incredulity. No sane 
 person would listen to them. But they are held in 
 a trembling reverence now, only because tlie mass 
 of Christians have never dared to question the 
 Divinity of the authority in whose name they have 
 hitherto claimed acceptance. 
 
 But when I read that " without doubt I shall 
 perish everlastingly " if I do not think rightly of 
 the Trinity, I laugh that threat to scorn. Even 
 though it be the voice of a Church hoary with the 
 centuries, it is to me only the croaking of human 
 ambition to crush me under its heel. And when I 
 read that " many shall seek to enter in (z.e., to be 
 saved) and shall not be able," I know full well that 
 I am listening to a poor deluded fellow-man, and 
 not to the living God incarnate on earth. 
 
 So the Theist cannot go to the Bible, or to the 
 Church, or to the words of Christ in the Gospels, 
 to learn submissively, and without question or 
 criticism, the truth about God and human destiny. 
 We still love and prize a great deal that is in the 
 Bible, and even some words of the Church's 
 
12 
 
 teaching ; but it is only because we find those 
 words to be true, in contrast with much more 
 that is false. We cannot make an authority of that 
 which we criticise. The moment we begin to say 
 this or that is wrong, is mistranslated or mis- 
 interpreted, we disclose the fact that we think we 
 know beforehand what God ought to have said. 
 We thereby place ourselves above the Kevelation, 
 and it ceases to be our infallible guide and authority. 
 
 Now all this preliminary attack upon "Revela- 
 tion " was necessary before showing you the 
 grounds on which our Theistic Faith rests. Some 
 of your clergy or ministers will tell you that 
 because our Theism is to be found in the Bible — 
 e.g.^ in parts of the Old Testament especially — 
 therefore we learnt it from the Bible, and we are 
 dependent, like them, on Revelation. Our full 
 answer to this will be manifest as we proceed ; but 
 for the present it will suffice to say that we never 
 had even a suspicion that pure Theism was to be 
 found in the Bible until long after our faith had 
 been built up on grounds of natural reason, or, as 
 I prefer to call it, common sense. 
 
 I hope I may have among my readers some of 
 those very rare persons who do not believe in a 
 God at all. Such as these may justly refuse me a 
 hearing altogether, if I set myself to write upon 
 what they would call an unproved and unprovable 
 assumption. I have observed that, for the most 
 part, men are Atheists only in rejecting those 
 crude and more or less immoral pictures of God 
 
13 
 
 with whicli tliey have been familiar since childhood. 
 I mean that they, perhaps, would not be Atheists 
 towards a conception of God which does no violence 
 to reason, offers no contradiction to science, and 
 harmonises with their moral instincts. I do not 
 know whether I can be of any service to them, 
 but at least I am bound to try. Let the 
 accustomed name of God be set aside for the 
 present. Let us begin at ourselves. Let us hold 
 fast to facts. It is an undisputed fact that we 
 are intelligent beings. By reason of that 
 intelligence in us, we discern the working of 
 intelligence in the world around us, and in the 
 construction of our own complex nature. That 
 is to say, the cosmos is what it is, not by chance, 
 but by set purpose. It is crammed full of actions 
 which (judging by ourselves as intelligent beings) 
 can only be due to one or more intelligent wills ; 
 manifesting, it is true, far more skill and power 
 than we possess, but acting of set purpose to 
 achieve a result more or less remote. We cannot 
 face a tree or a cow, much less a sun or a planet, 
 without being at once convinced of the existence 
 of an intelligent will, which, in whatever way, 
 or by however long a process it has worked, was 
 working and is working to a given end. Next, 
 we notice that all our true science is but the 
 discovery by us of knowledge already possessed 
 in its completeness by the mind which planned 
 it all. Every discovery, every generalisation we 
 make is part of the grammar of the language of 
 
14 
 
 Nature which we are learning. The laws which 
 we are only by slow degrees discerning were 
 there and in action before we began to think 
 and to pry into them. They will go on acting 
 after we are gone. But, because they are laws, 
 they imply and involve intelligence, for we find 
 them more and more interdependent the longer 
 we observe and the greater our light. Thus 
 science gives every encouragement to believe the 
 cosmos to be the product of only one and the 
 same mind, and gives no encouragement to, or 
 belief in, two or more Gods, and has no place at 
 all for a Devil. 
 
 Now, this active mind in the cosmos is, to a 
 certain degree, cognate wdth mind in man. It is 
 the same faculty in both, or else God does not 
 know the multiplication table or a single pro- 
 position in Euclid. If He does know this, He 
 and we, so far, stand on the same ground and have 
 a kindred nature. I am well aware, and I have 
 no fear in facing the fact, that the Author or 
 Ruler of the w^orld is by us incomprehensible. 
 The mode in which an omnipresent power and 
 knowledge can exist is for us hopelessly inscrutable. 
 But all our profound ignorance of that and other 
 mysteries does not prevent our using our common 
 sense, and so attaining quite sufficient knowledge 
 and assurance of the existence and knowledo:e of 
 the Supreme Being. We do know that He is, 
 and that He knows. Tlie word '* know " may be 
 captiously objected to, because we gain knowledge 
 
15 
 
 by ways and means, while His knowledge is not 
 acquired, but absolute and eternal. But for all 
 practical purposes the word "know" answers 
 well enough. If I see a horse in the street, I 
 know it is a horse. Common sense tells me that 
 God knows it is a horse, too. The fact that it 
 is a horse must be as well known to Him as to 
 me. The knowledge of the fact, small as it is, 
 is sufficient to prove to me that my mind bears 
 some likeness to His mind. 
 
 From Him you cannot escape. You cannot, 
 even if you try, shut out the idea of such a God 
 from your thoughts. Every object you see, and 
 every reflection of your own mind, forces you 
 to believe in His existence as a matter of fact. 
 No assumption at all ; but as much a proof to 
 you of His being as is your own eyesight a proof 
 that there is li^-ht. 
 
 The good people, for whom I am chiefly engaged 
 in these papers, must kindly forgive this more 
 private discussion with the unbeliever. Moreover, 
 it is needful for them to see that even our faith 
 in God's existence at all rests on plain facts — facts 
 obvious to common sense. These grounds of pure 
 reason are immeasurably more sure than the rotten 
 props of " Revelation." 
 
 Having proved the existence of an intelligent 
 God, our next task Avill be to prove that He is 
 what we believe Him to be — the loving Father 
 and Friend of all mankind. 
 
PART III. 
 
 Proofs of the Goodness and Love of God. 
 
 Power and skill, however vast, do not necessarily 
 inspire tlie human soul with feelings of reverence 
 and adoration. If all we know of God was that He 
 was possessed of unlimited power and matchless 
 ingenuity, we should not of necessity love and 
 worship him, for He might be malignant towards 
 us, or altogether indifferent to our moral welfare. 
 So my readers would do well if they pressed me for 
 the proof, which I have promised, that God is one 
 whom we may trust and love. 
 
 Bibles and churches give no proof except in a 
 very roundabout way. At best, they come to us 
 at second-hand. They are not God's thoughts, but 
 onlv records of men's thou2:hts about God — some- 
 times good and lofty, at other times bad and 
 degrading. Accepted as final authorities, they 
 represent God now as holy and loving, now as 
 unholy and vindictive ; now as man's friend, now 
 as man's foe. Instead of such testimony as that, 
 
17 
 
 we want proof that God is entirely good and trust- 
 worthy ; that His purposes are absolutely and 
 universally loving unto men. 
 
 The principle laid down by Theism — by common 
 sense in thinking about God — is that the mind, or 
 disposition, or moral character of God can only be 
 inferred from His works and products, and inasmuch 
 as man, in his highest aspect as a moral and spiritual 
 beins:, is the noblest work of God of which we know 
 anything by actual experience, our search for the 
 moral attributes of God must be prosecuted chiefly 
 in examining the higher part of man's nature. 
 And we must bear in mind at every step of our 
 enquiry this Theistic axiom : God must he at least 
 as good Himself as the best of His creatures. He 
 may be ever so much higher and better, but He 
 cannot be below them. This axiom is a two-edged 
 sword. It not only enables us to attain the loftiest 
 conception of God possible in any given age, but it 
 enables us to cut down to the very roots every 
 allegation of " revealed " religion which is untrue. 
 Every text, every dogma, which paints God as 
 morally inferior to the best human character, or to 
 the best human conception of God, is at once seen 
 to be false. 
 
 The first fact which I bring forward in proof that 
 God is good — z.^., just, righteous, pure, truthful, 
 faithful, and generous — is that we are moral beings, 
 that we have a moral sense or " Conscience " as we 
 call it, which urges us always to do what we believe 
 to be right, and to refrain from doing what we be- 
 
 c 
 
18 
 
 lieve to be wrong. Moreover, this conscience urges 
 us to take utmost pains to find out whicli is right 
 and which is wrong in any given alternatives of 
 conduct. 
 
 Further still, the conscience in man scrutinises 
 the motives as well as the behaviour, and even more 
 than the behaviour. Conscience demands from us 
 that we should do right without any desire for 
 reward, and should refrain from wrong- doing with- 
 out any desire to escape punishment. Our con- 
 science does not approve us whenever we act only 
 from " self-interest," no matter how right our con- 
 duct has been. Neither does our conscience blame 
 us if we have done wrong through sheer ignorance, 
 while thinking we were doing right. So this moral 
 sense, which is the common property of mankind, 
 reveals the purpose of God in having made it part 
 of our hio:her nature. It is desioned to make us 
 good ; not merely to regulate conduct, but to purify 
 and elevate character, to refine our most secret 
 springs of action, and to enable us to become 
 2:ood at heart, good from deliberate choice and 
 preference for goodness. 
 
 Still further, we are taught by the conscience to 
 see that the true welfare of the world at large is 
 only to be secured by each man doing his duty to 
 his brother -man. So that, while the proximate 
 purpose of the conscience is to make each man 
 good, the ultimate purpose is to make the whole 
 world happy. (Of course, I take happiness in its 
 highest Theistic sense here.) 
 
19 
 
 Now go back with me to our starting-point. 
 God is to be morally measured by His works — the 
 best of His works. The conscience in man is one 
 of the best of His works, having only good for its 
 object, and universal good into the bargain ; and if 
 God cannot be below the best of His works, He is, 
 at least, equal to man as a moral being. God, then, 
 is Himself intrinsically good — good from free choice 
 of goodness, good in His purposes — never, in any 
 form or degree, evil. He is thus proved to be a 
 trustworthy God, a most friendly God, a God who 
 is intent on the highest welfare of the creatures 
 under His control, and therefore He is a God to be 
 thoroughly trusted everywhere and always. Just 
 as the wonders of the cosmos prove the existence of 
 a mighty and wise God, so do the wonders of the 
 moral sense within us prove that that God is 
 righteous, and faithful, and true. And the charm 
 of this proof is not only its simplicity, which everj'- 
 one can understand, but also its universality, which 
 every sane moral being can verify for himself by a 
 little calm thinkino^. It is not second-hand. It is 
 vour and mv readino; at first hand God's ow^n words 
 written in our consciences. Everyone carries that 
 Bible in his own breast until by persistent violation 
 of his conscience he strikes it dumb. After a little 
 space I shall deal with the objections, more or less 
 captious, which have been brought against this 
 proof of the Divine Goodness. But all I desire now 
 is to drive it home and make my readers /i?6^/ that it 
 stands to reason that if God be the Author of the 
 
 c 2 
 
20 
 
 conscience in man, He Himself must be good, and 
 at least as good as the best moral being whom He 
 has made. Everyone knows, without being told, 
 that his conscience somehow reminds him of obli- 
 gations to God ; that he cannot sin against his 
 fellow-man without a sense of having sinned against 
 God too, and at the same time, and by the self- same 
 sinful deed. And everyone knows that it would be 
 absurd to feel this sense of sin towards God, if He 
 were an evil God and delighted not in goodness, but 
 in evil. The facts of our own experience thus 
 corroborate the facts made knov^^n to us by obser- 
 vation of other men. The goodness of God is no 
 longer a pious assumption but a demonstrated fact. 
 Yet, above and beyond even the conscience, we 
 are endowed with a gift still more precious and 
 exalted. It is " the unspeakable gift " of LOVE. 
 This most sacred of all human words has, I know, 
 been applied to feelings in us which are the very 
 opposite of love, to the most base and brutal selfish- 
 ness, to unlawful and degrading appetite, and is, 
 perhaps, more than ever a misnomer when we talk 
 about " self-love." But I appeal with confidence to 
 the ordinary mass of men and women, and ask them 
 to say if they do not know perfectly well what true 
 love is. There is love in the world as pure, 
 as perfect, as unselfish as it can possibly be. 
 The love of a mother for her babe, and of the 
 true father for his children, are standing types 
 ot the purest and most unselfish love. We know it 
 at once, whenever we see it or feel it, by the con- 
 
21 
 
 quest it makes over our lower nature, by the 
 sacrifices so gladly, so rapturously, offered for love's 
 sake. True love is intense desire to do srood, and 
 the highest good, to a fellow-creature, and that at 
 all cost to oneself. In fact, the more we sacrifice 
 for it, the better we are pleased. Nothing counts 
 beside it. Everything else is dross. 
 
 To analyse love and to talk plain prose about it 
 seems almost a profanation ; yet, because w^e are 
 thinking now, and not giving way to mere senti- 
 ment, we must put our thoughts into dry and formal 
 words. If you try to think w^hat love does and is 
 intended to do, as the chief factor in human nature, 
 it will tell you more about God than anything else 
 can. 
 
 In the first place, love makes every duty a 
 pleasure. It tarns all drudgery into a delight. If 
 we love any one truly we shall do our duty to him 
 not for mere conscience' sake, not driven to it by a 
 sense of obligation which we should be glad to be 
 free from ; but we shall do our dutv with a wilJins: 
 and glad heart, delighted to do it, delighted that 
 it costs us somethino; to do it well. 
 
