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SOME MODERN DIFFICULTIES: 
 
 NINE LECTURES. 
 
 BY THE REV. 
 
 S. BARING-GOULD, M.A., 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF,' 
 'LIVES OF THE SAINTS,' ETC. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 W. SKEFFINGTON, 163, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1875. 
 

 By Transfer 
 
 D, C. Public Library 
 
 JUN 7 1938 
 
- 
 
 >S85 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Six of the following lectures were delivered (i ad 
 Clerum " in the Trophy Room of S. Paul's Cathe- 
 dral, by kind permission of the Dean and Canons, 
 in the week before Advent, 1874. 
 
 They were listened to with attention and interest, 
 and I was requested to publish them. 
 
 Their object is to draw the attention of the 
 Clergy to some of the difficulties which beset 
 minds at the present day in the matter of Christian 
 belief ; and to show that, granting nearly every- 
 . thing established by natural science and Biblical 
 criticism, our Faith in God the Creator, and in 
 Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, need not be shaken. 
 
 I desire also to protest with all my heart against 
 the attitude assumed by so many of the Clergy 
 towards science and Biblical criticism. It seems 
 amazing that it should be necessary for one to utter 
 a word of warning on such a subject, but the follow- 
 ing extract from the ' Times ' of December 1st, 1874, 
 
 a 2 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 which came into my hands whilst these pages were 
 passing through the press, proves that such a pro- 
 test is not uncalled for. 
 
 " The Bishop of l preached on Sunday evening at the first 
 
 of a series of special Advent services, held in the nave of 
 
 Cathedral. The Bishop took his text from the nth verse of the 
 1 8th chapter of S. Matthew — * For the Son of man has come to 
 save that which was lost.' His Lordship compared the history of the 
 four Gospels with the ' Gospel of Science,' which had now so many 
 prophets and apostles, and asked what the latter Gospel was. Was 
 it even good news for man ? In it there was no eternity or here- 
 after ; no Divine life, and, properly speaking, no humanity. ; that 
 all that was within us was bestial, and we shared it with the brutes 
 — no virtue, no vice, good nor evil. It made us mere automatons, 
 mechanically moved according to our molecular structure — moved 
 by atoms coming none knew whence and going none knew where. 
 He should not stop to ask whether it were a true or false Gospel or 
 true or false news. He would only ask if it were good news ? That 
 Gospel of Science, if a Gospel at all, was a Gospel for the strong and 
 the clever, but not for the poor, the weak, the sick, or the suffering. 
 It was a Gospel which taught mankind to live as the brutes, in 
 which the strong trampled down the weak and the poor ; it was a 
 Gospel according to which the institutions and hospitals for the sick 
 and the incurable were a scientific mistake. It taught us to fight, 
 to trample, and push our way in the world, no matter what we 
 fought with or what we trampled down, and if we succeeded we 
 could eat, drink, and be merry, for nothing was to come hereafter • 
 and if we did not succeed, why should we lead a useless life ? for we 
 should be no longer in the fore-front of humanity. Society had no 
 need of us, and we could take ourselves out of the way — crawl into a 
 hidden place as a sick or wounded animal did into some deep 
 thicket to die away from its fellows. That was the Gospel that 
 in this our day was set up against the grand old story — ' The Son 
 of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.' The 
 Gospel for the lost was what humanity needed, not the Gospel for 
 the strong — the Gospel for the weak, for the poor, for the dying, 
 for the outcast, for the suffering. That was a Gospel that no 
 
 1 I omit the designation purposely. 
 
PREFACE. v 
 
 human philosopher had ever discovered, and that no natural science 
 could ever reveal to mankind. Thank God for the old story in our 
 Bible Gospels — that which philosophers had not yet robbed us of. 
 As we stood by the sick beds and looked at the dying, as we minis- 
 tered to the sick and the suffering, we thanked God we had the old 
 story still to prove that the Son of man came to seek and save that 
 which was lost. That was the only safe foundation on which human 
 society could securely rest." 
 
 Is it not piteous to see science thus misrepre- 
 sented, science which labours night and day to 
 alleviate the maladies of human nature ! It is 
 necessary for the Bishops, as well as our inferior 
 Clergy, to learn that the Gospel of Science is as 
 Divine as any historical Gospels of Christ ; that one 
 is as much a revelation as are the others, that 
 rightly understood there can be no antagonism 
 between them. To pit the canonical Four against 
 the Gospel of Science is like the work of those 
 critics who pit S. John against the Synoptics. 
 
 Such a passage as that quoted reads like an 
 extract from the i Osservatore Romano ' on Pro- 
 testant civilization. The same ultramontane viru- 
 lence, misrepresentation, injustice. If to the 
 Ultramontane we say, "Render unto Caesar the 
 things that be Caesar's," we may say to our 
 divines, " Render also to God the things that are 
 God's ;" for the truths disclosed to science are as 
 certainly Divine as are the truths revealed to 
 Apostles and Prophets, only, the truths belong to a 
 different order. 
 
 The Gospel of Science without Christianity is 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 false because one-sided. And Christianity without 
 science is also imperfect. God has many aspects ; 
 the Church reveals one, science reveals another. 
 
 For myself, I can truly say that with every fibre 
 of my soul I cleave to the Catholic faith, and to 
 the Gospel of Science ; that with quiet composure 
 I can hold simultaneously the truths revealed to 
 the Church and revealed to science, and patiently 
 wait till apparent contradictions shall be solved by 
 the outpouring of more abundant light. 
 
 Philo says that the Word, which is the manna 
 feeding the soul of man, is made into two cakes, 
 tasting of honey and of oil, and that the one is 
 the Word revealed through science, and the other 
 is the Word in religion. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT I 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 ON MYSTERIES .. 22 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION 38 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 THE MYSTERY OF MAN 56 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 PRIMEVAL MAN 71 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 1. THE OLD TESTA- 
 MENT 93 
 
vin CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 2. THE NEW TESTA- 
 MENT .. .. 116 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL .. 145 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 THE INCARNATION 161 
 
I. 
 
 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 When Peter Abelard appeared before the Council 
 of Sens, he found Bernard of Clairvaux occupying 
 a pulpit in the midst, with a string of extracts 
 culled, or pretended to be culled, from Abelard's 
 writings, which he called on the assembled prelates 
 to condemn. 
 
 The reading of the passages was demanded, 
 passages of deep philosophic thought in long 
 succession, involving propositions and deductions 
 which the bishops and abbots present had not 
 received mental training to grasp and understand. 
 
 It was a hot June day ; one after another, the 
 listeners, the judges, fell asleep, or drowsed, with 
 their heads on their knees or uneasily reposing 
 on their palms. Others were only kept awake by 
 the fear lest their nodding should be interpreted 
 as consent to the incriminated doctrines. 
 
 " Damnatis ?" cried S. Bernard after each passage. 
 "Damnamus," muttered the sleepy prelates, and 
 some feebly mumbled only " — namus." 
 
 B 
 
2 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 Abelard turned on his heel and left the Council. 
 He refused to argue his case before such an 
 assembly. 
 
 And what was the ground taken up by Abelard, 
 against which Bernard called down the thunders 
 of the Gallican hierarchy ? That to believe aright, 
 it is necessary to have an intelligent conception 
 of the objects of faith ; that the powers of the 
 mind should be called in to show that Christianity 
 is not an incoherent jumble of dogmas, but a 
 rigidly co-ordinated system of truths, such as the 
 reason can admit without abdicating its throne. 
 
 After a long winter, minds were bursting from 
 sleep, were expanding, and stretching towards light 
 and air. The time was come for the Church to 
 throw herself into the heart of this young, vigorous 
 life, and if she were divine, to direct its aspirations. 
 Bernard's horizon was too narrow for him to admit 
 the possibility of such a course. It never over- 
 leaped his abbey walls. When, at the exhortation 
 of his friends, he entered the Paris schools, it was 
 only to preach with fervid eloquence to the assem- 
 bled scholars to fly the tree of knowledge — a serpent 
 was coiled about it — to come forth out of Babylon, 
 and bury the new-found talent in the heavy clay of 
 monastic routine. 
 
 If I do not mistake, we stand at a period in 
 the history of intellectual development not unlike 
 that of the twelfth century. There were daring 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 3 
 
 speculators then ; there is no lack of audacity in 
 speculations now. 
 
 The Church, forgetting the shriekings of the 
 Clairvaux prophet, accepted the task Abelard 
 claimed for her, and produced Albert the Great, 
 Aquinas, Bonaventura, who led the swollen stream 
 of thought into sober channels. 
 
 It may be that we are dazzled with the flash, 
 and stunned with the explosion of new ideas 
 falling round us on every side ; that our old land- 
 marks seem to be made the butts at which modern 
 speculation is hurled. 
 
 But this is no excuse for our remaining idle, 
 stark, wincing, sighing at every plunge of the iron 
 hail. 
 
 We are often vastly in error if we conclude that 
 because new opinions by their explosion shake 
 our towers, that therefore they are levelled against 
 them. 
 
 To shut our eyes to the questions searching 
 hearts and racking souls around is selfish and 
 cowardly ; yet, alas ! it is the most common refuge. 
 Is our only attitude to be one of flight, our only 
 harness ignorance ? Are we to be like the tailor 
 in battle, who sewed a plate of iron over his back, 
 and ran away ? Is the position of the pursued 
 ostrich, with its head under the sand, either digni- 
 fied or prudent ? 
 
 We cannot prevent the questions which are in 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT, 
 
 the wind from lighting and germinating all around 
 us, in the fields we are set to dress. What patient 
 life-long study, what concentrated thought brought 
 to bear on a vast accumulation of carefully collected 
 and finely sifted data, have we got in modern 
 science ! How conscientious in its treatment of the 
 subjects it handles, how cautious in drawing 
 deductions, how logical in application of them ! 
 
 And what is the answer from countless pulpits, 
 not in England only, but in France and Germany 
 as well ? An anathema. The effervescing curate 
 shrieks "Damnamus," and the easy rector mumbles 
 " — namus ! " — and who heeds ? 
 
 Not the Abelards ; they turn on their heels with 
 a sneer at the fool's paradise we have created for 
 ourselves, and refuse to dart their logic into our 
 heavy ears. Not the active, expanding minds of 
 the readers of our day — they see nakedly which 
 way reason runs. Authority is a wherry blundering 
 across its path, to be run down and swamped, if it 
 will not clear out of the course. 
 
 It is a mistake, it is worse than a mistake, it is 
 an injustice, to condemn opinions which we have 
 never seriously set ourselves to understand. If the 
 conclusions arrived at be sound, let us accept 
 them ; if they seem to us to controvert established 
 beliefs, either those beliefs are human glosses on 
 divine revelation, or the scientific conclusions rest 
 on insufficient data. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 5 
 
 It is a mistake, it is worse than a mistake, it is 
 a sin, to assume that a new scientific or critical 
 discovery ruins the foundations of our belief, be- 
 fore we have thoroughly mastered it and have 
 had time to estimate its bearings on religious 
 doctrines. 
 
 Rome trembled at the Copernican system, and 
 doomed Galileo to recantation. Yet revelation has 
 survived the discovery 7 that the world goes round 
 the sun. "E pur si muove." Let us be cautious 
 lest we, like the Inquisition which condemned the 
 great astronomer, make ourselves the laughing- 
 stocks of the future. 
 
 At one time the fossil shells in our chalk hills, 
 the saurian bones in our lias beds, were shown as 
 manifest confirmations of the Mosaic narrative of 
 the universal deluge. 
 
 Scandalized beyond measure were our grand- 
 mothers when geologists parted lias from chalk by 
 a chasm of ages, and protested that even the 
 modern chalk was earlier than the Flood by a 
 thousand centuries. To ruin a cherished evidence 
 of Bible revelation was profanity. To abandon 
 this proof was to wreck Christianity. Yet it is all 
 accepted now. " E pur si muove." 
 
 And now we have strange disclosures of the law 
 of evolution discovered to rule the world ; of the 
 antiquity of man, and his gradual emancipation 
 from the stage of ape. 
 
6 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 How far these are established on conclusive 
 evidence, how far they are hasty deductions from 
 data inaccurately observed, I cannot now say. 
 
 What is true will survive, what is erroneous will 
 fall. The survival of one sort of truth cannot im- 
 peril the life of other truths ; though it may sift out 
 truths from conjectures. A robust, long-lived con- 
 jecture is often accepted as a truth. 
 
 Truth, from whichever quarter it comes, should 
 not scare us. " Reason," says Justin Martyr, 
 " commands those who are good, and lovers of 
 wisdom, to cultivate and love Truth alone, casting 
 aside the opinions of their ancestors if they be 
 wrong." l 
 
 A few years ago I was invited to attend a 
 meeting of a clerical debating society. The subject 
 of discussion was " Clerical Reading." Fifteen 
 clerics attended. The chairman opened the topic, 
 and each present was expected to speak on it. 
 The first, in a florid speech, declared that one book 
 alone was needed, before whose effulgence every 
 human composition faded — the Bible ; let that be 
 the one, the only study of the Christian minister. 
 A second rose and advised the addition to the 
 library of one book more — the hearts of his 
 parishioners. A third recommended the daily 
 paper; a fourth the ' Cornhill Magazine;' a fifth 
 Scott's - Commentary ; ' a sixth Simeon's * Skeletons.' 
 1 < Apol.' I. § 7. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT, 7 
 
 None got so far even as ' The Contemporary 
 Review. 5 x 
 
 As I walked sadly home after this discussion, 
 I passed some little boys sitting on a bridge, 
 fishing for gudgeons with crooked pins. They had 
 sat thus all the afternoon, but had caught nothing. 
 Crooked pins catch no fish. 
 
 We are grievously in error if we think that the 
 attitude of men's minds at the present day is one 
 of hostility to Christianity. 
 
 There never was a time, probably, when men 
 craved more sincerely for truth, panted more 
 fervently for the water-brooks of God. 
 
 At the time when the first great expansion of the 
 Church took place, men felt a need for religious 
 truth ; the poor and ignorant because paganism 
 wiped no tears from their eyes ; the wise and 
 learned because they needed something stronger 
 as a stay than the speculations of philosophers. 
 
 Christianity satisfied two great needs. The 
 down-trodden and suffering wanted hope and 
 sympathy ; the learned wanted a revelation in 
 place of guesses. 
 
 Christianity held up the cross and crown to the 
 sufferer, and he accepted it without inquiring into 
 the credentials of the Church. 
 
 Aristobulus, the Jewish Peripatetic, and Philo 
 
 1 This incident, related by me to a friend, has already found its 
 way into print from his pen. 
 
8 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 paved the way before Christ to the Greek philo- 
 sophical mind. Dionysius and the Alexandrian 
 school after him supplied the thinkers of the first 
 three centuries with a Christian philosophy nobler, 
 more coherent, surer founded, than those of Pytha- 
 goras and Plato. 
 
 Christian philosophy went down under the 
 waves of barbarian invasion ; as the waters re- 
 ceded some precious relics only were cast up in 
 fragments. 
 
 The loss of some of the most valuable books 
 of the Areopagite, Catholic philosophy will never 
 cease to deplore. 
 
 What Dionysius did for the first age, Aquinas 
 did for the middle age. Then, as before, the want 
 was felt of a rational system of Christian doctrine. 
 If men were required to hold the Faith with their 
 hearts, they would hold it with their understand- 
 ings also. If it were divine it would answer the 
 appeal of the opening intellect, and feed it, as it 
 had fed the heart. The work of Aquinas pre- 
 vented the rupture of intellect from faith. It was 
 full up to the level of knowledge at his day. 
 
 Knowledge has been increasing since Aquinas 
 wrote his ' Summa/ but the level of Christian 
 philosophy has not risen with it. Science is in 
 advance of theology ; and theology has been 
 steadily losing ground. We look in vain for any 
 token of rebuilding the ruins of Dionysius, and 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 9 
 
 enlarging and modernizing the deserted halls of 
 Aquinas. Theology must master the questions 
 of the day, or be crushed to death under them. 
 We stand much in the same position as did the 
 preachers of Christianity when philosophers in 
 the third century, and schoolmen in the twelfth, 
 asked a reason for the hope held up by the 
 Gospel. 
 
 It may be, it is, shocking to some minds, that 
 what they have regarded since infancy as God's 
 truth should be summoned before the bar of rea- 
 son, and asked to give an account of itself. But 
 it is inevitable, so long as the world is full of 
 religions, each clamouring for the adhesion of man- 
 kind, and each producing claims to be divine, 
 Men in the present day do not object to believe, 
 they feel a need of religious truths, just as did 
 the philosophers and schoolmen of old, but their 
 reason must be satisfied that the statements they 
 are invited to believe are truths. They decline 
 to hook themselves on crooked pins. 
 
 Now what is the only answer we have given 
 to this very just demand ? 
 
 It is this : — The Bible is God's Word, His re- 
 velation of Truth to the world. 
 
 But a second question arises, How are we to 
 know that the Bible is God's Word, His revelation 
 of Truth to the world ? 
 
 The answer given is the only one that can be 
 
IO THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 given, By the internal evidence of its truth. Now 
 Biblical critics have set themselves to the task 
 of examining this internal evidence, the task which 
 we preachers of Christianity have set them. If 
 there be that internal evidence, well and good, 
 they will accept our first premises, and become, 
 what we wish them to become, Bible Christians. 
 But if, on the other hand, the first touch of 
 criticism causes our proposition to snap and fly, 
 and discloses flaws in what we protested was 
 sound metal, who is to blame ? Not the critics, 
 they are only doing what we set them to do. We 
 must beware of not resenting the result arrived 
 at ; our duty plainly is to re-examine our faulty 
 propositions. 
 
 And science, accepting our dogma of the Bible 
 as the basis of all Christianity, the perfect revela- 
 tion of Truth, having arrived at certain conclusions 
 on the origin of species, the antiquity of man, the 
 non-universality of the Deluge, and the like, says : 
 Here are facts which we can prove by overwhelm- 
 ing inductive evidence. They do not accord with 
 the statements in that Book you say is a complete 
 and infallible exponent of Truth ; therefore your 
 assertion is false. What evidence is there to the 
 truths of Christianity ? 
 
 Is science wrong in taking up this line ? We 
 have forced her to assume it ; we should be the 
 last to blame her. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. II 
 
 What is the force which urges on our scientific 
 men, our Biblical critics ? Is it not a passionate 
 love of truth ? a craving to find out the truth ? 
 And what is a more healthy sign of divine life 
 than this ? 
 
 Through all the shams and veneers of modern 
 conventionalities, arms are stretched forth to clasp 
 the true, the firm. Voices cry, when we present 
 them with bold assertions, Are these true, or are 
 they shams only ? Like dying Gothe, souls sick 
 of the yellow glimmer of artificial illumination 
 plead for " more light," not of the same quality, 
 but white and clear, the pure beam of day. It is 
 the cry of health, an appeal from man to God ; 
 and God will not reject it. In what age have there 
 been such revelations as in the present ? And why 
 so ? Because the craving for truth in man is like 
 the rod of Moses ; it taps the fountains of eternal 
 truth, and makes them gush out of the flinty stone. 
 God's revelation answers to man's cry, to man's 
 capacity for receiving it. 
 
 The healthy reason gasps for truth as the lungs 
 pant for air. Its function is discrimination. But 
 reason is dead and in dust among those who gulp 
 down with equal zest a Catholic verity and a 
 mediaeval figment ; to whom the marvels of Beth- 
 lehem and of La Salette are alike and equally 
 credible. 
 
 The same principle which w T ould forbid the 
 
12 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 exercise of the reason in matters of Christian faith, 
 would also fatally forbid the Moslem or the Parsee 
 to desert his creed ; would consecrate to all eternity 
 the African fetish and the Hindoo idol. 
 
 To a certain class, Christianity will be always 
 acceptable ; they will not ask to see her credentials, 
 believing that she bears them on her truthful brow. 
 But this is the same class as that which received 
 her when she first appeared on earth. These will 
 receive her for the same reason, because she satis- 
 fies a need in their souls. 
 
 Never, never, as long as the earth is full of 
 violence, and men suffer and women weep, will the 
 Cross disappear from the sky. 
 
 The dying gladiator, that noble relic of classic 
 art, is a picture to us of the wronged and suffering 
 of the heathen world. The side pierced, the life- 
 blood draining away, the head bowed hopeless to 
 the earth. Oh the sorrows of the ancient world, 
 unlighted by a single ray ! The tears only dried 
 by death ! the broken hearts bleeding, bleeding, 
 like an open vein, without a healing hand to 
 staunch and bind them up ! Only the earth to 
 look to in dull despair, on which to fall, into which 
 to be trampled ! 
 
 And look from that statue to the stone forms on 
 the cathedral front, types also. Martyrs, Magda- 
 lens, with raised eyes, pressing a book against their 
 hearts, and finding therein rest for their souls. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 1 3 
 
 There are fibres in human nature which sound 
 responsive to the vibrations of the strings in the 
 Gospel, as I have heard the chords of a harp 
 tremble and sound when another instrument has 
 been played. 
 
 But it is not the same with persons in easy cir- 
 cumstances, who have had nothing particular to 
 distress them. A good breakfast, a thriving busi- 
 ness, a capital dinner, and a comfortable home — 
 what do they want more ? There is no room for 
 a want. 
 
 Such persons have been brought up to adopt no 
 course of action which does not commend itself to 
 their reason ; to invest no capital in any venture 
 which is not secured by guarantees. They are 
 brought up from childhood to accept nothing on 
 trust, to examine everything for themselves, to 
 prove all things before they lean their weight on 
 them. 
 
 How is this acquired frame of mind to be abdi- 
 cated when it looks to religion ? 
 
 Such persons are convinced only through their 
 reason. Other persons are open to conviction 
 through their hearts. The door to their souls is 
 through their reason ; the door to others' souls 
 is through the affections. 
 
 Then by all means let Christianity in by the only 
 entrance that is available, and do not hammer at a 
 door that has been nailed up against the east wind. 
 
14 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 I fear we have been sadly neglectful towards this 
 class. No doubt the conviction of the heart is more 
 beautiful than that of the head, yet, perhaps, intel- 
 lectual faith is as precious in God's sight as that 
 which is emotional. The latter is impulsive and 
 unreasoning; the former, if cold, is more sub- 
 stantial. 
 
 The constant appeal to the feelings is unwhole- 
 some to the audience, and injurious to the preacher. 
 It tends to make the religion of the former senti- 
 mentality, and to effeminate the mental fibre of the 
 latter. 
 
 There was a time when the clerk ruled the minds 
 of men. It is not to be regretted that the preroga- 
 tive of learning is no longer confined to a caste ; 
 it is matter of thankfulness that the key of know- 
 ledge is in every hand. 
 
 But there is one cause for regret, that the clerk 
 in Holy Orders has allowed himself to be out- 
 stripped in learning by the lay clerk ; and it is 
 cause for humiliation that he does not gird up his 
 loins and strive to overtake him. 
 
 The temper of mind of a past age may have 
 been one of indiscriminate acceptance as truth of 
 every doctrine enunciated, but that was because the 
 instinct of truth was then hybernating. 
 
 The present age, on the other hand, is actuated 
 by an enthusiasm for truth, and its presence the 
 clergy should be the last to ignore or misinterpret. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 15 
 
 It may be more pleasant to the teacher to have 
 his doctrines received without dispute, but it is 
 certainly most mischievous. 
 
 It is satisfactory to the doctor that his patients 
 should swallow his prescriptions with implicit belief, 
 and reverence his cochineal and water as the elixir 
 of life ; but such a temper, if general, would en- 
 courage quackery. Unhesitating belief in the 
 province of religion would lead to superstition. 
 
 An unreasoning faith is a tincture, an intelligent 
 one is an essence. 
 
 God asks of no man a blind faith, and what 
 God does not ask, we should not attempt to exact, 
 
 All the forces of the human spirit ; every investi- 
 gation in every realm, physical, spiritual, humane ; 
 every artistic creation, even every refinement in the 
 pursuit of pleasure, are the aspiration of the soul 
 towards truth. 
 
 The truths men see are, indeed, partial ; but they 
 are the irradiations of the sovereign, all-embracing 
 Truth. 
 
 Truth is a light which invades the soul, and 
 brings to it the sense of certainty ; evidence of a 
 fact or of a law. 
 
 It does not depend upon the will, which seeks 
 often in vain to elude it ; it masters, penetrates, 
 absorbs the will ; it is a new sensation, like the 
 magnetizing of the needle. The iron bar that lay 
 listless wherever it was flung, when once animated 
 
1 6 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 by this new tendency, rests nowhere but pointing 
 to its poles. 
 
 If we take the mathematical verities, the clearest 
 there are, is it not certain that so soon as the mind 
 has resolved a problem, it rests in the solution with 
 the relief of an exhausted swimmer who touches 
 land ? 
 
 Moral truth is not as tangible ; but it does not 
 carry with it less light. It is produced less from a 
 syllogism than from an intuition of the soul The 
 jury which pronounces on the guilt of a culprit 
 does not seek the same sort of demonstration as is 
 contained in a geometrical theorem. The research 
 is through an analysis of acts and motives, difficult 
 and precarious, and reason would never thread its 
 way, were it not preceded by conscience with a 
 torch. 
 
 Truth in the analytical sciences lies at the 
 bottom of the analysis, and the certainty of finding 
 it there constitutes the attraction of the pursuit. 
 Without the conviction that a certain result would 
 crown the effort, there would be no research. 
 
 This conscience of truth, this passion for truth, 
 establishes a filiation of the human soul from God, 
 who is the plenitude of truth. The instinct of 
 truth is the appeal of man to God through reason, 
 just as love is the appeal of man to God through 
 the heart. 
 
 So far as we are permitted to comprehend God's 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 1/ 
 
 design with respect to man, it would appear that 
 each instinct is given to man to lead him to perfec- 
 tion. The man, therefore, who cultivates only the 
 emotional side of his being, is incomplete ; and 
 the same may be said of the man who sacrifices the 
 heart to the head. One instinct rectifies another, 
 so that there is always a tendency to a general 
 result. An one-sided development is a moral 
 monstrosity. A partial and progressive conquest of 
 truth is the supreme exercise of intelligence ; it is 
 the duty laid on individuals, and on all humanity ; 
 the goal to which they must tend through heart 
 and through head, the windows through w T hich the 
 soul sees heaven, the conduits through which truth 
 flows in. 
 
 Perhaps future felicity, which religion promises, 
 may consist in the spirit penetrating farther and 
 farther by knowledge and love into the essence of 
 the infinite Being. But in the meantime, the efforts 
 of science from the beginning of the world are the 
 striving of the mind to raise a little now, to-morrow 
 more, the corner of the veil that covers the prin- 
 ciples of facts, the laws by virtue of which they are 
 engendered. 
 
 But God is the cause of all law, the source of all 
 principles. What, then, is human science but the 
 search after God ? 
 
 That it is sometimes hasty in its conclusions is 
 not to be wondered at. This arises from the im- 
 
 C 
 
1 8 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 petuosity of the soul in its pursuit, which obscures 
 its judgment, and leads it to make premature 
 generalizations, and to forget the verity that 
 truths are complex and mutually control one 
 another. 
 
 I have insisted, somewhat warmly, on the fact that 
 modern science and Biblical criticism are not irreli- 
 gious, anti-Christian ; that, on the contrary, they are 
 eminently religious and Christian, inasmuch as the 
 mainspring of their activity is the passion for truth. 
 
 This is not, indeed, the light in which they are 
 regarded by pious souls reposing in traditional 
 belief. The daring speculations of science, of criti- 
 cism, of philosophy, afflict them with a panic. The 
 water of their pool is troubled ; they cannot think 
 that an angel has descended into it, to give it 
 healing virtue. 
 
 The progress of science is viewed with appre- 
 hension, as though threatening the precious realm 
 of faith ; every discovery is a Khivan expedition 
 bringing science nearer to their confines, and con- 
 veying a threat of invasion. Better intervening 
 wastes of barbarism than such close proximity with 
 civilization everywhere. 
 
 No doubt that scientific and critical and philo- 
 sophic speculation is often daring ; but what would 
 science, criticism, philosophy be without specula- 
 tion ? To deprive them of it is to pronounce their 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT 19 
 
 death warrant. Speculation is to science what the 
 tendril is to the vine. Before it ascends, it thrusts 
 out a feeler, and that feeler is a conjecture. If it 
 lays hold of facts, it pulls up all its wealth of leaf 
 and fruit a stage higher. Speculation is to science 
 what the eye is to the snail. The daring guess is 
 projected forward to survey the ground before it 
 creeps onward. 
 
 No doubt that scientific men and Biblical critics 
 have shocked somewhat roughly preconceived ideas, 
 and we may wish to address them as Virgil ad- 
 dressed Dante : 
 
 " Look how thou walkest. Take 
 Good heed thy soles do tread not on the heads 
 Of thy poor brethren.'' 
 
 But if they have been rash and rough, have not 
 the clergy been unduly suspicious of them, unjust 
 towards the motive that actuates them ? 
 
 There is temper lost on both sides through 
 mutual misunderstanding. The clergy and pious 
 laymen are not wilfully obscurantists, hugging doc- 
 trines in which they do not believe, nor are scientific 
 men actuated by an iconoclastic spirit. 
 
