•JO) 
 
 <:cO 
 
 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 OF 
 
 BELIEF
 
 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF
 
 OXFORD 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF 
 
 OR 
 
 LAW IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY 
 
 BY 
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL 
 
 K.G., K.T. 
 
 > ■• 
 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 
 1896
 
 • « C M' C 1
 
 IP 
 
 a, 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 o 
 
 M 
 
 n: 
 a. 
 
 \o,o 
 
 T 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 en 
 
 CO 
 
 
 ^' 
 
 OT This work is the concluding volume of a series 
 which began with T/ie Reign of Laiv published in 
 1866, and which was continued in The Unity of 
 Nature published in 1884. Although each of these 
 works may stand independently by itself, they are 
 yet very closely connected. They represent, in the 
 main, one line of thought on the greatest of all sub- 
 jects, namely, the philosophy of religion in its 
 6 relations with the philosophy of science. The first 
 of these treatises, The Reign of Law, dealt with the 
 
 ^ question how far the idea is rational that physical 
 j laws are the supreme agencies in Nature, or whether, 
 
 *\3Q on the contrary, Mind and Will are seated on that 
 universal throne. The second of the series, The 
 Unity of Nature, starting from a fresh point of view, 
 dealt mainly with the problem how far our human 
 faculties are competent, on this matter, to give us 
 any knowledge whatever, or whether they must leave 
 us in conscious, yet helpless, and hopeless, ignorance 
 on the whole of it, and on all that it involves. The 
 third and last endeavour of the series — the present 
 
 316609
 
 Vi PREFACE 
 
 volume — applies the reasonings and conclusions which 
 have been thus reached, to an examination of the 
 relation in which the great conception of Natural 
 Law, when properly understood, stands to religion 
 in general, and to Christian theology in particular. 
 
 If the preface of a book is to be of any use at all, 
 it must supply the reader with some relevant in- 
 formation which is not to be found in the book itself. 
 On such a subject as that here dealt with, there is 
 no subsidiary information so relevant as the direction 
 from which the author has himself approached it. 
 Sometimes, this may be of real importance to the 
 understanding of an argument, or, at least, to the 
 appreciation of its place and value in connexion 
 with contemporary thought. I am induced, there- 
 fore, to give some personal explanations which 
 otherwise might well appear to be uninteresting or 
 superfluous. 
 
 Neither in theology, nor in philosophy, have I ever 
 had any scholastic training. A very quiet country 
 home was the only scene of my education. I was born 
 and entirely brought up in Scotland — never having 
 even crossed the English border until the fourteenth 
 year of my age in 1836. In the death of my mother, 
 before I was five years old, I lost the source from 
 which most men receive their earliest impressions 
 of religion. My father \ although he had a very 
 
 ' Then Lord John Campbell. Succeeded his brother in 1839 as 
 seventh Duke of Argyll. Died in 1847.
 
 PREFACE Vii 
 
 reverent mind, was not a theologian, and such 
 rehgious instruction as I received, under his arrange- 
 ments, was entirely in connexion with the usual 
 teaching of the Established Church of Scotland. 
 It was altogether simple and uncontroversial, for 
 although all my early tutors were men preparing 
 for the ministry of that Church, yet in the matter 
 of catechisms I was mercifully dealt with. In that 
 tremendous document which is called the Shorter 
 Catechism I had but a very partial drilling, with 
 the result that the first question and answer — 
 certainly one of the noblest in all the documents of 
 systematic theology — has alone survived at the call 
 of memory ^ For the rest, plain Bible reading, and 
 the ordinary collections of sacred poetry, together 
 with the usual Sunday services in the church, were 
 the whole of my earliest education in theology, so far 
 as outward influences were concerned. 
 
 Nevertheless, amidst such quiet surroundings of 
 external circumstance, events occurred in my boy- 
 hood which moved in me a somewhat wakeful, and 
 
 ' Question. What is the chief end of man. 
 Answer. Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for 
 ever. 
 
 This catechism was drawn up by the Westminster Assembly of 
 Divines in 1647, and, with the Confession drawn up by the same 
 body, was soon after adopted by the General Assembly of the 
 Established Church of Scotland. It differs, however, widely from 
 the old native Confession of the Reformation epoch, and was ex- 
 pressly assented to only, or mainlj^, in pursuit of that ignis fahms of 
 the time — uniformity of worship throughout the three kingdoms.
 