 Illustration would be endless, but everyone knows 
 that love is the strongest impulse for good that was 
 ever heard of, that it breaks down every barrier of 
 human sin and selfishness, and makes the path of 
 duty and virtue to be rich in pleasantness and peace. 
 If all the workl obeyed their consciences, there 
 would be no offence one against another ; but the 
 stern justice which w^ould prevail, and the exact 
 
m 
 
 performance of every obligation might be over- 
 clouded with melancholy and secret discontent with 
 the burdens we were called upon to bear. We 
 might all do our duty, but have a canker, at the 
 heart, of sadness, because we could not have our own 
 way and do as we listed. Surely it would be a dull 
 and severe world ; and men only governed by a sense 
 of duty could not be very happy — if that were all. 
 So Grod, in His forethought and bounty, has given 
 us, beside the conscience, the power to love those 
 to whom we owe duties, so that the fulfilment 
 of them should be our exceeding great reward, that 
 we should find our highest pleasure in serving and 
 succouring our fellow-men. Most of us know 
 what we ought to do well enough. The trouble 
 with us is how to get ourselves to do it. We want 
 the impelling force. Threats and bribes have 
 been tried long and in vain. They are power- 
 less when compared to the impelling force of love ; 
 for love is not a driving power at all, but a 
 winning one. It draws and does not drive. It is 
 the spontaneous leaping up with joy to do the task 
 which we have been dreading or trying to evade. 
 This is seen in God setting us duties to discharge, 
 and making it a delight to fulfil them ; giving us 
 the sweet impulse from within to do them freely 
 of our own will and choice, and with a rapture 
 that turns sacrifice into ecstasy. And now we 
 behold in God a Being who understands and knows 
 what love is, and who has given to us all a little 
 share of it, that the fulfilment of His laws may be 
 
23 
 
 the means of our enjoying the highest happiness 
 obtainable. And love is, in some measure and form 
 of it, to be found everywhere. It comes to greet 
 every new-born babe ; it provides for the weak, 
 the defenceless, the oppressed ; it is the frequent 
 healer of disease and the consoler of sorrow ; in its 
 bosom lie wrapped all the loveliest virtues which 
 have adorned humanity ; it enforces truthfulness, 
 it inspires courage, it gives fortitude ; its patience is 
 never wearied, its mercy and forgiveness are 
 boundless. Out of human love, especially as it is 
 seen in domestic and family relations, come nine- 
 tenths of all the goodness which men attain, and ot 
 all the good deeds of their lives. Love is the 
 means by which we raise and refine others while 
 we are raising and refining ourselves. 
 
 On such a theme one never knows how to stop. 
 I must break off abruptly, and recapitulate what 
 has been said : — 
 
 1. God knows and has intelligent purposes. 
 This is proved by our possession of the faculty 
 of reason. 
 
 2. God is good and trustworthy. This is proved 
 by the facts of our moral nature, by conscience 
 and the high place in which we cannot help re- 
 garding it. 
 
 3. God is loving and infinitely worthy of our 
 gratitude and love. This is proved by our own 
 human love, and by its results when manifested 
 in its highest form. Any truly good and kind- 
 hearted man would, if he could, make every 
 
24 
 
 other life at least end in perfect goodness and 
 happiness. If he only had the knowledge how to 
 do it, and the power to do it, he w^ould do it. 
 Therefore God wall do it, because He has the 
 requisite power and knowledge, and has a loving 
 will not less loving than our own. 
 
 These are proofs^ and not mere guesses. The 
 indisputable facts of our nature are the grounds 
 on w^hich rest the perfect FriendJiness and Fatherly 
 Love of God for us all. 
 
PART IV. 
 
 Influence of Theism on the Life. 
 
 I HAVE proved already, on grounds of pure reason, 
 the existence of a Supreme Being of matchless 
 power, wisdom and goodness, who loves us with a 
 changeless love, who is the Father of our souls and 
 our best Friend. 
 
 It is obvious that if this be accepted as true, so 
 far as it goes, it ought to have an enormous in- 
 fluence on our hearts and lives and character. 
 A mere cold intellectual assent to it, simjoly 
 because it is irrefutable, will have little or no 
 practical effect. 
 
 Suppose one of us to be in some great difficulty 
 from which he cannot extricate himself, or under 
 some terrible fear which he cannot shake off, and 
 then he were to be told of a kind and able friend 
 who could and gladly would release him from his 
 fear and overcome all his difficulties. The sufferer 
 might believe this in a sort of way, might not find 
 any cogent excuse for not believing it, and yet he 
 
26 
 
 might forbear to seek the help of that unknown 
 friend. He might assent to the assertion of this 
 willingness and power to help him, but still lack 
 sufficient conviction to avail himself of it. It is 
 precisely the same in regard to Theism. Its 
 propositions may seem reasonable and true ; those 
 who listen to them may be willing to assent to 
 them ; but unless they are convinced, unless they 
 feel the truth of the assertions, they will remain 
 unmoved and unaltered by them. Once firmly 
 convinced, once feeling deeply the necessity for 
 themselves and for all mankind of such a God of 
 goodness and love, the belief in Him is no longer a 
 mere theory or set of reasonable propositions, but 
 becomes an intense influence on their hearts and 
 lives, affecting all they do, and think, and say. 
 
 The great question, " Is life worth living ? " to 
 which so many vain and mournful answers have 
 been given, is one that can only be answered when 
 the true purpose of life is seen ; when the origin 
 and cause of life are properly apprehended. 
 Human life is most certainly part of a plan, and not 
 the result of chance or chaos. It is in our power 
 to discern something, at least, of its purpose ; and 
 as soon as we learn what Theism teaches about 
 God, we perceive likewise that God has caused us 
 to see that He is the fountain- source whence we 
 derive all the faculties of our higher natiu-e, and the 
 existence and duration of our bodies. We see, then, 
 that our life here on earth is mainly designed to 
 lift us as moral, spiritual beings above the merely 
 
animal and material, to raise our character, to 
 elevate our aspirations, and to make progress 
 possible in all that is worth knowing, and doing, 
 and being. So far, this concerns the individual; 
 but we are placed in groups, in families, districts, 
 nations, races, with the purpose of helping and 
 benefiting one another. The purpose of everyone's 
 life is to serve and befriend his fellow-man. His 
 opportunities for doing this are countless and 
 incessant. All his nobler faculties are given 
 to him for this end ; his reason, conscience, 
 and love are unaccountable if severed from 
 this primary function of doing good and being 
 a blessins: to others. And in this is revealed to 
 us the love of God in having given us life, the 
 double life of the soul and the body, the life of the 
 body as an adjunct and agent to the life of the soul. 
 The soul exists for its own sake ; for God's sake, 
 because He loves it ; and most of all for the sake 
 of mankind, for whose well-being it is to live and 
 groAV perfect. We, then, are souls, and not bodies. 
 The body is a sacred thing, to be cherished by us 
 and reverenced ; never to be profaned by neglect 
 or misuse, never to be befouled by excess or 
 unlawful appetite, but always to be used under the 
 ceaseless control of reason, conscience, and love, 
 for the welfare of man and the honour of God. 
 Still, the body is only a tool, an exquisite and 
 wonderful machine, put into our hands for a time — 
 God's time— to use rightly, but not to keep for 
 ever ; but when it has served its turn it is to be 
 
28 
 
 laid aside and parted from in calmness, and trust, 
 and hope. It was never meant to be more than a 
 temporary lodging for the immortal soul ; never 
 meant to be anything but the willing and able 
 servant of the God-begotten soul wdthin. 
 
 If once we see the distinction between the soul 
 and the body — between ourselves and the houses 
 we live in — the w^hole aspect of that vast question 
 " Is life worth living ? " becomes changed. vSo long 
 as the word " life " stands for the life of our mortal 
 bodies alone, the problem is insoluble. But if by 
 " life " we mean the life of the soul, then we see the 
 infinite value of living. We answer the question 
 wdtli our most emphatic " Yes," and begin to view 
 the life of the body in an entirely new light. The 
 proportions are altered. Heretofore we put the 
 body first and the soul second, or forgot it 
 altogether. Now we put the soul first, and the 
 body as subordinate. And all this reflection is 
 needful to our right understanding of the enormous 
 value of believing in a God wdio is our Father and 
 Friend. If we were bodies only, if we were only 
 animals, we should not need to recognise or to believe 
 in any God at all. We then should have nothing 
 better to do than to rake together all the "good 
 things" of this world within our reach, to make our 
 bodies as comfortable as we can, to gratify every 
 appetite, and to defend ourselves from annoyance, 
 loss, and disappointment. The world would then be 
 a great j^ig-stye, only ten thousand times more foul 
 and horrible than anything yet heard of in human or 
 
29 
 
 animal history ; hut no one would be aware that 
 there ivas anything wrong in it. But if we are 
 souls, and if we know it, we shall not be able to 
 do without relig-ion, z.6^., without a clear conscious- 
 ness of God and a deep conviction of His righteous 
 rule over us and His loving purposes with us. 
 For the reason, conscience, and love in man speak 
 to him loudly and incessantly of his utter de- 
 pendence on the Author and Giver of life. Man 
 sees the action of an irresistible Will in forces 
 which create, preserve and destroy, without any 
 deference or reference to human hopes or fears. 
 Trouble and anguish fall alike on the innocent 
 and on the guilty ; the forces in Nature do not 
 discriminate, by any moral test, between the 
 victims they crush and the lucky ones who escape. 
 The body is the sport of her wildest freaks by 
 catastrophe, by disease, and by torture. No sane 
 person would deliberately insist on the certainty 
 of life, though many happily forget its uncertainties. 
 By reason, then, man is forced to acknowledge his 
 abject dependence on a Power outside himself for 
 mere bodily life. 
 
 Yet the conscience teaches a deeper sense of 
 dependence still. Under its influence, we feel 
 beholden to a Moral Kuler whose rights over us 
 we cannot ignore. " Conscience doth make coAvards 
 of us all," and though the terror w4iich it begets 
 is wholesome and good — better far than to be 
 indifferent or presumptuous — that fear of punish- 
 ment belongs not to the nobler part of man's 
 
30 
 
 nature, but to his lower ; it is bodily, not spiritual ; 
 it is craven, not man-like ; it would mislead, if not 
 soon made away with for a sentiment more noble. 
 Our sense of dependence grows into a sense of 
 obligation, and this reacts upon the soul, making- 
 it cry out more than ever for the Living God. 
 The sin which made one at first run away and 
 hide from that Presence, now, in our better state, 
 makes us draw nigh and plead for help and blessing, 
 plead even for correction and judgment rather 
 than be left unaided in the o:reat moral struo:o:le, 
 or be left uncleansed with a lingering longing to 
 sin again. 
 
 When once we have our eyes open, and stand 
 face to face with the duties we owe to our fellow- 
 men (not to speak of any duties we owe to God 
 Himself) ; when once we have full consciousness 
 how weak and frail and selfish we are ; when once 
 w^e see that all progress in virtue, all real growth 
 in nobility of character, all elevation of our motives 
 can only be accomplished through severe and 
 strenuous conflict with our lower nature ; — then we 
 feel the full need of God ; then we feel how 
 dependent we are on a strength higher than our 
 own ; then we are drawn to that unfailing, faithful 
 Friend as our onlv Eefuo;e from our weak and 
 wavering selfish selves. 
 
 Yet nothing makes us feel so dependent as our 
 natural human love. Many a man is brave and 
 heroic, facins^ dans^er for himself with no tremblino; 
 step 01' quivering hand ; grand and fearless, and 
 
31 
 
 almost divine, in his scorn of personal injury or 
 death, as he rescues some poor forlorn stranger 
 in mortal peril. But the same brave man will 
 tremble as a child, and quiver like an aspen leaf 
 in the presence of a danger to any one whom he 
 loves, when it is a danger which he cannot avert- 
 Aye, the soldier, facing without flinching the 
 hideous carnage of the battle-field, trembled and 
 wept, wept and trembled, when he bade farewell to 
 his wife and child. He could not help his fear, 
 Avhen he bethought him of all the dire chances 
 which lay between him and ever seeing them 
 again. And the anxious father and mother, bidding 
 good-bye to a son not over- fortified against the 
 wiles of the world and the frailties of youth, must 
 need feel their hopeless, helpless incapacity to 
 o'uard him from evil. 
 
 Every day and all day the loving heart is torn 
 and tortured in anxious fear for others, and would 
 be soon demented altogether, but for the Kefuge 
 to which it flies. To Him it springs upward and 
 lays the burden at His feet. It says " Lord, Thou 
 knowest ! " It may or may not beg for the 
 protection it craves ; but it is enough to behold 
 the loving Father's face, to remember that not 
 even the sparrow can fall without His will ; and 
 then the heart, however sore, in that Presence 
 has no more fear. If the worst should befall, it 
 will not be evil, but only good ; an unspeakaljle 
 ])lcssing hidden from eyes which could not see it ; 
 a blessing believed in and hoped for by a heart 
 
32 
 
 which trusts the goodness and h)ve of the Eternal, 
 Righteous Father. 
 
 Not in a spirit of enforced and slavish submission ; 
 still less in a spirit of blind fatalism ; but with 
 clear vision that Eternal Love can do no wrong, 
 it cries out of the depths of a satisfied conviction, 
 " Father, not my will, but Thine be done!" 
 
 God alone can measure the sense of dependence 
 created by the reason, conscience and affections 
 of man. 
 
PAET y. 
 
 On Prayer. 
 
 We have traversed the ground of facts on which 
 our belief in a righteous, loving God is based, and 
 we have seen how necessary it is that we should 
 not only have a right intellectual conception of 
 God, but also a deep and lieartfelt conviction of 
 His universal goodness and love, which shall 
 influence our (conduct and character. Our next step 
 must be to speak of the first instinctive action of a 
 sold thus impressed. This is the act of prayer. 
 
 " Prayer " is a word so variously understood and 
 applied that it will be necessary to clear our minds 
 from all confusion of thought respecting it before 
 we can see whether it be reasonable or not to pray. 
 
 The most common meaning of prayer is petition, 
 asking earnestly for something. Such prayer is 
 continually being offered by man to man, and is so 
 natural in case of need that it requires no ex- 
 planation. We all know perfectly well by our 
 experience, from childhood upwards, how to pray. 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 Prayer is a term often applied to the use of set 
 forms, in set times and places, addressed to God, or 
 to mediators, saints, and angels. But this is not 
 true prayer unless the heart's desire goes up with 
 the spoken words. The saying of prayers is not 
 necessarily prayer. 
 