 If it frighten the former to see questions agitated 
 which they thought were for ever set at rest, it 
 irritates the latter to hear on all sides the shrill 
 piping of those who lie stiff and stark in the icy 
 
 C 2 
 
20 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 fetters of an unbending orthodoxy, like the spirits 
 Dante saw in Cai'na : 
 
 " Moving their teeth in shrill note like the stork," l 
 
 and always in condemnation. 
 
 When I see the activity of minds, the general 
 agitation of spirits, which characterizes this age, I 
 cannot doubt but that a divine breath of life has 
 passed over the earth, a magnetic wave which has 
 attracted and set trembling the needles within. 
 
 This is no evil influence at work. Evil produces 
 torpor, death ; good produces life, activity. We are 
 at a transition period in the life of Christianity, who 
 can doubt it ? The last word on Christianity has 
 not been uttered. Every divine verity contains in 
 itself manifold truths, and the epiphany of each 
 manifestation is preceded by a movement in the 
 spiritual world. The days of the Lord never come, 
 unless there is first an awakening of the dead. The 
 excitation of minds in the third century preluded 
 the advent of theology. Through the preceding 
 age Christianity had been a religion of facts. Then, 
 without abandoning one fact, it unfolded a theology. 
 The convulsions of the sixteenth century were the 
 precursors of a new manifestation, under which we 
 now live ; Christianity became a system of philan- 
 thropy. 
 
 Again, after a long rest, the forces which stir 
 
 1 Dante, * Inferno,' xxxii. 
 
THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT, 21 
 
 spirits are moving. Never, perhaps, since the dawn 
 of the Day Star, has there been such a shuddering, 
 a rending of tombs, and rising from the dead. 
 
 Does this presage the death of Christianity ? God 
 forbid that we should entertain such a thought ! 
 It precedes the advent of a new expansion, a new 
 revelation of the truth contained in Christianity. 
 
 Each manifestation has answered some need felt 
 by the age which saw its birth. And the sense of 
 that need is evoked by the touch of God. 
 
II. 
 
 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 At the entrance of an Egyptian temple stood on 
 either side a range of sphinxes, symbols to all who 
 entered that they were approaching mystery. 
 
 It is over the sphinxes in Christianity that men 
 stumble nowadays. Why, they ask, should there 
 be mystery in religion ? Why should we be called 
 upon to give credence to that which we cannot 
 understand ? A religion to be divine, to be suitable 
 for man, must be devoid of mystery. 
 
 The objection is plausible enough, but its plausi- 
 bility is all that it has to recommend it. 
 
 In the temple of every human science, if the 
 sphinx does not watch at its gate, it crouches 
 within, in its last recess, behind a veil. Penetrate 
 as far as you will, through the propylseum, the nave, 
 thrust aside the veil on which the eyes of genera- 
 tions have rested, and which they have been con- 
 tented to regard as inscrutable, press on into the 
 sanctuary, and the mysterious sphinx is there. 
 
 In every science we have to admit the presence 
 
ON M YS TERIES. 2 3 
 
 of the inexplicable, the insoluble. We give a defi- 
 nition of it, and are satisfied that by naming it we 
 have learned all about it. The definition of one 
 age becomes the question of the next. 
 
 The mythic father of the House of Cleves was 
 by name unknown ; unknown he dwelt with his 
 bride at Nymwegen, for a year and a day. A fatal 
 curiosity urged her to ask his origin. Then a swan 
 leading a shallop by a silver chain came swimming 
 down the Rhine ; the sad bridegroom entered the 
 boat, and the swan swam away with him into the 
 region of mystery, and was never seen again. 
 
 Science embraces mysteries and accepts them as 
 facts, she governs, becomes a mother by them ; but 
 her fatal curiosity prompts her to ask too closely 
 their nature, their origin, and they disappear from 
 her sight. The final answer of to-day is the starting 
 point of inquiry to-morrow. We are ever in pursuit, 
 but never attain the perfect solution of every 
 enigma. One mystery involves another, like Chinese 
 puzzle-boxes. We open one, it contains a second, 
 the second a third, the third a fourth, and so on 
 till we come to the last ; but in Nature there is no 
 last box to be broken open, the succession is 
 infinite. 
 
 It is unjust to expect of religion, what is ad- 
 mitted as necessary in science, to argue that mys- 
 tery is unsuitable to the service of man in the 
 realm of religion, when we live and act upon the 
 
24 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 assumption of unsolved mysteries in our daily 
 transactions. 
 
 Who doubts the identity of his personality with 
 the little child of thirty years ago, and the youth 
 of twenty ? And yet that identity is a mystery. 
 
 Of what am I constituted ? I am a congeries 
 of matter, that is my body ; my soul is the 
 resultant of all the forces packed up in the atoms 
 of which my flesh, and blood, and bone, and nerve 
 are composed. 
 
 But what is that which collects material, dis- 
 tributes it, builds up neurine cells here, weaves 
 fibrine there, forges rubies in the caverns of lung 
 and heart, and rolls them in the rivers of artery 
 and vein ? What is that which assimilates some 
 matter and rejects other? In the midst of the 
 incessant flux of matter and change of forces, 
 where, what am I ? 
 
 I have not an atom in my body which con- 
 stituted part of me when I was a little child ; not 
 a force that acted on my centre then acts on it 
 now. Why then am I the same ? What creates 
 my identity ? How explain my memory ? 
 
 How comes it that lighting suddenly on an old 
 copy of i Red Ridinghood ' I had pored over when 
 I first learned how to read, and have not seen 
 since, causes such a trembling in the finest, inner- 
 most fibres of my heart ? That crimson cloak 
 and gamboge basket are perfectly familiar to me — 
 
ON MYSTERIES. 2$ 
 
 even the blue patch of paint, extending from the 
 little gown to the wolfs snout, though I have not 
 seen them for thirty-five years, The brain par- 
 ticles, which received that impression more than 
 thirty years ago, have gone through strange 
 travels ; they have been wafted off and utilized 
 by herb and flower; the bee gathered them out 
 of the heart of a rose, and built them into walls 
 of wax, and the wax has burnt in a lustre at a 
 duchess' ball, and the carbonic particles have 
 drifted away, to be breathed in by the lungs of 
 the fresh grass, and the grass has been consumed 
 by the sheep, which served your meal to-day ; 
 but the old 'Red Ridinghood 5 is nothing to you, 
 who have woven these particles into your brain ; 
 and I — I cannot look at it without turning my 
 face to the wall. How is this ? What constitutes 
 that identity in me which ' Little Red Ridinghood 
 has revealed ? The sphinx is there. 
 
 I take up on my finger this tiny grain of sand. 
 Little grain, What are you ? Answer me. 
 
 There is weight, there is shape, there is colour, 
 there is consistency. I can seat you in a scale, 
 or weigh you in water, and tell your actual or 
 your specific gravity. I can hold you down under 
 a magnifying glass and measure your facets and 
 angles. I can ascertain your powers of polarizing 
 light. I can register your hardness. A hundred 
 years ago you were only a bit of sand. Look up, 
 
26 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 granule ; you are silex to-day. We know all about 
 you. Your name is silex. Silex, to be sure, yes, 
 silex, that is flint. Are we satisfied ? May we 
 dismiss you to your place ? 
 
 No, little atom, we must know more. What is 
 silex ? Why do your crystals always form so 
 many faces ? Why are you not soluble in nitric 
 acid ? Why not disposed to oxidize ? I know as 
 a fact that you are not ; but I want the reason of 
 these facts. 
 
 Ha ! no answer. The sphinx is there, in the 
 little grain. I doubt the navigation of human 
 reason, which wrecks on a petty particle of sand 
 that I blow from off my nail. 
 
 There is a mystery, a miracle, hanging daily 
 above our heads. Hitherto it has baffled science. 
 It is a daily enigma, a daily apparent defiance 
 of an universal law. A sphinx set in the sky — 
 the sun. 
 
 The law of the equilibrium of forces and the 
 indestructibility of matter is perfectly established. 
 Yet the sun defies that law, or rather, let me say, 
 we are, as yet, incapable of applying this funda- 
 mental, primary law to it 
 
 The photosphere of the sun is composed of incan- 
 descent metallic clouds. We can analyse those 
 fiery vapours, and tabulate the metals of which they 
 are composed. 
 
 Combustion is chemical action. The metals in 
 
ON MYSTERIES. 2J 
 
 the photosphere are being combined with some 
 gas, probably hydrogen. The light and heat 
 emitted are the forces given out, as these metals 
 are converted into salts, hydrides, which will be 
 precipitated upon the solid surface of the sun, in 
 an unflagging rain of ash. 
 
 From the beginning of time there has therefore 
 been an incessant liberation of force in the modes 
 of light and heat, radiated into infinite space. 
 Here and there these waves break upon a planet. 
 We walk and rejoice in their glory and warmth, 
 consume some and roll back others, which ripple 
 away through boundless regions in ever-widening 
 circles. There is, therefore, a daily, hourly, inces- 
 sant exhaustion of the forces in the sun. 
 
 But if so, then the attraction of the sun must 
 be sensibly diminishing, our orbit be steadily 
 widening, our year lengthening, our seasons ex- 
 panding. 
 
 Such, however, is not the case. 
 
 According to the law w r hich science recognizes as 
 infallible, the sun must receive a return of force in 
 exact equivalent to the amount expended. 
 
 And as the force is radiated into space, from 
 space the equivalent must return, or the balance be 
 destroyed. 
 
 And whence comes the metallic supply that feeds 
 the voracious orb, and whence the hydrogen to 
 make them flame ? .. If these had been erupted from 
 
28 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 the body of the sun, it would have burnt itself out 
 long ago. Metal once converted into cinder cannot 
 be used up again. It has given off something in 
 marrying hydrogen — light and heat, so much latent 
 force, which is now raying away, away, eternally in 
 the vast abysses of space. 
 
 But if there be a steady accession of material 
 from without, in meteoric showers, for instance, 
 then the bulk of the sun must be steadily increasing 
 under the unfailing cinder rain. And if the mass 
 of the sun be increasing by the acquisition of addi- 
 tional matter, then so is its total weight, its power 
 of attraction. We are being drawn nearer to the 
 sun, our orbit is contracting, our years, our seasons, 
 are shortening. 
 
 No doubt some day this mystery will be ex- 
 plained. But till it is, science has no right to 
 discredit religion because it is not bare of mys- 
 teries. 
 
 Mysteries, then, surround us, are above us, under 
 our feet, are in us, are everywhere. We must 
 expect, therefore, to find them in religion ; and the 
 existence of mysteries in the Christian faith is no 
 argument against its truth. 
 
 Yet to hear the objections raised against Chris- 
 tianity, one would suppose that a mystery was an 
 offence to the understanding ; that it is unendur- 
 able for a rational spirit to be required to admit 
 certain statements which it cannot sound, which it 
 
ON MYSTERIES. 29 
 
 cannot demonstrate with the precision of a problem 
 in one of the exact sciences. 
 
 1. Mysteries are relative. 
 
 A mystery is a truth which we do not under- 
 stand. 
 
 What is mysterious to me may be perfectly 
 explicable by you. 
 
 The rising of water in a bent pipe to its own 
 level, to the height whence it entered the tube, is a 
 mystery to the labourer laying down a pipe between 
 a spring and a cistern. To me it is no mystery. 
 I know that what to him is a phenomenon is obedi- 
 ence to a law. The water rises at one end of the 
 pipe to the level at which it enters it at the other 
 end, because the column of air at one orifice must 
 balance the column of air at the other orifice. 
 
 This is conclusive to the plumber. But I am 
 uneasy about my law. I ask, Why has the air got 
 weight ? And I am told that the air has got no 
 weight ; that weight is only another name for the 
 attractive force exercised on a substance by the 
 earth. 
 
 But why has the earth this attractive power ? 
 Because it has force of cohesion. The attraction 
 of gravitation is the resultant of the forces of cohe- 
 sion in the atoms which constitute the earth. And 
 why have these atoms cohesion ? What is an 
 atom ? Produce one. 
 
30 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 My friends, we are stumbling in the dark over a 
 multitude of sphinxes. 
 
 But to return to my point. Mysteries, I said, 
 are relative. They are relative to the degree of 
 knowledge in each man. What is mysterious to 
 me is not mysterious to another. 
 
 The mechanism of the steam engine is a mystery 
 to me. The spectroscope is a mystery to you. A 
 track of light lies before every man, illumined by 
 his own knowledge, but all around, on every side, 
 rise phantoms and darkness. 
 
 Standing in a fir plantation, and looking straight 
 forwards, one sees an avenue reaching away to 
 light and sky ; but on right and left is a labyrinth. 
 Yet another man a yard or two off, has the same 
 vision of an aisle of tree trunks and o'erarching 
 branches, and where you stand is confusion only. 
 
 There is a great difference among men in the 
 power of discerning truths, and the discernment of 
 a truth is the rolling back of mystery. 
 
 There is a difference in aptitude for receiving 
 truths. There is a hierarchy of genius. Some 
 minds are more enlightened, with greater capacities 
 than others. The more extended the knowledge, 
 the less of mystery. All the intelligences of crea- 
 tion stand on different stages of a scale which 
 stretches from earth to heaven, and each has his 
 sweep of horizon more or less extended according 
 to the elevation at which he stands, — the highest 
 
ON MYS TERIES. 3 l 
 
 intelligence commands the widest circle ; but it is a 
 circle nevertheless ; it has its circumference, and 
 beyond that horizon broods mystery. As he 
 widens his circle, he widens his ring of limitations, 
 of the unknown, of mystery. 
 
 What is a mystery at one time of life is not a 
 mystery at another. 
 
 This follows from the fact of man being con- 
 stantly undergoing education. Things seen par- 
 tially and imperfectly in early life are seen perfectly 
 in later years. The mist rises as the day advances. 
 
 2. The existence of mysteries is a necessity. 
 
 If mystery be that which lies over the frontier of 
 the known, then mystery must exist wherever 
 knowledge is partial ; and partial knowledge must 
 be, in finite minds. 
 
 To God there can be no mystery, because He 
 sees all things perfectly in all their relations. 
 
 But this is not possible with finite minds. The 
 intellect may embrace all the laws which govern 
 nature, but it cannot pursue every application of 
 them to each individual worm or lichen. 
 
 Are we justified in concluding that we know all 
 the laws and forces of nature perfectly ? In 1783 
 Montgolfier sent up the first fire-balloon. To 
 ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the balloon 
 was a miracle ; it ascended in defiance of the laws 
 of gravitation. When it was ascertained that hot 
 
32 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 air was lighter than cold air, the ascent of the 
 balloon ceased to be regarded as miraculous ; it 
 ranged itself under application of known laws. 
 
 When it was proclaimed that the chemical con- 
 stituents of the sun and of the fixed stars could be 
 tested, it was thought impossible. Who could 
 mount to sun and star and analyse their flames ? 
 When the spectroscope was exhibited, the state- 
 ment which seemed an insult to reason was 
 acknowledged as true. 
 
 Modern scepticism objects to miracles, says that 
 those claimed as having been wrought by Christ 
 were impossible. God could not violate His own 
 laws. No, He could not ; but there may be laws 
 and forces at His command which as yet we know 
 imperfectly, or not at all, by which these marvels 
 may have been wrought. 
 
 We are not justified, then, in asserting that 
 miracles are impossible ; the only legitimate ground 
 of argument against them is defect of evidence 
 establishing that they took place. 
 
 Man, then, must see things partially ; and this 
 partiality in his vision is the cause of mystery 
 lying on his horizon. 
 
 God could not, even if He would, make mysteries 
 disappear from our eyes. For were He to do so, 
 He would make our reason unlimited ; and infinite 
 intelligence resides with God alone. To give man 
 absolute knowledge would be to cause an explosion 
 
ON MYS TERIES. 3 3 
 
 in his brain. Infinite knowledge cannot be crushed 
 into limited capacities. "Not by caprice nor by 
 choice," says Dante, " has God kept all things 
 veiled, but by necessity." 
 
 3. Mystery is necessary for us. 
 
 For our happiness. 
 
 It is mystery which gives zest to every science 
 and to art. 
 
 For if a science were limited, it would lose its 
 interest. It is the immeasurable depth, the never- 
 exhausted variety, which exists in every depart- 
 ment of the study of nature which draws on the 
 mind, captivates the attention, quickens observa- 
 tion, creates and feeds research as an absorbing 
 passion. 
 
 The primeval men, says Indian tradition, lived 
 in a subterranean abode. They perceived long 
 fibres hanging to them from above, roots that 
 stretched feeling down for moisture. They laid 
 hold of these trailing fibres, and crept up and up ; 
 as they ascended they became aware of light and 
 space and air, and so at length they reached the 
 surface of the world. 
 
 Every science is some such thread let down out 
 of infinite light and truth and space, and up them 
 men are climbing, light brightening, truth growing, 
 space widening around them as they mount. 
 
 And art is only attractive because of mystery in 
 
 D 
 
34 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 it, because it too lays hold of a fibre of infinity. If 
 it were bound round with impracticable barriers, if 
 it could but mix its colours and vary its designs, 
 like the changing pieces in a kaleidoscope, it would 
 lie down and die of despair. 
 
 The permutations of a kaleidoscope are so many, 
 the combination of ideas in an artist's brain are so 
 many. There is nothing new under the sun. A 
 hot, hard band contracts the brow. The soul is 
 stunned and stupefied. 
 
 Greek ecclesiastical iconography is all rule ; and 
 Greek art is no more. A sacrifice of Abraham 
 must have a green tree on the right and a brown 
 tree on the left ; the angel must have one hand up 
 and the other down in a prescribed upper corner. 
 The ram must be caught in a thicket by both 
 horns, and must be in profile. Abraham must be 
 in such a posture, and in such coloured garments of 
 such and such a cut ; and Isaac in such and such. 
 
 It is said that in every picture you must show a 
 peep of sky, or a way out of it into the sun. There 
 is no opening in Greek iconography for the artist's 
 soul to break out, ruffle its wings, dip them in 
 heaven's dew, and soar skywards. 
 
 " In that which is secret," says Humboldt, " there 
 is an inexplicable charm, a breath of infinity." 
 
 S. Theresa, if I remember rightly, had a vision of 
 hell. Not flames and the undying worm were its 
 torment, but its drear monotony ; its dark wall 
 
ON MYS TERIES. 3 5 
 
 opened glimpses of no future, were hung with no 
 ideal pictures. Everything was finite, and there- 
 fore the soul perished with suffocation. The soul 
 had lost all sight of God, of the infinite, and this 
 was death eternal. 
 
 And what is more distressing to the human soul 
 than to be windowless ? Weariness of spirit, ennui, 
 is the languishing of the soul in the presence of 
 things it knows all about. Give it a new pursuit, 
 open it a passage into some fresh path, and life, 
 zest, happiness revive. 
 
 Take the first and simplest illustration that 
 occurs — a Swiss inn in rainy weather. Hour after 
 hour, day after day, of a curtain of falling parallel 
 lines without, of three poor lithographs on the wall, 
 and two Tauchnitz volumes on the table. The 
 monotony becomes maddening. Everything in 
 the room is perfectly well known, every attitude 
 in the lithographs, every situation in the old novels. 
 The mind is dying of boundary. It cannot break 
 through book or picture. 
 
 Mystery is therefore a necessary consequence of 
 the sense of the infinite ; its presence is the earnest 
 given to the soul that it may expand and aspire. 
 The progress of knowledge does not lead to the 
 destruction of mystery, but to the revelation of 
 more and more of it. Every newly-acquired light 
 throws back the problem without dissipating it ; 
 and if it seems to illumine one mystery, it is only 
 
 D 2 
 
36 ON MYSTERIES. 
 
 that it may disclose a grander, more solemn one 
 behind it ; and this is necessarily the case, for mys- 
 tery is only another name for the stage of the 
 infinite at which our reason halts. The reason 
 may grow eternally, and eternally advance, but it 
 never can attain infinity. 
 
 4. If, then, mystery necessarily spring into 
 existence through the contact of the finite with the 
 infinite ; if the existence of mystery be a necessary 
 consequence of the finality of man's knowledge, 
 then its presence in Christianity is no argument 
 against the truths of Christianity. If religion did 
 not contain mysteries, if it did not touch the 
 infinite, it could not be divine, it would not be true. 
 It would be no religion, but a cul-de-sac. 
 
 Every science, nay, every action of our lives, 
 reposes on the assumption of hypotheses. 
 
 We assume the objective reality of the pheno- 
 menal world, the unity of the thinking I, myself; 
 our freedom, causation, and a thousand other 
 things, which are not demonstrable. 
 
 To systematize chemistry, the existence of the 
 atom which no man had ever seen or weighed was 
 assumed and given weight ; and on this gratuitous 
 assumption the science of chemistry was reared. 
 
 The point and the line are defined, and geometry 
 starts to life, but point and line are not ; there 
 are no such things, never were, yet without the 
 assumption of them geometry would be impossible. 
 
ON MYSTERIES. 37 
 
 What is the unit ? absolute, indivisible ? We 
 have no unit in the world. Everything is com- 
 pound, multipliable, divisible, and subdivisible. 
 Nowhere in the world are we shown the unit en- 
 gendered of nothing, indivisible by itself, which 
 multiplied and divided by itself is always and only 
 one, immutably itself. 
 
 The existence of the unit is hypothetical, and it 
 lies at the base of numbers and of mathematics. 
 
 What hypotheses are to science, that revelations 
 are to religion, foundations on which to build. The 
 whole of Christian morals and religious worship 
 stands to the facts of revelation in the same position 
 as the problems of Euclid stand to the definitions 
 and axioms. The fundamentals of religion must 
 be either hypotheses or revelations ; but whether 
 one or the other they must be mysteries, for they 
 relate to the unknown, the unknowable. 
 
 As Dante in ' Paradise' sings : 
 
 " The deep things which here I scan 
 Distinctly, are below to mortal eye 
 So hidden, they have in belief alone 
 Their being ; on which credence, hope sublime 
 Is built/ 5 
 
III. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 Apart from the world which God has called into 
 being, God is unknowable, because inconceivable. 
 
 I AM THAT I AM is the only name by which 
 He can be designated apart from creation. Oblite- 
 rate from your thoughts the existence of the 
 phenomenal world, and try to conceive a notion of 
 God,— it is impossible. When we say that God is 
 good, is wise, is infinite, is all-powerful, we use ex- 
 pressions to which we have only a right because of 
 the existence of the world ; and these expressions 
 are purely relative, they describe the position in 
 which God stands to creation. He is good because 
 the creatures of this world are happy ; He is wise, 
 because the laws of this world are admirable ; He 
 is infinite, because space predicates infinity ; He is 
 all-powerful, because force acting through matter 
 emanates from Him. Destroy matter, and what is 
 force ? Remove boundaries, and what is infinity ? 
 Destroy the world, and laws cease to rule, wisdom 
 disappears from our horizon, and with it the con- 
 ception of goodness. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 39 
 
 The existence of the world is therefore the revela- 
 tion of God's nature in relation to phenomena, not 
 in itself, for of that we do, we can know nothing. 
 
 This truth is well brought out in the Book ' Zohar,' 
 one of the earliest monuments of the Kabala : 
 
 " Before God manifested Himself," in creation, 
 "when all beings were yet concealed in Him, 
 among the unknown He was the most unknown. 
 Then the idea of God can be given no name, it can 
 only be indicated by an interrogation. He first 
 formed the imperceptible point, and that point was 
 His thought" — of creation — "and that thought 
 assumed a mysterious and holy form, and He 
 clothed it with a rich and shining vestment ; then 
 the universe was, and God was thenceforth name- 
 able." 1 
 
 " Before God had created form in the world, 
 before He had produced any image, He was alone, 
 resembling nothing, inconceivable. For who could 
 conceive Him as He is, before creation ? what was 
 the form by which He could be seen ?" 2 
 
 Now, there is a question which man has often 
 asked, and which will always interest him. What 
 is the origin of the world ? 
 
 As long as man is engrossed only in getting out 
 
 1 * Zohar,' fol. I and 2 ; fol. 105. ' Zohar' is a collection of Caba- 
 listic maxims and philosophy, not by one hand, or of one date, but 
 varying from the first to the seventh century. See Frank, " Le 
 Kabale," in the ' Memoires de l'Academie,' Paris, 1839. 
 
 2 * Zohar, 5 fol. 42. 
 
40 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 of the soil what will sustain life, he asks no ques- 
 tions, any more than does the ox or the ass, content 
 with its turnip or thistle. 
 
 The mind of the Central African negro, of the 
 Australian or Papuan savage, has never done aught 
 but grovel. From time immemorial it has run on 
 all fours, seeing only pumpkins and maniocs, and 
 seeing them only with an eye to eating them. 
 
 There are minds that never hatch, that lie per- 
 manently coiled up in their shells, which are to 
 them at once a cradle and a coffin, satisfied with 
 the air-bubble and yelk that nourish embryonic 
 life, without a wish to burst into activity, to the 
 surprises, the contests, ay ! and the conquests of 
 real life. 
 
 But the moment man begins to think, he begins 
 to ask questions about the world he sees. And 
 these are the leading questions that he asks : 
 
 1. How came the world into being ? 
 
 2. Why does the world exist ? 
 
 The rudest people who think have asked, How 
 is it that the world we see, the sun, the moon, the 
 solid earth, the plants, the beasts and birds, have 
 come into existence ? Why is the sun constant in 
 his course, the moon in her phases, the seasons 
 in their sequence, the birds and beasts in their 
 habits ? 
 
 But it is only after men have cultivated thought, 
 and have learned to look for purposes underlying 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 4* 
 
 all action, that they have further asked, Why does 
 the phenomenal world exist ? 
 
 Till we have found some answer to the first 
 question, it is idle to speculate on the second. Let 
 us, then, take this first problem, and seek its 
 solution. 
 
 How is it that the world came into being ? Now, 
 before answering this question, let us see what 
 sources of information we have to go to, on which 
 to base a satisfactory answer. 
 
 First: We have Nature herself to question, but 
 Nature may babble to us of her childhood, she can 
 tell us nothing of her nativity ; she can, however, 
 reveal to us the laws which govern her, and thence 
 we may deduce a strong presumption as to the 
 processes she has traversed in attaining maturity. 
 
 Secondly: We have the answers of different 
 religions, which provide us with accounts of the 
 origin of the world. It is very clear that such 
 accounts cannot be founded on the evidence of 
 men. They must be either guesses or revelations. 
 
 These revelations or guesses may be subdivided 
 into two classes. They yield us, after sifting, one 
 of two answers. They give us a creation or a 
 cosmogony ; they represent the world as creatura, 
 ktlctls, or else as natura, fyvcris. The world was 
 made, or the world was born. 
 
 Each answer presents a difficulty. Each possibly 
 contains a truth. 
 
42 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 Out of each a distinct religious system has 
 emerged, Theism and Pantheism. According to 
 the Theistic view of the universe, the world was 
 created by God. By an act of will He called into 
 being all things that exist. He spake, and they 
 were made, He commanded, and they were created. 
 On these created existences God impressed immu- 
 table laws. Creation is a marvellous mechanism 
 made and set in motion by the Almighty, who also 
 maintains it in working order. He stands outside, 
 apart from his work, as an artificer who makes and 
 regulates a watch. There is no evolution, no varia- 
 tion, no spontaneity. All moves in predestined 
 order ; all beings are struck in their inevitable 
 shapes in inflexible dyes. Prolong this theory into 
 religion, apply it to man, and its infallible, logical 
 result is Augustinian, Calvinistic, Mohammedan 
 predestinarianism falling like a frost upon him. 
 
 And it is a theory open to grave objection. If 
 God is thus placed outside of, apart from the uni- 
 verse, if God be one, and the universe be another, 
 then God is not infinite, not everywhere present. 
 
 And it is a theory which contravenes the daily 
 accumulating results of observation, of science. 
 From the lowly fungus, which, under varying cir- 
 cumstances assumes varying forms of organization, 
 up to the tree that grows obliquely if it cannot 
 otherwise reach the light, from the highest human 
 faculty which increases or dwindles according to the 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 43 
 
 demands made on it, down to the polype that 
 changes its skin into stomach and its stomach into 
 skin when turned inside out, we see everywhere at 
 work a living intelligent force, adapting its mani- 
 festations, modulating its expression, according to 
 accident and circumstance. 
 
 Examine the recently laid egg of some common 
 animal, such as a salamander or a newt. It is a 
 minute spheroid, in which the best microscope will 
 reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a 
 glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. Let a 
 moderate supply of warmth reach this semi-fluid 
 globule, in its watery cradle, and the plastic matter 
 undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and 
 purposelike in their succession, that one can only 
 compare them to those operated by a skilled 
 modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with 
 an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and sub- 
 divided into smaller and smaller proportions, until 
 it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too 
 large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent 
 organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger 
 traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal 
 column, and moulded the contour of the body ; 
 pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the 
 other, and fashioning flank and limb into due sala- 
 mandrine proportions, in so artistic a fashion, that, 
 after watching the process hour by hour, one is 
 almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that 
 
44 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION, 
 
 some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic 
 lens would show the hidden artist, with his plan 
 before him, striving with skilful manipulation to 
 perfect his work. 
 
 Where, what is the power that performs this 
 miracle under our very eyes ? 
 