 Viii PREFACE 
 
 perhaps precocious, activity of the speculative reason. 
 Those events were not local only. During the ten 
 or twelve years following 1823, the date of my birth, 
 there was, as is well known, a general movement of 
 thought among all the Churches in these islands in 
 sympathy with, or in antagonism to, corresponding 
 political agitations. That movement took very 
 different directions in England and in Scotland. In 
 England its most notable result was the rise of the 
 Oxford school. In Scotland it was less definite, and 
 in general less purely theological. But it intensified 
 differences of tendency within the national Church 
 which had long existed, and which ultimately led to 
 the great secession, commonly called the Disruption, 
 in 1843. 
 
 It was in the middle of this critical period of 
 years that the quiet and then remote parish of my 
 home on the Firth of Clyde ^ suddenly became the 
 very centre and focus of a theological controversy, 
 and of a religious persecution, which drew the atten- 
 tion of the whole of Scotland. In 1825 the parish 
 living had become vacant, and a young minister was 
 appointed - who soon became a power. With a 
 naturally acute and discriminating intellect, he com- 
 bined a nature full of love to men — an absorbing 
 devotion to the honour and to the credit among 
 them, of Christian truth — and all the personal attrac- 
 
 * The parish of Row (pronounced Rue) in Dumbartonshire. 
 
 * By the patron, my uncle, George seventh Duke of Argyll.
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 tions of a most saintly character. He soon found, 
 or thought he found, the real doctrines of Christianity, 
 on some points of cardinal importance, to be seriously 
 misconceived and misrepresented in the popular theo- 
 logy of the time. How right he was in this con- 
 viction, can be best appreciated by those who have 
 seen the changes of feeling and of opinion which 
 have since been brought about. Long before his 
 death his name had become one of the most honoured 
 names in Scotland. The University of Glasgow con- 
 ferred upon him the degree of D.D. His principal 
 work has attained the rank of a standard treatise on 
 the most difficult of all theological subjects \ and has 
 had a wide influence, not in Scotland only, but also 
 in England. The beauty of its spirit is no small 
 recommendation of the truthfulness of its doctrine. 
 If the average teaching of the pulpit, now, upon that, 
 and some kindred subjects, is indeed very different 
 from the same teaching sixty-five years ago, that 
 difference is largely due to the influence exercised by 
 this young minister of my native parish. It is not 
 that any tenet has been formally abandoned. It is 
 not, even, that any one has been formally amended. 
 It is that, on some doctrines, nothing is now quite the 
 same. Things often said in sermons then, are never 
 said in our days ^ ; whilst old words and phrases, which 
 cannot be laid aside, are used in a better sense 
 
 1 On the Nature of the Atonement (Macmillan). This work is now 
 in its sixth edition. 
 
 ^ I have alluded in this volume to an example at p. 354.
 
 X 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 and in a larger spirit. The points on which he 
 attacked the popular theology, might seem to many, 
 as they actually did seem, to lie in the region of the 
 most transcendental psychology and metaphysics. 
 But, in reality, through a thousand open and inevitable 
 avenues of thought, they touched some of the most 
 fundamental conceptions, not only of Christianity, but 
 of all religion. They touched the character of the 
 Godhead, the nature of man, and the only possible 
 conditions of true worship, or of acceptable sacrifice. 
 His deep and spiritual views did not agree with those 
 of either of the older parties in his Church. Full of 
 prejudice and of misconception, they both combined 
 against him, and after a gallant struggle on his part 
 of some six years' duration, his teaching was con- 
 demned as heretical, and he was finally deposed from 
 the ministry by the supreme ecclesiastical Court, the 
 General Assembly, in 1831. 
 