 Prayer, moreover, is considered by some to be a 
 power possessed by man to move or alter the will 
 of God. We are falsely taught in words ascribed 
 to Jesus Christ : " Whatsoever ye shall ask in 
 prayer, believing, ye shall receive." " Whatsoever 
 ye shall ask the Father in my name. He will give it 
 you." This we not only know to be untrue, but 
 we reverently thank God that it is false. For if it 
 were true, it would have the effect of transferring 
 the government of the world from God's hands into 
 the hands of ignorant and foolish men. 
 
 Another and more true aspect of prayer is that it 
 is the natural communion of the human soul with 
 the living God. It may or may not include petition, 
 but it is, first and foremost, the real movement of 
 the soul towards God ; the conscious turning of our 
 thought to Him, and the silent or spoken out- 
 pouring of our feelings and wishes before Him, as 
 when we commune with any one we dearly love on 
 earth. The questions which would be put by an 
 accurate and reasonable man in regard to such 
 prayer would be probably these : — 
 
 1. Does God Himself wish for our prayers ? 
 
 2. What benefit can we rightly expect from 
 them ? 
 
35 
 
 In answer to the first question, we say that if God 
 be such as we have already described Him to be — 
 knowing all things, bent only on goodness, and 
 filled with love towards us ; even if He be only equal 
 in goodness and love to a good earthly father — 
 then it is inevitable that He should desire His 
 children to come to Him, to speak to Him, to con- 
 fide in Him all their wants and sorrows, and to ask 
 for His guidance in their perplexities, and for His 
 help in doing what is right. 
 
 If the love of God towards us be more, and not 
 less, than an earthly parent's love, then God must 
 desire us to pray to Him. But there is a stronger 
 proof of it than this reasoning affords to be found 
 in the fact that so soon as we really believe in such 
 a God, our hearts cannot help going to Him in 
 prayer. We are so constituted, it is such a positive 
 law of our being, that prayer is an immediate 
 consequence of the conviction that God is our 
 loving Father and Friend. It is, in fact, He who 
 thus draws us to Himself; it is the spirit of the 
 Father in the spirit of the child, which makes the 
 mutual attraction inevitable. 
 
 It is hardly possible in human nature for any one 
 to know and trust in an earthly friend and yet not 
 to seek any converse or communion with him. The 
 law of our being makes such communion inevitable. 
 The loving intercourse between parents and children 
 is a perpetual witness to this fact of our nature. 
 Therefore we may be sure that the Father of our 
 souls loves to see His children drawing nigh unto 
 
 D 2 
 
36 
 
 Him in prayer, seeking the comfort and help of 
 His presence : " When Thou saidst, Seek ye My 
 face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, 
 will I seek." 
 
 2. What benefits may we rightly expect from 
 prayer ? 
 
 Of course all depends on our having a right idea 
 of prayer. We cannot expect to turn God from 
 any one of His purposes. If we could, it would be 
 our bane and not our benefit. We cannot expect 
 to work any miracles, to subvert or to supplement 
 the course of Nature ; if we could do so, our very 
 prayer would be an impious sin. The true and the 
 highest idea of prayer is communion with God, as a 
 child with its father ; but w^ith absolute trust in His 
 greater wisdom and love, and therefore correcting 
 all its native hopes and desires by the Avish at the 
 bottom of the heart : " Xot my will, but Thine, 
 be done." 
 
 Yet, inasmuch as all souls have not yet attained 
 to this manly standard, as many are still childish 
 and ignorant of what is best for them, they still 
 pray for things, still go on begging God to let them 
 have what they want, and to have their own way. 
 It is just the same in a human family. There are 
 the infants, the young children, the boys and girls, 
 and the grown-up sons and daughters ; just in pro- 
 portion to their ages and mental development, their 
 prayers to their parents vary in wisdom and good 
 sense. The little ones ask for impossible or in- 
 jurious things ; the elder, more wise, ask only for 
 
87 
 
 things profitable, or, more likely still, cease to ask 
 for anything at all, unless it be good advice or help 
 in some difficulty. Shall we condemn all people 
 for praying who do not pray wisely and in a manly 
 spirit ? Is prayer of no benefit wdien associated 
 with ignorance and childishness ? I do not think 
 so. I think that every one, according to his 
 spiritual age or stature, according to his immature 
 or matured development, has a right to pray as he 
 pleases, to pour out before his loving Father what- 
 ever be in his heart, to ask even for impossible or 
 injurious things — for those very things which he 
 will one day thank God for refusing to grant. I say 
 we all have a Divine right to tell to God our most 
 secret hopes and desires, and to use a child's 
 privilege of carrying its care to a loving Father's 
 ear. 
 
 And I go on to affirm that even in such childish 
 praying there is enormous benefit to the soul. The 
 practice intensifies and strengthens the tie between 
 the soul and God. Sooner or later all the childish- 
 ness will be outgrown and all the benefit of daily 
 communion with God will remain. For the essence 
 of all prayer is the recognition of the fact, and the 
 reaUsation of the fact, that God is our true Father 
 and we are His own children, w^e the objects of His 
 ceaseless love, He the loving Friend in wdiom we put 
 our ceaseless trust. 
 
 That Father and Friend is the greatest and most 
 important fact in the universe ; and to live without 
 remembering and acting upon it is the greatest folly. 
 
38 
 
 But if it be a benefit even to offer childish 
 prayers, how much greater is the benefit of a more 
 enlightened and manly communion with God ! 
 
 As we grow older and wiser, we cease to besiege 
 God with petitions for physical and temporal good, 
 and we begin to care far more for moral and 
 spiritual advancement. It is only when we put 
 away childish things that we see the unspeakable 
 superiority of the interests of the soul over those of 
 the body ; and nothing assuredly was ever heard of 
 which keeps up that vivid perception so much as 
 constant prayer and communion with our Father. 
 The benefit of it is essentially moral. It intensifies 
 conscientiousness, it reminds us of our obligations 
 to God and to each other ; it deepens within us the 
 sense of shame when we have done wrong, and 
 when we have nesrlected some duty ; it makes us 
 scrutinise our motives, remembering that God knows 
 the inmost secrets of our hearts, knows our own 
 tendency to deceive and excuse ourselves. We not 
 only confess before Him in true sorrow our 
 misdeeds, but beseech Him to cleanse us from our 
 secret faults, from the defects and impurities which, 
 in our blind self-conceit, we do not always see. 
 
 Prayer is thus the safeguard and the very life of 
 character. It is the best known means of making 
 as better from day to day. And I appeal, without 
 any fear of contradiction, to my fellow-men, one 
 and all, to say if it be not true that the men and 
 women who truly and habitually pray to God to 
 help them to be good are the most trustworthy of 
 
39 
 
 all persons. Even the wicked and the irreligious 
 will choose the best characters they can find to 
 become the guardians of their children and property, 
 and to put in a position of trusteeship, wherever 
 honesty and sterhng integrity are required. 
 
 The benefit which every praying soul derives is 
 not confined to himself, but spreads welfare and 
 blessing on all others with whom he has to do. He 
 who makes a friend of God becomes more and more 
 a true friend to man. So even on the low ground 
 of utility it is good to pray ; good for the individual, 
 and good for mankind at large. 
 
 And they who pray can testify to the comfort 
 and hope and joy which constant communion with 
 God always brings. The lamentations which fill 
 the air would be turned into songs of praise, if only 
 the sufferers and the mourners knew, and acted as 
 if they knew, what a friend they have in God— able, 
 wilHng, ever faithful to do only good to them all, to 
 bring blessing out of every seeming bane, joy out 
 of every sorrow, and hope out of despair. We all 
 have our troubles of mind, body, or estate, troubles 
 which press heavily on our beloved, and therefore 
 hurt us most severely ; worse troubles than all, 
 those which are directly traceable to sin in our- 
 selves and others. But there is not one trouble 
 that prayer will not mitigate or remove. "In the 
 multitude of the sorrows that I had in my heart. 
 Thy comforts have refreshed my soul." In the 
 presence of God, we are often taught the good 
 reason why we have been in trouble, often taught 
 
40 
 
 how to remedy and escape it, always taught how to 
 bear what is inevitable Avith patience and hope ; and 
 every one who prays now in earnest shall at last be 
 able to say in triumph : " I sought the Lord, and 
 He heard me ; yea. He hath delivered me out of all 
 my fear." 
 
 The foregoing papers on Theism contain the 
 simple beliefs and i)rinciples of true religion, the 
 religion of common sense. My next duty will be to 
 defend it against the attacks of a false philosophy 
 and the sneers of a blind and arrogant orthodoxy. 
 
PART VI. 
 
 On Anthropomorphism. 
 
 An objection has been raised against Theism 
 that it is anthropomorphic ; that, in the language 
 of Matthew Arnold, the God in whom we believe 
 is only " a magnified man " — not a true and real 
 God, but one created by us after our own likeness, 
 one evolved out of our own consciousness. 
 
 For readers who may not understand Greek, it 
 may be as well to say that anthropomorphism^ as 
 used in this connection, means the making of God 
 in the likeness or form of man. 
 
 This process has prevailed ever since man began 
 to conceive about a God at all. But the con- 
 ceptions of God have varied from age to age, and 
 among different races, according to their own 
 development as human beings. The lower the 
 man was in the scale of humanity, the lower and 
 grosser were his conceptions of God. The natural 
 appetites, the fierce, strong passions, the greed, the 
 selfishness, and the cruelty which distinguish the 
 savage, were by him instinctively attributed to 
 
4:2 
 
 his God, so long, and only so long, as he remained 
 unconscious that there was any moral evil in their 
 indulgence. But when the savage began to have 
 moral perceptions, however dim and fragmentary, 
 the fact altered and raised his conception of God. 
 He began to beheve in gods and devils too ; in 
 gods who were amicably disposed towards him, 
 and in devils who were hostile and vindictive. His 
 gods he did not think it needful to propitiate or to 
 pray to, while his devils required all his devotion 
 and sacrifice to avert their malice. Then, for a 
 long while, men in this low condition had no 
 distinct consciousness of their own two-fold 
 nature ; they could not imagine themselves to be 
 spirits as well as bodies. The body to them was 
 the whole of a man. Hence their conception of 
 the gods was of beings in a human form, occupying 
 space, localised, measurable, albeit powerful and 
 cunning enough to master and outwit them. 
 
 We find even in the Bible traces of this kind of 
 anthropomorphism, where Jehovah is described as 
 toiling and resting, walking in a garden, speaking 
 with audible and human voice, and, later, showing 
 His back to Moses, and His feet appearing as He 
 walked over the firmament ; and, finally, literally 
 dwelling in the Tabernacle and Temple. No 
 wonder, then, that we also find ascribed to Jehovah 
 the weakness and evil passions of man. He is 
 vexed and disappointed at the way in which 
 His own creation had turned out. It repented Him 
 that He had made man upon the earth, and He 
 
resolved to destroy the whole human race, save 
 Noah and his family. He is represented as jealous 
 of rival gods, as jealous of His honour, as under 
 the influence of vanity, when Moses prevented Him 
 from an act of fierce vengeance against Israel by 
 reminding Him of what people would scornfully 
 say, and how they would deride Him for not being 
 able to keep His promises to His chosen. 
 
 The Jews, we know by their own books, 
 gradually outgrew many of these savage con- 
 ceptions of their God. One by one the grosser 
 anthropomorphisms were laid aside ; a purely 
 spiritual idea of Jehovah took the place of the 
 animal and material ideas. He had no likeness 
 to anything in heaven above or in the earth 
 beneath ; and little by little the conception of God 
 grew into that of a perfectly righteous God who 
 loveth righteousness, and in whose everlasting arms 
 of love the whole world might lie down in safety. 
 
 Alas! contact with polytheistic races prevented 
 the universal adoption of these nobler conceptions 
 of God ; and some Jews, like St. Paul and the 
 writer of the Fourth Gospel, reintroduced the 
 pagan anthropomorphism and the pagan idea of 
 incarnations, and of deified men. The Jews as 
 a nation kept absolutely clear of these corruptions, 
 but the few who founded the Christian Church 
 owed all their success to two distinct but united 
 ao-encies. The one was the introduction of the 
 loftier morality which characterised Jewish faith 
 and thought ; the other was the adoption of pagan 
 
44 
 
 anthropomorphism, which enabled the Gentile 
 world to embrace the Christian mvtholoo:v without 
 any or-reat shock to their own habits of thouo^ht. 
 
 I/O o 
 
 But it must be owned, also, that the mythology 
 of the Christian faith was far sweeter and more 
 simple than that of the Greeks and Romans, which 
 it superseded ; while its anthropomorphic elements 
 were immeasurably less gross, except in one 
 particular. This was the idea that God the Father 
 required, and that God the Son surrendered, his 
 human blood in order to make it possible that God 
 should lay aside His wrath, and that men's sins 
 should be forgiven them. This conception of God 
 was worse than any Greek or Roman myth, and 
 carried the Christian Church back to the worst 
 degradation of the days of Moloch, when men 
 offered their sons and their daughters to avert His 
 dis]3leasure. 
 