 Is it without, or is it within ? Does an external 
 artificer make that reptile according to immutable 
 design ? or is there a spontaneous, intelligent force 
 in that glairy sac, energizing its constituents into 
 form, marshalling the cells, co-ordinating the diverse 
 functions distributed among them ? 
 
 Regard chaos as that egg in which floats purpose- 
 less matter. The heathen writers of Greece begin 
 with the dark and formless chaos, in whose womb 
 all beings slumbered in dreaming, fermenting germs, 
 out of which they developed themselves by degrees 
 in a dim, instinctive manner. With them there is 
 birth, but not creation. 
 
 The kingdoms of Nature fight their way out of 
 the depth of the life of Nature, emancipating 
 themselves, differentiating themselves, accentuating 
 themselves, by the impulse of some dark forces, 
 incomprehensible, inexplicable, — a world-soul, as 
 Plato called it. 
 
 Modern science leans towards a similar theory. 
 Starting from matter as a homogeneous mass, sub- 
 ject to the operation of force in some quite simple 
 form, there must ensue a process of evolution ; the 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 45 
 
 mass will be penetrated with force which will act 
 from centres dividing the like from the unlike, and 
 grouping them apart. 
 
 Thus there will grow up a progressively more 
 and more complex structure of the universe, each 
 portion undergoing its own peculiar changes. Slowly 
 from this embryo universe, the universe of to-day 
 is developed. 
 
 The various existences sprang up, indeed, subject 
 to law, but it was the law of necessity. They were 
 forced to assume their peculiar features, or must 
 have disappeared. Thus law is imposed by the 
 existences in the world. All the forces in the 
 universe act, so to speak, on each solitary germ, 
 and project it into such and such a condition of 
 life, which it must fill or die. The universe is an 
 oligarchy. 
 
 Is there no truth in this theory ? I should be 
 sorry to say so. But that this theory covers the 
 whole of the question I cannot admit. It leaves 
 untouched the very heart of the question. It may 
 describe a process, but it does not establish its 
 origin. 
 
 Underlying that question of the origin of the 
 world is another, a very important one, which must 
 engage our attention before we approach the ques- 
 tion that rises out of it. 
 
 That question is, What is the world ? 
 
 If we can answer this question aright, unless I 
 
46 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 mistake, we shall find that what is true in Theism 
 and what is true in Pantheism are capable of 
 conciliation. 
 
 What, then, is the world ? 
 
 I adopt the definition of the Areopagite ; — it is 
 a theophany. It is the manifestation of the 
 thoughts of God. 
 
 What an act or word is to man that the world is 
 to God. Man's thoughts find expression by muscu- 
 lar action, more or less complex, of the hand, or 
 the foot, or the tongue. By such means he trans- 
 lates an idea into a fact. So the exteriorization of 
 an idea in the mind of God is a creative act. 
 
 The glorious vision of the universe rose up 
 before the mind of God — I speak as a man — and 
 He converted that wondrous possibility into an 
 actuality. What in eternity was ideal, became in 
 time phenomenal. 
 
 The universe is, so to speak, the incarnation 
 of the Divine ideal. 
 
 But what is idea ? It is the archetype, the 
 paradigm of things that are to be. 
 
 The ideas of God formulate themselves in a 
 created vehicle, and become their force. 
 
 Science declares the indestructibility of matter 
 and of force. Why are they indestructible ? 
 Matter, we are told, may change its combinations, 
 force its direction, but neither can cease to exist. 
 Why so ? Because the thoughts of God are inde- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 47 
 
 structible. That is the guaranty for their per- 
 manence. 
 
 The creative ideas entering the phenomenal world 
 become subject to the conditions of time. 
 
 In eternity time is not ; time is not an entity, 
 it is a condition of matter. Cause and effect, 
 origin and end, are all one till matter is created. 
 Then the result detaches itself from the cause, 
 processes unfurl, the chain of effects unwinds. 
 
 The Divine ideas, having become phenomenal, 
 pass under the categories of time, traverse all 
 the stages from cause to effect. Consequently the 
 idea of a plant or of an animal must needs travel 
 through the periods of development from the first 
 sporule to the last term. 
 
 Consequently, also, the world was at once 
 created and born. It had a beginning when it 
 passed by creation from the realm of idea into 
 the region of actuality, and from the moment that 
 the Divine idea clothed itself with matter it passed 
 through all the stages of natural evolution. 
 
 We express our thoughts in words — I recur 
 to the illustration — which we articulate with the 
 tongue, or transcribe with the pen. The tongue 
 and throat are set in motion to produce certain 
 vibrations of the air, the hand to trace certain 
 characters on paper. The instantaneous idea is 
 spread out into a succession of sounds and letters. 
 The doctrine which I am enunciating is not only 
 
4§ THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 that of Dionysius, the great Christian philosopher 
 of Alexandria, it is also that of the Kabala : — 
 " Come and see," says the Book ' Zohar/ (< thought 
 is the origin, the principle, of all that is. But the 
 idea is at first undeveloped, it lies enfolded within 
 itself. When the idea begins to expand, it arrives 
 at the degree of spirit ; then it takes the name of 
 intelligence, and is no more as before hidden, the 
 idea has exteriorated itself. Spirit in turn de- 
 velops itself, in the midst of the mysteries which 
 envelop it. Thence emerges the voice, which is 
 the reunion of all the celestial choirs. The voice 
 separates into distinct words and articulate sounds." 
 
 Thus the procession issues from the idea to 
 creation, which is the complete manifestation of 
 all that is contained in the one idea. " The idea," 
 says the Book ' Zohar/ " is the principle of all that 
 is, whence all that is derives being." 1 
 
 It is not a little remarkable to find the dis- 
 coveries of modern philosophy, of which Germany 
 is justly proud, anticipated and applied to solve 
 the mystery of creation by the early ancient 
 Christian philosopher and the Jewish Kabalist. 
 
 Nature shows us every species of organism with 
 which we are acquainted begin in a sporadic form. 
 Accordingly we may conclude that the world 
 started from innumerable beginnings, each of the 
 
 1 * Zohar,' pt. I., fol. 246. The same notions occur also in Philo's 
 treatises * O he Creation/ and ' On the Sacred Laws,' B. 1. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 49 
 
 infinitely many germs growing, expanding, ripen- 
 ing, attaining their destined perfection. 
 
 And what is each of these germs but the living 
 Divine idea, slowly, surely, making its epiphany ? 
 Now if this hypothesis be true, we obtain a theory 
 of creation not opposed to the doctrines laid down 
 by modern science. 
 
 We are told that the primitive germs of all 
 plants and animals are indistinguishable proto- 
 plasms, vitalized cells, and that these have been 
 ruled by circumstances to assume here a position 
 in the vegetable realm, there one in the kingdom 
 of animals. 
 
 The Divine ideas of the man, the beast, the bird, 
 the flower, the lichen, start from one source, the 
 most rudimentary living cell conceivable. But they 
 advance, gather material, differentiate functions, co- 
 ordinate their action, from the simple progress to 
 the complex, till each idea accomplishes itself in 
 the perfect lichen, flower, bird, beast, or man. 
 
 In their course they run parallel for a while, but 
 one halts here, another there ; one branches off in 
 this direction, another in that. 
 
 The various creatures are milestones on the road 
 run by man ; letters, syllables, words in the long sen- 
 tence that ends and finds its signification in man. 
 
 Has every idea run its course out ? is the variety 
 of combinations exhausted ? I cannot think so. 
 
 Look at a few ideas carried out to perfection 
 
 E 
 
SO THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 here, and see how many are the directions in which 
 perfection is to be found. 
 
 Take, for instance, the hand in man, that organ 
 so delicate, almost intelligent. In the bat it becomes 
 a leathery wing, in the tiger a clawed foot, in the 
 ruminants a column and hoof, in the walrus an oar, 
 in the fish a fin, in the bird a wing. 
 
 Take the idea of lungs. If we look to the object 
 designed to be attained by that organ, it seems to 
 us as if it reached its most admirable and effective 
 development in man ; in whom it is folded within 
 his breast. 
 
 But not so. Look at the bee, the butterfly. What 
 are the wings ? They are, to some extent, the lungs 
 of the insect, not furled up within the body, but 
 drawn out at the sides, spread, transparent or scaled 
 with gorgeous colours. 
 
 What infinite variety there is in the bee, the moth, 
 the butterfly ! How marvellous is the splendour or 
 the quiet loveliness of their painted or transpa- 
 rent lungs ! Look at the variety of shape and of 
 colour, — of colour from the purple emperor flitting 
 about the oak tops, to the ghost moth wandering in 
 the summer night among the apple trees ; — of shape, 
 from the streamers of the Brazilian swallow-tail to 
 the twenty-four dainty plumes of the polydactyla. 
 
 Surely this idea cannot be further varied. 
 
 But look under water, and see the wondrous struc- 
 ture of air-bladders and gills in the fish, the delicate 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 5 1 
 
 fringes that adorn some of the shell-fish, the fea- 
 thery blossom of the serpula, the soft brushes that 
 protrude from the sides of the larva of the day-fly, 
 the frost-flowers adorning the sea-slug. 
 
 These also are lungs, — lungs marvellously varied 
 and marvellously perfect 
 
 Surely in them the idea must be exhausted, so 
 lavish is their variety. But not so. Look at the 
 plant. What are the leaves, what the petals of the 
 flowers ? These are the lungs of the plant. Think 
 of the inconceivable variety of leaves, of petals, 
 variety in shape, in disposition, in colour, and you 
 will get some faint notion of the unlimited changes 
 that can be produced in the idea of lungs of this class. 
 
 And is not each in its way perfect ? The indented 
 leaf of the oak, the feathery fern, the sword of the 
 rush, the disc of the penny-wort, the orange petal 
 of the tiger-lily, the blushing cheek of the rose ? the 
 blood-tipped rays of the daisy, the heaven's blue 
 lobes of the gentian. 
 
 Take, but very briefly, another instance : — the 
 soft down on the human skin. In the hair of 
 the head, in the nails on the fingers : the same 
 idea takes distinct inflexions. But the same idea 
 bursts forth also in the glorious plumage of the 
 bird, makes the little humming-bird flash like an 
 animated gem ; the same idea clothes the fish, the 
 lizard, the armadillo, with scales, strong and glisten- 
 ing with prismatic colours. 
 
 £ 2 
 
52 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 I have taken but a sample of instances to exem- 
 plify the manifoldness of one idea. And if one idea 
 contains in itself so many possibilities, we obtain a 
 view of nature not opposed to the law of evolution 
 observed by natural philosophers. They take an 
 animated cell, and they show how that by altering 
 its circumstances they can alter its direction ; they 
 can develop it as a plant or as an animal. 
 
 Well ! — the creative, living idea contains in itself 
 many possibilities, and ripens into that form, ex- 
 pands in that direction which is adapted to the con- 
 ditions in which it is placed. As the sun's ray 
 falling on the rain-drop on the spray in the morning 
 flashes as a ruby, as an emerald, as a topaz, or as a 
 sapphire, according to the angle at which it is re- 
 fracted, so is it with creative purpose entering into 
 relations with matter. 
 
 From this we learn what is the law which governs 
 evolution ; — it is the law that the individual is con- 
 ditioned by the whole. As the integers in a fixed 
 sum may vary from the unit upwards, but as one 
 rises in value, the others correspondingly decrease, 
 as 5 + 5, 4 + 6, 3 + 7, 2 + 8, 1+9 make up ten, 
 so can the integers which make up the creative 
 ideal vary indefinitely, but can never disturb the 
 balance, never break the unity. 
 
 The sum of life in the coppice may be equal to 
 the sum of life in the park ; but in the former each 
 of the countless saplings that spindles upwards 
 
THE MYSTERY OE CREATION. 53 
 
 represents but a petty fraction of the unit ; whereas 
 in the park the number of trees is diminished, and 
 the amount of life in each is so much the more 
 increased. 
 
 A square foot of soil will grow, say ten weeds 
 and one meagre mangold. Pull up the weeds, and 
 the mangold becomes comparatively bigger. The 
 sum of life in the square foot is not disturbed. 
 
 The sum of life in savage Europe and that in 
 civilized Europe may be equal, but in the former it 
 was made up of tangled forest, dense morass, the 
 urochs, the elk, the bear, the wolf, and here and 
 there a group of shivering savages. The integer 
 representing human life was low, that which stood 
 for vegetable and bestial life was proportionately 
 high. 
 
 But as Europe becomes civilized, the low integer 
 increases, the population becomes denser, and the 
 integers representing animal and vegetable life 
 descend the scale. The forests yield to fields, the 
 morass to meadow ; the urochs and the wolf dis- 
 appear. 
 
 And thus we arrive at a reason for the law which 
 we observe ; the reason for that law is the unity of 
 the Divine idea of creation, an unity which it is 
 impossible to disturb. 
 
 When the eye rests on a landscape, the vision 
 forms an image on the brain. But though one, 
 that image contains in itself subsidiary images, — of 
 
54 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 
 
 the trees, the grass, the rocks, the sky. But each 
 of these subsidiary images is itself composite ; it is 
 made up of the representations of the leaves, the 
 trunks, the grass-blades, the stones, the tracts of 
 blue, and the patches of cloud. 
 
 Now in some analogous manner we may, with 
 reverence, imagine the vision of creation to have 
 stood ideally before God. The idea is one, but 
 divisible, and subdivisible into an infinitude of 
 subsidiary ideas, processions^ to use the Dionysian 
 term, all co-ordinated in one. All these ideas 
 enclosed in the one vast idea of creation, inasmuch 
 as they emerge from, and fall back into one idea, 
 must be in perfect accord and unity. 
 
 The human mind receives ideas, and the ideas 
 are transmitted from the objects to the brain. The 
 illustration therefore is faulty. For in the Divine 
 mind the ideas originate, and proceed from it, as 
 rays from a centre, which differentiate themselves, 
 from the simple break into the composite through a 
 series of processions, each manifestation being an 
 hypostasis of the thought of God. 
 
 " Every number," says the Areopagite, " pre- 
 exists uniformly in the monad, and the monad 
 contains uniformly in itself every number, and 
 every number unifies itself in the monad, and the 
 more it departs from the monad the more it divides 
 and multiplies itself. 
 
 " So also, all the rays of the circle co-exist in the 
 
THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 55 
 
 centre in their one point of union, and this is a 
 point which comprehends in itself these lines uni- 
 formly united among themselves, which also per- 
 fectly coincide in the centre/' to which they converge, 
 and which also generates them, " and as they leave 
 the centre, and separate, the more separable they 
 become, the more also they diverge from one ano- 
 ther." Thus in Nature the reasons of all in- 
 dividual and particular existences are in God, all 
 partake of the unity of their origin, all issue forth 
 from the one creative source, drawing from it their 
 nature, their force, their direction. 
 
 " Among themselves all things 
 Have order ; and from thence the form, which makes 
 The universe resemble God. In this 
 The higher creatures see the printed steps 
 Of that eternal worth, which is the end 
 Whither the line is drawn. All natures lean, 
 In this their order, diversely ; some more, 
 Some less approaching to their primal source." l 
 
 1 Dante, ' Paradise,' I. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 In my former lecture I gave an answer to the 
 question, "How the world came into being?" 
 
 I showed that the world is the manifestation of 
 the creative ideas in God. 
 
 On this occasion I wish to show why the world 
 was called into being. 
 
 If the world was made, there must be a reason 
 for its creation. We cannot suppose that God 
 called the universe into existence without a pur- 
 pose, for to operate without purpose, is to operate 
 without intelligence. If the world came into being 
 without guiding intelligence, purpose unfolding itself, 
 we have blind chance working in pre-existing matter, 
 — a notion I set aside as one I am not prepared to 
 discuss on this occasion. 
 
 What, then, is the purpose of God in creation ? 
 At the outset we must put aside certain reasons as 
 inadmissible. We cannot say that God was con- 
 strained to create by any want in His nature. 
 
 We have needs, and the satisfaction of these 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 57 
 
 needs is the motive of our action. But the existence 
 of these needs is the proof of our imperfection. If 
 our nature were complete in itself, it would have no 
 desires. Having no desires, it would not act. Con- 
 sequently, to us, imperfection is the stimulus and 
 guaranty of activity. 
 
 But God's nature is complete in itself; there is 
 no defect, therefore no need. Consequently the 
 motive of creation must not be sought in any 
 necessity constraining God. 
 
 We speak our thoughts, we build, paint, compose 
 music, write, because by so doing alone can we 
 realize our ideas, and thereby give ourselves satis- 
 faction. Our ideas demand exteriorization, and 
 this exteriorization is necessary to us because we 
 are composite beings. If we had no ideas to con- 
 vert into action, we should be material beings only ; 
 if we had ideas with no desire to express them in 
 act or word, we should be spiritual beings, only. 
 But the fact of the imperious necessity in our nature 
 requiring the manifestation of our thoughts, proves 
 to us the duality of our nature. 
 
 Through the mind of deaf Beethoven rolled rich 
 undulations of harmony, and fluent melodies, which 
 he transcribed. But have we not heard of the tears 
 wetting the old musician's cheeks and dropping on 
 his manuscript, because he could not translate into 
 sounds, hearing which he might rejoice, those ideas 
 that welled up in his mind ? 
 
58 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 An idea with us is only realized when trans- 
 formed into an act. But with God it is not so. 
 A noumenal idea to Him is as real as that which 
 is phenomenal, because His nature is simple, 
 whereas ours is complex ; His is spiritual, whereas 
 ours is spiritual and material. 
 
 Consequently, we must put entirely away from 
 us the notion that the world of ideas is not as real 
 as the world of phenomena ; and that to God, who 
 is a Spirit, the idea of creation was not every whit 
 as real as the visible universe of to-day. 
 
 If, then, the reason for creation were to be found 
 in the nature of God, there would be no creation. 
 We must therefore look elsewhere for the motive 
 that led God to transform the world of possibilities 
 into the world of actualities. 
 What, then, is the purpose ? 
 
 Let us examine our own natures, and see if they 
 do not afford us a clue. 
 
 Now, why do we give form to our ideas ? I have 
 already given you one reason, but that reason is not 
 the only one. We translate our ideas into acts 
 either to give satisfaction to ourselves, or because 
 I we desire to convey our ideas by that means to the 
 minds of others. 
 
 Here, then, we have two reasons ; the first of 
 which we cannot admit as explaining creation. 
 But the other, I believe, unlocks the mystery. 
 God created the world in order that through 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 59 
 
 the visible things of the universe He might 
 communicate His ideas to certain existences who 
 should be capable of receiving them. 
 
 How do we know a man ? By his thoughts. 
 How do we know his thoughts ? By his acts and 
 words. So God may be known by His thoughts ; 
 and the thoughts of God are manifested by 
 creation. 
 
 The world, then, is the visible exhibition of 
 the ideas of God, Nature the sensible signs of 
 His thoughts. It is a mighty book, written within 
 and without with Divine conceptions. But w r ho 
 is to read this book ? Who is to spell out this 
 created speech, and comprehend its significance ? 
 Not the being simply material, the mineral, the 
 vegetable, the animal ; they are the alphabet of 
 the great scroll, not the readers thereof. They 
 live only in the material world ; their notions 
 move and circulate only in a created medium. 
 
 The readers, the interpreters must live in an- 
 other world as well — in the world of ideas. Ideas 
 exist and move in spiritual spheres. Those who 
 are to catch and understand the ideas of God 
 must have a spiritual nature capable of perceiving 
 transcendental truths. 
 
 Now if God desired to manifest His thoughts 
 to purely spiritual beings, He would not have 
 created. For pure spirits receive ideas imme- 
 diately, without material media acting as vehicles 
 
60 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 for their transmission. Idea answers to idea in 
 the spiritual world, as the flash in the west is a 
 reflexion of the lightning-flash in the east. 
 
 Therefore, he who is to read creation must be 
 neither mere spirit nor mere body, but must have 
 a spiritual nature combined with a corporeal nature, 
 so that through the things revealed to the mind 
 by the bodily senses the thoughts of God may be 
 perceived. 
 
 And who is this, but man ? 
 
 " God/' said Timseus of Locri, " composed man 
 by uniting the indivisible essence (spirit) and the 
 divisible essence (matter), so that of the twain he 
 made one, in whom are united the two actions 
 which serve as principle of the two movements, one 
 always the same (towards unity, infinity), the other 
 always diverse (towards plurality, finality)." 
 
 If, then, God is the author of creation, creation 
 is only rational with man as its final term. And 
 man as its final term is only the key to and expla- 
 nation of creation, if he have in him the faculty 
 of reading and interpreting creation. 
 
 But that faculty is the mind or soul. 
 
 Now of mind or soul there are two sorts. 
 
 There is that which belongs to the animal, and 
 there is that which is the prerogative of man. If 
 man were a mere animal, he would require a mind 
 sufficiently illumined to enable him to combat 
 those hostile influences which combine for his 
 extinction. That is to say, he would require 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN, 6l 
 
 sufficient intelligence to form weapons wherewith 
 to defend himself against wild beasts, and to pro- 
 vide himself with their flesh for food and their 
 skins for clothing. His intellect would be higher 
 in type than that of the dog and horse, inasmuch 
 as he would possess the faculty of framing weapons, 
 but in the structure of a dwelling hardly surpass 
 the bird that builds so dainty a nest 
 
 The measure of man's intelligence would be his 
 necessities, and his necessities would be deter- 
 mined solely by the obligation laid on him by 
 his nature of preserving his race from extinction. 
 
 But this animal intelligence is not the only one 
 that has been observed in man. It is the only one, 
 indeed, that is to be seen in certain races of man- 
 kind ; but the fact of high civilization demonstrates 
 the existence in man of not only an instinct of self- 
 preservation and preservation of the species, but also 
 of an entirely distinct phenomenon, — the capacity 
 for and desire to reach a development independent 
 of and even injurious to physical perfection. The 
 oyster sickens to produce the pearl, and the artist 
 and the student have not the rude health and 
 muscular development of the savage. Art and 
 science in no way conduce to the perfection of man 
 as an animal. Art will not make man eat and 
 drink and sleep better, and science by prolonging 
 weakly lives tends to the physical deterioration of 
 the race, for it allows those to live and become 
 parents of still sicklier children, who in a savage 
 
62 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 state would die off in early youth. Science inter- 
 feres with the operation of the law of natural selec- 
 tion, and we have to thank it for the prevalence of 
 consumption, neuralgia, and lunacy amongst us. 
 
 We have then as a demonstrable fact, in our 
 natures an element whose development is inde- 
 pendent of our animal instinct. Man has a double 
 capacity, and a double intelligence ; a capacity for 
 animal development, with a corresponding animal 
 instinct ; and a capacity for intellectual develop- 
 ment, with a corresponding spiritual intelligence. 
 
 The former is the anima animalis, the latter the 
 anima spiritualis. 
 
 Man with only the animal instinct would be no 
 explanation of creation, he would be but another 
 step in the ladder leading to nothing; — a stride 
 ahead of the gibbon and the gorilla, as the anthro- 
 poid ape is a stride ahead of the tailed monkey ; — 
 but that is all. 
 
 To explain creation man must have a spiritual 
 intelligence. And a spiritual intelligence we know 
 that man has got. 
 
 But you may ask what I mean by saying that 
 he has the faculty of explaining creation. 
 
 I mean this : — that the intellectual faculty, mind, 
 or soul, in man is capable of seeing beyond what is 
 phenomenal ; of detecting unity in the midst of 
 diversity ; of perceiving the abstract athwart the 
 concrete ; of piercing the limit to gaze on the in- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN, 63 
 
 finite ; of seeking the simple in the midst of the 
 multiple. 
 
 What is unity but the form of the creative idea 
 embracing all possibilities, every variety in perfect 
 harmony ? And the simple, the abstract, the in- 
 finite, the absolute, are Divine thoughts, reflecting 
 the very nature of God Himself. 
 
 Without these ideas, science and art could not 
 exist, mental progress would be impossible. 
 Whether man acknowledges it or not, God is in 
 all his thoughts, for he introduces the ideas of God 
 into all his scientific problems, into all his artistic 
 conceptions. 
 
 Man beholding creation may place himself on 
 one side and see in it only Nature, as when one 
 observes a sunbeam penetrate a dark room, and 
 watches the motes that glance in the ray ; or he 
 may look up the long chain of existences, and 
 behold God through them, as one standing in the 
 sunbeam glances up it, and his eye catches, and is 
 dazzled by the sun. 
 
 I have said that whether man acknowledges it or 
 not, he has God in all his thoughts, for he has the 
 ideas of infinity, of unity, of order, of truth, of 
 beauty. 
 
 These are ideas which are manifested in creation, 
 but which do not manifest themselves except to 
 spiritual natures. 
 
 The world is made up of what is limited. In it 
 
64 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 there is nothing that is not finite ; but the mind 
 perceives beyond every limit, however far extended, 
 into space indefinitely stretching. 
 
 The mind seeks for plan and unity in all phe- 
 nomena. It compares analogous or opposed ideas, 
 eliminates some, identifies others, till it has suc- 
 ceeded in discovering an underlying element of 
 similarity which enables him to classify all creatures, 
 and marshal them in their families and species and 
 orders. 
 
 Truth is the clear view of every existence in its 
 exact relations to every other existence. Error 
 arises from the relations being misconceived in their 
 proportions or position. To God alone all things 
 are visible in all their relations ; the perspective of 
 relations exists in the world which does not suffer 
 us to see them thus, yet the mind is ever seeking 
 to see things as they are, and not foreshortened. 
 
 It is ever straining to behold things as they are 
 to God. Why so ? Because it sees the idea of 
 truth in all creation. And the beautiful is the true. 
 The soul rejoices in the beautiful, because that 
 which is beautiful is, that in which all the relations 
 are seen in just order. A discord thrills with pain, 
 for in it we have a note out of its due place, a 
 colour too intense, too harsh for its surroundings. 
 
 Why does beauty delight ? Because the mind's 
 eye sees order as one of the thoughts of God. If 
 the mind saw not the general abstract idea, it could 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 65 
 
 not derive pleasure from its concrete expression in 
 the rainbow or the flower. 
 
 I have now shown why God created the world. 
 I have shown you that it was, it could be, through 
 no caprice that it was created. That He created 
 from no want in His nature, and that, therefore, 
 the object for whom He created must be sought 
 elsewhere. 
 
 I have shown you that as creation is the articula- 
 tion in sensible signs of the Divine ideas, that great 
 speech is addressed to some one. 
 
 That some one I show r ed you must be man, and 
 that to understand the ideas underlying and vivify- 
 ing the sensible signs — the objects of creation — 
 man must have a spiritual as well as a material 
 nature. 
 
 I have shown you that man is possessed of such 
 a nature, and that he can and does read the 
 thoughts of God through the works of God. 
 
 Therefore man solves the enigma of creation. 
 
 But I have only shown for whom God has 
 created this phenomenal world. There is yet 
 something more to be exhibited, and that is the 
 motive actuating God in regard to man whom He 
 created : Why did God reveal His thoughts to man ? 
 
 There is but one motive conceivable, and that is 
 Love. 
 
 Was it a guess of the ancients, or was it a revela- 
 tion, that they declared Eros, Love, to have founded 
 
 F 
 
66 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 and formed the world ? No ! it was no guess. For 
 a guess which is true, ceases to be a guess, and 
 becomes a revelation. 
 
 The motive actuating God was love — love to 
 man then existing only in possibility, in idea. 
 
 Of love there are two sorts — the first is that 
 whose highest manifestation is found in the mutual 
 affection of husband and wife. 
 
 But this arises from either sex being imperfect 
 without the other. What is deficient in the nature 
 of man — the plastic, emotional, refining element — 
 is supplied by the woman ; and what is deficient in 
 the nature of woman— the self-reliant, creative, 
 spontaneous element — is supplied by man. The 
 creative and the plastic elements united constitute 
 the complete homo. 
 
 Such love as this has its foundation in an imper- 
 fection of nature, and is not, therefore, to be spoken 
 of with respect to the motive of creation. 
 
 But there is another sort of love, of which we 
 have a sketch in parental affection — a love rising 
 out of a nature complete in itself, and pouring its 
 benefits on the head of the child, with no selfish 
 aim in view, with no thought save for the welfare 
 of the dear child. This, I conceive, is the motive 
 of creation, love, pure beneficence to man. 
 
 Look where we will, then, we see in all creation 
 a love-token of God to us. 
 
 The child kneeling up in bed, watches through 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN, 6? 
 
 the lattice the white moon sailing in the sky, the 
 little spirit is filled with wonder. Dim thoughts 
 struggle into form in the young mind. When God 
 hung the silver globe in the heavens, in the begin- 
 ning, He foresaw the rapt awe of the little child, 
 and rejoiced therein. 
 
 When the willow first thrust forth her furry cat- 
 kins, the Eternal One beheld the village children 
 on the cool spring mornings by the pool gathering 
 " palm " branches. The wood-anemone strewn in 
 the budding copse, the white sorrel under the drip- 
 ping bank, the red robin, the blue hyacinth, in the 
 wood under the young green leaves ! Have they 
 not answered the purpose, the loving purpose, that 
 called them forth ? 
 