 I was far too young to understand that contro- 
 versy at the time. I recollect nothing but sermons 
 of inordinate length, and, in the congregation, some 
 hard, watching, criticizing faces, that had none of the 
 fine spiritual light which even a child could appreciate 
 in the preacher's gentle and thoughtful countenance. 
 But although the battle raged outside, it never entered 
 within, the walls of the household in which I lived. 
 The kinswoman who kept my father's house when he 
 became a widower, was an earnest disciple of the 
 reforming minister — without, however, any tendency to
 
 PREFACE XI 
 
 disputation on the subject. But the human mind has 
 a strange property of receiving, and keeping, vague 
 general impressions of which it is quite unconscious 
 at the moment. There is, moreover, a still more 
 strange phenomenon connected with its working, and 
 that is the widespread prevalence at particular times, 
 of some general tendency, or atmosphere, of thought 
 in which seeds, long latent, are everywhere suddenly 
 and simultaneously developed. I cannot say how 
 early it was that I became fully conscious of the 
 difificulties, both intellectual and moral, which beset 
 the acceptance of such theological doctrines and 
 ideas as those which had aroused the reforming 
 energies of Mr. John McLeod Campbell. But I know 
 that it was very early indeed, A spirit of wonder, 
 and a tendency to speculative inquiry — to cross- 
 question every verbal proposition — were innate ele- 
 ments in my mental constitution. I think, too, that 
 in very early years, I was conscious of the great dif- 
 ference between such propositions when they merely 
 transcend the reason, and when they confound, or 
 contradict, it. The notion of ideas in themselves 
 irrational, and still more of others which violate the 
 moral sense, being insisted upon as parts of religious 
 faith, was always to me a notion most painful and 
 distressing. 
 
 Meanwhile, the physical sciences had begun their 
 training. Geology was then making some of its most 
 rapid strides. One of my father's intimate friends was
 
 Xii PREFACE 
 
 Mr. James Smith of Jordanhill, who first discovered 
 the glacial shell-beds of the Clyde area — a discovery- 
 raising many questions which still await solution. 
 In his yacht and under his guidance I was first 
 initiated into the beauty and the interest of marine 
 zoology — a branch of science then in its infancy, but 
 one which has now assumed the highest rank In 
 biology. The splendid work lately done in the 
 Reports of the Challenger Expedition, by my friend 
 Dr. John Murray, is indeed a marvellous development 
 of that which I saw begun in 1838 by Mr. Smith. 
 But he saw the wide bearing of it on the problems of 
 organic life. His mind was thoroughly scientific, and 
 embraced a wide range of investigation. His nautical 
 and geographical treatise on the Voyage and Shipwreck 
 of St. Paul, recorded in the twenty-seventh chapter of 
 Acts, is one of the most interesting contributions to 
 the historical evidences of the Apostolic narrative, 
 and as such was republished a few years ago by the 
 late Bishop (Goodwin) of Durham. A curious and 
 most interesting paper on the ' Ships of the Ancients,' 
 and another on the difficult subject of the connexion 
 between the Synoptic Gospels, were examples of his 
 rapid and sagacious intellectual activity. 
 
 The spirit and conversation of this oldest and 
 earliest friend, reinforced all the tendencies of my 
 own home. I had myself an intense love of ex- 
 ternal Nature, and especially of ornithology ; and 
 this led me, by an accidental concurrence of cir-
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 cumstances, to the habitual contemplation of some 
 special problems which rise out of the region of 
 mere science to the higher levels of philosophy. 
 My father had a keen interest in every branch 
 of physical inquiry, but his favourite pursuit was 
 mechanics. Only a very few years before, he had 
 seen steam-navigation rise, and become established, 
 on the waters which spread beneath the windows of 
 his ancient castle. I have often heard him describe 
 the hideous noises made by the rude machinery of the 
 first steamboat started by James Bell — noises so loud 
 that it was difficult to hear conversation on the deck. 
 He was himself a very highly skilled workman, making 
 with his own hands many beautiful articles in wood; 
 in ivory, and in metals. The most perfect workman- 
 ship was with him a passion — ^joinings close to a hair- 
 breadth, surfaces of perfect smoothness, structures 
 strong and solid for any work they were designed to 
 do. He used to boast that this was characteristic 
 generally of British handiwork, as compared with the 
 flimsier and less trustworthy productions of foreign 
 producers. Then, from the mechanics of human inven- 
 tion, he passed, by an easy and natural transition, 
 to the vast subject of organic or animal mechanics, 
 and especially fixed his attention on the highest and 
 most typical example of the principles involved in 
 them, namely, the machinery of flight. Thus I was 
 brought, first, to appreciate the mystery and the wonder 
 of the results ; and then, secondly, taught to consider
 