 Viewing the history of religious ideas in as 
 comprehensive a manner as possible, we cannot 
 fail to see that the rise in conceptions of God has 
 been mainly a process of cutting down and casting 
 away anthropomorphic ideas. We find less and less 
 anthropomorphism as we descend the stream down 
 to our own times. The merely animal attributes 
 have long disappeared from all serious intelligent 
 thought about God. He is not in any one place. 
 He is everywhere, and knows everything, and the 
 verv heaven of heavens cannot contain Him ; while 
 He is present with all who open their eyes to see 
 Him, and He loves to dwell in the lowly and 
 
45 
 
 contrite heart. Not only have the animal hunaan 
 aspects disappeared, but the mental and moral 
 attributes ascribed to God have been vastly elevated. 
 Our conceptions of His mode of producing the 
 cosmos and perpetually changing its outward forin 
 have been greatly raised by the discovery of the 
 principles of evolution. Our appreciation of the 
 skill and wisdom everywhere disclosed by the 
 Laws of Nature has led us further and further 
 away from the idea of God as a miracle- monger or 
 a juggler with the forces at His command. And, 
 best of all, our ideas of His goodness and love have 
 led us to abandon the conception of an angry and 
 vindictive God. We cannot any longer ascribe to 
 Him any of our own bad passions or weaknesses. 
 The higher the standard we have set up of human 
 excellence, the higher have risen our thoughts 
 concerning Him. And this process is one of the 
 most important ethical facts. Of two men, the one 
 who is more faithful, conscientious, and trust- 
 worthy Avill have a higher conception of God's 
 faithfulness and trustworthiness than the other. 
 Of two men, the one who is most loving, who best 
 knows and practises true fatherly love, will in- 
 evitably have a higher and truer conception of 
 the Love of God than the other. It has been by 
 men growing better that their concejDtion of God 
 has risen at all. The process is a matter of present 
 observation, and is beyond dispute. 
 
 It is to the increase and development of human 
 sympathy that the doctrine of endless torture in 
 
46 
 
 hell is now widely discarded even among Christians, 
 and is destined to disappear altogether. Men can- 
 not believe of their God character and purposes 
 which are below their own standard of common 
 human kindness. Human nature at its highest and 
 best will ever remain — not the measure or limit 
 of what God is — but a unit of measure in an infinite 
 round of numbers. It will ever remain as the 
 standard below which God cannot be conceived to 
 be ; the standard by which to test the moral truth 
 of any creed, or so-called revelation, however 
 ancient, however venerable, by whomsoever it 
 may have been first promulgated. 
 
 You Avill now sav to me that I have not met the 
 objection, but admitted its truth and its validity. 
 Most certainly I do admit that Theism, like all 
 other forms of belief, is anthropomorphic, and 
 must in the nature of things be so. This is why 
 it is not Jinal, but must one day grow into some- 
 thing higher and better. But this is also why it 
 is better than the Christian Faith, whv it must 
 supersede that faith. Because, on grounds of fact 
 which cannot be disputed, its conception of God is 
 unspeakably higher and more true than those 
 distinctive conceptions of God which are essentially 
 " Christian." 
 
 I repeat that all conceptions of God have been 
 more or less anthropomorphic, and I will now show 
 that it could not be, and cannot be, otherwise. 
 
 Every scrap of our knowledge on every con- 
 ceivable subject is the sole result of human 
 
experience. All our thoughts, and, therefore, all 
 our language is limited by experience. We cannot 
 think or speak in terms which are not derived from 
 it. We are, as it were, shut up within a sphere 
 beyond which we cannot pass. 
 
 But, nevertheless, within that sphere we find 
 ourselves possessed of reasoning faculties which 
 extend our knowledge far beyond the limits not of 
 our experience but of our senses. Among these 
 faculties is the power of imagination, by which we 
 can, so to speak, realise or picture to ourselves 
 much that is unseen. It is, therefore, possible to us 
 to create impossible existences and forms of being 
 which live only in our fancy, and are not in any 
 sense real. But when such creations of the 
 imagination are analysed, we find every separate 
 part of them to be only a reproduction of some- 
 thing which we already know by experience. Such 
 fanciful creations are only grotesque combinations 
 of forms and ideas already suggested by what 
 we have seen and known. There is no other 
 source from which even the most vivid and subtle 
 imagination can produce anything, and I reverently 
 say that God Himself, who has made us what we 
 are and placed us in our present condition, could 
 not make us know or understand anything which 
 transcends our experience, until experience itself is 
 extended to the requisite degree. 
 
 It is, therefore, absolutely impossible for us to 
 know the whole truth about God, to understand 
 the mode of His existence, or the exact relation 
 
48 
 
 which He bears to the phenomenal world. If any 
 knowledge of Him at all be possible to us, it mast 
 be limited to our own human experience. !N'o 
 outside revelation of what is beyond that would be 
 intelligible. All the pretended revelations of the 
 world are only the thoughts of men, sometimes 
 wise and true, sometimes foolish and false. 
 
 We can, as I have already shown in these 
 papers, know something surely about God, but 
 only by means of what we see and know of our- 
 selves and of the cosmos. We have facts which 
 are simple, intelligible, and indisputable, whereby 
 Keason compels us to infer that a God exists, that 
 He is spirit and not material, that He has certain 
 feelings and dispositions and purposes towards us. 
 But all these thoughts are necessarily anthropo- 
 morphic. They are drawn exclusively from what 
 we are, and what we find in ourselves when we try 
 to know what we are. We find that we are spirits, 
 and not merely bodies ; we see the impassable gulf 
 which separates thought from the motion of 
 molecules in the brain ; we feel and know the non- 
 material spiritual emotions of conscience and of 
 love ; and from this common human experience we 
 can pass, without any violation of reason, to the 
 conception of a God who is spirit only, and can be 
 everywhere present, and can know everything. If 
 we know a little, a very little, w^e can grasp the 
 idea of One who knows all things ; still it is 
 anthropomorphic, and cannot be otherwise. The 
 higher side of human nature — the soul or spirit of 
 
49 
 
 man — is our only clue to the soul or spirit who is 
 the Author and Ruler of all Nature. Just as we 
 realise that a machine cannot be made by men 
 without will, purpose, and plan, so we see that 
 some mental faculties — transcending our own 
 beyond definition — are needful to account for the 
 cosmos, and specially needful to account for our 
 own mental faculties. The Author of all must have 
 will, purpose, and plan, and certainly knowledge 
 of all the sciences, in order to produce the result; 
 else, if He had no will, no purpose, no plan, and no 
 knowledge, in all these particulars man would be 
 greater and more richly endowed than He. The 
 alternative is too manifestly silly to dwell upon. 
 So it may be argued likewise with all the other 
 attributes ascribed to God. We know that our 
 moral sense and our pure love are the gifts which 
 make us most noble, and raise us most as human 
 beings above the mere animal body. These are 
 the best products of divine achievement in human 
 nature. Hence the necessities of common sense 
 compel us to attribute goodness and love to Him 
 who has made us what we are. We must be 
 anthropomorphic even here, although we feel how 
 lamentably these words fjxil to convey our reverent 
 estimate of the goodness and love of God. 
 
 The difficulty of anthropomorphism was felt 
 by the Hebrew prophet, but it was met by an 
 utterance of everlasting importance and priceless 
 value when he represented God Himself as saying 
 to us men : " My thoughts are not your thoughts, 
 
 E 
 
50 
 
 neither are your ways M}^ ways, saitli the Lord. 
 But as the heavens are higher than the earth, so 
 are My ways higher than your ways, and My 
 thoughts than your thoughts." This is the true 
 Theistic position likewise, when we affirm and 
 repeat, almost to weariness, that God cannot be 
 below the best and highest that we know or can 
 imagine. The corollary follows as a matter of 
 course — " Or God and His pueposes nothing is 
 
 TOO GOOD TO BE TEUE." 
 
PAET YII. 
 
 On Moral Evil. 
 
 We come now to consider another objection to 
 Theism, which may be called a philosophical one, 
 but which is certainly not confined to philosophers 
 or pseudo-philosophers. The objection is often 
 loosely designated " Pessimism," which is intended 
 to express the idea that the real evils and so-called 
 evils of the world are incompatible with a belief in 
 a good and loving God, who is at the same time 
 possessed of supreme power. The objection owes 
 all its force to its being based on facts — on the 
 painful facts of human and animal existence. The 
 evils are present and undeniable. How can they 
 be reconciled with the righteous, moral government 
 of the world ? 
 
 I say, at starting, that hitherto no man has been 
 able satisfactorily to explain all the instances of 
 evil which have occurred, or to reconcile every 
 
n9 
 
 detail with the belief in a good God. But we 
 Theists can rightly claim that we have found 
 satisfactory explanations for a vast amount of pain 
 and sorrow and sin, and that these, when carefully 
 observed, are sufficient not merely to reconcile the 
 evils with a belief in a good God, but largely to 
 increase and strengthen that faith by the dis- 
 closure of purposes and methods which reveal a 
 far higher wisdom and goodness in God than were 
 heretofore imagined. In our view, the grounds on 
 which the pessimistic objection is urged become 
 the grounds for a still stronger and nobler faith in 
 God. What was brous^ht forward to overthrow 
 that faith is at length seen to establish it more 
 firmly than before. This is our claim, and we ask 
 only for a patient attention to the proofs of its 
 validitv. 
 
 The " evils " of the world divide themselves 
 naturally into two distinct categories — physical and 
 moral. But by the term "physical" must be 
 understood not only such evils as bodily pain, 
 disease, and death, but also the mental pains of 
 sympathy or sorrow directly arising out of physical 
 evils which fall upon others, not ourselves. The 
 term " moral evil " speaks for itself. It includes 
 every form of conscious guilt, whether of thought, 
 word, or deed— sin against ourselves, sin against 
 each other, and sin against God. 
 
 Mankind has so risen in the moral scale that the 
 best of men and women have quite settled the 
 question as to the relative badness of these two 
 
53 
 
 classes of evils. They, one and all, are convinced 
 that moral evil is far worse than physical evil. 
 They are always ready to undergo any amount of 
 pain rather than commit sin ; they would delibe- 
 rately prefer to see their own child lying dead, or 
 the victim of painful disease, rather than to see him 
 convicted of a crime or the victim of some base 
 passion ; and even when men and women have not 
 risen to this standard of moral excellence, all 
 ordinary persons agree that the pains of the world 
 would be comparatively bearable if it were not for 
 the selfishness and wickedness which abound. It 
 is also very generally admitted, even by those who 
 are not religious at all, and very little moral, that 
 many of the physical evils of the world would dis- 
 appear altogether, or become much more bearable, 
 if the moral evils could be extirpated, if there 
 were no more sins committed, no more vices in- 
 dulged. 
 
 From all this it will be seen that by far the 
 worst evils of the world are the moral evils, and 
 that, therefore, the existence of moral evil in the 
 world is prima facie a ground of accusation against 
 God much stronger than the existence of physical 
 evils. This, then, is my reason for taking up the 
 subject of moral evil before that of physical evil. 
 
 As before, we argue only from facts. We deny 
 or ignore no fact, however apparently hostile to 
 our theory. If we prove our point, it will be on 
 the ground of fact alone. 
 
 Now, let us enquire : What really constitutes 
 
54 
 
 " moral evil " ? Not certain actions, but conditions 
 under which certain actions are done. We attribute 
 no moral evil, say, to the tiger for killing and 
 eating a man, because, rightly or wrongly, we 
 assume that the tiger is destitute of the moral 
 sense. In killing and eating a man the tiger does 
 not know that its action is right or wrong. The 
 action has no moral quality at all. The same may 
 be said of the human being who is a congenital 
 idiot, or who has become mad and commits a 
 murder while deranged. Not only judges and 
 juries, but all sensible men and women, do not 
 impute moral evil to any criminal who has per- 
 petrated crime while really insane. The action in 
 that case is neither moral nor immoral, but it is 
 unmoral, like the act of the tiger. Moreover, apart 
 from insanity, we never think of ascribing moral 
 evil to savages, who do actions which we call 
 wicked, while they are wholly unconscious that 
 such actions are wicked. We see and say that 
 they kill and eat their captives in war, either think- 
 ing it right to do so, or not thinking it wrong, or 
 never giving a thought as to its morality or 
 immorality at all. Again, some customs— ^.^., 
 polygamy and polyandry— are accounted moral in 
 one country, and immoral in another, according to 
 circumstances. What would be considered quite 
 right by one race of people would be considered 
 quite wrong by another. The moral quality of the 
 custom or action is determined by the existence 
 and verdict of the moral sense. If I think that 
 
55 
 
 a thing is wrong for me to do, it is moral evil if 
 I do it. 
 
 Again I appeal to the human conscience. We 
 never feel guilty, and never can be made to feel 
 guilty, for any disaster which may have happened 
 through our agency, if it did not happen through our 
 negligence or malevolence ; if, in short, we could 
 not help it. Some such events will readily occur 
 to you. Neither the action nor the consequences 
 of it can create a sense of guilt (under these con- 
 ditions), although we may grieve and lament the 
 catastrophe to our dying day. A man may be 
 sorry for the unforeseen and unintended mischief 
 he has done ; but he can never feel guilty or repent 
 of it as a sin unless he had the power to prevent it, 
 and knew that he was doing wrong at the time. 
 Have I not now said enough to show that moral 
 evil does not consist in particular actions, but in 
 the conditions under which those actions are done ? 
 The conditions are mental and moral. There must 
 be a clear understanding of the act (not necessarily 
 of any of its consequences), and a conviction in the 
 heart or conscience that the action is wrong. Sins 
 of omission — not doing the right thing which we 
 know we ought to do — are exactly similar in 
 principle. Moral evil is not an abstraction, but in 
 every case is a concrete reality, caused by a person 
 doing wrong when he knew it was wrong, or 
 neglecting to do the right thing when he knew he 
 ought to do it. 
 
 The next step is obvious. Moral evil is the 
 
oG 
 
 result of the possession of a moral sense. It can 
 only be created by that moral sense. Without a 
 conscience there can be no moral evil or sin. 
 
 We might have been left like the tiger, and 
 the dire consequences of an almost inconceivable 
 savagery would have flooded the world and bathed 
 all human history in mire and blood ; but no one 
 would have been at all conscious that anything was 
 wrong anywhere. A state of absolute unmorality 
 would certainly have produced disastrous effects 
 beyond man's imagination to conceive ; but there 
 would have been no moral evil at all. There would 
 have been nothing to reveal to mankind any differ- 
 ence of moral quality between one action and 
 another. All alike would have been steeped in 
 absolute moral darkness, in which right and wrong 
 would have ever remained unperceived and un- 
 known. 
 
 That which has created moral evil, then, is the 
 addition to our animal nature of a sense by which 
 we perceive moral differences between certain 
 thoughts, words, and deeds. This moral sense is 
 the gift of God, a most precious and altogether 
 beneficent gift, because it is the only means known 
 to us by which it was possible at all for man to rise 
 above the purely animal condition. Remember, 
 that the " evils " of such a condition would liave 
 been unspeakably worse than present evils, and 
 would have been also without a remedy : for no 
 one would have been aware that anything was 
 " wrong," or that it was our duty to exercise self- 
 
57 
 
 control, in order to prevent or to mitigate the evils 
 perpetually being inflicted upon each other and 
 ourselves. 
 