 I remember a young girl standing under a mul- 
 berry tree one summer eve, listening breathless to 
 the warble of a nightingale heard for the first time. 
 When the egg was laid, and the bird grew, the 
 thoughts of God were in that heart swelling with 
 ecstasy at the chant of the nightingale in that 
 summer night. 
 
 When the earth's strata were bent and broken, 
 and their jagged edges were thrust up into the sky, 
 draped with glacier, crowned with snow, God fore- 
 knew the passionate delight the alpine peaks and 
 ranges would afford to many a weary toiler in office 
 and study. The Burgundian tyrant Gondecar laid 
 a tithe on all the produce of his land, and demanded 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 of James, bishop of the Tarantaise, his share of the 
 tribute. James had neither corn nor wine, nor flax. 
 The only produce of his alpine diocese was snow. 
 He filled two panniers with it, placed them on an 
 ass, drove her to the court of Gondecar, and 
 poured his tribute, a snow-drift, over the purple 
 stair of his throne. The king sprang up in fury, 
 and exclaimed at the " vile offering !" "It is not 
 vile," answered the saint, " but thou hast not learned 
 to value it." 
 
 The time of alpine snow has come ; age after 
 age has seen it powdered on the mountain peaks, 
 slide down the flanks in ice, and flow away in rivers 
 to the sea, unesteemed save for the water it yielded. 
 But its time has come, its value is known. There 
 is no medicine to weary brain like the golden light 
 on a distant bank of alpine snow. 
 
 You may remember the verses of a distinguished 
 authoress, on the artist with a thought, a message 
 to men throbbing in his brain. She bids him grave 
 his thought in stone figure and flower on the 
 cathedral portal. And years will flow by, men — 
 the soldier, the statesman — come and go, the 
 market women pass the portal, but the sculpture 
 yields not up its thought, till the poet for whom it 
 was destined stands before the gate. 
 
 ' * Then, I think, those stony hands will open, 
 And the gentle lilies overflow, 
 With the blessing and the loving token 
 That you hid there years ago, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 69 
 
 And the tendrils will unroll and teach him 
 
 How to solve the problem of his pain, 
 And the birds' and angels' wings shake downward, 
 
 On his heart and spirit tender rain. 
 While he marvels at his fancy, reading 
 
 Meaning in that quaint and ancient scroll, 
 Little guessing that the loving carver 
 
 Left a message for his weary soul." 
 
 And have not the Alps been such a thought in the 
 divine mind ? a thought full of beauty, tenderness, 
 and love to the clerk and the student, unfolding 
 now, and speaking health and peace and faith to 
 his soul ? 
 
 I remember a mountain scramble, leading me 
 suddenly from rough rocks and sear grass upon a 
 dell of rich green-sward, girt about with pines. 
 Set in the turf was here and there a fallen star — a 
 yellow anemone, on the rocks the carmine alpine 
 rhododendron was in full blaze of blossom, and 
 over all the sward was a tender bloom of blue 
 forget-me-not. Overhead burnt a glacier in the 
 summer sun, and a thread of silver fell in powder 
 from it, waving in the soft air. I am not ashamed 
 to tell you that that vision filled my heart to over- 
 flowing. God spake through that scene, through 
 every flower, out of the mountain, out of the ice. 
 The voice of God walking in that garden was as 
 audible as of old in Paradise, when Adam heard it 
 in the cool of the day. 
 
 Every flower declared His love, His beauty, His 
 perfection. Forget-me-not was the bloom cast over 
 
70 THE MYSTERY OF MAN. 
 
 all ; it was the whispered appeal of God ! the voice 
 still and small. Forget Thee, my God ! Forget 
 Thee ! 
 
 Creation, then, is the manifestation to man of 
 the thoughts of God, and that manifestation is 
 made in love. Inorganic life is a prophecy and 
 preparation for organic life. Organic life supposes 
 man to read and interpret it. 
 
 " See through this air, this ocean and this earth, 
 All matter quick and bursting into birth. 
 Above how high progressive life may go, 
 Around how wide ! how deep extend below. 
 Vast chain of being ! which from God began, 
 Natures ethereal, human, — angel, man, 
 Beast, bird, fish, insect which no eye can see, 
 No glass can reach, from infinite to Thee, 
 From Thee to nothing/' — Pope. 
 
 Man is the explanation of creation. Looking 
 back, the world is inexplicable without God ; look- 
 ing forward, it is an enigma without man. 
 
V, 
 
 PRIMEVAL MAX. 
 
 A NEW science, scarce thirty years old, has made 
 its appearance, and has established itself in our 
 midst, which has already made strange revelations 
 relative to the antiquity of man, and threatens to 
 overthrow tradition, and disturb our preconceived 
 ideas as to his origin. 
 
 Like all sciences which are in their infancy, it 
 promises more than it can perform. It must be so 
 — a new science, like a new speculation, must 
 advertise itself, make exaggerated pretensions, to 
 excite interest and arrest attention. 
 
 But without admitting that all its promises are 
 possible of fulfilment, we cannot deny that the 
 science of prehistoric archaeology, of which I am 
 speaking, has already played a considerable and 
 brilliant part, and has thrown a flood of light on a 
 hitherto obscure topic — the history of primeval 
 man. 
 
 If hypotheses have entered too freely into the 
 system, and have arrogated to themselves the cos- 
 
72 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 tume and airs of facts, it is but what one must 
 expect in the midst of the excitement and enthu- 
 siasm attendant on a novel discovery. 
 
 But in spite of boasts and mistakes, the study of 
 human palaeontology has taken rank among the 
 positive sciences. It has accumulated already a 
 vast number of facts absolutely certain, the syn- 
 thesis of which has already in great part been 
 effected. Its researches have reproduced on the 
 scene the rude and savage life of man in the first 
 period of his career ; it has disclosed to us his 
 habits, his pursuits. 
 
 It has done more than this. It has accorded 
 him an undreamt-of antiquity. By extending its 
 investigations beyond the epoch at which the pre- 
 sent surface of the globe was formed, before the 
 continents assumed the shapes they now affect, and 
 the seas filled their present beds, it has carried us 
 back to an antiquity which cannot be reckoned by 
 years nor by centuries. And it has shown us 
 representatives of our species existing through the 
 last transformations of the terrestrial crust, before 
 the map of the world in the smallest degree re- 
 sembled its present appearance. 
 
 In a science in course of formation, which is 
 daily advancing, but is also daily revising and 
 modifying preceding conclusions ; in a science 
 which reposes on an infinity of facts of detail, 
 established independently by diverse observers, it 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN, 73 
 
 is impossible but that errors should occasionally 
 slip in, and affect its generalizations, which it will 
 require time and scrupulous care to correct. 
 
 But after making allowance for this, there re- 
 main certain conclusions which it is not possible 
 any longer to dispute. Such is the dogma of the 
 existence of our species on the earth throughout 
 the geologic period designated " quaternary." The 
 anterior existence of man during a portion of the 
 "tertiary" period is on its way towards being 
 established by proofs of great solidity, though not 
 as yet sufficiently numerous and independent to be 
 determined conclusively. 
 
 Now, however, that attention has been directed 
 to this point, we may predict that before many 
 years are passed, with the progress of discoveries, 
 this point also will be demonstrated with the same 
 degree of certainty. 
 
 Let us now consider, as briefly as is compatible 
 with the interest and importance of the subject, the 
 results satisfactorily arrived at, and the conjectures 
 that have been formed relative to the origin of 
 man, and then we shall be able to estimate their 
 bearing on the doctrines of revelation. 
 
 The most ancient vestiges of man as yet found 
 have been in the middle of the tertiary period, in 
 the superior miocene beds ; and the fauna and 
 flora of those beds bear a relation sufficiently close 
 to the fauna of the globe at present as to lead us 
 
74 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 to surmise that the first ancestors of the races of 
 man now peopling the earth synchronized with the 
 first appearance of the species of beasts now 
 extant. 
 
 The flora and fauna of the beds which exhibit 
 the first traces of our species, show that Europe at 
 that time enjoyed a temperature much more ele- 
 vated than it does at present. Central Europe 
 basked in a climate resembling that of the tropics ; 
 the most northerly portions of Asia, America, and 
 Greenland itself, were not then mantled with snow. 
 Even within the polar circle, all the unsubmerged 
 land' — then much more extensive than at present — 
 was covered with dense forests, and enjoyed a tem- 
 perature conducive to rich vegetation. In Green- 
 land, under latitude yo° N., the Sequoia semper- 
 virens ripened, which now is fruitless at Zurich, and 
 only flourishes without check on Lake Como. 
 Spitzbergen was clothed with woods of hazel, 
 poplar, beech, and plane ; and rank forests of 
 beeches, oaks, magnolias, and cherry clothed the 
 mountain sides of Greenland above Disco Isle. 1 
 Huge anthropoid apes resembling the gibbon, the 
 four-toed rhinoceros, the gigantic acerotherium, 
 prowled about the ancient forests of central 
 Europe. 
 
 We have not got very precise information on the 
 
 1 "The Miocene Flora of N. Greenland," by Prof. O. Heer, in 
 the Royal Dublin Society's Transactions for i866 8 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 75 
 
 condition of man in the miocene period. All that 
 we possess is due to one observer in a narrow 
 circle — the Abbe Bourgeois in Loiret and Loire-et- 
 Cher. 
 
 Certain flints rudely chipped into scrapers have 
 been collected in the calcareous beds of Beauce, 
 near Thenay and Selles-sur-Cher. 
 
 We can picture to ourselves the miserable 
 savages of that infinitely remote period, living 
 under tropical palms and gigantic ferns, on islets in 
 the midst of lakes or seas, out of reach of the fero- 
 cious monsters that haunted the jungles of the main- 
 land, fashioning their scrapers out of the coarse 
 flint in the chalky soil — the fine flint and chert of 
 which the polished stone weapons were afterwards 
 made did not then exist in Beauce — that, having 
 killed a beast, with these scrapers they might 
 scratch the flesh from the bones, and clean the 
 hide. 
 
 Above these calcareous beds lie the sands of the 
 Orleanais, also a miocene deposit, but more recent. 
 It belongs to the period which saw the arrival of 
 the mastodons and dinotheriums. It also exhibits 
 relics of man. In that bed have been found the 
 same flint scrapers, and even fragments of rude 
 pottery. 
 
 In beds, again, superior, but still tertiary, has 
 been found the skeleton of a cetacean (halitherium), 
 the bones cut and scored by flint knives. Look on 
 
7& PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 the map : see Pouance, where that whale was cast 
 on the beach and devoured by men, lying in a fold 
 of the hills, towards the east, that stretch from the 
 north in La Manche to the Loire in the south, and 
 wonder at the remoteness of the period when a 
 vast sea occupied the heart of France, when Finis- 
 terre was a granite island in an ocean, when a 
 mighty channel, wider than the Mediterranean, 
 swept from the Caspian with scarce a break across 
 eastern Europe, roared round the iron point of 
 Norway, and foamed along the Malvern and York- 
 shire hills. 
 
 All our knowledge of miocene man is as yet 
 derived from the few facts above mentioned. 
 
 A change swept over the globe, or at least its 
 northern zones. Slowly the temperature de- 
 scended, and the tropical plants disappeared, to 
 make way for those of the temperate zone. And 
 as the flora altered, the fauna underwent a parallel 
 modification. Did the primeval man survive this 
 change, and linger on in cooler Europe till the 
 glacial period set in and froze him out ? Or did 
 he migrate south with the gigantic apes to the 
 steamy regions of equatorial Africa ? We cannot 
 tell. We have no data on which to found an 
 opinion. No traces have yet been discovered of 
 man in the deposits of this period. 
 
 In the middle of the pliocene age set in the first 
 glacial epoch. The temperature had sunk so low, 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 77 
 
 that vast accumulations of ice formed over the 
 north of Europe. Scandinavia, Scotland, England, 
 the central plateau of France were wan and white, 
 and deathlike. Scarce a leaf showed ; from every 
 hill, down every vale crept cold glaciers, grinding 
 the rocks, and turning up the soil before them like 
 a plough. Even the petty chalk range visible from 
 Cambridge, which you have to look over the hedge 
 to see, sent a vast sheet of ice to the German Ocean, 
 and I live on a mighty heap of its grindings and 
 sweepings, where it discharged into the sea. The 
 mastodons, and with them trains of ruminants and 
 carnivora, emigrated to the south before the ad- 
 vancing walls of ice. 
 
 The deposits of this period are mute concerning 
 man. They contain no traces of his handiwork. 
 A chasm of ages which the mind in vain strives to 
 overleap, separates the miocene man from man on 
 his next appearance on the scene. 
 
 Through that vast period he remained stationary, 
 if he survived it. Century after century and cycle 
 after cycle rolled its course, and left him unchanged. 
 But where was he ? We do not know. He may 
 have gone south, and so the quaternary man may 
 trace his filiation from the tertiary man. Or the 
 primeval man may have died out before the 
 glaciers, and the man who appears in the new age 
 may be a new creation. 
 
 With the pliocene period the temperature of 
 
78 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 Europe again rose, and from thenceforth remained 
 much what it is at present ; for from that date the 
 flora remains tolerably constant. But the new 
 vegetation which spread over the land was very 
 different from that which had preceded the period 
 of ice. The fauna also was different. The hippo- 
 potamus and the horse appear. At the same time 
 man reappears, and his arrow heads, bones of 
 pachydermata cut or split, show that he lived by 
 the chase. The contour of the land was not yet 
 quite what it is now. An elevation of the bed of 
 the English Channel to 600 feet united the British 
 Isles with the Continent. The Thames was then 
 an affluent of the Rhine, and fed the sea which 
 covered northern Germany and Denmark. To the 
 south Sicily was attached to northern Africa and 
 to Spain. The Gulf of Obi was the mouth of a 
 vast inland sea that washed the roots of the Altai, 
 and has left its feeble trace in Lake Baikal. 
 
 Through Sicily passed a stream of African 
 migration of beasts ; a hyperborean fauna simul- 
 taneously began its travels south, and poured upon 
 central Europe across the plains of Russia. Each 
 of these migrations consisted of analogous but dis- 
 tinct species. From the north came the mammoth 
 and the hairy elephant (Elephas primogenius), the 
 furry rhinoceros {Rhin. tickoriniis), the reindeer, 
 elan, |glutton, and musk-ox ; from the south came 
 cne fauna which subsists in Africa, with its peculiar 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 79 
 
 elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami. The 
 indigenous fauna of the pliocene period died out, 
 with the exception of the cave bear, and some 
 others, before the double current of immigration, 
 which met over their graves in the British Isles. 
 The different phases of this substitution of one 
 fauna for another may be traced in the coral crag 
 of Norfolk and Suffolk, in the forest-bed of Cromer, 
 in the fluviatile beds of Montreuil near Paris, in 
 Sicily in the vast accumulations of bones which fill 
 the grottos of Syracuse and San Theodoro, and 
 which are exported annually in ship - loads to 
 Marseilles, for the manufacture of saltpetre. 
 
 At this time were formed these deposits in the 
 Yorkshire and Devonshire caverns, which contain 
 numerous evidences of man's co-existence with 
 these extinct monsters. 
 
 During this period took place also a grand re- 
 volution changing the relief of the continents, and 
 marking the dawn of a new geologic epoch. 
 
 A steady subsidence, especially noticeable in 
 the northern regions, plunged the greater part of 
 the north of Europe under water, and floating 
 blocks of ice were wafted over the submerged plains 
 of Russia, Poland, and Prussia, laden with rocks 
 and stones torn from the polar mountains. As 
 these floating rafts melted, they discharged their 
 burdens on the floor of the shallow sea. The 
 British Isles were reduced to an archipelago of 
 
8.0 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 little isles. Atlas stood up and took the morning, 
 and reflected her red peaks in a shallow sea that 
 covered what is now the desert of Sahara. The 
 great tertiary Atlantis disappeared, Sicily broke 
 her connection with Africa. 
 
 The accomplishment of these changes, the mo- 
 ment when they attained their maximum of inten- 
 sity, open a new geologic epoch, the quaternary. 
 
 It began with a second glacial period, but not 
 one of the same intensity as the first. Streams of 
 ice filled the valleys of Scotland, Wales, of the 
 Pyrenees, the Apennines ; and the glaciers of the 
 Alps disgorged upon the plains of Lombardy. One 
 is not surprised at finding in the deposits of this 
 age the relics of all the species, alive or extinct, 
 which characterize the circumpolar regions, and 
 which can only live in a cold climate. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that the climate 
 was like that of Siberia. The fossil deposits ex- 
 hibit an extraordinary mixture of species proper to 
 hot and cold zones. The African elephant then 
 lived in the forests beside the Rhine ; the two- 
 horned rhinoceros, now restrained to the extreme 
 south of Africa, laid its bones in Great Britain. 
 The African hippopotamus bathed in the Aire near 
 Leeds ; a huge lion or tiger — the Felis spelceus — 
 with the hysena and the leopard, haunted the plains 
 of France. The explanation of this remarkable 
 phenomenon is to be found in the fact that at the 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 8 1 
 
 quaternary period the ocean extended farther 
 than at present, and wound in and out amidst a 
 labyrinth of islands and peninsulas, bearing with it 
 currents of warm water, and loading the air with 
 vapour. The mountains were covered with glaciers, 
 the rivers were swelled to an enormous width, and 
 the lowlands and valleys enjoyed a mild steamy 
 atmosphere. 
 
 All through this period man lived, and left in- 
 numerable traces of his activity in the soil ; and not 
 of his activity only, his bones were laid in it as well, 
 and by them we are able to reconstruct him in flesh 
 and blood. The skulls of Stangenas, of Lahr, of 
 Maestricht, of Eguisheim, of Neanderthal, and 
 numerous others, prove the existence of two dis- 
 tinct types of men in Europe, distinguished by the 
 shape of their heads. 
 
 The one race, the dolichocephalic, was tall, with 
 elongated skull ; the other race, the brachycephalic, 
 was short, with round bullet head. 
 
 It can hardly be said with certainty which of 
 these races was the first on the stage. The Euro- 
 pean dolichocephalous savages have their analogies 
 in the New Caledonians. The type of the pri- 
 mitive brachycephalous men is preserved in the 
 Esquimaux. 
 
 I need follow no further the history of our race 
 as revealed by its remains ; thenceforth there are 
 no gaps in it ; but there has been a slow yet steady 
 
 G 
 
82 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 advance towards civilization. According to the 
 lowest computation twenty thousand years have 
 elapsed since the appearance of pleistocene man ; 
 other calculations throw the date back to a hundred 
 thousand. 
 
 And now, before proceeding any further, and 
 opening up fresh questions, let us ask whether the 
 admission of these facts, and facts they are, contra- 
 dict the Biblical record, 
 
 In the first place, let it be remembered that the 
 Biblical account and the discoveries of modern 
 science on palseontological man have, and can have, 
 but few points of contact. The history of the 
 primitive ages of man is considered from two oppo- 
 site sides. The Bible views facts of the moral 
 order, whence it may draw religious instruction, 
 whereas human palaeontology embraces facts of the 
 material order only. The two domains of faith 
 and science adjoin, but are not to be confounded. 
 
 It is argued that two facts which emerge from 
 the new discoveries on primeval man ruin the credit 
 of the Mosaic narrative. First, in that the origin of 
 man is thrown back long previous to the period 
 fixed by Biblical chronology ; and secondly, in 
 that primeval man is exhibited, not intelligent, 
 like Adam and Eve, but in a condition of abject 
 barbarism scarcely elevated above brutality. 
 
 The Bible, however, was not written to teach chro- 
 nology ; the calculations based on the genealogies 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 83 
 
 of the patriarchs have never proved satisfactory ; the 
 Hebrew text and that of the Septuagint vary in the 
 number of years attributed to the first fathers, show- 
 ing that the original texts were not agreed on this 
 point. It is possible, moreover, as has been in- 
 geniously suggested, that the names of these patri- 
 archs represent, not individuals, but races. This 
 was almost certainly the case later, when Arphaxad 
 is so termed as " a dweller on the confines of the 
 Accads," the primitive Turanian race in Chaldsea ; 
 and Israel is used often as the name of a nation, 
 though it was originally that of its ancestor alone. 
 
 I pass to the second point ; the low point of civi- 
 lization at which man first appears on the stage. 
 
 Here a question arises. What is man ? Let me 
 offer a definition. It is, perhaps, arbitrary, but if it 
 be accepted, it solves a crowd of difficulties. And, 
 moreover, it is a definition in accordance with 
 revelation. 
 
 Man is that animal, highest in the scale of mam- 
 mals, in whom the sense of the infinite first arises. 
 In other words, man is that animal in whose breast 
 the spark of soul is first elicited. 
 
 What is the Adam of the Mosaic record ? He 
 is a man, the first man with a living soul ; the first 
 man with the faculty in him of looking beyond the 
 bounds imposed by matter, and of seeing God ; the 
 first in whom the image of God was reflected. 
 
 I offer this definition with diffidence. But I 
 
 G 2 
 
84 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 would ask you to consider it well, and see whether 
 it is not consistent with the idea of Adam as set 
 forth by Moses, and then to note how, if we adopt 
 this definition, we are able to admit all the conclu- 
 sions of eminent naturalists on the origin of races, 
 on their gradual evolution, and to consider their 
 speculations without alarm, waiting only to accept 
 them till they are established on irrefragable evi- 
 dence. 
 
 I. It is observable that in the book of Genesis 
 there are hints of the existence of men independent 
 of Adam. There are two accounts of the creation 
 of man in that book, and it by no means follows 
 that the second account is an amplification of the 
 former. Cain is said to have had a mark set on 
 him, lest he should be slain by the people then 
 living on the earth. Who were these people ? 
 The sons of Adam, the son of God, — the Adamim 
 go in unto the daughters of men, the Goim. It is 
 an union of distinct races which is described and 
 spoken of as an offence. 
 
 The Biblical narrative is therefore quite tolerant 
 of a theory that there were men before Adam, men, 
 that is, of human type, with instinct budding into 
 intelligence, but not men with souls, with a power 
 of perceiving what was beyond the limits of the 
 senses, who stood in the same relation to the 
 Adamites that the Papuans occupy at the present 
 day towards Europeans. 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 85 
 
 2, Such a theory is in conformity with my argu- 
 ment, that the law of the world is evolution, that 
 the manifestation of the divine idea passes through 
 the categories of time, in a series of processions. 
 
 The one divine idea of life differentiates into vege- 
 table and animal life. Animal life, starting from 
 some elementary form, such as the amoeba, divides 
 into the synamoeba and the infusoria. The former 
 branches out into the Protasci and the Prothelymna. 
 From the former issue the races of sponges and 
 zoophytes ; from the latter the worms. The idea 
 thence rays off through forms in series reaching the 
 classes of echinoderms, articulata, vertebrata, and 
 mollusca. The solemn rhythmic march proceeds. 
 From the monotremata emerge the ornithodelphians 
 and the marsupials ; from the latter the placentalia, 
 then the decidua ; the forerunners of the apes, the 
 elephants, the lions. From the prasimiae arise the 
 simiae ; the miocene period witnessed the apparition 
 of the anthropoid apes. Their descendants are 
 represented in Africa by the engecco and the gorilla, 
 in Asia and America by the gibbon and the ourang. 
 Then appears man. Is the progress a genealogical 
 tree of man ? That I do not affirm. The paradigm 
 I have traced does not necessarily indicate a natural 
 filiation, but rather an ideal procession. 
 
 We need not affirm that at a given moment a 
 monkey produced a man, but that the general idea 
 of the simiae contained in itself among all its possi- 
 
86 PRIMEVAL MAi\. 
 
 bilities the idea of man, belonging by his anatomical 
 structure to the same family as the gibbon and the 
 gorilla, but diverging from it in certain structural 
 peculiarities, and, above all, by his possession of an 
 intelligent soul. 
 
 3. Science asserts, and asserts truly, that there 
 exists a gap between the anthropoid apes which 
 appeared in the miocene period and pleistocene 
 man. It would interject an intermediary species 
 of man-apes, walking upright, with modifications 
 of the anatomy corresponding to this position, 
 without speech, and with instinct hovering on the 
 confines of intelligence. 
 
 As Adams and Leverrier, by observing the orbits 
 of certain planets, satisfied themselves that another 
 world existed, which had not yet been seen, and 
 having calculated its position, turned their glasses 
 to that point of the sky where they had convinced 
 themselves it was to be found, and Neptune sparkled 
 into their eyes, so anthropologists conclude from the 
 anthropoid ape to the man, that there must have 
 been an intermediate species. 
 
 If we accept the doctrine of the procession of 
 divine ideas in creation, we may concede this also. 
 For the divine ideas never advance by leaps, but 
 always in logical progression. One manifestation 
 postulates the next, and that which is presupposes 
 that which goes before. 
 
 The idea of nerve predicates its manifestations 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 87 
 
 either arranged as a column or as a ring, and thus 
 gave birth to the vertebrate and radiate realms of 
 life. The existence of the lizard presupposes the 
 worm, and the worm the amceba. 
 
 As yet no fossil remains of the primeval man 
 {Homo primigenins) have been found ; but if we 
 compare the inferior races of woolly-haired men 
 with the higher species of anthropoid apes, we are 
 led to admit that, at least for the African races, their 
 forerunner must have united the characteristics 
 intermediate between their forms ; that he must 
 have been dolichocephalous and prognathous, have 
 had woolly hair, and a dark skin ; that his arms 
 were longer and stronger, his legs shorter and defi- 
 cient in calf. The brachycephalous precursor of the 
 Asiatic races was closer allied to the type of the 
 Asiatic apes, with hair not woolly but lank. 
 
 When did this man-monkey race exist ? Was it 
 at the miocene period, and is it they who have left 
 their traces in the chalk of Beauce and the sands 
 of Pouance ? We cannot tell, as no bones have yet 
 been found, but it is probable. 
 
 4. I have said that the paradigm of man does not 
 necessarily indicate a natural filiation, but rather an 
 ideal procession. 
 
 Nevertheless, I am not unprepared to accept the 
 modern theory of development by a process of 
 natural selection, so soon as it is established on 
 sufficiently firm ground. I do not see that to accept 
 
55 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of man need 
 shock religious minds, need be considered as sub- 
 versive of what is revealed. 
 
 " Those great modifications of structure and of 
 external form," writes Mr. Wallace, " which resulted 
 in the development of man out of some lower type 
 of animal, must have occurred before his intellect 
 had raised him above the condition of the brutes, 
 at a period when he was gregarious, but scarcely 
 social, with a mind perceptive but not reflective, ere 
 any sense of right or feeling of sympathy had been 
 developed in him." 1 In other words, man was 
 anatomically, before he was spiritually. There 
 was a time when there was no soul in man, when 
 he was not yet Adam, when the divine likeness 
 was entirely in abeyance ; to the eyes of science a 
 human being, but not to the eyes of the seer as 
 yet a " son of God." 
 
 And is not this a transformation which takes 
 place before our eyes, now? Have we not got 
 savage races occupying tracts of the earth's surface 
 which have never risen from their original brutality, 
 through all the ages that have rolled over their 
 heads, but in whom, under the influence of civiliza- 
 tion at their doors, some feeble glimmer of light 
 begins to manifest itself, to be in fact kindled ? 
 
 And if there be now going on this transformation 
 of the animal man into the intelligent man, the 
 
 1 * Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,' pp. 319, 32a 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 89 
 
 spiritual man — a transformation taking place in our 
 own selves — is it not probable that there was a 
 time when the external pressure of circumstances 
 forced certain apes into the anatomical position of 
 man ? How remarkable it is that the negro and the 
 gorilla in Africa should bear a family resemblance, 
 and that the lowest type of Asiatic man should 
 have affinities of structure with the Asiatic rather 
 than the African apes. 
 
 I do not, however, accept the theory of the 
 development of man as completely established, 
 waiting till it is confirmed by more conclusive 
 evidence. To me, it seems that the Dionysian 
 theory of the procession of ideas explains the facts 
 of this order which science reveals, without having 
 recourse to a direct filiation of species the one 
 from the other. 1 
 
 But I cannot think that the Darwinian theory 
 is repugnant to Christian doctrine. It is quite pos- 
 sible to hold it enthusiastically and be a sound 
 Churchman at the same time. How this is possible 
 will be better understood when we come to consider 
 what Revelation and Inspiration really mean. 
 
 In conclusion, let me briefly restate the theory 
 of Man which I suggest as a solution to scientific 
 difficulties. 
 
 1 * Creation of Modern Science,' by the Rev. G. Greenwood, 
 published by King and Co., 1874, is an admirable tract on the same 
 subject. The author arrives at the same conclusions from a different 
 point of starting, and through a different chain of reasoning. 
 
90 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 Adam is the first man in whom the sense of the 
 infinite, the spark, that is, of soul, was first struck ; 
 the first father of the whole race of intelligent men. 
 
 A beast sees nothing beyond the surface, never 
 catches a glimpse of what underlies phenomena ; 
 and a two-legged, erect being that sees no farther, 
 is, to all intents and purposes, a beast, and no son 
 of Adam. 
 
 Are there races of men who have no such sense ? 
 If so, they have not yet attained to the stage of 
 Adam. Into their nostrils no living soul has yet 
 been breathed. For if there is soul, there must be 
 chinks through which it stretches out towards the 
 infinite. Some day the spark may fall from heaven 
 into the dark heart of an Andaman islander, and 
 at once a germ of movement and of growth will 
 manifest itself, the light will pierce into the heart, 
 at first in thin rays, but gradually it will widen 
 and brighten, till the transformation is complete. 
 