 The first effect of the moral sense is to create 
 sin, to make us think that we are sinful ; and yet 
 this is the first step, and the essential step, towards 
 the attainment of any goodness at all. The entrance 
 of sin into the world was, therefore, no " fall " of 
 man, but a "rise," a real step onwards and upwards 
 towards that goodness which is our destiny. We 
 could never become saints if we had not first been 
 made sinners. 
 
 Mere innocence is not goodness. Had we been 
 made, at the first, incapable of moral aberration, we 
 could never have been truly good ; only mechani- 
 cally accurate and well-ordered. People forget 
 that the mere inability to go wrong is of no moral 
 value. The only true morality must be the result 
 of efltbrt, of deliberate choice of good in preference 
 to evil ; and, therefore, one must not only have 
 power to discern the one from the other, but be 
 placed in circumstances where both are possible. 
 So God o:ives us a short tether of real freedom 
 within Avhicli it is possible for us to choose to do 
 right or wrong ; the choice of right under these 
 circumstances being the only condition under which 
 virtue is possible at all. 
 
 No one will need any argument to convince him 
 that the purpose of the moral sense is to make 
 us better than we were before, and ultimately to 
 ensure our moral progress till we have become 
 
58 
 
 perfectly good. The first stage is a good one — 
 to be ashamed of ourselves — to see and know how 
 much there is to mend in ourselves and in the 
 world around us. All the divine action is slow. 
 Evolution teaches us to discern the quiet patience 
 of God in developing the intractable elements with 
 which He has to deal. But it is not wise to com- 
 jDlain that we were not made good all at once ; for 
 this, so far as we can see, would be impossible. 
 Shall we complain that the oak-tree must grow out 
 of the acorn, or the solar system out of star- mist ? 
 These slow processes seem good in the eyes of that 
 wise Euler, and no doubt are not only good, but 
 the best means for attaining His ends. So if His 
 purpose be to make all men and women good in 
 the end, He must gro?/) them ; He must develop 
 them. The moral processes are organic, just as the 
 growth of an oak from an acorn ; and if only they 
 are not to be finally defeated, we may well confess 
 that His processes are the best that could have 
 been devised. That they do involve great trouble 
 and inconvenience to mankind, and are, therefore, 
 called " evils," I do not deny. What some of us 
 have yet to learn is that the game is Avorth the 
 candle, that the cost of attaining moral perfection 
 is cheap and insignificant, beside the privilege and 
 the glory of it. 
 
 In my next paper I will cite facts which are 
 easily recognisable and verifiable as to the entrance 
 and first efiPects of the moral sense. Meanwhile I 
 ask my readers to tell me, if they can, of any 
 
59 
 
 explanation or solution of the problem of moral 
 evil which is equal to the one I have advanced, 
 in reasonableness and simplicity ; I ask them to 
 instance any theology or philosophy which accounts 
 so fully for the existence of moral evil, and at the 
 same time reconciles the presence of it with the 
 goodness of that God who rules our world. 
 
PART vm. 
 
 The True " Fall of Manr 
 
 The " Fall of Man " was an early and excusable 
 error into which man stumbled in trying to account 
 for the presence of moral evil in the world. But 
 the error lay not in saying that our first parents 
 " fell " from a state of " innocence," but in sayino: 
 that they fell from a state of moral perfection — 
 " original righteousness," as it was called. This 
 was a contradiction in terms, because, if our first 
 parents had been morally perfect^ they would not 
 have fallen before the first temptation, which we 
 are told they did. Moreover, had it been possible, 
 the event would have brought great dishonour upon 
 God. We have no need to go back to legend or to 
 history to understand the true " Fall of Man." 
 What is meant by that expression will be clear to 
 us when we add to it the words " from a state of 
 innocence," and turn our attention to the little 
 children everywhere around us. In them we may 
 behold the actual process of the fall from a state 
 of innocence. 
 
 No one will pretend that a new-born babe is 
 
61 
 
 moral being at all. It has no consciousness of 
 any difference between right and wrong. It can de- 
 serve neither praise nor blame. It is not moral nor 
 immoral, but simply w;2moral. AVe have a proverb 
 expressing the fact : " As innocent as a new-born 
 babe." After a while it becomes conscious of its 
 own existence, though none of us can remember that 
 first awakening to the fact. As soon as it is old 
 enough to receive and understand precepts and 
 prohibitions, its parents or nurses have to give it 
 some kind of command, e.g.^ " You must not touch 
 that," " You must stay there till I come." Xot 
 having the least sense of duty or obligation, the 
 child is pretty sure to break that first command. 
 It may get burned or hurt in consequence, or get 
 slapped or scolded for disobedience. If it obeys, it 
 may get some reward or approbation. And either 
 of these experiences will probably influence its 
 conduct in that particular in future. But, so far, it 
 is only guided in its choice by the pain or pleasure 
 which, it remembers, had followed on obedience or 
 disobedience. It has not yet even begun to be 
 moral. By -and -by the day will come when it has 
 broken a parental command, and instead of merely 
 being afraid of punishment, it Avill feel deeply 
 ashamed, and sorry for the act itself, feeling for the 
 first time in its life that it ought to obey, and ought 
 not to disobey, its parents. It feels the rightness 
 of obedience and wrongness of disobedience quite 
 apart from their respective consequences. Then 
 the moral sense is born within it, and not before. 
 
62 
 
 Then the child passes from a state of innocence 
 into a state of guilt, a knowledge that it has lost , 
 its peace of mind, its self-respect, and is verily 
 ashamed to meet the loving eyes of father and 
 mother, ashamed of its sin, even though the sin 
 could remain for ever concealed from them. The 
 child has fallen from its state of innocence, but it 
 has, then and there, by and through its sin, risen 
 from its former wholly animal condition into that of 
 a moral and spiritual being. In no other way, in 
 no better way, at all events, could it be raised ; in 
 no other way could the attainment of goodness be 
 made possible to it. Remember, that goodness 
 consists in the love of it, in the preference for 
 it over evil, in the choice of it instead of evil. 
 But without knowledge of both, the choice of 
 goodness would be impossible. Everything is 
 learnt by contrast. Unless we know what sin is, 
 we could never hate it. Unless we know what 
 goodness is, we could not love it. Therefore, we 
 need to be in a state where we can experience 
 both, and have sufficient freedom to be able to 
 choose at all. And out of this " fall " from inno- 
 cence, this real " rise " into the moral state, the 
 child may learn, and will learn, how to grow into 
 moral perfection. It must be a conscious sinner, it 
 must be ashamed of and sorry for its sin, in order 
 to become a saint, in order to love goodness. 
 
 This is the true story of the "Fall of Man"; 
 and God is enacting for us the scene every day, if 
 we will but open our eyes to watch it. And we 
 
63 
 
 see in it God's real method of punishing sin and 
 rewarding virtue. The child iirst awakened to a 
 sense of sin is far more distressed by its own shame 
 and remorse than it would be by bodily chastise- 
 ment or by a severe scolding. Scolding has no 
 good effect on the character at all, only on the 
 behaviour, until the sense of shame has been 
 aroused, and then scolding becomes superfluous. 
 If the child, on the next occasion, should do right, 
 the sense of heartfelt satisfaction far outweighs the 
 pleasure of I'eward, whether by gift or praise. It 
 has the double joy of being at peace with itself and 
 at peace with its lawgiver. 
 
 The physical consequences of sin are not always 
 painful, while some consequences of heroic virtue 
 are intensely painful. It is not in these conse- 
 quences that we must look for God's rewards 
 and punishments, but in the feelings of the 
 heart and conscience, where His eye ever sees, 
 and His judgments never fail to acquit or to 
 convict. If we did but allow common sense to 
 have more control over our thoughts and actions, 
 we should grow up, and be trained up, to hold our 
 conscience in greater regard than we do, and w^e 
 should regulate our lives and cultivate our character 
 in conformity with the rule that — before all things 
 else — we must do and be that which is right, for 
 goodness' sake, for love of God, and love of men. 
 That rule involves, of course, painful and difficult 
 conflicts with our lower nature, and with base 
 principles which infect our very minds and hearts. 
 
64 
 
 The same sacred awe of Duty, which kept our little 
 fingers from picking and stealing the sugar and the 
 jam, will keep us, when we have grown up, from 
 all unlawful gratification. God makes us more 
 than animals, allows us to become immoral, guilty 
 sinners, in order that we may one day be like 
 Himself in loving and choosing and preferring 
 goodness of our own free will. And do not fear 
 that His purpose will fail. In spite of all our 
 animalism and subtle selfishness. He will cause to 
 grow and flourish and triumph the seeds of good- 
 ness which He has sown in all our hearts. We 
 have all taken the first step when we first became 
 conscious of guilt. It will not be the last, but we 
 shall make our road to goodness shorter or longer, 
 smoother or rougher, according to our obedience or 
 disobedience to our consciences. As Tennyson 
 says : — 
 
 Men may rise, on stepping-stones 
 
 Of their dead selves, to higher things. 
 
 Conscientiousness is our bliss ; the lack of it is our 
 bane. Of conscientiousness, as of true religion — of 
 which it is an essential part — it may be truly said, 
 " Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her 
 paths are peace." 
 
 And now I must do a little fio-htino;. An 
 impatient company of listeners are eager to unfold 
 to me the many instances known to them of natural 
 human depravity, manifest even in young children, 
 which, in the opinion of the objectors, proves the 
 taint of the old orthodox " original sin." 
 
65 
 
 It is quite true that children are born with 
 hereditary tendencies to specific vices or virtues. 
 This fact is not sufficiently recognised or remem- 
 bered by parents. Our habitual sins do transmit 
 to our offspring a tendency to fall into them. 
 Drunkenness and profligacy are well-known in- 
 stances of transmission by heredity ; falsehood and 
 cunning likewise. And, on the other hand, the 
 virtues of parents give their children the advantage 
 of a natural tendency to imitate those virtues, and 
 to make moral conflict all the more easy. So it is 
 very certain that all men do not start from the 
 same moral level'; i.e.^ though all are born inno- 
 cent, they are not all possessed of equal native 
 tendencies to good or to evil. It is harder for a 
 child of impure parents to be chaste ; for a child 
 of liars to be truthful. But I do not see how this 
 can in any way affect God's justice, or hinder His 
 final purpose to make all men good at the last. 
 The law of heredity is a good and just law. 
 It cuts both ways. It immensely increases the 
 responsibility of parents, and deepens their sense 
 of obligation to do right and avoid evil for the 
 sake of their chiklren and posterity ; and besides 
 all this, not one of our native faculties is evil in 
 itself. The evil arises from its exercise under 
 improper conditions, and to an improper degree ; 
 at a wrong time and in wrong company ; from a 
 base motive instead of a good one. All the natural 
 and normal faculties are good in themselves, and 
 are given for a good purpose, and would produce 
 
 F 
 
6G 
 
 only good if used aright. All our vices are but 
 perversions of innocent or virtuous propensities. 
 In any case, the variation of native tendencies in no 
 way touches my argument as to the origin of moral 
 evil. 
 
 I conclude this paper with a few suggestions as 
 to the visible and undisputed results of living in a 
 sinful world like ours. 
 
 First, there is the effort made by individuals to 
 conquer the moral evil within them. Without such 
 effort there could be no goodness in us at all. 
 
 Secondly, in our contact with moral evil in 
 others, some of the most noble and beautiful virtues 
 are engendered, which otherwise could never have 
 had birth. Sin committed ao^ainst ourselves beg-ets 
 patience, forbearance, long-suffering, pity, mercy, 
 and forgiveness ; we are led by it into the heroic 
 virtue of returning good for evil, blessing for 
 cursing, love for hatred. Man is never so noble as 
 then ; and the heart of mankind looks upon such 
 loveliness of character with admiration and envy. 
 Such virtue receives an apotheosis, and the men 
 who show it are called Divine. 
 
 But how could any of these beauties of virtue 
 have sprung up at all unless in direct contact and 
 conflict with sin ? Shut out moral evil, and you 
 cripple and stunt mankind ; you make impossible 
 the higher and highest attainments of moral excel- 
 lence. In spite of all its awful evils, the world is 
 still a good world, the work of a good God, bearing 
 witness, in many details within reach of our know- 
 
67 
 
 ledge and experience, to the grandeur and sublimity 
 of its moral purpose, and to the far-reaching love 
 of God, who ordains that men shall rise to real and 
 lofty goodness by personal conflict with moral evil 
 in themselves and in others. 
 
 And the lesson to be drawn from the facts when 
 we see them is to use well the little liberty and the 
 little light which God has given in working out 
 our own salvation and the salvation of the world 
 from sin. If we do our part faithfully, we may 
 safely look for His help, and be very sure of our 
 final triumph. 
 
PART IX. 
 
 On Pain and Sorrow. 
 
 By the better part of mankind it is universally 
 felt that sin is a far greater evil than any bodily 
 pain, or mental suffering arising out of such pain. 
 I am sorry to say there are a vast number of us 
 who feel exactly the opposite, and act as if pain 
 and earthlv misfortune were much worse evils than 
 sin. 
 
 Nevertheless, all men are capable of taking the 
 higher ground. When they seriously reflect upon 
 it, most men would rather suffer acute bodily pain 
 than commit a crime. They would prefer to see 
 their wives and children cold and stark in death, 
 rather than see them fall into incurable vice. 
 
 So I will take it for granted that the worst evil 
 which can befall us is to be wicked ; far worse than 
 merely being disgraced and locked up in a gaol. I 
 have already endeavoured to show that sin or 
 moral evil is consistent with the sovereign rule of 
 a Righteous God, that it is caused by the light of 
 the moral sense, added, as it were, to our human 
 
69 
 
 nature, in order to raise us from the purely animal 
 condition in which we are born. I have shown 
 that a fall from innocence is the first step in our 
 endless progress towards real goodness ; and if all 
 this be true, the righteousness of God is abundantly 
 vindicated, even when we are considering the worst 
 of all the evils which afflict mankind. Therefore, 
 it will be a comparatively easier task to prove His 
 righteousness and His love in the appointment or 
 permission of bodily pain and of temporal adver- 
 sities, not less also of the sorrows caused by 
 sympathy and bereavement. 
 
 The only justification for the appointment of 
 pain is to be found in the purpose or purposes for 
 which it is inflicted. I am not so fooHsh as to 
 think that every single instance of pain and sorrow 
 may be satisfactorily explained. All I can do, and 
 all T shall attempt, is to show that in very many 
 instances pain and sorrow are productive of results 
 highly beneficial to mankind at large, and even to 
 the sufferino; individuals themselves, which could 
 not be achieved in any other way, so far as we can 
 see. If we cannot vindicate God's goodness and 
 love in every case, and yet can do so in many cases 
 and over wide fields of observation, it is only 
 common sense to give Him credit for a good 
 purpose in those cases also which we cannot 
 explain. And especially is it reasonable to remem- 
 ber the enormous disparity between us and Him as 
 regards our age and His, our experience and His, 
 our wisdom and our skill and His. 
 
70 
 
 First, let us look at the fact that the same 
 organisation which makes j^ain possible to us is 
 also necessary to give us any pleasure at all. 
 If we could not feel pain, neither could we feel 
 IDleasure. Pain is the inevitable consequence of 
 those organs by which we are enabled to have any 
 pleasure at all. 
 
 Next, it is an admitted fact that a great deal of 
 pleasure is derived purely from the alternation of 
 pain withlit. Where pain is never felt at all, there 
 is no sense of pleasure— ^.^^., in a healthy state, the 
 action of the heart and lungs does not produce any 
 conscious pleasure. It is only when disease has 
 temporarily deranged these organs and produced 
 pain, that the person so affected derives any con- 
 scious pleasure in the action of the heart and lungs 
 when restored to health. There is often pain in 
 desire wdiich creates the pleasure of gratification. 
 Common hunger gives a relish to food like nothing 
 else. And hunger is a kind of pain, becoming 
 more acute the longer it lasts. 
 
 Again, it is proverbial that satisfaction of animal 
 wants often produces satiety, or loss of the very 
 pleasure which a moderate or interrupted satisfac- 
 tion begets. If you think it over for yourselves, 
 you will see how much of your pleasure, both in 
 quantity and quality, is due to alternations with 
 discomfort or pain. 
 
 But we must go on to ask, what are the direct 
 uses of pain ? 
 
 The pains of want or desire are essential to life 
 
71 
 
 itself. If the babe did not pine for its food, it 
 would not feed itself by suction. If its cry of 
 hunger did not pierce the mother's heart, she would 
 not know that the child was hungry, nor, perhaps, 
 care to supply its wants. From these very simple 
 instances you may readily learn that the pain 
 arisins: from want is necessary to life itself. It is 
 also necessary to Avarn us from danger. If fire did 
 not burn ; or poisons did not injure and destroy ; if 
 dust did not make our eyes smart ; or smoke did 
 not irritate our bronchial tubes ; — we should be 
 quickly injured and destroyed by exposure to those 
 sources of pain. The world is so full of illustra- 
 tions that it would take a lifetime to recount 
 them. I can only give you a few hints, so that 
 you can find other instances for yourselves. Life 
 is largely preserved through the pains caused by 
 noxious and dangerous objects. The pains are 
 God's warnings and signals of danger. 
 
 But, further, pain is the chief cause of the 
 development of our faculties. We say in the old 
 proverb, " Necessity is the mother of inventions." 
 What is that "necessity" ? It is the necessity for 
 avoiding pain. Pain is the real mother of inven- 
 tions. Pain has taught us all we know — is the 
 reason why every art has been invented. It was 
 the assent bv which man became a strong and 
 cunning animal, asserting and maintaining his right 
 of supremacy over the animal kingdom. His pain 
 drove him to hunt, drove him to ensnare his prey, 
 drove him to clothe himself, and to build shelters, 
 
72 
 
 drove him to lead a domestic and social life, to 
 ward off dangers and injuries by united effort ; 
 drove him, in short, to seek in civilisation the 
 greatest possible immunity from suffering, or, at 
 least, the best mitigations of the common lot. 
 
 Pain is with us to excite our opposition, to call 
 forth the latent energies which otherwise would 
 have lain dormant and useless. We owe every- 
 thing that Ave have done, and all that we are, to the 
 battle between humanity and physical pain. It has 
 made us restless and enquiring ; all our knowledge 
 has sprung out of pain, just as every man amongst 
 us owes his life to-day to the pangs of hunger 
 which he felt when an infant. Pain has been man's 
 intellectual and physical and moral schoolmaster. 
 Had it not been for pain, and the restless desire to 
 prevent or remove it, there would have been no 
 cultivation of the mind, no discoveries of stored-up 
 treasure, no reading of the wonderful books of 
 Kature which are spread out before us. Our 
 inevitable sufferings have been a perpetual stimulus 
 of our minds to knowledge, of our hands to skill, 
 and, of our social instincts to civilisation. Where 
 are the so-called lower animals in the race of life ? 
 Do they not stagnate ? Are they not pretty nearly 
 in the same undeveloped, unadvanced condition age 
 after age ? Possibly this is owing to the compar- 
 ative ease and happiness of their lot. They do not 
 suffer a hundredth part of the pain that we men 
 suffer. They have very few wants ; and remember 
 that every want is a pain in embryo, every unsatis- 
 
73 
 
 fied desire is painful. These humbler creatures of 
 God have little or nothing to stimulate them to 
 human exertions and human inventions. They are, 
 for the most part, in absolute contentment with 
 their lot, and, though not without occasional 
 suffering, they have no pains like ours to endure. 
 So, merely as animals, we are infinitely benefited 
 and enabled to advance by reason of our far 
 greater and more numerous pains. 
 
 It is when we come to man as a moral and 
 spiritual being that we behold the grandest of 
 God's good and loving purposes in the appointment 
 of pain and sorrow. I would fain keep to the last 
 that one quality which all the world recognises as 
 the sweetest, loveliest flower of human nature ; but 
 I cannot restrain myself. I must ask, this moment. 
 Where would sympathy have been in a world in 
 which there was neither pain nor grief? Why, 
 your very word, your golden, heavenly word 
 ''sympathy," has no meaning without pain and 
 sorrow. Would you really, deliberately, like to 
 live in a world in which sympathy would be 
 unknown ? And yet, as sure as the sunlight never 
 pierces the bottom of a mine, so sympathy would 
 never have shone in a painless, tearless, griefless 
 world. Sympathy! What poet shall ever sing 
 the noble deeds, and the still anore noble impulses, 
 engendered by sympathy ? She outstrips our best 
 endeavours, our most ardent hopes. No man, no 
 woman even, can keep pace with her angelic speed. 
 We try in vain to maintain even a decent level 
 
74 
 
 with her requirements ; our best endeavours to 
 answer to her claims are but miserable limpings 
 after all, borne along as we are on the crutches of 
 human resource. Sympathy is the daughter of 
 God, brought here by pain to remind us of our 
 celestial birth, and of the high destiny to which we 
 shall attain ; and you will be only too ready to say 
 that the price of human suffering is a cheap one to 
 pay for such an honour, such a glory, as the power 
 of sympathy. 
 
 Besides this surpassing splendour, there is a 
 stream of minor virtues engendered wholly and 
 solely by the conditions of grief and pain. There is 
 fortitude, the manly power of endurance, which in 
 itself confers nobility ; there is patience, which 
 involves acquiescence in a Diviner, more loving, will 
 than our own ; there is active endeavour to lighten 
 the burdens of our fellow-men, involving the devo- 
 tion of a whole life to scientific research for the 
 sole purpose of reducing or mitigating the sufferings 
 of the race. 
 
 And pain, especially the pang of bereavement, 
 does bring us home to God. It creates and keeps 
 alive the sense of dependence on Him, even when 
 we cannot see why we should suffer. It is good 
 for us to be afflicted, that we may remember that 
 we are born for a higher life than this ; that we 
 may be conscious that there is something for which 
 we ought to crave, much more precious than mere 
 animal ease and pleasure. 
 
 Pain and sorrow remind us that we are children 
 
i o 
 
 of God, and that the virtues which only pain can 
 beget are of infinitely more account to beings such 
 as we than the sufferings of this present life. 
 
 And, therefore, pain reminds us not only of God, 
 but of our duty. We cannot look on the sufferins^ 
 and sorrow-stricken world without remembering 
 what a large measure of its pains and woes are our 
 own work, the results of our own stupidity, or 
 criminal neglect, or vicious selfishness and covet- 
 ousness. It is too often oz^r fault when om- 
 bre thren die of hunger, or we ourselves are smitten 
 by loathsome disease. There is a ghastly list of 
 pains and griefs due to nothing else but sin ; and 
 till we have driven every one of these out of the 
 world by faithful obedience to God's laws, we 
 ought, in decency, to be silent of reproach against 
 Him for allowing us to suffer at all. 
 
 Let our sympathy have its natural course, and 
 keep us from doing those evil things which produce 
 unnecessary pain. Let conscience be heard to 
 keep us from many a sin, many a folly, which 
 entails disease and suffering on our posterity. 
 Let reason be listened to when she urges us to 
 study God's laws of health and soundness, and to 
 follow them faithfully. And above all, let love 
 have full sway over our hearts and lives, that it 
 may interpret for us all that is yet unexplained in 
 the Divine dealings with us. If we love Him 
 truly, we shall trust Him, and admire the wisdom 
 and goodness of His purposes, even in our greatest 
 afflictions. And if we love our fellow-men, we 
 
76 
 
 shall never rest until we have done our utmost to 
 make their burdens light, and to turn their very 
 pains and sorrows into joy. 
 
 And let me give you one word of advice, if you 
 happen to be still unconvinced : 
 
 Do not be so foolish as to ask me^ Why does not 
 God effect His good purpose at once without all 
 this distress and bother and pain ? 
 
 Ask God this question, who alone can give the 
 answer. 
 
 I see that if He wants an oak tree he begins with 
 an acorn, down in the dank, dark earth, its shell 
 rotting away all winter. If He wants a man, He 
 begins with a germ, an infant, and so on. 
 
 This is His method — slow growth and progress — 
 much surely being required of His creatures, in co- 
 operation, in the use of faculties already bestowed. 
 We see no sign of haste, no sign of omnipotence,* 
 but proofs everywhere of purpose which is only 
 good and kind. This is enough for me. 
 
 *"■ By this term I mean that popular idea of omnipotence wliich 
 ascribes to God the power of doing impossibilities and absurdities. 
 
PAKT X. 
 
 The Life after Death. 
 
 If you have followed me so far in my endeavour 
 to justify the ways of God to men, you cannot fail 
 to be impressed by the conviction that, if His 
 purposes be good and kind, if the development of 
 the highest virtue and the enjoyment of the most 
 refined pleasure be the objects aimed at by His 
 discipline of us here on earth, these good purposes 
 cannot be wliolly achieved unless there be for one 
 and all a life to come, in which the processes may 
 be continued till the end be gained. Clearly the 
 end is not attained in this life ; we may almost say, 
 with certainty, it cannot be. Here on earth, we 
 witness only the first beginnings, the first incipient 
 movements of the moral and spiritual life. It is 
 not worth while to argue about that at all. If 
 God's purposes be as I have described them, and if 
 there be no life to come, then He has made of this 
 world a miserable faiku'e, in which there is an 
 enormous amount of useless, purposeless suffering, 
 in which all our highest aspirations are frustrated, 
 
78 
 
 and in which we, as moral beings, can find an 
 awful list of impeachments against His goodness. 
 It pertains, therefore, to Theism to furnish the 
 grounds on which we may reasonably hope and 
 expect that for us, and for all mankind, there is a 
 life to come after the death and dissolution of the 
 body. 
 
 For my own part, I consider that the remarks with 
 which I have commenced this portion of my essays 
 on Theism are quite sufficient ground for the hope 
 of a future life, inasmuch as it is plain that if the 
 sroodness of God cannot be vindicated without it. 
 He would cease to be worthy of our trust and love. 
 Nevertheless, there is so much more to be said in 
 favour of the hope, that it is only right to enlarge 
 upon it. In the first place, we, frail and sinful men 
 and women, with all our faults, have at the bottom of 
 our hearts this one undoubted feeling — we would, 
 if we could, bring every one of mankind to a state 
 of perfect goodness and happiness at last. If we 
 had but the power and the skill to do it, we should 
 not need prompting. We should do it ; we should 
 ^ive ourselves no rest till we had done it. Why? 
 Because we have been endowed with some measure 
 of sympathy and love. It is love that would make 
 us do this if we could, and if we knew how. Our 
 loving wish to do it is, in my opinion, a witness for 
 God that He certainly will do it, because He can, 
 and because He knows how\ We cannot be more 
 loving than God. Surely our love is in this, at all 
 events, pure and unselfish ; it is noble and beautiful. 
 
79 
 
 without u trace of meanness or self-interest. For 
 even if you or I could do this for all mankind, 
 except only for ourselves — if we could thus save the 
 world and be ourselves lost — that would not keep us 
 back for one moment from trying to save them. 
 And I venture to affirm that it is not only impious, 
 but silly, to think that our love for mankind is 
 greater than God's love. And the unbending 
 axiom of Theism is that God cannot be below the 
 best and hio-hest of His creatures, nor yet below 
 the best and hio-hest that they can imas^ine Him to 
 be. Xothino; can be too o;ood to be true of God 
 and His purposes. 
 
 If, then, words have any meaning, and if God have 
 true love towards us, it is a necessary consequence 
 that He will not part with us ; that loving us once, 
 even in our low estate, He will love us for ever, 
 and take more delight in seeing His image ripening 
 in us as the ages roll on. 
 