 Look at the savage Kelt or Teuton. Shut in on 
 every side save one, — Religion. Through that one 
 opening above came -down a ray of light into his 
 abode, obscured by superstition, may be, yet God's 
 light for all that. Like the gap in his cabin which 
 was at once window and chimney, that opening 
 admitted truth and let out error. 
 
 Through that opening our forefathers looked up, 
 and saw stars, and stars beyond stars, and in those 
 seen, prophecies of stars unseen, leading the spirit 
 
PRIMEVAL MAN. 9 1 
 
 on and up, away from the dull narrow bounds of 
 sense, and educating him to be the father of the 
 English of to-day. 
 
 And now, What is our present condition ? Why 
 every science, every art opens into infinity. Cre- 
 ation is a crystal palace, and the light flows in 
 through every wall. 
 
 Wherever there is seen law, goodness, beauty, 
 truth, there is an hypostasis of God. Every leaf 
 that flutters in the wind, every spider that drops 
 down its silken line, every atom that dances in the 
 water, or floats in the sunbeam, opens into infinity. 
 And man's life has become one of stretch and strain 
 towards God through the objects of sense. 
 
 Education, progress, is the law of the life of man, 
 as a son of Adam. He who walks in the meadows 
 and sees in grass only grass, and in flowers only 
 flowers, is imperfect ; he halts between the ape and 
 the angel. 
 
 I once heard a farmer's daughter exclaim with 
 amazement at the delight and interest which a 
 country walk afforded an accomplished lady. To 
 herself, the wild-roses were only roses, the blue 
 dragon-fly flitting over the yellow flags was only 
 a fly. The ape prevailed in one, the angel in the 
 other. The one rested at the husk and saw only 
 shape and colour, the other perceived beauty and 
 design. Every rose-leaf, every dragon-fly opened 
 the kingdom of heaven to the daughter of Adam. 
 
9 2 PRIMEVAL MAN. 
 
 The song of all creation was a sursum corda re- 
 sounding in her ears, inaudible to the other. 
 
 And what is history ? A collection of facts 
 to the Goim, the revelation of principles to the 
 Adamim. 
 
 And art ? The vision of beauty, striven after ; 
 and beauty is an hypostasis of God. 
 
 Thus all that is in the world becomes to the true 
 man a revelation of the Deity, drawing him out of 
 himself, thrilling his soul to its finest fibre, kindling 
 in him a hunger which is never satisfied, a longing 
 desire which never languishes, till in the great 
 expansion of his innermost being, like Lamartine's 
 stone-mason of Saint-Point, " He dies of the love 
 of God." 
 
VI. 
 
 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 i. The Old Testament. 
 
 THREE hundred years ago the conscience of 
 Western Christendom, waking under the night- 
 mare of the Papacy, put forth an arm to grope for 
 something firm, something by clutching which it 
 might shake off the haunting dream. Its hand fell 
 on the Bible. The authority of the Book was 
 marshalled against the authority of the Church. 
 Protestantism seized on it as an arsenal of pro- 
 jectiles. In response to every anathema and ex- 
 communication hurled from Rome, it shot back a 
 keen, barbed text from Wittemberg or Geneva. 
 To carry on an effective warfare against the 
 Papacy, the Reformers were forced, by the logic of 
 circumstances, to assume the exclusive sufficiency 
 of Scripture, its absolute, unqualified infallibility. 
 
 The formal position of the Reformation is often 
 stated as the insurrection of human reason against 
 the yoke of authority ; the movement may have 
 
94 BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 
 
 tended in this direction, but it was not this con- 
 sciously or avowedly. Its formal and avowed 
 basis was an appeal from the Church to the Bible. 
 The Reformers rejected traditional belief in favour 
 of Divinity speaking through the Document. The 
 cogency of their appeal lay in its presenting itself 
 as an appeal from the human to the divine ; from 
 tradition, now discovered to be the voice of men, 
 to a Book, thought to be the Word of God. 
 
 Reason was not consulted dispassionately. It 
 was not for one moment suffered to dispute the 
 hypothesis to which the whole movement was 
 pinned. The claims of reason were not discussed, 
 the question lay, in the sixteenth century, between 
 rival authorities. The daring innovator who should 
 have ventured into the vaults, torch in hand, over 
 which the Reformers had built their house, and 
 wrangled and passed laws, would have been dragged 
 forth, hung, drawn, and quartered as a traitor. 
 
 A very slight acquaintance with the history of 
 the Reformation is sufficient to show that the 
 hypothesis of the Book owed its victory over the 
 rival hypothesis of the Institution to causes ex- 
 traneous to any superior probability intrinsic in 
 the hypothesis itself. 
 
 At any rate it was inevitable that, when this' 
 theory had done its work in controversy against 
 Papal supremacy, it should itself, in quieter times, 
 be subjected to examination. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 95 
 
 Reason, called in to expel the Pict and protect 
 the Kelt, would in time turn its arms towards sub- 
 jugating that which had invoked its aid. 
 
 It was inevitable that those w T ho were told that 
 the world rested on a tortoise should ask further 
 on what the tortoise stood. 
 
 In surveying the battle-field one is surprised, 
 almost amused, to note how wholly untenable the 
 Protestant position was before a well-directed attack. 
 Its flank was uncovered. On what authority did 
 it accept the Bible ? The book had not fallen 
 down from heaven like the silver image of Diana. 
 It was a bundle of documents selected from amidst 
 a litter of others. Who tied the tape around these, 
 and rejected the rest ? The existence of the Bible 
 as a sacred unit proved that there was a body 
 authorized, or which thought itself authorized, to 
 make this selection, and to publish a canon. 
 
 Nor was the Roman position less precarious. 
 The Romanists admitted the authority of Scrip- 
 ture, and pointed to its texts as a basis for the 
 claims of the Church. The Scriptures were its 
 title-deeds, but then they were deeds of its own 
 drawing up. The Church was infallible because 
 the Bible said so, but the Bible was only infallible 
 because it was authorized to be so by the Church. 
 The argument revolved in a circle. 
 
 Thus the whole subject of contest at the Refor- 
 mation period amounted to this, which had priority, 
 
96 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 the egg or the bird ? The bird that laid the egg, 
 or the egg that produced the bird ? 
 
 More than three hundred years have passed 
 away, and reason, which was sealed up by frost 
 after its activity in the sixteenth century, has 
 begun once more to flow. Its stream is inevit- 
 ably directed against that basis on which Pro- 
 testantism built itself a house. 
 
 There are fissures in the walls, widening daily. 
 The rector of a church with which I am ac- 
 quainted was told that cracks had formed in the 
 tower. " Paper them over," was his suggested 
 remedy. 
 
 Papering cracks will not mend faulty foundations 
 or arrest ruin. This is a truth it behoves us to 
 acknowledge and act upon. Unfortunately paper- 
 ing cracks is too frequently resorted to, and the 
 caution is not uncalled for. 
 
 If there be fissures in the walls, it behoves us [to 
 consider whether weight has not been laid on 
 ground not calculated, never designed, to bear it. 
 
 It cannot be doubted, I think, that a general 
 sense of uneasiness exists in religious minds rela- 
 tive to the authority and inspiration of Scripture. 
 
 I am not of course alluding to ignorant religious 
 minds which have never studied or thought about 
 the questions affecting Biblical infallibility. Igno- 
 rance and hesitation are to one another in inverse 
 ratio ; no man is so positive on a matter as he who 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 97 
 
 knows nothing about it. So in the matter of 
 Biblical inspiration, none are louder and more 
 exacting in their assertions of it than those abso- 
 lutely devoid of critical reading. 
 
 But I am alluding to those devout souls loving 
 Jesus, the Author and Finisher of their faith, to 
 whom the Bible is the dearest book ; to whom the 
 loss of the Gospel would be the loss of the sun out 
 of their firmament ; to such as these am I alluding, 
 who have more or less been brought in contact 
 with the current of rationalism ; and who see that 
 what they once supposed was a closed question is 
 now a crying one. Lothair thought life the simplest 
 thing in the world till he entered into it, and felt 
 and found how complex it was. 
 
 Two difficulties beset the received, popular, 
 doctrine of Biblical infallibility at the outset. 
 
 1. Scientific discoveries contradict, or seem to 
 
 contradict, statements of the sacred record. 
 Thence the corollary is drawn, that if the 
 Bible be proved guilty of error in matters 
 which are verifiable, there is no guaranty 
 that it does not err also in such matters 
 as escape verification. 
 
 2. Criticism has reduced the Bible to a collection 
 
 of independent documents of various dates 
 and description, arbitrarily collected into one. 
 Therefore the authority of the Bible as a 
 whole is impaired. 
 
 H 
 
9§ BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 On the first of these points it is not my purpose 
 to speak at present. The objections are too much 
 matter of detail to be examined in a single lecture, 
 and some of them have been touched on in my 
 former discourses. 
 
 But the second point admits of being considered 
 more briefly. 
 
 Criticism reveals that the Bible is not one book, 
 nor is it made up of two parts, an Old and a New- 
 Testament, but that it is, on the contrary, a collec- 
 tion of from sixty to seventy independent com- 
 positions by different hands made at periods far 
 removed, under circumstances widely various, in dif- 
 ferent stages of civilization and of religious thought. 
 
 Not only so, it shows also that we have not got 
 these books in their original form, but glossed, 
 interpolated and altered at different times, and with 
 different intent. 
 
 Also, that some of them were never even written 
 by the persons to whom they are attributed, and 
 others never written with the purpose which has 
 been thought to justify their position in the canon. 
 And that doctrines have been twisted out of texts 
 which were unknown to the writers, and prophecies 
 pointed out, which prophecies were never intended. 
 
 All these points, and there are many more, are 
 used with force to detach minds from traditional 
 belief, or if not to detach them, at least to loosen 
 their adhesion. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 99 
 
 The Bible proves to be no homogeneous rock, but 
 a congeries of stones drawn from various quarters, 
 like the piles of drift which strew the plains of 
 Prussia, in which are found fragments from the 
 mountains of Spitzbergen, the rocks of Nova Zembla, 
 from the Ural and the Dovrefjeld. 
 
 Let us now trace the formation of the dogma of 
 Biblical infallibility in its most extreme form, and 
 then we shall be able to estimate how much of truth 
 it contains, and how much is made up of arbitrary 
 conjecture. 
 
 Then, perhaps, we shall find ourselves in a position 
 to form some theory of inspiration which will prove 
 less faulty at the touch of reason. 
 
 Mosaism never took firm hold of the Hebrews 
 through the period from the promulgation of the 
 Law to the captivity in Babylon. Its prescriptions 
 had not become the mould of their lives, its mono- 
 theism had not mastered their minds. If Mosaism 
 did not fall into complete oblivion, this was due 
 solely to an uninterrupted succession of prophets, 
 men who, from the age of the Judges to the fall of 
 the kingdom, pleaded incessantly, not for the ob- 
 servance of its precepts, but for the acknowledg- 
 ment of its revelation of the Divine unity. The 
 bias of the Hebrew people was towards idolatrous 
 polytheism ; and the prophet was a protest against 
 this tendency. 
 The Law had fallen into disregard, like canon Law 
 
 H 2 
 
100 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 in the English Church at the present day ; its com- 
 mands were ignored, as antiquated ; its ceremonial 
 was modified ; some of its distinctive rites were, 
 perhaps, never performed. 
 
 The new moons were still observed, but they 
 were equally sacred among the Canaanites ; and if 
 the ark was still reverenced, it was, perhaps, be- 
 cause the Moloch-worshippers had also their sacred 
 coffer, the palladium of every tribe. 
 
 But about four centuries before Christ a radical 
 change passed over the family of Israel. One 
 might suppose oneself confronting a new people. 
 The name is changed, and with the name of the 
 nation, its tendency. Hebrews went down to 
 Babylon ; Jews rebuilt Jerusalem ; the old title was 
 laid aside, and from thenceforth the people are 
 known as Jews. But it was especially in its beliefs, 
 its religious and moral tendencies, that the change 
 in the people is most conspicuous. 
 
 Mosaism in the Hebraic period had never been 
 frankly adopted ; now it became incarnate in Jew- 
 dom. The Law T which had been violated without 
 compunction by the Hebrew, became to the Jew the 
 sovereign rule of life. The sons of Israel who had 
 been led captives to Chaldaea had for centuries 
 gravitated towards polytheism ; from the moment 
 of their return to the present day, their monotheism 
 has been ineffaceable. 
 
 The Captivity must have cut the Jew to the heart. 
 
BIBLICAL INS P IRA TION. I O I 
 
 The proof is In the complete transformation it 
 effected. The bondage in Egypt and the captivity 
 in Babylon, each was the anguish going before the 
 birth of a new idea ; the pangs that preceded a 
 regeneration. 
 
 Yet those who returned to Palestine by permission 
 of Cyrus, did not bring with them these new habits, 
 but they brought a disposition wholly new. The 
 books of Ezra and Nehemiah exhibit to us these 
 returned Jews living in the violation of the most 
 positive prescriptions of the Law. Usury, forbidden 
 by Moses, was exercised among them with odious 
 cruelty ; in less than a century after the return of 
 the first colonists under Zerubbabel, it had reduced 
 a considerable portion of the population to abject 
 misery. 1 
 
 The sabbaths and the feasts, far from being cele- 
 brated with decency, were desecrated by markets, at 
 which assembled members of neighbouring nations 
 with whom Moses had forbidden relations. 2 Mar- 
 riages were contracted with Gentile women. 3 The 
 members of the sacerdotal tribe, the son of the 
 high-priest himself, had set the example. 4 
 
 But though there was no change in the manners, 
 there was a complete change in the hearts of the 
 people. The iron of captivity had entered deeply 
 into their souls. They were conscious that their 
 
 1 Neli. v. I— 13. 2 Neh. xiii. 1-3; Ezra ix. 10-15. 
 
 * Neh. xiii. 23-28 ; Ezra ix. 10. 4 Neh. xiii. 28 ; Ezra x. 18, sq. 
 
102 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 exile had been a punishment, and their hearts were 
 ripe for repentance. But as yet there was only the 
 disposition. That Law which was to rule them 
 thenceforth was as yet to them unknown. It lay 
 rolled up in the custody of the high-priest, covered 
 with dust. 
 
 Ezra and Nehemiah inform us that what was 
 wanting to the Jews, their contemporaries, was, not 
 a ready will to obey, but the knowledge of the Law 
 which they were to be called on to obey. 
 
 The infractions of the commandment had been 
 committed through ignorance, not through obsti- 
 nacy. This is proved by the prompt repentance 
 with which the instructions of Ezra and Nehemiah 
 were received, by the readiness with which ties of 
 family, consecrated by time and affection, were 
 broken under the overpowering sense of duty. 
 
 After the calamity which, nearly a century before, 
 had ruined the last relic of David's kingdom, after 
 an exile, in which the generation which had known 
 the ancient order of things had died out, there were 
 no longer antecedents, or habits formed, to occasion 
 a stubborn resistance to a reformation in conformity 
 with the Mosaic institutions. Everything had to 
 be begun afresh. 
 
 No other model presented itself for adoption save 
 the ancient national legislation. The immigrants 
 knew no other, its origin they esteemed divine. 
 
 The small number of the returned exiles, the 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 103 
 
 compactness of the body, facilitated the carrying 
 out of a Mosaic restoration. Above ninety years 
 passed, however, before a decided step was taken. 
 Years they were, not without their lesson, deepening 
 in the hearts of the colonists their yearning for an 
 organization. The little settlement languished, 
 exposed to absorption and disappearance among 
 the surrounding peoples ; their language, their 
 traditions, their beliefs were slipping from them ; a 
 few more years, and they would have melted into 
 the mass of Gentiledom. The fear haunted them, 
 but it also paralysed them. 
 
 A chief was wanted who, by the force of his 
 character, the exaltation of his faith, could impose 
 his enthusiasm on the colonists and quicken their 
 dispositions into actions. That man appeared in 
 time. It was Ezra. But alone he might have 
 failed to accomplish the task he had set himself as 
 he mused by the banks of Euphrates. He went up 
 with deliberate purpose, "Ezra had prepared his 
 heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it, and 
 to teach Israel statutes and judgments." l 
 
 Fourteen years passed, and yet little was accom- 
 plished, when Nehemiah, a Jew, inspired with the 
 same love of his nation, and faith in its destiny, 
 came to Jerusalem, appointed governor of the 
 colony by the Persian king. Thenceforth, with one 
 heart, the scribe and the governor wrought toge- 
 
 1 Ezra vii. 10. 
 
104 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 ther to create Judaism. One was the head, the 
 other the arm, in this undertaking. Jewish tradi- 
 tion, the echo of the general opinion in these remote 
 times, has sacrificed Nehemiah to Ezra, and has 
 attributed to the latter the origin of all the insti- 
 ' tutions which thenceforth gave to the people of 
 Israel its permanent stamp. 
 
 As Moses was the father of Hebraism, Ezra was 
 the father of Judaism. 
 
 I need not relate to you the solemn production 
 of the roll of the Law, the reading of it in the ears 
 of all the people, the oath administered to them, 
 and roll call of the covenanters. There is scarcely 
 a more thrilling page in history, sacred or profane, 
 than that which describes the triumph of Ezra. I 
 know of but one scene like it, the Scottish Covenant 
 of 1638. Each marked an epoch, was a hinge on 
 which the destiny of a nation turned. From that 
 feast of Tabernacles, when the people assembled as 
 one man in the street of the Watergate, to this day, 
 Jewdom has been not so much the witness to an 
 idea, as the incarnation of a Book. 
 
 The prophets had upheld the Idea, the lawyers 
 were the ministers of the Book. The success of the 
 prophets had been but partial, because spasmodic ; 
 that of the lawyers was complete, because syste- 
 matic. Enthusiasm had done its work, it had 
 handed on the lamp ; and now routine accomplished 
 what enthusiasm had begun. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 105 
 
 By a chain of circumstances which it is not 
 necessary for me here to particularize, the Hebrew 
 language ceased to be understood by the Jew, and 
 the tongue which, in the days of Hezekiah, 1 had 
 been unintelligible to them, became their ver- 
 nacular. 
 
 The process was in course in Ezra's time ; as he 
 read the Law, he was attended by interpreters, occu- 
 pying the same pulpit of wood. ' 
 
 Hebrew having become a dead language, the 
 lawyers, or scribes, became an important and in- 
 dispensable body in the new community. They 
 were not necessarily priests, they were not often 
 nobles ; every class, and trade, and profession 
 yielded sopherim, who made the Law their study, 
 and the interpretation of it their occupation and 
 delight. 
 
 The fact of the Law being in the dead tongue of 
 their race consecrated to them that ancient lan- 
 guage. Every extant fragment of the literature of 
 the golden age of Hebrew greatness and culture 
 was carefully collected, and the divine unction 
 which rested on the writings of the Lawgiver rolled 
 down to and hallowed the skirts of that extinct 
 literature. 
 
 Now, what was this Law, which had been pre- 
 served, and which stood so high in the estimation 
 of the people ? It was that code of rules given to 
 
 1 Isa. xxxvi. 1 1 ; 2 Kings xviii. 26. 
 
106 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 Moses, which we find scattered through the books 
 of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These 
 books critics tell us did not then exist in their 
 present forms, that probably no narrative was mixed 
 up with the regulations, that the Law was a code 
 and nothing more. 
 
 But other books existed, such as the " Wars of the 
 Lord," Y which contained the narrative ; and as the 
 significance of the regulations depended much on 
 the incidents which had called them forth, the 
 narrative, it is supposed, was melted in with the 
 code, and thus constituted the books of Exodus, 
 Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. 2 
 
 It is necessary to bear clearly in mind that in 
 asserting the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch, we 
 do so solely on the opinion and authority of the 
 sop her im of three or four centuries before Christ. 
 
 Papyrus rolls had survived the ruin of the Temple, 
 each roll was but a leaf of a rush, every leaf was 
 separate ; all remembrance of their original connec- 
 tion was lost, and Ezra and those who laboured 
 with him to restore the observance of the Law had 
 also to restore the text of the Law. What, then, 
 more natural than that they should take one leaf 
 
 1 Num. xxi. 14. 
 
 2 According to Rabbinic tradition the ancient books had been 
 lost at the burning of the Temple, but Ezra wrote them down from 
 recollection. This is not true, but it shows that the Jews were 
 aware that Ezra had a great hand in the recomposition of the 
 Pentateuch. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 107 
 
 from, say the Law, and another from the "Wars 
 of the Lord," another from the " Book of Jasher," 
 another from the u Songs of Moses," and weave 
 them into a consecutive narrative ? 
 
 At the present day we have the library of Assur- 
 bani-Pal laid up in the Temple of Nebo, discovered 
 at Koujundjik. It is composed of inscribed tiles, 
 piled in volumes ; but tiles belonging to one volume 
 have found their way into other heaps, and it is a 
 work of extreme difficulty and nice critical discrimi- 
 nation to sort the brick pages into their several 
 positions. 
 
 This was what Ezra and those who laboured 
 with him had perhaps to do with the volumes 
 of ancient Hebrew literature that had survived 
 the wreck of the Temple ; but instead of having 
 tiles to sort, they had the loose leaves of rushes 
 to piece together. 
 
 The Law was given to Moses, there could be no 
 doubt about that ; and when, with the regulations of 
 the Law, a record of the events which called them 
 forth was intertwined, the whole was given the 
 sanction of the name of Moses. Such modern 
 criticism asserts to have been the origin of four of 
 the books which constitute the Pentateuch. 
 
 The book of Genesis, a compilation of the early 
 traditions of the race, a book of unknown origin, 
 and of remote antiquity, containing, as it did, so 
 much to interest the Jew, so much of importance in 
 
108 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 establishing his position in the world as a witness 
 to God, was naturally attributed to the only writer 
 of the first age of Hebrew literature with whom the 
 Jews were acquainted. It was necessary to elevate 
 that book into an authoritative place, and it was 
 therefore conjectured, then it was asserted, and 
 finally was generally believed, to have been written 
 by Moses. 
 
 Thus the work of composing a canon advanced, 
 Books of the most diverse aim were enrolled in it. 
 The Song of Songs, for instance, which, if we may 
 trust some recent commentators, was one out of a 
 number of similar poetical dramas performed at 
 weddings ; the only relic of a popular character 
 which survived the Captivity, was invested with 
 the attribute of inspiration. 
 
 Job, the Faust of ancient Hebrew poetry, but the 
 Faust with a different climax and opposite moral, 
 was interpolated with the speech of Elihu to bring 
 it into accord with the new Jewish sentiment, 
 against which the whole tenor of the book was a 
 protest, and so altered was numbered with the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 Even Ecclesiastes, the sad lament of a voluptuary, 
 received canonization. 
 
 The interpreters of the Law springing up from 
 every class served to root the Law more securely in 
 the popular affections. Synagogues were esta- 
 blished, in which the Pentateuch was read on the 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 1 09 
 
 sabbaths, and its interpretation became the highest, 
 nay, the only aim of Jewish intellectual life. 
 
 The interpreters of the Law, at once theologians 
 and jurists, were those who slowly and surely 
 formed the national character. They wove the 
 web of the Law round the life of every Jew, so as 
 completely to envelop him, and control his action 
 from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning 
 till he closed them at night. There was no moment 
 too private, no act too insignificant, into which the 
 lawyer did not penetrate with his rule. 
 
 The Jews became more and more firmly con- 
 vinced of their mission, of the uniqueness of their 
 
 a 
 
 situation in the world. 
 
 Impressed with the one absorbing conviction 
 struck from their consciences by the blow of the 
 Captivity, that they could only survive as a nation 
 by rigidly minute organization, and finding a frame 
 for this organization in their Law, it became a 
 national necessity for them to make that Law 
 infallible. From it they spun the web, fine and 
 enduring as the thread that bound Fenrir, in which 
 they have since been entangled. Talmudism in the 
 realm of moral and social regulation, Cabalism in 
 the region of theologic speculation, are the creation 
 of the national spirit, the fatal, logical creation out 
 of the hypothesis of the infallibility of every word 
 and letter of the Law ; a hypothesis the national 
 spirit was forced to frame to preserve its existence. 
 
1 1 BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 
 
 The lawyers, therefore, were the expression of this 
 national sentiment. They were never false to it. 
 Priests and nobles at times turned traitors to their 
 country and their religion, but never a lawyer. 
 
 Times had changed since the fresh simple days 
 when the Pentateuch had been written ; a very 
 different order of civilization now prevailed. Intel- 
 lectual conceptions were as changed as manners 
 and the social situation. As a manual of belief, 
 the Pentateuch did not suffice ; as a moral and 
 judiciary code it contained a large number of pre- 
 scriptions absolutely inapplicable, whilst there were 
 no dispositions for a crowd of contingencies called 
 into existence by new social relations. 
 
 It was necessary, therefore, to supplement the 
 Pentateuch by other books. That these books 
 must be written in Hebrew was the universal con- 
 viction. And thus the need and the patriotism of 
 the Jews served to exalt every extant fragment of 
 the old literature into a position of authority. The 
 rabbis set themselves to interpret this collection 
 thus formed, and to wring from its texts rules to 
 regulate every act of which man is capable, and to 
 extort precepts for every emergency. 
 
 The Talmuds of Jerusalem and of Babylon are 
 the accumulation of these interpretations, monu- 
 ments to all time of the folly of devotion to the 
 letter without regard to the spirit, of the perils that 
 encompass exegesis unaccompanied by criticism. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. Ill 
 
 Thus, then, in the period between Ezra and the 
 Christian era, grew up the theory of Biblical infalli- 
 bility. 
 
 In the year 312 before Christ, Ptolemy I., after 
 having taken Jerusalem, carried away with him to 
 Alexandria a colony of Jews. 
 
 Voluntary migrations augmented this colony. 
 The Alexandrine Jews acquired the same civil 
 rights as the Greeks, obtained the monopoly of the 
 corn trade, and increased rapidly in number and 
 prosperity. 
 
 They had left Jerusalem before Rabbinism had 
 set hard. They took with them the sacred books, 
 but they did not carry with them the extreme 
 theory of the infallibility of every sentence, word, 
 and letter, for that theory had not as yet been 
 formed, — it was in process of formation only. 
 Alexandrine Judaism developed an exactly oppo- 
 site current of religious life from that which 
 flowed in Palestine. It was philosophic, expansive, 
 catholic. It used the sacred text for a purpose 
 wholly opposed to that which animated Pales- 
 tinian Judaism. 
 
 It brought into prominence the grand eternal 
 doctrines of the unity of God, of creation, of provi- 
 dence, of the immateriality of God, but the minute 
 ceremonial regulations it disregarded, the narratives 
 it sublimated into spiritual allegories. It did not 
 shrink from altering the text in such theophanies 
 
1 1 2 BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 
 
 as seemed to it inconsistent with the doctrine of 
 God's infinity and immateriality. 
 
 When Christianity appeared, and Jews of Pales- 
 tine and Jews of Alexandria passed into it, each 
 brought with them something of their past pre- 
 judices or persuasions with which they had been 
 invested from their infancy. As Simon Peter girt 
 his fisher's coat about him when he left his boat 
 and swam to Christ, so did these converts hug 
 their prejudices when they deserted their. ancestral 
 communities for the Church. The Palestinian Jew 
 brought with him his theory of the infallibility of 
 Scripture, the Alexandrine Jew his method of 
 Scriptural interpretation. 
 
 The latter reappears in all its extravagant capri- 
 ciousness in the writings of Origen, and then of 
 the Latin mediaeval commentators, till it died 
 exhausted by its exaggeration. Now we are able 
 to regard Scripture with a more just, less ideal, 
 eye, and are prepared to treat the allegories we 
 draw from the narrative as the play of pious fancy, 
 not unfruitful, indeed, but not as forming the 
 essence and kernel of Scriptural interpretation. 
 
 The Rabbinic theory of Biblical infallibility 
 reached its apogee at the period of the Reforma- 
 tion, determined then, as in the period of its first 
 formation, by the exigency of circumstances and 
 of controversy. 
 
 To put aside what is extravagant, and retain 
 
BIBLICAL INS P IRA TION. 1 1 3 
 
 what is wholesome in this theory is that which is 
 incumbent on us now. The question demands 
 review with a sober eye. 
 
 From one side and the other, unquestionably, we 
 shall meet with condemnation. For one we grant 
 too much, for the other too little to Divine inspiration. 
 
 But truth lies balanced between extreme and 
 opposite poles. 
 
 One thing it is very necessary for us to remem- 
 ber. However much the Reformers may have pro- 
 tested against tradition in some matters, they relied 
 implicitly on it in others, — they invested tradition 
 with infallibility at the very time that they rejected 
 its authority. 
 
 For the claims of the Pentateuch to be the com- 
 position of Moses rest on no other grounds than 
 the tradition of the Jews, and that tradition sprang 
 out of the conjecture of certain obscure lawyers of 
 the third century before Christ, whose very names 
 are forgotten. 
 