 But, here again, all the force of the argument 
 turns upon what w^e are, what is our true relation 
 to God, what is there in us to survive. We see 
 that, in a certain sense^ God cares nothing for our 
 bodies. T do not forget the wonderful and ceaseless 
 bounty which flows from Him on all animal life. 
 But what I am looking at now, as a serious fact, is 
 Death, the universal death which comes and destroys 
 in due time every '* body " which lives. The whole 
 scene of animal nature is in a state of flux. No 
 thing " continues in one stay." Accident, disease, 
 or decay makes short work of our bodies. God 
 
80 
 
 throws them away, pulls them to pieces, restores 
 them into their original elements or atomic con- 
 ditions, just as it suits His purpose. I cannot say, 
 then, with any pretence of sincerity or accuracy, 
 that God loves any body. Now, my parents did 
 love my body — would have grieved sorely had my 
 body been taken from them. A mother w^eeping 
 over her dying child loves the body of her child, 
 and would never part from it at all if she could help 
 it. I could not, therefore, think of God for one 
 moment as a Father to our bodies. But then our 
 bodies are not we ; our bodies are only the houses 
 in which ice dwell, the machinery which we use, or 
 the clothing which conceals us from each other's 
 eyes. 
 
 Our bodies do not partake of spiritual life. 
 They are in no way Divine, or partakers of the 
 nature of God. They are material, physical, and, 
 therefore, mortal and utterly perishable. But ive do 
 share in spiritual life as thinking beings, moral 
 beings, beings who can and do love. In all this 
 we live, and move, and think, and feel in a region 
 which is not material, in a region of thoughts and 
 desires, of emotions and passions, of hopes and 
 fears, not one of Avhich is subject to the laws of 
 inatter and motion, but lies wholly in another and 
 a higher sphere. 
 
 And it is here alone that we recognise what we 
 really are, and what is our relation to God, and 
 what there is in us that can survive. Herein we 
 discover our Divine parentage, our real sonship to 
 
81 
 
 God, our affinity with supreme intelligence, right- 
 eousness, and love. Herein we see that God is our 
 real Father, that we are " begotten, not made," and 
 that He can love what will never die ; that His 
 Fatherly love is not to be looked for among the 
 material things of earth, among the bodies of 
 animals, or the petals of a rose, but in the world of 
 souls, which are dearer to Him than a babe to its 
 tender mother. What God loves, in that true and 
 higher sense, far higher than mere provision for 
 bodily wants. He will not part with, He cannot lose. 
 Deny the existence of the soul ; deny the love of 
 God toAvards it, if there be a soul, and not a trace 
 of ground is left on which to build any hope of 
 immortality for man. And then, in the waste 
 howling wilderness which you have created by 
 your denials, you have made God Himself guilty 
 of " a blunder infinite and inexcusable." 
 
 And I Avould wish you to observe how perfectly 
 futile it is to think to overthrow the hope of a life to 
 come by asking questions as to how such a life can 
 be made possible after the death and dissolution of 
 the body. This is one of the things kept purposely 
 from our knoAvledge by God Himself, Avho knows 
 to what bad purposes such knowledge might be 
 put, and how His purpose might be defeated or 
 hindered thereby. Or, supposing Him to be willing 
 that we should know all about it, in all probability 
 no words could possibly describe it to us, for it 
 takes experience to enable us to understand 
 anything. Even God could not impart to us 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 knowledge unless we first had the faculty of 
 receivmg it. Besides that, men are quite discon- 
 tented enough with their earthly lot ; they might 
 be still more discontented with an insight into the 
 next. The best prej^aration for another life is to 
 have made the best of this one. 
 
 Not pretending to know details, we may yet well 
 believe, arguing from analogy, that our life to come 
 will be progress, slow or rapid according to our 
 own use of it ; that there will be no jumps or leaps 
 into unearned joys, or translations into a heaven 
 for which we are not fit. We shall have to work 
 out our own salvation there as well as here, and it 
 will depend on om^ own willingness and earnestness 
 to work together with God, whether we attain 
 sooner or later the end for which we were born, 
 and for which our bodies die. 
 
 Theism does not concern itself with any of the 
 details and methods of what that life to come may 
 be. Its one trust is in tbe true Fatherly love of 
 God, which is sure to devise and to carry out all 
 that is best for our welfare. 
 
 Some may wish to ask me, as I have been asked 
 many a time. What about the wicked ? What 
 will be their future life ? And I have found such 
 curiosity suddenly and remarkably chilled by 
 asking them in return: The wicked? How do 
 you know that you are not one of " the wicked " 
 yourself? Have you ever duly considered what 
 ideal justice would say ? Is not " wickedness " to 
 be measured in every case by ability or inability 
 
83 
 
 to have done better ? Advantages and disadvan- 
 tages differ so enormously that men do not all alike 
 start at the same moral level; and if I, with my 
 unspeakable advantages, have failed in doing what 
 I could do, and what I know I ought to have done, 
 then I am one of " the wicked," and God only 
 knows how much worse I am than " this publican," 
 or " this harlot," whom, in my stupid and blind 
 self-righteousness, I may have despised ! 
 
 Depend upon it, God will be a fairer Judge than 
 any of us, and we shall get, each and all, exactly 
 the right discipline we may need for the cleansing 
 of our sinful hearts from the love of sin. 
 
 When we are once assured of a life to come, 
 on the reasonable ground of God's purposes ot 
 goodness and love towards us, we see many 
 other reasons why it would be right for us to live 
 on after death. 
 
 The aspirations of man, which he did not create, 
 but which God Himself has implanted, need to 
 be satisfied, if we are to take into account the 
 righteousness and justice of God. Our proper 
 craving for a wider and deeper knowledge of the 
 wonders of the world ; our longing for enlarged 
 capacities of useful service ; and our thirst for 
 truth in every department of thought — all point 
 to a time and condition in which it would be 
 only right to gratify such lofty hopes. Far more 
 important are those secret longings of the soul 
 for goodness, for a complete weaning from the 
 love of sin, and a heart wholly set upon righteousness. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 
 
 How we long and pray to be good, not merely 
 to abstain from Avrong actions and to do right 
 actions, but to have clean hearts and right 
 spirits, and to do always the best with the pm^est 
 motives, and to be entirely what the Eighteous 
 Father wishes us to be ! Not to satisfy such 
 longing as this would hardly seem right in the 
 eyes of a true moral judgment. Then, again, 
 there is our pure and unselfish love, so bitterly 
 wounded by bereavement. Would it not be in 
 the highest degree right and just to allow to that 
 old love its full fruition in a life where separation 
 would be impossible ? or, if for wise purposes 
 separation were allowed, it would always be 
 certainly followed by reunion. And is the 
 discipline of this life so perfectly clear to one 
 and all that there is no need for explanation, no 
 need for a higher standpoint to enable us to see 
 the goodness and wisdom, which, here below, 
 we cannot always discern ? Much as Theism 
 has already said to reconcile us to God's dealings, 
 it cannot solve every problem, or cast light strong 
 enough to make visible every detail of the Divine 
 dealings. We do want a wider range and improved 
 faculties for such a stupendous research. 
 
 And I, for one, reverently declare my conviction 
 that it would be onlv rio;ht in God to clear ui) 
 for me, some day, every present difficulty, and 
 to remove every cloud which our earth-born mists 
 have cast up between ourselves and the brightness 
 of His face. 
 
85 
 
 But all these are minor arguments compared 
 with the one supreme ground of our hopes : — 
 
 God loves us all, just as we are, with an ever- 
 lasting love, and that means that we can never 
 perish nor remain in endless sin and misery. 
 
 " Now Lord, what is my hope ? Truly my 
 hope is even in Thee." 
 
 " As for me, I will behold Thy face in 
 righteousness, and when I awake up after Thy 
 likeness I shall be satisfied therewith." 
 
PAKT XL 
 
 The Moral Value of Theism. 
 
 We have now gone over the principal beliefs of 
 Theism, and the grounds of fact and reason on 
 which it rests. It remains now to show how, in 
 addition to the unspeakable comfort and hope 
 which it affords, it is the greatest possible aid to 
 morality. For it will be admitted, on all hands, 
 that religion is a sham and a farce unless it helps 
 us to be more faithful in duty, to grow better from 
 day to day, or, at least, to keep us from degenera- 
 ting into a lower moral condition. 
 
 And the principle of Theism is, that as it sets 
 before us God in the most lovable aspect, as it 
 teaches the entire friendliness and matchless love 
 of God toAvards us, it thereby invokes and inspires 
 our love to Him in return, the love of gratitude and 
 the love of admiration. And in so far as this love 
 toward God is sincere and strong, it must produce 
 in us a most fervent desire to do His will, i.e.^ to do 
 
87 
 
 what is right, and to forsake what is wrong. 
 Further still, it impels us to desire to he right at 
 heart, to be good in secret where no eye but God's 
 can see, to be set free from the love of sin, which is 
 the one foe we have to fight from the cradle to the 
 grave. 
 
 And inasmuch as we can render no service to 
 God except in and through the service we can 
 render to our fellow-men, it follows that he who 
 most desires to please God will be the most loving, 
 and faithful, and true, and trustworthy towards 
 those among whom he may be placed. It is well 
 known that the most conscientious man is always 
 the best trusted by his fellows, whether they be 
 o-ood or not. It is well known that the most 
 
 o 
 
 loving man is always the best loved. Therefore, 
 conscientiousness and love require no further re- 
 commendation. The verdict of humanity is passed 
 that these are the best gifts which any man can 
 possess. 
 
 The Theist maintains that these faculties are 
 immensely strengthened and enlarged by Eeligion, 
 by remembering God, by a sense of duty towards 
 Him, by deep gratitude for His goodness, and by 
 love and admiration of God Himself. The Theist 
 pleads for the acceptance of his thoughts about God 
 and His dealings on the ground that they oifer no 
 stumbling-blocks in the way of our perfect trust in 
 Him. Theistic thoughts of God are free from 
 countless blemishes and inconsistencies, which 
 either puzzle the mind of the seeker after God, or 
 
88 
 
 openly blacken His face and tarnish the lustre of 
 His moral perfections. We know but little, it is 
 true, of all that may yet be known of God and His 
 goodness ; but even that little is enough to make 
 all men declare — and feel, if they will not declare — 
 that it is the best and highest and most attractive 
 of all the conceptions of God hitherto proclaimed. 
 
 All that is wanted is that men should believe it, 
 and feel it, and act upon it, and henceforth disci- 
 pline their own lives and character in accordance 
 with it. 
 
 There is, first, the thoroughness of it ; the tack- 
 ling with evil at its root, the cleansing of the heart 
 and the motives, the enlisting of our affections, as 
 well as our conformity, on the side of obedience. 
 Then there is the hope of success, the absolute 
 certainty of growth towards the attainment of our 
 noblest aspirations. God will not leave us in the 
 lurch, if we will only hold by His hand and look 
 up to Him for guidance and strength. It is true, 
 and grandly true, that He will never compel our 
 obedience, and can never drive us to love Him. But 
 He can and will, if we let Him, draw our hearts 
 towards Him and kindle our love to Him by the 
 sight of His love to us. He promises us the final 
 victory over all evil within and around us ; not in 
 the words of any text, or by voice M^hich may be 
 heard with our outward ears ; but by the experi- 
 ence we have had of what true love is. If we have 
 ever learned that, we have therein His promise to 
 do for us all that true love demands : '* taste and 
 
89 
 
 see how gracious the Lord is. Blessed is the man 
 that trusteth in Him." 
 
 Then, besides this thoroughness and this hope of 
 final victory, there is the exceeding great and 
 jDrecious joy which is to be found in the honest 
 endeavour to be and to do what God requires. 
 Whatever we do for love is a delight to us. There 
 can be no drudgery in it, nor weariness. The 
 duties which seem so hard, the self-denials which 
 seem so painful, are, by love, transfigured into 
 privileges and enjoyments. Instead of being driven 
 to them, we are drawn ; we run gladly to do the 
 work and to endure the hardship for the luxury of 
 gratifying our love to God and men. Life becomes 
 a j)Grfectly new experience. The world is a 
 perfectly new world so soon as love gets hold of 
 us, and we can forget our poor selves in the rapture 
 of true service to others. 
 
 Yet another most helpful thought is to be found 
 in our logical conclusion that, because God is the 
 common Father of all mankind, all we are brethren. 
 My heart sinks at the thought, how this grand 
 truth has lost its significance by repetition, how it 
 has become a cant phrase which ends only in 
 sound, and has no practical effect on our lives. 
 But nevertheless it is not quite dead. It will, and 
 must, revive and wield the most potent influence 
 for good over our relations with each other. 
 Especially do we need it in the higher regard 
 for the rights of others than for our own ; in 
 thinking more heartily and disinterestedly of our 
 
90 
 
 duties to them than of their ckities to us. The 
 " brotherhood of men " may yet emerge as the 
 saviour of society when it means just this in every 
 conceivable relation in life : " Put yourself in his 
 place. How would you like to be treated as you 
 are treating him ? " Unless we are deliberate liars 
 to ourselves, we cannot always face such a question 
 without guilt and shame. We know, and we ought 
 to lament it more than we do, that men and w^omen 
 of every rank and class in life, rich and poor, 
 employers and employed, have not always felt or 
 acted towards each other as brothers and sisters. 
 We want our own hearts set right before we can 
 reform present abuses and anomalies, or even judge 
 correctly of the merits of any scheme. In Religion 
 and not in Secularism lies the poor man's hope. 
 In brotherly love and not in covetousness will be 
 found the remedy for all injustice. I, for one, look 
 to Theism, or to a belief in God higher and better 
 still when it can be found, to mend all the evil 
 ways of the Avorld, to abolish envy and covetousness 
 from all hearts alike, to abolish criminal self-seek- 
 ing and selfish neglect of our brethren, to drive 
 away all strife, bigotry, persecution, and to trample 
 in the mire our base, our contemptible, ambitions. 
 
 It will yet break the neck of tyranny, whether of 
 potentates, parliaments, or mobs ; it will destroy 
 the noxious elements alike in wealth and in 
 poverty ; it will breed universal contentment only 
 by kindling universal love. For the more we love 
 God, the better shall we love one another. In 
 
91 
 
 striking contrast to a religion which teaches 
 " Whoso h)veth father or mother, son or daughter, 
 more than me, is not worthy of me, and cannot be 
 my disciple," Theism teaches that we cannot love 
 each other too much, so long as it is true and not 
 sham love ; and that the way to please our Father 
 best is to love each other with a pure heart 
 fervently. 
 