 Our canon of sacred writings of the Old Testa- 
 ment is traditional ; it has been accepted unhesi- 
 tatingly from the precursors of the Talmudic 
 rabbis — men with the minimum of critical know- 
 ledge — men blind to the incomparable grandeur of 
 the documents they chose or rejected, actuated by 
 no appreciation of their merits, their antiquity, or 
 their authenticity, but impelled by a narrow, petty 
 spirit of national bigotry and conservatism. 
 
 I 
 
1 1 4 BIBLICAL INS P IRA TION. 
 
 What I have said may surprise and startle some 
 of my hearers, but I beg them to understand that I 
 am laying down facts, not stating opinions. 
 
 Facts they are, and we do well to acknowledge 
 them. We receive the Pentateuch as the works of 
 Moses on the guess of ignorant Jewish rabbis, 
 utterly unqualified to pronounce an opinion on 
 their authorship. We accept our Old Testament 
 canon on the same authority. 
 
 Mind me ! I believe with all my heart that God 
 inspired the ancient poets and lawgiver and pro- 
 phets of the old Hebrew golden ages of literature, 
 and that He used the narrow-minded rabbis of a 
 later age to conserve to the time when the deposit 
 should become the treasure of the Church, these 
 inexpressibly valuable relics. But this does not 
 alter the facts above stated. We invest the igno- 
 rant lawyers of the period between the restoration 
 and Christ's coming with infallibility, when we un- 
 hesitatingly accept their assertions, and denounce 
 as unbelievers those who call them in question. 
 
 The sticklers for Biblical infallibility are, in fact, 
 the canonizers of the sopherim of the Ezraic revival. 
 Reduce their assertions to a statement of plain 
 facts, and it amounts to this : We believe that 
 those lawyers who carried out Ezra's work, who 
 recomposed the scattered fragments of the old 
 Hebrew literature, were divinely inspired. Who 
 they were, however, w r e do not know. 
 
BIBLICAL INS P IRA TIOX. 1 1 5 
 
 From earliest childhood we have been accustomed 
 to see the Bible as one book bound within two 
 boards, and it is only by an effort that we can 
 throw ourselves back mentally into the ages when 
 that one book was in process of formation. Seeing 
 it as an unit has led to ignorant conceptions con- 
 cerning the Bible, and it is of the utmost importance 
 that the history of the formation of the book should 
 be impressed upon us, lest we fall into prevalent 
 superstitions concerning it, and become the ready 
 prey of modern scepticism which can easily dispel 
 the superstition, and therewith will scatter the truth 
 that underlies it. 
 
 Nothing will conduce more to successful de- 
 fence of the verities of our Faith, than the cutting 
 down of the scrub that encumbers the ground and 
 serves as cover to the enemy. We battle to hold 
 points which it is impossible to maintain, and it is 
 a mark of good generalship not to extend his line 
 to cover these points, nor to convert them into 
 keys to his position. 
 
 The success of infidel agitators in our factories 
 and dockyards among intelligent workmen consists 
 in their representing these points as pivots of Chris- 
 tianity ; they ruin the credibility of the latter by 
 demonstrating the fallacy of the former. 
 
 It is because we do not know our own ground, 
 which we are set to defend, so well as do the 
 invaders, that routs are so frequent. 
 
VII. 
 
 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 2. The New Testament 
 
 In my last lecture I traced the history of the 
 formation of the theory of Biblical infallibility, 
 chiefly with reference to the Old Testament. I 
 propose in this lecture to give a brief sketch of the 
 formation of the canon of the New Testament, to 
 show that this underwent a process somewhat 
 analogous to that which the canon of the Old 
 Testament passed through ; and then, having cleared 
 the way by a statement of historical facts, to see if 
 we cannot form some theory of inspiration and 
 revelation which will not be in defiance of facts, 
 and which will satisfy the conscience. 
 
 It does not appear, from a perusal of texts, that 
 the Apostles held their writings to be specially in- 
 spired, nor did the Church during the first two cen- 
 turies attribute peculiar inspiration to them. The 
 Gospel was orally delivered, and became traditional. 
 When Churches were founded, those who presided 
 
BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 1 1 7 
 
 over them were intrusted with this oral teaching, and 
 not with written documents. The numerous terms 
 used in the New Testament to designate the teach- 
 ing of the Apostles, have all reference to instruction 
 by word of mouth ; everywhere we have speaking 
 and hearing, preaching, proclamation, tradition, not 
 once writing and reading, except in reference to the 
 books of the Old Testament. And even long after, 
 when the Apostles had passed away, this preference 
 for oral over written testimony remained. " I do 
 not think," writes Papias, friend of some who had 
 been disciples of the Lord, " that I have learned so 
 much from books as from the living surviving 
 voice." l It is certainly remarkable that S. Paul in 
 enumerating the gifts of the Spirit should say 
 nothing concerning the inspiration of the writer, 
 but only speak of the prophetic gift of the speaker, 
 a sure token that then the part the penman was 
 to play in the Church was undreamed of; that 
 a written revelation was not what the Apostles 
 intended as the basis of Christianity. 
 
 The character of the epistles written by S. Paul, 
 S. Peter, S. John, and S. James, is such as to 
 preclude the idea that they thought them formal 
 declarations of the Spirit to guide the Church for 
 all time. The letters were called forth by tran- 
 sitory circumstances, by short-lived disorders in a 
 Church, by private interests, as the running away 
 1 Euseb., ' H. E.,' in. 39. 
 
1 1 8 BIBLICAL INS P IRA TION. 
 
 of a slave, or the interference of a Diotrephes. 
 They were addressed to individual Churches or 
 persons, and were intended for them alone, unless 
 otherwise expressed. 
 
 They were not designed as exponents of doctrine 
 or as codes of morals. They were ephemeral 
 productions, which would have perished, but that 
 the love and reverence of the Churches or persons 
 to whom they were addressed preserved them, 
 Some certainly have been lost. 
 
 In the sub-apostolic age, though the Fathers, in 
 their writings, use sentences or expressions from 
 these epistles, they never quote them textually as 
 if they were authoritative. The only apparent 
 exceptions are where they address Churches to 
 which the Pauline epistles had been originally sent, 
 and then they appeal to these letters only to show 
 that the expostulations now addressed were in 
 tone the same as those already uttered by the 
 Apostle, their founder. 
 
 Clement of Rome, the disciple of S. Paul, does not 
 hesitate to invoke the " blessed " Judith, beside the 
 " blessed y) Paul, placing on the same footing writings 
 which we regard as widely parted. And it is re- 
 markable that when the apostolic Fathers cite the 
 epistles they never use the formulae, " // is written" 
 "As says the Scripture" but that they do thus quote 
 apocryphal books. In this manner Clement intro- 
 duces a passage from the second book of Esdras ; 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 1 1 9 
 
 and the author of the epistle of Barnabas quotes as 
 Scripture a passage in a lost prophet, and another 
 apocryphal prophecy as " written in the Scriptures.'' 
 
 S. Ignatius also quotes as a saying of the Holy 
 Ghost, " Do nothing without your bishop." 
 
 The case of the Gospels is otherwise. It seems 
 that no written Gospels were in the first age re- 
 ceived as canonical to the exclusion of others. 
 Probably every Church had its collection of sayings 
 and doings of the Lord, taken down from the oral 
 teaching of the Apostles ; and these, in Justin's 
 time, and probably long before, were read at the 
 celebration of the Holy Eucharist. But none was 
 stamped with oecumenical authority. Some of 
 these collections were fuller, others less complete. 
 The smaller collections were being daily amplified 
 by the addition of maxims and anecdotes contri- 
 buted by other Churches with fuller collections. 
 
 The proof of this statement cannot be entered on 
 here. I have established it elsewhere. 1 Suffice it 
 to say that writers of the first three centuries do 
 not always quote the Gospels we account canonical, 
 but do cite Gospels which are now lost ; and that 
 some of the Fathers were unacquainted with our 
 canonical Four. 
 
 We may safely conclude that by A.D. 130, or 
 thereabouts, though writings of the Apostles were in 
 circulation, none were appealed to as authoritative 
 
 1 See my [ Lost and Hostile Gospels.' Williams and Norgate, 1874. 
 
120 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 revelations of the mind of the Spirit, and that no 
 collection of these writings had been made. 
 
 If we look to writers between A.D. 130 and 
 A.D. 180 we see the same fact transpire, but already 
 we notice a trace of the apotheosis of the apostolic 
 writings. 
 
 In the celebrated letter to Diognetus there are 
 almost no quotations, but there are tokens of 
 acquaintance with certain of the writings of the 
 Apostles ; only once is S. Paul cited textually with 
 the formula " the Apostle says," but the formula in 
 this case contains no theologic element. One re- 
 markable passage, however, occurs in this letter 
 which must not be passed by. In speaking of the 
 Word revealing Himself, the author says, "Thence- 
 forth the fear of the law is sung, the grace of the 
 prophets is recognized, the faith of the gospels is 
 edified, the tradition of the apostles is protected." 
 This is the first instance of the Gospels being men- 
 tioned in the plural. At the same time it must be 
 remembered that the term "Gospels" does not 
 necessarily apply to the Four, but may refer to the 
 crowd of other Gospels then extant, most of which 
 have since disappeared. It is observable also that 
 the faith of the Church is shown to be the tradition 
 of the Apostles, and that no mention is made of 
 their writings. 
 
 Melito, bishop of Sardis, lived in the second 
 century. Amongst his writings was one on the 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 1 2 1 
 
 Apocalypse of S. John. This is the first instance of 
 a commentary on one of the books of the New 
 Covenant, and it is significant that the book chosen 
 to be commented on is the Apocalypse. Why so, 
 I shall state presently. 
 
 Claudius Apollinaris, bishop of Hierapolis, a 
 contemporary of Melito, insisted that Jesus had not 
 eaten the Paschal lamb before his death, for He 
 suffered on the day on which the Jews ate it ; and 
 he appealed to the Gospels in testimony that it 
 was so. It is evident, therefore, that Apollinaris 
 was only acquainted with S. John's Gospel, and 
 others which agreed with the Fourth Evangel on 
 this point, and that he was ignorant of the synop- 
 tics, where the contrary is maintained. 
 
 Dionysius of Corinth, who lived very little later, 
 mentions the reading of epistles in the assemblies 
 of the faithful ; not, indeed, the epistles of Apostles, 
 but letters sent from one Church to another. If, 
 then, the letter of S. Clement, dead sixty years 
 before, was, as he says, publicly read, it is probable 
 that in the same Church the epistles of S. Paul to 
 the Corinthians would be also read. 
 
 Apollonius, a writer against the Montanists, of 
 the same period, quotes the Apocalypse, and also 
 a saying of the Lord, which is not found in any 
 extant Gospel, showing that at his date the number 
 of the Gospels was not fixed canonically. Athena- 
 goras, moreover, who died A.D. 177, exhibits a cer- 
 
122 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION, 
 
 tain familiarity with S. Paul's writings, and he gives 
 a quotation from Our Lord's discourses which is not 
 in our canonical Gospels, and is therefore taken 
 from another Gospel, now lost. 
 
 The letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne 
 to those of Asia Minor, written in 177, also shows 
 an acquaintance with S. Paul's epistles, without 
 quoting them textually ; only once does it give an 
 extract preceded with the formula, that it is in 
 "'the Scripture," and in this instance, singularly 
 enough, the passage is from the Apocalypse. 
 
 The Pastor of Hermas, written about A.D. 160, 
 which was afterwards inserted in the canon of some 
 Churches, although it tacitly alludes to passages in 
 the synoptics, the epistles of S. Paul, and the first 
 of S. Peter, nowhere prefaces a quotation with the 
 famous " Sicut scriptum est," except once, and then 
 it is to quote from an apocryphal book, " As it is 
 written in the Book of Eldad and Medad." Justin 
 Martyr (A.D. 140) deserves more particular attention. 
 With him the supreme criterion of evangelic truth 
 is the argument drawn from the prophecies. The 
 prophets are the sure witnesses to Christ ; the 
 Gospel is true because the prophets spake before of 
 it. Justin was unacquainted with our four Gos- 
 pels ; all his references are either to a lost Gospel, 
 probably that of the Hebrews, or to the fragmen- 
 tary memorabilia of Our Lord's sayings and acts, 
 read, as he tells us, at the celebration of the Divine 
 liturgy every Sunday. 
 
BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 1 2 3 
 
 To Justin the Old Testament writers are alone 
 inspired ; neither Gospels nor Epistles are appealed 
 to by him as such, — the latter indeed are never 
 cited at all, and the Gospels only as an historic 
 record of facts wrought in accomplishment of 
 prophecy. 
 
 But Justin did recognize as inspired other works 
 beside those in the Old Testament, and as such he 
 speaks of the Apocalypse of S. John, of the revela- 
 tions of the Sibyl, and of a lost prophet Hystaspes. 
 Justin also expressly declares that the seventy 
 translators of the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired 
 by God. 
 
 Theophilus of Antioch (A.D. 180) is the first 
 ecclesiastical writer to mention the Gospel of S. 
 John ; but it is remarkable that fifty years before, 
 this Gospel had been commented on by a Gnostic 
 writer. 1 Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr, wrote 
 a book called by some a Diatesseron, and by others 
 a Diapente. It has been appealed to as a proof 
 that the Four canonical Gospels were then known 
 and recognized, and that of these Tatian formed a 
 harmony. But this is begging the question. Ac- 
 cording to one account, the book was made up of 
 five narratives which he harmonized ; but we do 
 not know that any one of the canonical Gospels was 
 employed in the compilation. The book was a 
 
 1 Yet he does not venture to class S. John's Gospel among the 
 Holy Scriptures. That term he reserves for the Old Testament 
 alone: "The Sacred Scriptures, and other spiritual writers, of 
 which latter John," &c. 
 
124 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 Gospel, a sacred narrative composed from four or 
 five independent sources, the collections, probably, 
 of four Palestinian and Syriac Churches. This 
 Gospel or Harmony of Tatian was in use till late. 
 For in the fifth century Theodoret found it in the 
 hands of the Catholics in his diocese. He collected 
 as many as two hundred copies, and replaced them 
 by the canonical Gospels. 
 
 The very first instance we have of a collection of 
 epistles was that made by the heretic Marcion. 
 He had a Gospel, 1 and what he called an Apos- 
 tolicon, which contained the following epistles in this 
 order, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Thessalo- 
 nians, Laodiceans, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians. 
 
 The " Canon of Muratori " is found in a MS. of 
 the eighth century, copied from an earlier MS. It 
 is a list of books read in the church to which the 
 writer, an African, belonged. It is not an authori- 
 tative list, but a private one, by an unknown writer, 
 of apparently the end of the second century. The 
 portion of the MS. containing an account of the 
 Gospels is unfortunately imperfect, but there is 
 mention of Luke and John ; then the writer passes 
 to the Acts, and says that they do not contain the 
 passion of S. Peter and the journey of S. Paul into 
 Spain, which must be read elsewhere. 
 
 1 This Gospel I have shown in my ' Lost and Hostile Gospels ' to 
 have been the first edition of S. Luke's Gospel, before it had been 
 subjected to revision. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 125 
 
 This is the first direct mention of the Acts of the 
 Apostles in ancient literature. 
 
 Then the writer goes on to name the epistles of 
 S. Paul in this order, Corinthians, Ephesians, 
 Philippians, Colossians, Galatians, Thessalonians, 
 and Romans. The epistle to the Laodiceans and 
 that to the Alexandrines (he probably means the 
 epistle to the Hebrews) the African Church to which 
 the writer belonged did not, he says, read. 
 
 He next enumerates the epistle of Jude, and two 
 of S. John, but in ambiguous terms, as if they were 
 apocryphal. 1 The epistle of S. James and the two 
 of S. Peter he did not know T . 
 
 Then he names the two Apocalypses of S. John 
 and S. Peter as received, but some, he says, refused 
 to read them in the Church. 
 
 If we turn next to Irenaeus we find him quoting 
 as " Scripture " the epistle of S. Clement and the 
 Pastor of Hermas. 
 
 Tertullian gives an exalted place to some of the 
 books we now acknowledge as canonical, but he 
 relegates the epistle to the Hebrews to a position 
 not of authority, but of edification, classing it with 
 the Pastor of Hermas. His list of sacred writers 
 consists of the four Gospels, the Acts, the epistles 
 of Paul, one of S. John, and the Apocalypse ; it 
 
 1 " Epistola sane Jude et superscrictio (sic) Johannis duas in 
 catholica habentur et sapientia Salomonis ab amicis in honorem 
 ipsius scripta." For et read probably ut. 
 
 L 
 
126 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 was without the epistles of S. Peter, the second of 
 S. John, and those of Jude and James. The epistle 
 to the Hebrews he held to have been written by 
 S. Barnabas. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria quotes from the books 
 then in use in his Church ; its canon included the 
 epistle to the Hebrews, attributed to S. Paul, not 
 the epistle of S. James ; it contained also the epistle 
 of Barnabas, the Pastor of Hermas, the epistle of 
 Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, the Preach- 
 ing and Apocalypse of S. Peter, the traditions of 
 Matthias, and the gospel of theEgyptians, all which 
 are apocryphal. In quoting from these he intro- 
 duces the texts as drawn from "the Scriptures." 
 
 By the fourth century a tolerable consensus of 
 opinion had been formed on the respective merits 
 of the apostolic writings. 1 The Revelation of S. 
 John, after having been regarded as the only inspired 
 
 1 The most ancient extant manuscript of the Greek Bible is the 
 Codex Sinaiticus : it contains the canonical and apocryphal writings 
 of the Old Testament, and with the canonical books of the New, the 
 epistle of Barnabas and the " Pastor " ; the Alexandrine Codex adds 
 the epistle of S. Clement. The Clermont Codex of the seventh 
 century contains thirteen epistles of S. Paul, and a list of the books 
 accounted canonical ; it contains the usual books of the Old Testa- 
 ment to Chronicles, then the Psalms, and five books of Solomon 
 (including Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus), sixteen prophets, three books 
 of the Maccabees, Judith, Esdras (i. e. Nehemiah), Esther, Job, and 
 Tobit. The list of New Testament works comprehends the four 
 Gospels in this order, Matthew, John, Mark, Luke, then the epistles 
 to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, to Timothy, 
 Titus, Colossians, Philemon ; two of S. Peter, S. James, three of 
 S. John, that of Jude, that of Barnabas, the Revelation of S. John, 
 
BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 1 2? 
 
 book of the New- Covenant, came to be considered 
 as of doubtful authenticity, and had to struggle 
 against unjust suspicion raised by its association 
 with other Apocalypses of more than questionable 
 genuineness. 
 
 By the third century also the writings of the 
 Apostles had assumed a position of authority, and 
 were regarded as inspired. Yet tradition main- 
 tained its place as superior, as that to which final 
 appeal was made. 
 
 This is no gratuitous supposition ; it is a fact 
 attested by all the organs of the Catholic Church, 
 as it emerges victorious from its contest with 
 Gnosticism. 
 
 To prove this assertion it is necessary to make 
 citations, and one is embarrassed by the number 
 that offer themselves. The "rule of faith," which 
 united and directed the Church, consisted in a pro- 
 fession of belief in the one God who created the 
 world and of His Son, the Word, who appeared in 
 the fulness of time, born of a woman, a Virgin 
 mother, who preached a new law, died crucified, rose 
 from the grave, ascended into heaven, sent down 
 the Holy Ghost to guide the Church which He had 
 founded, and would come at the last day as judge. 
 
 This was Christianity, the rule, the canon of the 
 
 the Acts of the Apostles, the Pastor, the Acts of S. Paul, and the 
 Revelation of S. Peter. It did not contain the epistles to the Philip- 
 pians and to the Thessalonians. This in the seventh century ! I 
 
128 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 Church. 1 Christian faith was a matter of facts, not 
 of books. 
 
 No doubt the faithful desired to know more 
 details than were supplied them by their Creed, but 
 this was all that was necessary. The study of the 
 details would be matter of curiosity, of edification, 
 but not of vital importance. 2 
 
 Consequently, far from appealing to Scripture 
 to establish doctrines on a ground on which victory 
 would be uncertain, the primitive Fathers invariably 
 appealed to tradition, and if they referred to the 
 writings of the Apostles, it was only to show that 
 they accorded with Catholic tradition. 3 
 
 Beyond the accepted faith, " all Scriptural study 
 served only to upset the stomach and the brain." 4 
 Heretics could always wriggle out of a contest 
 through the aid of texts. There was, therefore, 
 but one mode of confuting them, and that was by 
 
 1 Regula fidei, kclvoov iKK\r](ri(TTLK6s. 
 
 2 li Ignorare melius est, ne quod non debeas noris, quia quod debeas 
 nosti. Fides tua te salvum facit, non exercitatio scripturarum. Fides 
 in regula posita est, habens legem, et salutem de observatione legis ; 
 exercitatio autem in curiositate consistit, habens gloriam solam de 
 peritiae studio. Cedat curiositas fidei, cedat gloria saluti." — Tertull., 
 ' De Prsescr. Hseret.,' c. 14. 
 
 3 " Ergo non ad scripturas provocandum est, nee in his constituen- 
 dum certamen quibus aut nulla aut incerta victoria est .... nunc 
 solum disputandum est, cui competat fides ipsa ? a quo et per quos et 
 quando et quibus sit tradita disciplina qua hunt Christiani ? Ubi enim 
 apparuerit esse veritatem disciplinae et fidei, illic erit Veritas scriptu- 
 rarum et expositionem et omnium traditionum." — Tertull., Ibid., c. 19. 
 
 4 "Nihil proficit congressio scripturarum nisi ut aut stomachi 
 quis ineat eversionem aut cerebri." — Ibid., c. 19. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 1 29 
 
 pointing to the unaltering traditions of the Church, 
 preserved as a sacred deposit by the bishops whom 
 the Apostles instituted, or their successors. 1 
 
 It is unnecessary to multiply citations. The 
 Catholic Church held steadfastly throughout the 
 Early Ages to this opinion — an opinion not un- 
 reasonable, inasmuch as for three hundred years 
 tradition remained constant, whereas the canon of 
 Scripture was in a state of flux, some books being 
 regarded as canonical here and rejected as apocry- 
 phal there ; and also, because the Church existed 
 before a line of Scripture had been written, and 
 Scripture, when written, was only the echo of 
 primitive tradition. 
 
 We must now consider the reasons which led 
 the Church eventually to canonize the writings of 
 the Apostles. 
 
 As time passed, the eye looked back from the 
 pettiness and distractions of the present to the 
 past, and magnified the perfection and grandeur of 
 the first founders of the Church. It was a natural 
 feeling ; nations have their heroic age, the age of 
 Arthur, of Charlemagne, of Barbarossa, and the 
 Church had its heroic age also, that of the Apostles. 
 As centuries elapsed, the writings of these founders 
 of the Church would naturally be treated with 
 
 1 Tfy TrapddocTLV rcoy airocroXoiiu iv irdcrr) iKKXrjcriq Trdpecmv kva- 
 yvcopicraL ro7s raXrjOf) bpav efle'Aoucri, Kal e^o^e*/ /caTafufyte?v roiis 
 virb tqqu airoffToAwp Karacrradeuras iincrKoirovs Kal rods diade^a/^evovs 
 avTols ews Tifxwv. — Iren., ' Adv. Haer.,' in. 3. 
 
 K 
 
130 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 respect, then with awe ; first as expressions of 
 opinion to be listened to reverentially, then to be 
 heard as infallible oracles. 
 
 But the Church would, perhaps, never have 
 attached such an importance to the fragments of 
 the literature of the first age, had not her attention 
 been directed to it by the Gnostics. It is a remark- 
 able fact, that the Gnostic heretics, a sect heathen 
 rather than Christian, were the first to appeal to 
 these Scriptures as ultimate authorities. 
 
 The Gnostics sought some ground on which to 
 erect a fantastic theology of aeons and emanations. 
 The living tradition of the Church they could not 
 touch. What authority could the Gnostics pit 
 against Catholic tradition ? They seized on the 
 New Testament Scriptures, and claimed them as 
 witnesses to their error. The Apostles, said they, 
 had taught Gnosticism, their successors had sub- 
 verted their teaching. It was the first instance of 
 the Bible against the Church in controversy. 
 
 Thus, the first commentary ever written on a 
 Gospel was that by a Gnostic on S. John's; 1 
 S. Paul's writings these heretics hailed as redolent 
 of Gnosticism. To the Old Testament they would 
 not appeal, as, according to their doctrine, it was 
 the work of an inferior, if not of an evil, principle. 
 
 1 Papias wrote a commentary on the sayings of the Lord by 
 Matthew, but not on the First Gospel, which was not then com- 
 piled, or at least not known to him in its composite form. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRA TION. 1 3 * 
 
 They were, therefore, forced to exalt S. Paul and 
 S. John into positions of infallibility, and their 
 scriptures as criteria of truth, — past revelations 
 of the divine Spirit, opposed to the living inspiration 
 of the Church. 
 
 When the existing Gospels did not suit their 
 purpose, they added to them or fabricated others ; 
 at least they were accused of doing so. But the 
 fact of the accusation, true or false, proves that the 
 ground on which Gnosticism opposed the Church 
 was the same as that occupied many centuries later 
 by Protestantism against Catholicism — the claim 
 to be scriptural rather than traditional. 
 
 This appeal by the Gnostics to the Apostles and 
 Gospels necessitated a vindication of their ortho- 
 doxy from the doctors of the Church. Their 
 attention was drawn to the holy writings, and they 
 laboured to show that the genuine teaching of the 
 Lord and of the Apostles was consistent with 
 the traditional faith, and not opposed to it, as the 
 Gnostics contended; and that those books which 
 did not thus harmonize with Catholic doctrine were 
 impudent forgeries. 
 
 The writings of the Apostles are the first link in 
 the chain of tradition. To interpret them one 
 must be in communion with the Church and par- 
 take of the Spirit. The holy tradition could subsist 
 well enough without paper and ink, and if the 
 Apostles had written nothing, appeal would be to 
 
 K 2 
 
1 3 2 BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 
 
 the tradition of the Churches they had founded, 
 without chance of error. 1 
 
 In A.D. 190 Serapion, bishop of Antioch, found 
 that the Church of Rhossus in his diocese used a 
 Gospel attributed to S. Peter. He suffered it to be 
 read, till it was told him that it favoured Docetic 
 views of our Lord's person. He at once forbad the 
 use of the Gospel. He did not ask if it were 
 authentic or not, but whether it agreed with the 
 traditional faith of the Church, and because it did 
 not do so, or he thought that it did not, he con- 
 demned it. 
 
 In the synoptical Gospels there was apparently an 
 account of a solemn anointing of our Lord after His 
 baptism. That some such a rite took place at the 
 time, we learn from a fragment of the Gospel of the 
 Hebrews which has been preserved, and it was on 
 account of this that He received the name of Christ 
 — the Anointed One. But the Docetae fastened on 
 this incident, and built their heresy upon it. It 
 was therefore expunged from the Gospels, and the 
 gap filled in S. Luke's by an unmeaning gene- 
 alogy. 2 
 
 1 TloXXh ZQvt) rwv fiapfidpoov r&v ets Xpicrrbv TriorrcvSj/roop x^P^ 
 Xaprov Koi fxeXavos yeypafM/j,evr)j/ exovres dia irp. cty. iv to?s Kapdiais 
 r)]v (rwrrjpiav Kal tV apxoLiav irapofioo'iv (pyXdorcrovres. — Iren., III. 4, 
 
 §2- 
 
 Ovk ap* eSet irpbs ras apxaiordras a7ro8payue?j/ e/c/cATjctas . . . . 
 Xafielv rb acrcpaXh Kal evapyh. — Iren., III. 4, § I. 
 
 2 I have shown this pretty conclusively in my ' Lost and Hostile 
 Gospels.' 
 
BIBLICAL INS P IRA TION. 1 3 3 
 
 S. Jerome and S. Epiphanius tell us plainly 
 that the Catholics cut out certain passages from 
 the Gospels, which they thought gave occasion 
 to error, or which they thought were interpolations. 
 
 All this shows that both Gospels and Epistles 
 were regarded by the Primitive Church in a very 
 different light from that in which we now view them. 
 
 Theophilus of Antioch, in A.D. 180, does indeed 
 attribute to the authors of the Gospels the same 
 divine inspiration which moved the prophets among 
 the Hebrews, and the Sibyls among the Greeks, 
 and he calls a saying of S. Paul "the divine word," 
 but when comparing the writings of the Old Testa- 
 ment with the Gospel of S. John, he calls the former 
 " Sacred Scriptures," and refuses to rank with them 
 the divine Apostle. 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow farther the fortunes 
 of the books which now constitute our New Testa- 
 ment. The collections of different Churches were 
 compared, and by degrees those which the majority 
 regarded as of undoubted genuineness came to be 
 held in the highest respect, and hesitation charac- 
 terized the treatment of those which were not in 
 general circulation. 
 
 The Abyssinian Church, at the present day, has 
 not the same canon as the Greek, or the Coptic, 
 or the Roman Church. The Roman has not the 
 same canon as the Anglican Church, In the third 
 and fourth centuries every diocesq had its canon, 
 
134 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 formed, not authoritatively by Council, but by acci- 
 dent, or the choice of the bishop. 
 
 A constant sifting went on, and little by little the 
 chaff was blown out, leaving only wheat 
 
 But the canon has been ever in flux. Books 
 which we treat as apocryphal, primitive Churches 
 accepted as authentic ; and books which we believe 
 to be genuine they rejected as apocryphal. 
 
 It is necessary, before we go any farther, to con- 
 sider what was the idea of inspiration held by the 
 Church in the apostolic age and in the two or three 
 centuries that followed. 
 
 Of this there can be no doubt. 
 
 The Holy Ghost was given to the Church and to 
 every baptized member of it, so that the whole 
 Church was inspired ; every Christian was under 
 its influence. 
 
 But what direction did this inspiration take ? It 
 took one — the preservation and transmission of the 
 truth. The truth revealed by Christ was the heri- 
 tage of the Church, and this was orally delivered to 
 the baptized, and expounded by the bishops. The 
 Church, by virtue of her inspiration, was assured 
 that this deposit would never be corrupted. 
 
 Consequently the Gospels fell under the condi- 
 tions of ordinary and general inspiration ; they 
 contained the truth, because what they related 
 accorded with what the Church held traditionally. 
 Where a Gospel did not agree with this traditional 
 faith it was rejected, or altered without compunc- 
 
BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 1 3 5 
 
 tion. The epistles, moreover, were inspired, but 
 so were all epistles from bishops or Churches ; the 
 epistle of the Church of Rome to the Corinthian 
 Church, the epistle of Clement, were read as in- 
 spired, because the Roman Church and Clement 
 were inspired, and the epistles of Paul and James 
 and Peter stood on precisely the same footing. 
 They were the expression of the thoughts and 
 feelings of the first bishops, higher in honour, as 
 founders, but not more fully inspired than Clement 
 or Ignatius or Polycarp ; for the same Spirit which 
 breathed on Paul breathed also on Clement with 
 undiminished effluence. 
 
 But there was one form of inspiration special and 
 extraordinary, which the early Church set apart, 
 and regarded in a very different light. This was 
 the spirit of prophecy. 1 This inspiration left un- 
 touched doctrine and past facts ; it was confined 
 to future events. This alone was the miraculous 
 outpouring of the Holy Ghost, distinguishing him 
 who had it, and elevating his utterances above 
 all others. Consequently the primitive Church 
 regarded the Apocalypses of S. John, of S. Peter, 
 of Enoch, the Testament of the twelve Patriarchs, 
 and the dreamings of the Sibyls as supremely in- 
 spired. It is this which accounts for the singular 
 
 1 Philo Judaeus, "On Drunkenness" (xxxvi.), gives us the pre- 
 vailing idea of inspiration in this century : * ' Those under the 
 influence of Divine inspiration have the soul excited, as if it were 
 frenzied, and the body becomes ruddy and fiery, ... so that many 
 foolish people fancy them to be intoxicated." — Cf. Acts ii. 15. 
 
136 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 fact that the Revelation of S. John is the first book 
 of the New Testament which is spoken of as in- 
 spired. Towards the fourth century these Apoca- 
 lypses had fallen into disrepute, and the Revelation 
 of S. John suffered from the reaction ; so that it 
 had to struggle for recognition. 
 
 Such, then, whether we like them or not, are the 
 plain facts of the history of the light in which the 
 early Fathers viewed the canonical books now com- 
 posing our New Testament, and of their fortunes in 
 the first three centuries. 
 
 A knowledge of these facts will prevent us from 
 falling into those errors which are so common, only 
 because ignorance is one of the commonest of 
 things. 
 
 We have now cleared the way for the formation 
 of a theory of inspiration which will not run counter 
 to facts. 
 
 1. The current book theory, that the New Testa- 
 ment, divinely inspired in every line, is that on 
 which the whole of Christianity rests, it is very 
 evident will not hold water for a moment in the 
 presence of facts. 
 
 For, 1st, No such book existed in the first ages ; 
 even now its contents are not settled. The Church 
 existed and throve without the book, portions of 
 the Church for two centuries were without one 
 single document now found in the New Testament, 
 and read other . documents which have since been 
 lost. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 137 
 
 2ndly, Men in different ages have decided what 
 books to choose and regard as divinely inspired, 
 and what books to reject as apocryphal. And we 
 owe our New Testament to the authority of Cran- 
 mer, Ridley, Latimer, &c, who chose to accept 
 such and such documents, which also happened 
 to be used and accepted by the Roman Church. 
 They received these documents on the authority of 
 the Roman divines ; and relying on them implicitly, 
 they rejected books which are read as divinely in- 
 spired in other branches of the Church. 
 
 If the book theory be true, then the Roman 
 divines who drew up the canon of the New Testa- 
 ment are made infallible. 
 
 So also, to accept the Jewish canon of Old Testa- 
 ment writers infalliblizes the rabbis who compiled 
 it after the Captivity. 
 
 According to the Protestant theory, then, certain 
 unknown Jewish rabbis and certain Roman pontiffs 
 were infallibly guided in the selection of the books 
 which the English binder puts between two boards, 
 and stamps " The Bible." 
 
 This theory carries its impracticability on its face. 
 We will have nothing more to say to it. 
 
 Let us come to close quarters with the ideas of 
 Revelation and Inspiration. 
 
 2. Revelation is the manifestation by God to 
 man of truths man cannot discover by the aid of 
 reason. 
 
' 
 
 138 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 Revelation cannot include those matters which 
 are attainable by intellectual process, for if so, God 
 by revealing a truth would be arresting in its pro- 
 gress that reason He has given, — He would be 
 undoing His own work. 
 
 The existence of God, as I have said elsewhere, 
 escapes demonstration. Every attempt to prove 
 this proposition rests on a petitio principii, is 
 built on arbitrary hypotheses. One demonstration 
 after another has been constructed, and succes- 
 sively ruined. Every one possesses a vulnerable 
 heel. 
 
 The Incarnation, again, is an undemonstrable 
 verity. No amount of miracles, no moral miracles 
 even, performed by Christ, could establish His 
 divinity to the human intellect. For the mind of 
 man cannot embrace the conception of the God- 
 head in all its relations ; therefore it cannot realize 
 its union with the manhood. The Incarnation is a 
 revelation, or it is nothing. 
 
 3. Revelation involves Inspiration. For revela- 
 tion being the manifestation of a super-rational 
 truth, that revelation must be made to a man, and 
 that man who is the organ of the Spirit, to commu- 
 nicate the truth to the world, is inspired. 
 
 Inspiration, then, is the investing of certain men 
 with the office of proclaiming revealed truths to 
 other men. 
 
 Inspiration is therefore for a definite purpose — 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 139 
 
 the conveyance to the world of truths which could 
 only be obtained through revelation. 
 
 From this it follows that outside of this purpose 
 the organ of inspiration is liable to error. Thus : 
 The author of the epistle to the Hebrews was in- 
 spired to draw the line between the ceremonial law 
 which was fulfilled, and the moral law which was 
 permanent ; but inspiration did not prevent him 
 from falling into error as to the position of the altar 
 of incense. 
 
 And it by no means follows that because God 
 chose a certain man as the organ for revealing His 
 truth, that inspiration obliterated his natural cha- 
 racteristics, imperfections of temper, or intellect, or 
 education. 
 
 Thus : S. Paul was inspired to declare to the 
 world the divinity of the man Christ Jesus and the 
 mystery of the Atonement. But inspiration did 
 not prevent him from using hasty language about 
 the elder Apostles, or enable him to conduct an 
 argument to its end without lapsing into digressions 
 and losing the thread of his reasoning. 
 
 4. We may append a corollary. 
 
 As certain of the truths which it is necessary for 
 man to know are historical facts, subject to obser- 
 vation, and subject therefore also to inaccurate 
 observation, inspiration extends to the record of 
 such facts, and is a guaranty to men that the re- 
 cords of these facts are substantially true. 
 
HO BIBLICAL INSPIRATION, 
 
 Consequently, if it be necessary for us to know 
 that Christ was born of a virgin, died really, rose 
 from the tomb, and ascended into heaven, then we 
 may rest satisfied that such records as we have 
 received of inspired writers contain true narratives 
 of these events. 
 
 But, inasmuch as the minor particulars of these 
 events are not of fundamental importance, therefore 
 we have no certainty that inspiration has extended 
 to these to the same extent. 
 
 For instance : There are serious discrepancies 
 in the accounts of the Resurrection by the four 
 Evangelists, which it is impossible to reconcile. 
 Of the fact of the Resurrection we can entertain no 
 doubt. The Evangelists were inspired to record 
 that ; but as the order in which the women went to 
 the sepulchre, the hour at which Christ rose, are 
 not matters of essential spiritual importance, affect- 
 ing salvation, into them human inaccuracy may 
 have crept. 
 
 5. Revelation involves an inspired Body to con- 
 serve it. If revealed truth be necessary for all 
 ages, then there must be a permanent inspiration 
 to declare it, to maintain the deposit uncorrupt. 
 
 If the Bible were a book which fell from heaven 
 complete in itself, then there might be no need for 
 a Church ; but as we know that the Bible is com- 
 posed of a number of independent documents, 
 selected from among a host of other documents, 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION, 14* 
 
 which the Church rejected, it is evident that the 
 Church must be inspired to choose aright, or there 
 is no guaranty that we have a revelation of God 
 in those books now bound up by her in one volume, 
 
 As a matter of fact, we know that no such a 
 thing as an isolated Book of Revelation existed 
 without a living inspired Body. 
 
 The revelation existed, and the inspiration was 
 given, before a line of writing was composed. 
 
 To the Hebrews was revealed the unity of God, 
 the fact of the creation of the world by God, and 
 His providential government of mankind. This 
 was their Tradition, their Creed, revealed to them 
 from of old. The Jewish Church was inspired to 
 maintain this sacred deposit ; and by virtue of its 
 inspiration, and in illustration of this revelation, it 
 collected and preserved all such books as contained 
 narratives of their history exemplifying God's pro- 
 vidential government, and prophetic sayings which 
 proved the continuance of inspiration in the Church. 
 By virtue of this inspiration, those who returned 
 from captivity recomposed in the Pentateuch the 
 fragmentary records of their past. The work may 
 have been that of ignorant lawyers, but for all that 
 it was the work of an inspired Church, so that we do 
 not receive the Old Testament writings on the autho- 
 rity of certain obscure scribes critically incompetent 
 to perform their task efficiently, but on the authority 
 of a Church animated by the Holy Ghost. 
 
1 42 BIB LIC A L INS P IRA TION. 
 
 So also with the New Testament. Historically 
 we know that the ultimate appeal was to Apostolic 
 Tradition. That was the revelation, the sacred de- 
 posit. This is matter of fact, I beg you to observe ; 
 it is no conjecture. It is a fact to which primitive 
 Christianity bears witness with one voice. There 
 were Gospels innumerable, prophetic revelations, 
 and apostolic epistles without number. Every 
 Church had its own Gospel, the echo of what it had 
 been taught orally of the Lord's deeds and words. 
 But none of these was authoritative. The only 
 authoritative revelation was the Truth delivered in 
 " a form of sound words " to the Baptized, 1 and 
 expounded by the bishops. "Nobody," says S. 
 Augustine, " commits this to writing that it may 
 be read : rather let your memory serve for a manu- 
 script, that you may be able to repeat without any 
 chance of forgetting what has been delivered to 
 you with so much pains." 2 
 
 And Rufinus says, " The last of their (the Apos- 
 tolic) ordinances was that these things should not 
 be written on paper or parchment, but retained in 
 the hearts of the faithful, that it might be certain 
 that none had learnt them from reading, but from 
 Apostolic Tradition." 3 
 
 1 The giving of the Creed to the Baptized was called the Tradi- 
 tion. The Baptized was then questioned what he believed, and he 
 repeated the Creed ; this was called the Reddition. 
 
 2 ' Serm. ad Careen./ § 1. 3 In Hurtley, 'De Fide,' p. 105. 
 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 143 
 
 I have trespassed so long on your time to-day 
 that I must conclude in few words. 
 
 If the Tradition of the Church be the Divine 
 Revelation, according to the theory of primitive 
 antiquity, then we may with composure listen to 
 the disclosures of critics relative to the books which 
 compose our Bible. The critics of to-day are only 
 doing what theologians for the first sixteen centuries 
 thought themselves justified in doing — examining 
 the authenticity of these documents, pointing out 
 interpolations here, forgeries there. An Armenian 
 prelate is at perfect liberty to question the genuine- 
 ness of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs 
 now read in his canon ; or an Abyssinian to dispute 
 the authenticity of the book of Enoch, which he 
 has been taught to regard as one of the Sacred 
 Scriptures ; or a Roman Catholic to doubt the 
 canonicity of the book of Judith ; or a Protestant 
 to express his opinion that the second epistle of 
 S. Peter is a forgery of the second century. 1 
 
 So long as a book agrees with the Revealed 
 Deposit it may be read for edification. Revelation 
 is not compromised if a book read in the Church be 
 proved apocryphal, for revelation is independent of 
 texts ; at least according to Primitive teaching. 
 
 In England we are singularly ignorant of the 
 
 1 Didynius of Alexandria, A.D. 392, says of it, " Non est igno- 
 randum prassentem epistolam esse falsatam quse licet publicetur non 
 tamen in canone est." The Greek is lost. 
 
144 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 
 
 results achieved by the biblical critics of Tubingen, 
 Jena, and Strassburg. The names of Baur, Volk- 
 mar, Reuss, Colani, Scholten, Hilgenfeld, are 
 scarcely known to us. But we cannot go on in 
 this ignorance. The press will reveal to English 
 people what has been done abroad in this field of 
 inquiry, and before it our faith will be like a vessel 
 beset with hummocks of ice in a gale. The old 
 theory, which has been so smooth and white and 
 firm, will go to pieces before the breath of criti- 
 cism, and will grind us and cast us into the depths. 
 It is therefore imperative on us to fall back to 
 primitive views of Revelation as into a safe harbour, 
 and let down our anchors where there is a firm 
 floor. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 In his ' Confessions/ S. Augustine draws a lively 
 picture of the distress and perplexity that his mind 
 underwent in its efforts to account for the presence 
 of evil in the world ; and he bitterly reproaches 
 himself for not having perceived that evil has no 
 real existence, that it is only the absence of good. 
 
 He adopted the Stoic view of evil, a view neither 
 comforting nor satisfactory. 
 
 Later in life he found occasion to alter his 
 opinion, and to pronounce in favour of the positive 
 nature of evil, so far, at least, as human action 
 is concerned ; and he was driven to the hypothesis 
 that the real cause of evil was to be sought in the 
 freedom of the will. This conclusion was forced 
 on him by the repugnance he felt to attribute to 
 the perfectly good Being the direct authorship of 
 evil. 
 
 From the same premises, Marcus Aurelius drew 
 a conclusion which denied the positive existence of 
 evil. If the whole universe, he urged, proceeds 
 
 L 
 
246 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 from an intelligent Being, it is impossible to con- 
 ceive anything in it which is evil ; that is to say, 
 which is opposed to the perfection of the whole. 
 Those things which we imagine to be evils are only 
 inferior forms of good. 
 
 But Aurelius seems to have derived as little 
 satisfaction from his theory as did Augustine. 
 Through the meditations of the Emperor transpires 
 a settled melancholy, only thinly veiled by the 
 stately indifference of the stoic. As for Augus- 
 tine, he does not affect to conceal how wretched 
 the whole subject made him, " I was crushed 
 down and stifled under these thoughts. I sought 
 concerning evil, and I sought ill ; and in my search 
 I saw not evil" 
 
 The problem which depressed and bewildered 
 Augustine and Aurelius is one, the solution of 
 which has been incessantly sought ever since ; and 
 we may say with confidence, that no solution of it 
 has been w T holly satisfactory. 
 
 If we deny the real existence of evil, so as to 
 free the infinitely good God of any part in the 
 production, in the authorship, of evil, then we fight 
 against one of the most primary, general, and 
 firmly-rooted convictions of the conscience, we 
 blow up the foundations of morality. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we allow the positive ex- 
 istence of evil, then we make God more or less 
 directly responsible for the evil that is in the world. 
 
THE MYSTER Y OF E VI L. I 47 
 
 If, again, to escape this difficulty, we exalt evil 
 into an independent sphere, and attribute it an 
 origin outside of God ; then we give to the uni- 
 verse two principles, one good, one bad, in inces- 
 sant conflict. We fall into Mazdeism, 
 
 If, again, we regard the infinite God as the 
 source of spirit, and evil as resulting from the 
 union of spirit with matter — if we consider evil to 
 be the yielding of the former to the seductions of 
 the latter, and good to be the emancipation of the 
 soul from the fetters of carnal appetites, then we 
 make matter evil, having its source in evil ; there 
 are in this case two principles, one spiritual, the 
 other material. We fall into Manichaeism. 
 
 Mazdeism and Manichaeism have been the Scylla 
 and Charybdis through which the Church has had 
 to make her way. Each theory is so simple, so 
 easily comprehensible, so plausible, that it has 
 obtained ready adhesion from unphilosophic minds. 
 
 There was an historical reason also, why this 
 should be the case. 
 
 From the fourth century before Christ Jewdom 
 was divided into two strongly marked sections, 
 the Palestinian, with its centres at Babylon and 
 Jerusalem ; and the Hellenistic, dispersed through 
 Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, with its centre at 
 Alexandria. 
 
 These two divisions, as I pointed out in my sixth 
 lecture, were governed by entirely distinct and 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 opposite principles ; for each section was exposed 
 to opposite influences. 
 
 When Zerubbabel led up some of the exiles from 
 Chaldsea, it was only the poor and ignorant who 
 followed him. The wealthy and learned remained 
 at Babylon ; and though afterwards, when Jerusalem 
 recovered some of its ancient prosperity, and be- 
 came the centre of the Rabbinic revival and organi- 
 zation, many Jews, no doubt, returned to the holy 
 city, yet Babylon and Pumbeditha retained flourish- 
 ing colonies, which throve under the patronage of 
 the Persian monarchs. 
 
 The Jews who returned to Jerusalem with Zerub- 
 babel, and afterwards with Ezra, had not been long 
 enough acquainted with the Persians to be affected 
 by their religious doctrines. But it was not so 
 with the large body that remained. Mazdeism 
 presented too many points of resemblance to 
 Mosaism, not to disarm the suspicion of the rabbis 
 of Babylon and Pumbeditha ; and the large and 
 important school of exegesis formed on the banks 
 of the Euphrates, unconsciously became infected 
 with Mazdean doctrines. The Babylonish school 
 was regarded by the Jerusalem school as rigidly 
 orthodox, and the intercommunication of teachers 
 and ideas between both was frequent : thus the 
 doctrines of Zarathustra gradually infiltrated the 
 whole body of Palestinian rabbinism. Jewish de- 
 monology was the result of this intercourse. 
 
THE MYS TER Y OF E VIL. 1 49 
 
 In the book of Tobit, a production of the Baby- 
 lonish Jews, Aishma-deva, a Zoroastrian div, appears 
 as a Rabbinic devil. 
 
 The demonology of the Jews of Palestine and 
 Babylon took a distinct form two centuries before 
 Christ. It was then only that the serpent which 
 tempted Eve w r as interpreted to be an incarnation 
 of an evil spirit. 
 
 Some commentators have supposed that the 
 Azazel to whom the goat charged with the sins of 
 the people was devoted, was a devil. " And Aaron 
 shall cast lots upon the two goats ; one lot shall 
 be for the Lord, and the other for Azazel." l . But 
 the word Azazel has no roots in the Hebrew 
 language, is a foreign word, and only reappears in 
 the book of Enoch, w r here a fallen angel is called by 
 this name. Not once does it recur in any of the ca- 
 nonical or apocryphal writings of the Old Testament. 
 
 The book of Job, composed probably in the 
 south of Palestine, at a very early date, and cer- 
 tainly outside of the influence of the Mosaic law, if 
 it did not precede its enunciation, is the first to 
 mention Satan. But in that book Satan is not a 
 devil, but an accusing angel, belonging to the same 
 category as the angels of destruction who wield 
 the sword of plague and death. 2 
 
 1 Lev. xvi. 8, io. 
 
 * 2 Sam. xxiv. 15, 16 ; Ps. IxxYiiL 49 ; xxxv. 5, 6 ; 2 Kings xix. 
 35 j Isa. xxxvii. 36. 
 
15° THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 According to the doctrine of the Jews before the 
 captivity, the angels of God were divided into 
 classes ; and the function of one class was the 
 execution of the judgments of God. Such was the 
 angel who smote the first-born of Egypt, such 
 the angel who was arrested at the threshing-floor 
 of Araunah. And to this class belonged Satan. 
 In the Psalms the name Satan occurs, but never as 
 that of a devil, it is used simply as " an adversary/' 
 " Let mine adversaries — Satans — be clothed with 
 shame," " For my love they are become my adver- 
 saries — Satans," " Let an adversary — -Satan— stand 
 at his right hand," &C. 1 
 
 In Zechariah, Satan is represented as an accusing 
 angel of the high-priest, Joshua ; approaching very 
 nearly to the place given him in the book of Job. 
 
 In the first book of Chronicles, a late composi- 
 tion, Satan is said to have prompted David to 
 number the people ; whereas in the earlier record, 
 it would appear that God inspired the thought. 
 Here, then, Satan is an angel like the lying spirit 
 sent to deceive the prophets of Ahab ; 3 but not yet 
 a devil. So in Genesis, God moves Abraham to 
 sacrifice Isaac, but in the book of Jubilees, a 
 composition of a date not later than the reign 
 of Herod the Great, it is the demon Mastema who 
 prompts Abraham. 
 
 1 Ps. xxxviii. 20; lxxi. 13 ; cix. 4, 6, 20, 29. 
 
 2 2 Sam. xxiVa I. 3 I Kings xxii. 22. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. IS I 
 
 But slowly, among the Babylonish and Pales- 
 tinian Jews, a system of demonology was being 
 elaborated which appears complete in their later 
 writings, exhibiting at every point indications of 
 Mazdean influence. 
 
 It was otherwise with the Alexandrine Jews. 
 The colony had been founded before the demon- 
 ology of the returned captives had been formed 
 They therefore had no preconceived notions on the 
 subject to direct the development of their doctrines 
 on the nature and origin of evil 
 
 They had parted from the parent trunk before 
 the serpent had begun to be regarded as the devil ; 
 and in their philosophy they explained the fall of 
 man in an entirely different way from the Pales- 
 tinian and Babylonish schools. 
 
 Manichaeism was not yet constituted as a system, 
 but all the ideas Manes appropriated were in exis- 
 tence before he was born. Alexandria was the 
 market-place of the East, where met all the philo- 
 sophies and religions of the Orient, modifying and 
 colouring one another. From India came the 
 notion of the inherent evil in matter. It at once 
 arrested the attention of the Alexandrine Jewish 
 philosophers, and became an integral part of their 
 system. 
 
 According to Philo, who reproduces the ideas 
 current long before his time, the soul is Adam, Eve 
 is matter. The Fall is the union of soul and body. 
 
152 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 The ethereal, divine Spirit, the breath of God, felt 
 an attraction towards that which was earthly, 
 material ; it left its high estate, entered into a 
 carnal body, and by so doing, fell. 
 
 Thence flowed a moral system. If the union 
 of body with soul constitutes the evil which 
 oppresses man, then the whole effort of his life 
 must be emancipation from the affections of the 
 flesh, the interests which attach him to the world. 
 In a word, the only ethics of Philonism is asce- 
 ticism. 
 
 Covert Manichseism, which entered the Church 
 with the converts of Alexandria, penetrated its 
 veins, and filled the deserts of Scete and Nitria 
 with hermits, and afterwards the rocks and forests 
 of western Europe. 
 
 The two systems mixed but never mingled, and 
 manifested throughout the history of the Church a 
 tendency to separate into independent philosophies 
 of evil. 
 
 We will now leave the historical side of the sub- 
 ject, and consider another— the philosophical one. 
 Mazdeism and Manichseism, still alive and active in 
 the Church, are not systems even tolerable to a 
 cultivated reason. We must set them aside to 
 consider another. 
 
 i. But, first, let us establish the Fact of the 
 existence of evil. 
 
 There lies open before every man an election 
 
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. I S3 
 
 between two courses — physical or intellectual de- 
 velopment. He may perfect himself as an animal 
 or as a man. The Red Indian is as noble a type 
 of physical development as it is possible to attain 
 to ; but his intellectual position is very low down 
 in the scale. 
 
 To be able-bodied, and enjoy rude health, the 
 cultivation of the higher nature must, to a certain 
 extent, be sacrificed. There is a certain amount 
 of vital force in every man ; if it be drawn upon 
 for the composition and corrosion of neurine, it 
 cannot be used for the construction and resolu- 
 tion of muscle. You cannot eat a loaf and have 
 it. It is a rare thing to find a student robust and 
 ruddy. 
 
 To sacrifice the cultivation of the higher faculties 
 in order exclusively to develop the physical condi- 
 tion, is an evil ; for it is the abandonment of a 
 superior aim for one which is inferior. 
 
 The duplicity of man's composition, therefore, 
 makes evil a possibility. 
 
 But the evil thus indicated is only a lower form 
 of good. It is good to be sturdy, — k is better to 
 be studious. 
 
 Does there exist evidence of evil different from, 
 and darker than this, which contains in itself no 
 apparent element of good ? I think that it cannot 
 be doubted that there does. 
 
 There is an evil which is inexplicable by merely 
 
154 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 supposing that the animal nature assumes prepon- 
 derance over the spiritual nature. For it is an 
 observable fact, that man has the faculty, and 
 exercises it, of not only suppressing the growth of 
 his intellect, but of simultaneously ruining his 
 physical powers. If man elected to be an animal 
 merely that he might become a more perfect and 
 splendid animal, the mystery of evil would be 
 simple enough. 
 
 Manichaeism saw that evil in man did arise from 
 the sacrifice of the spiritual to the animal nature, 
 and on this it built its theory. It made the animal 
 nature the source of evil. But this observation was 
 only a partial one ; and the theory based on it, 
 therefore, does not cover the whole ground. 
 
 It is perfectly certain that man, living as an 
 animal, can deliberately go against his animal 
 nature, and bring his physical organs into utter 
 degradation. He can live neither for his mind nor 
 for his body, but for the ruin of both. 
 
 It may be natural for a man to live as a savage, 
 but it is not natural for a savage to incapacitate 
 himself by debauchery from maintaining his life in 
 full vigour. 
 
 That a race of men should invade the land occu- 
 pied by another race and conquer it, is natural, but 
 not that a nation should exhaust itself by cruelties 
 and murder ; for such tend to no advantage physi- 
 cal or mental. 
 
THE MYSTER Y OF E VI L. 1 5 5 
 
 We may, I think, fairly conclude that there does 
 exist in the world evil which is unnatural ; that the 
 power to choose a course of life which conduces to 
 absolute ruin does exist in every man. 
 
 It is the observation of this unnatural evil which 
 has led to the formation of the idea that it is super- 
 natural ; that the influence which is exerted to draw 
 man into the ruin of his body and spirit stands in 
 immediate opposition to the influence which draws 
 man to the development and perfecting of his 
 entire nature. Thus Mazdeism has arisen, which 
 ranges the good and the evil principles in opposite 
 and nicely-balanced camps, and makes the moral 
 law consist in siding with the good principle against 
 that which is evil. 
 
 2. We are told again and again that the notion 
 of a personal devil, the author of all evil, is unphi- 
 losophical. 
 
 It is only unphilosophical if the personal devil be 
 exalted into a position such as that assigned him in 
 Mazdeism. 
 
 Dionysius laid this down as peremptorily as 
 M. Reville. u It is inadmissible/' said that great 
 doctor, " that there should exist two principles con- 
 trary the one to the other, in contest ; for, if so, 
 God himself would not be exempt from trouble and 
 contradiction, and all Being would be in incessant 
 struggle and confusion.'' 
 
 But, though it be inadmissible to exalt Satan 
 
156 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 into a principle of evil, it is not unphilosophic, h 
 presence of the facts of our experience of man, tc 
 suppose that such facts apply also to an angelic 
 creation. We know that men can, by an act of 
 free-will, refuse to develop their intellectual and 
 their physical faculties ; in a word, can oppose the 
 ideal of their nature. 
 
 Allowing that God may have created other 
 beings, spiritual existences with an ideal object of 
 perfection, and free-wills to enable them to advance 
 freely to that term, or to oppose it, th£n the exis- 
 tence of devils is no more unphilosophic than is the 
 existence of any degraded drunkard or prostitute 
 picked out of the gutter. 
 
 3. What, then, is evil ? 
 
 It is not a hostile power in conflict with God. 
 
 It is not inherent in matter and opposed to 
 spirit. 
 
 It is not a creation of God. 
 
 Dionysius answers, It has no positive existence. 
 It is a privation of good. 
 
 ~" It has been argued that evil, having no positive 
 existence, is the defect of good. But this is not 
 true. It is not evil in a beast to be without wings. 
 It is not evil in a plant to be without the power of 
 locomotion. But it is evil when a bird, designed 
 to fly, loses its wings, and when a beast, de- 
 signed to run, has its legs broken. 
 
 Evil exists in privation. That is, evil is the in- 
 
THE MYSTER Y OF E VIE 1 5 7 
 
 terference with the perfecting of the idea in each 
 object of creation. 
 
 Free-will makes evil a possibility, and free-will 
 makes duty a law. 
 