 And one word more on this theme, which, if we 
 do not remember and act upon, all our work and 
 time and thought will be thrown away: We cannot 
 be true Theists at all unless we become so by 
 giving our hearts to God, and trying to do His will, 
 and to love and serve each other. We literally 
 cannot know God as our Friend and loving Father 
 unless we know a little of the blessedness of human 
 friendliness and human love. This is the door by 
 which alone we can enter into the unspeakable 
 privilege and joy of knowing God at all. To 
 the utterly selfish heart there is no possibility of 
 knowing or loving God. 
 
 So, if we pray, as all men ought to pray, to be 
 able to know, love, and serve God, we must add to 
 our prayers every thought, word, and deed of 
 kindness, sympathy, and brotherly love which we 
 can think, speak, and do. Thus, and thus only, 
 can we work out our own salvation from sin, 
 and taste and see how gracious the Lord is. 
 
PART XII. 
 
 Theism contrasted with Christianity. 
 
 In this, my twelfth and last of the papers on 
 Theism, which the editor of TJie Weekly Times 
 and Echo has so generously allowed me to con- 
 tribute, it will be my duty to say some painful 
 words, perhaps all the more to be listened to and 
 weighed on that account, seeing that I am a human 
 being and would not willingly wound other 
 people's feelings. I shall have to show how far, 
 if Theism be true, it comes into collision with the 
 orthodox Christian beliefs. 
 
 Persons who do not see very far beyond the 
 immediate present have often said to me, " Why 
 do you not leave other people's beliefs alone ? 
 Why are you not content with simply stating that 
 which you believe to be true, and let it work its 
 own way quietly without raising controversy ? " 
 This plausible plea, often suggested by good 
 motives, might have some weight if the facts of 
 history did not betray the fallacy. Without 
 controversy, no change, no progress, no real im- 
 
93 
 
 provement would have been possible. Christianity 
 itself, a vast improvement on the Paganism which 
 it supplanted, owed its conquests and its triumphs 
 entirely to the controversies carried on by its 
 founders. St. Paul could do nothing without it. His 
 Epistles teem with it ; and all who had anything to 
 do with the promulgation of the Gospel had to 
 fight with existing errors and superstitions as well 
 as to proclaim the purer and nobler truths. 
 
 Now, if you have to teach arithmetic to children 
 or others who have never had any arithmetical 
 instruction before, your obvious duty would be to 
 confine yourself as a teacher to the positive truths 
 of arithmetic — e.g.^ the multiplication table, as we 
 know it — and it would be folly for the teacher to 
 drag in specimens of false arithmetic in order to 
 prove the superiority of the true. But supposing 
 his pupils had all been trained up in a false 
 arithmetic, and had learned a false multiplication 
 table — as, for instance, " Twice two are five, and 
 three times one are one " — then it would be 
 absolutely necessary for the teacher not only to 
 teach the true multiplication table, but also to 
 point out wherein the false one was false, and to 
 draw the contrast again and again until the pupils 
 had entirely unlearnt tlie false one. 
 
 Now this is exactly parallel to the relations of 
 Theism and Christianity (I will say orthodox 
 Christianity, lest some heretical Christians be 
 disturbed by the unqualified term). The teacher 
 of Theism, deeply convinced that it is true, or at 
 
94 
 
 least far more true than any other faith, and 
 desirous above all things to teach people to believe 
 it, finds himself confronted with a mass of his 
 countrymen Avho have been taught to believe much 
 which is wholly opposed to Theism, and which is, 
 therefore, by hypothesis, wholly untrue. These 
 false beliefs are so deeply ingrained in every fibre 
 of their minds and hearts, that it is extremely 
 difficult to dislodge them. The case in Theology 
 is far worse than in that of a false arithmetic. To 
 believe that twice two are five, or three times one 
 are one, though extremely inconvenient to the mis- 
 taught person, certainly can make no difference to 
 his eternal welfare, nor would arouse the an^rer of 
 God ; whereas the belief in Christian dogmas is a 
 matter of even more than life and death — is a 
 matter of endless joy or endless torment ; so that 
 any one believing those dogmas runs an awful risk 
 (so he has been taught) in denying or doubting 
 them for a moment. Even putting aside the awful 
 eternal consequences, believers in Christianity have 
 been taught that at least God will be dreadfully 
 angry with them if they do not beheve the whole 
 Bible, or the atonement by Christ, or if they 
 question for one instant tlie teaching and the 
 authority of " the Churcli." All this makes the 
 work of the Theist so much harder, and the duty 
 of controversy so much more imperative, because 
 if Theism be true and orthodoxy false, men's 
 minds must be first brought round to see that it is 
 no sin to read, and enquire, and to think for them- 
 
95 
 
 selves ; that the dear God in heaven will not be 
 angry with them for using the sacred faculties 
 which He has given for the very purpose of 
 seeking and finding Him, but that it will please and 
 deliglit Him to behold His children bent fearlessly 
 on searcJiing into the truth of tilings^ and weighing, 
 one against the other, the discordant cries of 
 human teachers. Theism thus comes into conflict 
 with Christianity at the very outset, and claims, in 
 the name of the Righteous, Loving God, men's 
 right to think for themselves, and urges the 
 paramount duty of doing so. (N.B. — That Church 
 condemns itself which teaches that it is a sin, a 
 heinous sin, to use our own God-given faculties in 
 criticising Church dogmas or the Bible.) 
 
 I will not attempt to illustrate all tlie points of 
 contrast between Theism and orthodox Christianity. 
 I will take only the distinctive idea or belief which 
 runs through every form of it, from the Church of 
 Rome down to the smallest and obscurest of 
 Christian sects. I state it in the baldest, barest 
 terms, not to hurt sensitive minds, but only to 
 avoid mistakes. All Christians, except those who 
 call themselves " Unitarian Christians," believe : — 
 
 That one God sent another God from heaven to 
 earth, to live, suffer, and die in a human body, in 
 order to save mankind, or some portion thereof, 
 from a frightful doom, described in the New 
 Testament as a "curse." This universal belief, 
 enshrined laro:elv in Creeds and Liturgies and 
 Sacraments, Articles of Religion, Councils of 
 
96 
 
 Trent, Confessions of Faith, and CatechismSj 
 involves and implies that the death of Christ and 
 the shedding of his blood was so necessary for 
 our salvation that, without it, God could hot, or 
 would not, be a loving Father and Friend to man, 
 but would sentence them, or leave them to fall 
 helplessly, into everlasting torment and sin. 
 
 To save us, or some of us, from this curse, was 
 the sole reason for the Incarnation of the Son of 
 of God on earth, for his sufferings, and for his 
 death. 
 
 If this be true, then these conclusions certainly 
 follow :— 
 
 1. There are two Gods. One who became in- 
 carnate, and the other who never was incarnate. 
 
 2. There are two Gods, one of whom is repre- 
 sented as saving us by his own sufferings from the 
 awful wrath and vengeance of the other God. 
 
 3. There are two Gods, one of whom men cannot 
 help loving supremely, while they hate or dread the 
 other. 
 
 4. One of the two Gods is represented as unjust 
 beyond all human injustice, sentencing to ever- 
 lasting perdition the whole race of mankind for the 
 sin of their first parents ; as cruel, beyond all human 
 cruelty, in keeping alive for ever, in torment and in 
 sin, creatures who were, without their consent, born 
 into the world frail and weak and easily tempted. 
 This God is represented as demanding the sacrifice 
 of human blood to appease His wrath and to cancel 
 His sentence of doom. For a thousand years it was 
 
97 
 
 commonlv tau^i^lit that the shecldino; of Christ's blood 
 was the price paid for our ransom to the Devil, till 
 Anselm arose and showed that this idea was wrong 
 and contrary to the New Testament, and that the 
 blood of Clirist was the ]n-ice paid for our ransom to 
 God the Father. This has been taught in Christen- 
 dom ever since. 
 
 0. The fifth conclusion is obvious, and is verified 
 at this day, viz. : That Jesus Christ has taken the 
 place of the living God, our Father, in the affections 
 of men. That the Father, to whom even Jesus him- 
 self prayed, and to whom he taught his disciples to 
 pray, is either an object of dread, or is altogether 
 overlooked and disregarded, while Jesus is wor- 
 shipped, trusted, and loved in His place. 
 
 " Out of Christ," as the phrase is, God is an 
 unspeakable horror, the fierce and relentless foe of 
 mankind ; but " in Christ " God is all love and 
 compassion. The whole system of mediation turns 
 upon these Christian thoughts about God. The 
 whole Sacramental system and the arrogant claims 
 of the Church likewise depend on the primary and 
 fundamental belief that there was an awful doom 
 decreed bv one God ao:ainst us, and from which Ave 
 can only be delivered by the sacrifice of the other 
 God. 
 
 Now, as a teacher of Theism, and indeed more 
 still as an earnest seeker after God and His truth, 
 I am bound to place in open contrast this Christian 
 idea of God's wrath and the scheme of salvation 
 with the simple and sublime idea of God as a loving 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 Father. Xot I alone, but we are all bound to ask 
 and go on asking, " Which of these ideas of God is 
 true, and which is false ? " Both cannot be true, 
 though both may be false. The contradiction is so 
 complete that thej cannot be harmonised. The 
 Christian does not really worship and love the same 
 God as the Theist does. The God of the Theist is 
 the Eternal, Righteous Father of all men, who is 
 ever so near and close to His children that an 
 incarnation like that of Jesus Christ would be not 
 only superfluous, but would create a gulf between 
 God and men which never existed. And if God be 
 our Father in deed and in truth, mediation and 
 intercession would only distress and insult Him. 
 
 Then, again, our Father punishes us for sin, only 
 to correct and amend us. If so, we cannot afford 
 to lose a grain of His chastisement ; and, therefore, 
 an atonement, a sacrifice, or propitiation, which 
 Avould save and screen us from God's punishments, 
 would be no blessing at all, but a curse — not a 
 deliverance, but a doom. 
 
 Again, unfortunately for those who worship 
 Christ as God, and love him supremely, his alleged 
 history is reported in the four Gospels, wherein he 
 is made to say and do things which only reflect dis- 
 credit on him as a man, which betray errors of a very 
 serious kind, concerning both God and man, some 
 of his sayings being deeply at variance with other 
 sayings of his which were lovely and true, so that 
 we have not even the picture of a perfect man 
 before us, much less of a perfect God. 
 
99 
 
 Now I say that it corrupts the heart as well as 
 confuses the mind to worship and love supremely, 
 as a God, a human heing with at least some of the 
 frailties and errors which belong to us all. It is 
 dishonouring to God to put any creature in His 
 place. " The deification of Jesus is the grand his- 
 torical testimony to the meanness of man's thouirhts 
 about God." It is, then, I plead, a matter of 
 supreme and solemn importance to us all, not to 
 rest satisfied till we have found out which is true 
 and w^iich is false — Theism or Christianity. It 
 concerns not only us jirivate individuals, but every 
 Bishop, every dignitary, and every clergyman of the 
 Church of England, and all the ministers of every 
 other Church or sect in Christendom. To point to the 
 Bible, or to the Church, and say that either or both 
 of them have already closed the question, is to 
 impute folly or wickedness to the Most High — as 
 though, in such a solemn theme as this, God had 
 first given us faculties for the discovery of 
 religious truth, and then instantly had forbidden us 
 to use them ; and as though, in such a transcendent 
 matter as the Incarnation of a God to save the 
 world from everlasting sin and torture. He has 
 given not one single proof that the New Testament 
 contains no errors, has not o'iven us anv evidence 
 whereby we can positively be assured w^iich out of 
 all the claimants is the true and infallible Church. 
 The New Testament is full of contradictions. It 
 even casts discredit upon the Incarnate God whom 
 it professes to depict ; and " the Church " is an 
 
100 
 
 ano^ry mob of conflictino: riv«als, eacli one reviliiio- 
 the other for what thej call " damnable heresy." 
 
 The hope of miitj amongst the Christian 
 Churches and Sects is further off than ever. Men 
 will only unite by common assent to that which 
 makes the strongest appeal to their best thoughts 
 and feelings. 
 
 If they will be but in earnest ; if they will but 
 surrender themselves to the dear Father in heaven, 
 and beseech Him to teach and to guide them ; if 
 they will but use the faculties within them, their 
 reason, their conscience, and their natural human 
 love ; — these will teach them all that is best and 
 truest the w^orld has ever known or heard of; and 
 this assuredly will bring tliem into far closer 
 harm^ony of belief than any Church has done before. 
 It w^ill not make them infallible, it will never per- 
 mit them to make so silly, so mischievous, a 
 pretence ; but it will enlighten their minds, quicken 
 their consciences, and kindle the flame of sacred 
 love both to God and men. Religion is a 
 grand help to us in the faithful discharge of the 
 duties of this life, and of the service we owe to 
 each other. But religion is of greater valuta to us 
 the more true and simple and pure our creed is, and 
 the more closely it binds us in love to our God. So 
 for man's sake, as well for the sake of truth and 
 God, I beseech you, look into this great matter 
 without delay, and may God enable us all to come 
 to a right judgment ! 
 
WORKS BY Eev. C. VOYSEY, 
 
 The Sling and The Stone — s. d. 
 
 Vols. L, II., III., IV. . . Out of Print 
 
 Vol. V 5 
 
 Vol. VI 7 6 
 
 Vol. VII., On Prophecy . . . .50 
 
 Vol. VIIL, On the Paternoster . .40 
 
 Vol. IX 7 6 
 
 Vol. X., Revelation Tested on Moral 
 
 Grounds 10 6 
 
 Mystery of Pain, Death and Sin. New Edition. 
 Enlarged. .... Out of Print 
 
 Defence at York, 1869 10 
 
 Appeal to Privy Council, 1870 . . .10 
 
 Lectures on the Bible and The Theistic Faith 1 
 
 Lecture on the Church of England . .10 
 
 Lecture on Evolution 6 
 
 Revised Prayer Book and Hymns. Third Edition 3 6 
 
 Private and Family Prayers and Meditations 6 
 
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