 If evil were a positive existence, it must spring 
 from God. But a good tree cannot bring forth evil 
 fruit, neither can a sw T eet spring pour forth bitter 
 water. Every other explanation of evil than that 
 given by Dionysius is unphilosophical, and leads to 
 Mazdeism or Manichseism. 
 
 But to deny the positive nature of evil is not 
 enough. It is not, and yet it is. There is no such 
 an existence as evil, what existence it has is good, 
 for existence is that which is, but nothing is which 
 is not of God. Evil is a wilful defect, declension, 
 from the ideal. It is only possible because free- 
 will exists. That which we call evil is evil because 
 it is not what it might be. 
 
 Even the devils, as Dionysius argues, are not 
 intrinsically evil, for that which is intrinsically evil 
 is not, cannot be. The devils have being, and that 
 being is of God. Inasmuch as they exist they 
 are good ; inasmuch as they are not w T hat they 
 might be, they are evil. 
 
 I cannot do better than quote the words of 
 Dionysius : " How can the demons, created by 
 God, be evil ? For Good produces and establishes 
 only good things. I answer, they are called evil, 
 not because they are, for they issue from good, and 
 
158 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 have obtained as their lot a good nature ; but 
 they are evil because of that which they are 
 not, having abandoned the conservation of their 
 principle. 
 
 " In what are the devils evil but in the fact of 
 their squandering, surrendering by habit and opera- 
 tion the divine good which was theirs ? " 
 
 4. The Stoic conception of evil as the absence 
 of good, as I said at the outset, is eminently 
 unsatisfactory. But this cannot be said of the 
 definition of evil as the privation of present good, 
 the voluntary non-accomplishment of ideal per- 
 fection. 
 
 From this definition of evil, what a magnificent 
 perspective of moral law opens out ! Good is the 
 striving of man to reach his ideal ; in the Apostle's 
 words, to reach the measure of the stature of the 
 fulness of Christ. 
 
 Some natures are richer in possibilities than 
 others ; there are various directions in which they 
 may grow and flower ; they can never, in this life, 
 amidst the circumstances that hedge them in, reach 
 their full glory of perfection ; yet they can always 
 strain after it, always aspire. And this aspira- 
 tion, this struggle, constitute the law of their life. 
 The law of growth, of progress, stamped on the 
 material world, is impressed also on that of 
 spirits. 
 
 To neglect that law, to have no such aspiration, 
 
THE MYS TEE Y OF E VIE 1 59 
 
 to abandon this struggle, constitutes eyil in the 
 moral realm. 
 
 Evil is wherever there is interference with ad- 
 vance to the ideal ; moral evil exists only where 
 the free-will intervenes. 
 
 The boy born with faculties which by cultivation 
 may make him a poet, a painter, a man of science. 
 a philosopher, is so hedged round by adverse circum- 
 stances, that these faculties never become effective. 
 He spends his life as a farm-labourer. This is evil 
 But there is no moral evil in the case. 
 
 But when circumstances do not interfere, and he, 
 having opportunities, neglects them, abandons the 
 task of accomplishing any of his intellectual ideals, 
 that he may live only as an animal, — there moral 
 evil exists. 
 
 But if the same youth wastes all his intellectual 
 opportunities, branches out in none of the higher 
 possibilities open to him, and does not even develop 
 his animal nature, but wrecks his constitution by 
 loose - living and drunkenness, — here moral evil 
 exists in full intensity. He has not aimed at or 
 achieved even one ideal, but has rejected every one. 
 
 Where there is no free-will there is no moral 
 evil. 
 
 There is another form of moral evil, which we 
 are prone to overlook. We are liable to forget 
 that from the moment of birth to the last gasp, it 
 is the duty of man to be incessantly aspiring, seek- 
 
1 60 THE MYS TER Y OF E VIL. 
 
 ing to know more, to see farther. He has no right 
 to halt at any moment and rest satisfied with what 
 he has attained. So to do is to incur moral guilt. 
 It is enough to indicate that there are such, too 
 many in number, I fear, in whom the zest for the 
 acquisition of knowledge is blunted. 
 
 " Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by." 1 
 
 1 Dante, ' Inferno,' Cant. in. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE INCARNATION, 
 
 In my fourth lecture I showed you that the motive 
 of creation was love for man existing potentially 
 in the mind of the Creator. 
 
 Man has a double nature : he is part spiritual, 
 part material, and therefore in him the possibility 
 of a fall from his ideal exists. 
 
 But to lead him to God, he has the world to gaze 
 upon, and in it God's 'thoughts are legible. But it is 
 quite possible for him to rest in the visible creation 
 without looking through it to the ideas of which it is 
 the expression, because, as to his body, he is animal ; 
 and to the animal the exterior of the world is all. 
 
 Now if God's motive in creation be love, as I 
 showed, and there exist in the essence of man's 
 nature the possibility of a fall ; then it is probable 
 that God would also provide a possibility of re- 
 storation. 
 
 But before considering further this point, let me 
 say a word or two on the duality in man, and its 
 consequences. 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE INCARNATION. 
 
 In man there are two principles, or two ideas, 
 not necessarily opposed, quite possible of con- 
 ciliation ; but the fact of this duality in man's 
 nature shows that in him lies the possibility of a 
 schism. 
 
 There are two elements in the universe, God and 
 phenomena. There are two possibilities open to 
 man possessed of a double nature. He may seek 
 God through nature, or he may seek nature for and 
 in itself. He may rest in the word, or seek the 
 reason of the word. 
 
 The possibility of temptation, and therefore ot 
 a fall, lies in the fact that there exists a pheno- 
 menal world, which may be mistaken by man for 
 the object to which his nature tends, to the obscura- 
 tion and oblivion of his spiritual ideal and pole. 
 By making that which is created, material, pheno- 
 menal, his goal, he deifies nature. Nature is a 
 god to the beast, because it is the sole object to 
 which it gravitates. 
 
 And man, by virtue of the duality of his nature, 
 is capable of gravitating like the beast. 
 
 But nature, which is mother to the beast, should 
 be only step-mother to man, said the ancients. 1 
 In that man is spiritual, he is in the likeness of 
 God ; in that he is material, he is in the likeness 
 of the world ; and this two-sidedness of his nature 
 makes him liable to fall from God. 
 
 1 The saying is in Philo ; whence he quoted it I do not know. 
 
THE INC A RNA TION. 1 6 3 
 
 But this is just a possibility which should have 
 for ever remained a possibility. 
 
 The animal that follows its instinct completes 
 the purpose of its life. Man who is governed by 
 his passions cannot be said to do so, for he 
 has given no room for expansion to his spiritual 
 nature. 
 
 The child and the savage are the puppets of 
 circumstance. That is to say, they are subject to 
 the fatal dominion of exterior forces. We com- 
 plain that they are capricious. They do not act 
 from rational motives, but from the impulse of the 
 moment ; and the impulse of the moment is the 
 transformation of a sensation. 
 
 Richardson, speaking of the Dogrib Indians, uses 
 words which will describe equally any savages. " We 
 found that however high the reward they expected 
 to receive on reaching their destination, they could 
 not be depended upon to carry letters. A slight 
 difficulty, the prospect of a banquet on venison, or 
 a sudden impulse to visit some friend, w r ere suffi- 
 cient to turn them aside for an indefinite length 
 of time." 
 
 Few questions have been more hotly debated 
 than that of free-will ; but, it seems to me, that 
 question is comparatively simple. It resolves itself 
 into this — Has man got a mind open to ideas not 
 necessarily concerning his animal development ? 
 If he have, is that mind subject to the law of 
 
 M 2 
 
1 64 THE INC ARM A TION. 
 
 growth ? If it be, can he advance or retard that 
 growth ? 
 
 Or, more simply — Is man capable of resisting 
 the instantaneous impulse ? If he be, he has a 
 free-will. 
 
 The will is, indeed, the watershed of man's life, 
 sending its streams towards God or towards nature. 
 Free-will is the faculty of determining the develop- 
 ment of one factor of man's being at the expense 
 of the other, or of resisting the impulses of either. 
 If I can make a choice between study and idleness, 
 I have a free-wilL If when struck on one cheek I 
 can turn the other without retaliating by a blow, 
 I have mastered my natural impulse, I have esta- 
 blished the freedom of my will. 
 
 An accomplished lady, married to an eminent 
 man of science, has related to me how when she 
 —a young girl from school— first married, her hus- 
 band required her assistance in some of his work, 
 the registration of observations — work which inter- 
 fered with his deeper studies. At first she had her 
 novel under the table every day, and when her 
 attention was not in immediate request, she re- 
 verted from the dry meteorological records to the 
 harrowing romance. But by degrees she threw her- 
 self more and more into her husband's pursuits, 
 and is now happy in her home, a companion to her 
 husband, and in general honour. But for the exer- 
 cise of her free-will she would have been now a 
 
THE INCARNATION. 1 65 
 
 poor, frivolous, foolish woman, repining over her 
 lot, resenting her uncongenial surroundings, by 
 many pitied, by none respected. 
 
 Like the natural body, the spirit has before it 
 a life of growth and development. The metamor- 
 phosis of sensations into ideas does not take place 
 like those crystallizations which occur in a liquid, 
 slowly building up the branches of a metallic tree. 
 The soul has the faculty of catching each sensation, 
 of retaining, analysing it, and extracting from it 
 a sense, a lesson. The association of ideas has its 
 laws, no doubt ; the cerebral world has its echoes 
 which do not sound at random ; but there can be 
 no question that we have the faculty of elaborating 
 our sensations ; and, if so, we have the pow T er in 
 our hands of giving scope to the growth of our 
 spirit, or of cramping, starving, and killing it. 
 
 A spirit originally perfect is a contradiction in 
 the world of nature, for the law of nature is evolu- 
 tion ; and a spirit entering into union with matter 
 becomes subject to the law of growth. The nutri- 
 ment of the spirit is ideas; and these ideas are 
 extracted from phenomena. But the fact of the 
 spirit being compelled thus laboriously to draw its 
 nourishment subjects it to conditions of time. It 
 slowly accumulates ideas, and the accumulation of 
 ideas is the acquirement of knowledge ; and each 
 step in knowledge is a stage of mental growth. 
 
 Perfection is the goal of the spirit, attained by a 
 
1 66 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 continuous action of the will struggling against the 
 fatal laws of nature. But by this, the spirit mani- 
 fests its liberty. 
 
 In the child, the empire of liberty is scarcely 
 founded ; the domination of fatality is supreme ; it 
 is subject to the play of circumstances, and re- 
 sponds to them without independence. In the 
 man who, by the sweat of his brow has formed 
 his character, has established his individuality, the 
 control of circumstances, the tyranny of fatality is 
 reduced to extreme feebleness, whilst the empire of 
 liberty is sovereign. 
 
 Now the spiritual nature of man is complex. 
 As it looks towards nature, its tendency is towards 
 science ; as it looks towards men, its tendency is 
 towards morality. 
 
 That is to say, the mind in contemplating the 
 works of creation, perceives in them order and 
 unity, forms of the Divine idea, and seeks there- 
 for to arrange the objects of nature in their order, 
 and exhibit their unity. The mind applies abstract 
 ideas to things that are concrete, and is able 
 thereby to understand them. 
 
 But the mind in considering the relations of man 
 with man is filled with these same ideas of order 
 and unity, and thereby learns that man has duties^ 
 which he owes to his fellow-men, the correlatives of 
 their rights. 
 
 Without a knowledge of the broad principles of 
 
THE INCARNATION. l§7 
 
 moral law, society would be an impossibility ; with- 
 out society, civilization would be impracticable. 
 
 But these ideas which thus lie at the root of 
 science and morals are the forms of the Divine 
 idea in creation. Without God, they are rays with- 
 out a sun, streams without a source. It is from 
 God that all abstract ideas flow in which existences 
 take shape and significance. Order and unity 
 without God as their cause are inexplicable ; 
 morality without God to impose it, is without 
 obligation. 
 
 Yet it is possible to consider nature and society 
 as ends in themselves, and thus to cast them adrift 
 from God, In that possibility consists another 
 departure from God. 
 
 The animal, the plant, cannot fall. Their destiny 
 is to live for themselves ; to evolve their nature to 
 its extreme limits, and then to hand on their life to 
 fresh generations. When the tame pigeon escapes 
 from its dovecot and takes to the woods, its pro- 
 geny lose the characteristics of the domesticated 
 pigeon, and become ordinary wild wood-pigeons. 
 
 I have in my garden a row of hollyhocks. They 
 were planted double. They have in two years 
 become single ; they have deteriorated. But in the 
 pigeon and the hollyhock there is no fall ; for the 
 bird and the plant are governed in their growth by 
 external circumstances only ; and they assume that 
 form best adapted to the circumstances in which 
 
1 68 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 they find themselves. The forest life is unsuitable 
 to the fancy pigeon ; the stiff loam to the double 
 hollyhock. 
 
 Man is, indeed, subject in a measure to circum- 
 stances, but is not, as I have already shown you, 
 fatally governed by them ; he has in him 'an ele- 
 ment—his spiritual nature — which enables him to 
 rise superior to adversities and difficulties. If he 
 succumb, his is a true fall, for there existed in him 
 the faculty of overriding the forces of nature, and 
 maintaining his supremacy. 
 
 According to Christian doctrine, Adam, the first 
 man, fell. That is, Adam, the first man possessing 
 a spiritual nature, the Divine spark of soul, the 
 faculty of seeing God, and reading creation, had 
 before him God and the world, the spiritual and 
 the cosmical poles of his being. He had before 
 him the problem of attaining physical and. spiritual 
 perfection. By an act of free choice he inclined 
 the scale of his nature towards the lower, animal 
 pole ; he gave the material, physical, fatal element 
 preponderance over the immaterial, spiritual, free 
 element. And the beam he kicked has remained 
 overbalanced ever since. 
 
 There are three possibilities open to man : the 
 recognition of God, the deification of the ideas of 
 God, and the deification of the phenomena which 
 are the manifestations of these ideas. There are 
 open to him, therefore, two sorts of apostasy : the 
 
THE INCARNA TION. 2 69 
 
 idolatry of ideas, and the idolatry of phenomena* 
 The idolatry of ideas consists in accepting the 
 abstract ideas of God without acknowledging them 
 as belonging to God. The idolatry of phenomena 
 consists in the deification of the objects of sensual 
 life. The former is an arrested gravitation of the 
 spirit towards God, the latter is a rupture of the 
 spiritual attractive forces, and a rush of his energies 
 towards the pole of animal life. 
 
 Before proceeding, let me briefly sum up what I 
 have been saying in a series of propositions. 
 
 1. There are two elements in the universe — God 
 and nature. 
 
 2. God has clothed his ideas in form. All the 
 objects of creation are the manifestation of His 
 thoughts ; and man was made in order that he 
 might, through these external signs, read the inner 
 thoughts, and see these thoughts as proceeding 
 from the mind of God. 
 
 3. And in thus reading the thoughts of God does 
 man's spiritual nature grow to its ideal, which is 
 perfection of knowledge. 
 
 4. But it follows as a possibility that man may 
 not only be arrested by the outward husk, but may 
 also halt at the ideas. By so doing he falls short 
 of seeing God, and therefore of attaining his ideal. 
 
 5. And, alas ! we know by experience that this 
 possibility has become a fact. 
 
 If, then, the possibility of a Fall lies before man, 
 
1 70 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 and the motive of creation was love for man, it is 
 reasonable to conclude that God would provide 
 some additional check upon man, make some 
 other appeal to man, for his preservation or resto- 
 ration. 
 
 One thing God could not do ; He could not 
 perfect man without man's consent and co-opera- 
 tion. He could not do so for this reason, — that 
 man is spirit as well as body ; and the essence of 
 spirit consists in its freedom. 
 
 If God were to will man's perfection without 
 man's free consent, it would necessitate the destruc- 
 tion of his freedom. But the destruction of his 
 freedom would be the destruction of his spirit, and 
 the destruction of his spirit would be the reduction 
 of man to the condition of a mere animal. His 
 perfection would then be his degradation. 
 
 Calvinistic predestinarianism therefore strikes at 
 the root of Christian theology. By making man's 
 fate depend solely on the determination of the 
 Creator, it reduces his spirit to a condition analo- 
 gous to that of the beast, higher it may be, but not 
 more free, and therefore not really spirit. 
 
 If, then, God designs man's restoration, He must 
 seek that restoration of man, not by suppression of 
 man's freedom, but by supplying additional mo- 
 tives and inducements for the exercise of his will 
 in electing agreement with God's design. 
 
 God can make another appeal to man, and must 
 
THE IXC A RNA TIOX. 1 7 1 
 
 then leave it entirely to man to give his ear to it or 
 reject it. 
 
 The whole of creation is an appeal to man,— it 
 was designed as an appeal to him, to his under- 
 standing. It is calculated to lift him above his 
 animal associates, and enthrone him as the king of 
 creation. He was sent into the world without hairy 
 clothing like the bull, without the claws and teeth 
 of the lion, the agility of the panther, with a naked 
 and unprotected body ; and this destitution of 
 natural protection and means of offence and defence 
 served to develop the faculties of his mind, His 
 needs were goads to the exercise of his mental 
 powers. " Though less capable than most other 
 animals of living on the herbs and fruits that un- 
 aided nature supplies, this wonderful faculty (of 
 reason) taught him to govern and chisel nature to 
 his own benefit, and make her produce food for 
 him when and where he pleased. From the moment 
 when the first skin was used as a covering, when 
 the first rude spear was formed to assist in the 
 chase, the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand 
 revolution was effected in nature — a revolution 
 which in all the previous ages of the world's history 
 had had no parallel ; for a being had arisen who 
 was no longer necessarily subject to change with 
 the changing universe — a being who was in some 
 degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew 
 how to control and regulate her action, and could 
 
1 72 THE INC A RNA TION. 
 
 keep himself in harmony with her, not by a change 
 of body, but by an advance in mind." l 
 
 So, throughout, has civilization been produced 
 by the advance and growth of the mind through 
 observation and conquest of nature. 
 
 Creation has been the appeal of God to man's 
 reason, He appeals through it still; and as science 
 grows, men are penetrating farther and farther into 
 the mind of God. 
 
 But the appeal through creation has not sufficed 
 man ; at all events, not all men. There are many, 
 no doubt, who, seeking the laws of nature, do rever- 
 ence to God whose thoughts they are, but there are 
 others inaccessible to such appeals. 
 
 Moreover, the study of nature, though it may 
 advance civilization, does not provide man with 
 what is of greatest importance to him — the law of 
 his conduct. History is the Book of Revelation of 
 God's moral law, in which the philosopher may 
 trace the tendencies of certain principles to the 
 welfare or fall of nations ; but, after all, it is an 
 uncertain study, for so many causes are at work 
 towards the development or destruction of a great 
 state that it is impossible to reduce its welfare to 
 dependence on a moral code, or rather to elaborate 
 a moral code from the fluctuations in the prosperity 
 of a nation. 
 
 1 'Anthrop. Rev./ May, 1864: Mr. Wallace, "The Origin of 
 the Human Race." 
 
THE 1NCARNA TION. 1 7 3 
 
 Nor, indeed, in ordinary life, do we find that 
 observation will give us a correct moral standard 
 on which to frame our conduct. 
 
 The current theory that virtue is always recom- 
 pensed with happiness is broken through by great 
 and many exceptions. The cross and crown of 
 thorns are often its only reward. 
 
 Nobleness, godliness, heroism of character in any 
 form whatsoever, have nothing to do with man's 
 prosperity, or even happiness, The utterly vicious 
 man who violates soul and bodily ideals is no doubt 
 wretched enough ; but not so the worldly, prudent, 
 selfish man, who understands perfectly how to 
 gratify his senses with tempered indulgence, follow- 
 ing the hack routine of respectability. Though he 
 may be the basest and most contemptible slave of 
 his selfishness, he is happy and prosperous. He is 
 following out an ideal — a low and ignoble one ; but 
 inasmuch as it is an ideal, he therein finds content- 
 ment. 
 
 It cannot be said that social life encourages a 
 high ideal. On the contrary, with a thousand hands 
 it drags daring originality down to the common 
 vulgar level. 
 
 Moreover, society takes cognizance of crimes, 
 but not of sins ; of crimes, that is, wrongs which 
 affect others ; but is supremely indifferent to sins, 
 wrongs done by us to ourselves. 
 
 Consequently the philosophy of history and 
 
1 74 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 social science will never supply men with a code of 
 moral law for the guidance of their conduct with 
 regard to themselves. 
 
 Natural science is the revelation of the thoughts 
 of God in one order — declares one class of laws. 
 
 History and social science manifest to us the 
 thoughts of God in another order — declare another 
 class of laws. 
 
 But still there is a third order, very essential to 
 man to know, which none of these reveal, the class 
 of laws which relate to himself individually ; laws 
 which make heroism a duty, which transfer the 
 principle of progress within, and constitute it the 
 governing principle of man's conscience. 
 
 Now is it not probable that a God creating 
 out of love would also in His love reveal those 
 moral laws which affect man's personal well-being ? 
 Such a revelation Christianity declares was made 
 in Christ Jesus. 
 
 As creation is the manifestation of God, so is 
 social life, political organization, a manifestation of 
 God ; so also is the Incarnation a manifestation 
 of God. 
 
 Creation is the revelation of the laws that govern 
 matter. History, social science, reveal the laws 
 that govern communities. The Incarnation unfolds 
 the laws that govern individuality. 
 
 Law is evoked by the struggle of beings for 
 existence. Law is really a fact ; the fact of the 
 
THE INCARNA TION. 1 7 5 
 
 unity of the ideal which contains other ideas. We 
 may call it a law which makes 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, or 
 3 + 3 = 6, and will not suffer any one integer to 
 swell without a corresponding diminution in the 
 others ; but it is really a fact. 
 
 As in the universe there are myriads of exist- 
 ences — i. e. ideas working to the surface — law r is 
 called into being to harmonize them. But this law 
 is simply the fact of the unity of the idea of creation 
 in the mind of God. 
 
 As in mankind there are multitudes of men, and 
 their civilization depends on the control of the 
 separate individualities, their subordination to the 
 welfare of the whole, on the maintenance of just 
 balance between authority and liberty, between, 
 that is, the will of the whole and the spontaneity 
 of the individual, law is called into existence ; and, 
 so far as it is true, founded on true observation, it 
 is a revelation of God's will with regard to man as 
 a social being. 
 
 But as the individual man has a double nature, 
 the friction in this case also necessitates the 
 production of a law, that is, the revelation of the 
 ideal of God in respect to man's perfection as an 
 individual. 
 
 For the welfare of mankind, therefore, two 
 revelations are necessary : the revelation of the 
 laws which govern society, and a revelation of the 
 law r s which govern the springs of man's inner being. 
 
1 76 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 The laws which govern society may be learned 
 by experiment Every form of government the 
 world has seen has been an experiment to discover 
 these laws. Parliament is a laboratory in which 
 these laws are being investigated annually. These 
 laws are to be discovered experimentally, as sani- 
 tary laws may be ; and the political fortunes of 
 nations are the data from which they may be de- 
 duced. We learn from the mistakes of a previous 
 age, and may fairly hope in time to determine 
 governmental laws as satisfactorily as we have 
 determined certain laws of physics. When this 
 goal has been arrived at, the political situation will 
 be one of ideal perfection. 
 
 Now the Incarnation is the revelation of ideal 
 perfection in man as an individual ; and therefore 
 the establishment of the law which is to govern 
 his conscience. 
 
 If the world has been created in love, then a 
 moral revelation is demanded. To create man, 
 and not tell him his destiny, how he is to attain 
 to the highest and noblest climax of his being, is 
 to create him without love. 
 
 Yet love is the key to creation. It alone ex- 
 plains it. 
 
 Allow that the world is a revelation of the ideas 
 of God, then a further revelation is postulated by 
 it — a revelation of the ideal of human individual 
 perfection. 
 
THE INCARNA TION. 1 77 
 
 That revelation is in Jesus Christ, the Man, the 
 perfect exhibition before the world of the arche- 
 typal man, as he existed in the mind of God before 
 the creation of the world. 
 
 Now let us turn to another order of thoughts. 
 
 Such a revelation has for its object the influ- 
 encing of the human will. 
 
 Through creation God reveals Himself to the 
 reason, and influences the will by instructing the 
 judgment. But as there are men who are not 
 governed by reason, whose will acts against their 
 judgment, men who will not cultivate their judg- 
 ment, God — according to Christian doctrine — has 
 made a further revelation of Himself, not now to 
 the reason, but to the heart, to influence the heart, 
 to stir up the heart to quicken the judgment, and 
 so stimulate the will to choose that which has been 
 simultaneously revealed — the moral law. 
 
 It would be impossible to conceive a more beau- 
 tiful and touching life than that of Our Lord — one 
 more eminently calculated to move the heart. And 
 the emotion thus aroused is not a vain stirring of 
 sympathy ; it is designed to lead on to something 
 — to acceptance of His teaching, the declaration 
 to man of the moral law. 
 
 Man's perfection consists in the development of 
 his whole being, and this is possible within certain 
 boundaries only ; he must know these limitations 
 to his energy, and freely accept them. To compass 
 
 N 
 
 i 
 
178 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 this, God manifests His love to man through Jesus 
 Christ, by whom also He declares to man what the 
 law of his nature is. Man, attracted by this exhibi- 
 tion of love, voluntarily bows to the law, and in 
 Christianity reaches the apogee of perfection social 
 and individual. 
 
 The design of creation was to reveal to man 
 ideas of a certain class only ; ideas of another class 
 are revealed to man through Christ. 
 
 Creation is the prologue to the Incarnation ; it 
 prepares for and leads up to that which is its 
 completion. 
 
 Man is the explanation and climax of creation ; 
 and Christ is the explanation and climax of man. 
 
 If man sum in himself all animate and inani- 
 mate nature, Christ sums in Himself all humanity. 
 That revelation which was partial in creation is 
 completed in Christ. In Him God reveals His 
 fulness, and creation was a prophecy of Christ. 
 
 It is not possible to demonstrate the fact of the 
 Incarnation. All that I can do is to show you 
 that this Christian doctrine is not impossible, nay, 
 further, is probable. 
 
 Now I must answer, very briefly and imperfectly, 
 one of the most prominent objections made to the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 
 It is said, How could God the Creator become 
 His own creature? This is thought to contain an 
 irreconcilable contradiction. 
 
THE INC A RNA TION. 1 79 
 
 But it does not do so. 
 
 If creation be possible, the Incarnation is pos- 
 sible ; for if the ideas of God can be clothed in form 
 and substance in creation, so can also the idea of 
 God in Himself be invested in flesh. 
 
 The Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, is 
 the living Divine idea of the Godhead begotten of 
 the Father, existing from all eternity. 
 
 For God could not exist without having the idea 
 of Himself, in the plenitude of His perfection, and 
 that idea is begotten of God ; yet the time never 
 was when He had not this idea of the plenitude of 
 His nature. 
 
 The idea of God, issuing from the mind of God, 
 is the idea of God with all His attributes, and is 
 therefore equal to God. This eternally begotten 
 Divine idea, one with God, is the Logos. 
 
 God, as the I-myself, revealing itself to itself, 
 and unfolding its fulness in the form of distinct 
 thought, is the Eternal Father. Looking on the 
 heavenly image of the world as it arises out of His 
 own essence, God sees the express image of His 
 person, the vision of His own perfect essence as its 
 cause and its end. 
 
 The heavenly ideal world would not be a system, 
 but a chaos split into variety, without order, but for 
 the idea of God rising as the principle of thought 
 before His mind as the unifier, the co-ordinator, 
 the all - sustaining principle of that objective 
 
 N 2 
 
1 80 THE INCARNA TION. 
 
 manifoldness which presents itself to the Father's 
 gaze. 
 
 Thus the Son is the alpha and omega of 
 creation, its harmonizer, its sovereign ; li without 
 Him was not anything made that was made." 
 "By Him are all things, and in Him all things 
 consist/' 
 
 Indeed, it is inconceivable that the Father could 
 have called the world into being without the Son ; 
 for He could not have seen the ideal world rise 
 up in imagery before His mind, without the idea of 
 Himself as its source, its law, its end. 
 
 Now apply the same thought to mankind. 
 
 God sees the human creation, and the idea of 
 Himself as that from which it sprung, and to which 
 it tends as its perfection. Without the Son, man 
 could not exist ideally ; and man needs the Son 
 present to lead him back to God. 
 
 If the Son be the centre of creation, He is the 
 centre likewise of the innermost ring of that great 
 circle of being. 
 
 All men are indeed manifestations of a Divine 
 idea, and that idea constitutes their individuality. 
 But no one of the individuals, who constitute the 
 human family, expresses more than a partial and 
 imperfect union of the Divine and human natures. 
 
 All, therefore, point beyond themselves, to an 
 union of God and man, which shall be perfect and 
 complete. 
 
THE INC A RNA TION. 1 8 1 
 
 As the fulness of all creative ideas is in the 
 Father, so the fulness of all humanity is in the Son. 
 He entered into immediate relation with humanity, 
 not merely as the idea of humanity in the abstract, 
 but as the idea of perfect human individuality, to 
 be the exemplar of all mankind, and to be the 
 point of union through which they may return to 
 their source. 
 
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