 Xiv PREFACE 
 
 how those results were mechanically achieved. The 
 final cause — that is to say, the purpose — of a wing was 
 obvious. It was the function, or the power, of flight. 
 The proximate causes of that power in the working 
 of adapted structures, were almost infinitely compli- 
 cated and obscure. I well recollect hearing one of 
 the most distinguished men who have held the chair 
 of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edin- 
 burgh, the late J. D. Forbes, afterwards Principal of 
 the University of St. Andrews, declare that to him the 
 theory of flight was one of the most inscrutable of all 
 problems, so that he was sometimes inclined to regard 
 it as approaching the miraculous. He knew, he said, 
 that it must be done, somehow, by the 'resolution of 
 forces,' but how * resolved ' he could not understand. 
 Yet the confidence that these proximate causes were 
 discoverable by careful investigation and reasoning — 
 that, somehow, purely material or physical laws were 
 the mere servants and instruments of intention and 
 contrivance, was a confidence that was absolute 
 and unconditional. I was accustomed to hear it ex- 
 plained how weight, or gravitation, which seemed the 
 insuperable difficulty to be overcome, was compelled, 
 in spite of itself, to be one main agent in enabling 
 heavy bodies to accomplish, in thin air, the most easy 
 and beautiful evolutions. I was accustomed to hear 
 this great triumph of Purpose, traced and explained 
 through the finest mechanisms, not only in the bodies 
 of birds— not only in the structure of the whole
 
 PREFACE XV 
 
 wing — but in the position and structure, also, of each, 
 and of all its separate feathers. I was accustomed to 
 hear this exquisite mechanism contrasted with the 
 stupidity of men in vainly trying to utilize the inert 
 buoyancy of balloons. Thus the great doctrine of the 
 intelligibility of Nature, and of the certain truth of 
 our (so-called) ' anthropomorphic ' explanations of the 
 creative Mind, was a doctrine borne in upon my con- 
 victions with even more power than it is embedded 
 in the universal instincts and language of mankind. 
 Indeed, it was, with me, not so much a doctrine as 
 a Presence. It never appeared to me to be any mere 
 inference, or the result of an argument of any kind, 
 however linked and strong. It was an integral part 
 of the observed phenomena, and a direct object of 
 perception. 
 
 But. obviously, this was a confidence which ex- 
 tended farther. The correspondence between the 
 Intelligence of man and the structure of the Universe, 
 could not stop where mechanical explanations ended. 
 It must extend to higher things. The wings of 
 thought must be as much an adjusted mechanism as 
 the wings of flight. This was an idea which justified 
 and encouraged some kinds of doubt, whilst it acted 
 as a powerful solvent upon others. On the one hand, 
 it encouraged and justified a reasonable scepticism on 
 every dogma of the schools which is really obnoxious 
 to the instructed reason, or to the enlightened con- 
 science. On the other hand, it put an end to that 
 
 b
 
 XVI PREFACE 
 
 bottomless distrust of all thought, and of all reasoning 
 upon spiritual things, which is, as it were, a suicide of 
 the soul. 
 
 For more than sixty years the consequences and 
 developments of this conception have been the con- 
 stant subject of my meditations — in its innumerable 
 relations to science, to philosophy, to politics, and to 
 religion. On all of these subjects I have read a good 
 deal, and thought a great deal more, taking a special 
 pleasure in biology and metaphysics. The many 
 losses which a man must encounter — losses of which 
 I am often painfully conscious — who has never been 
 at either school or college, may have some consider- 
 able compensations. An attitude, indeed, of isolation 
 on subjects which have exercised, the most powerful 
 intellects since the world began, can only be an 
 attitude of ignorance and presumption. But, on the 
 other hand, a certain detachment from schools and 
 parties, and from the hero-worship so natural to the 
 enthusiasms of youth at times and places of great 
 intellectual excitement, may be a positive advantage 
 — provided, always, that the mind is kept continually 
 in living contact with Nature, and with books. My 
 father's horror of slovenly workmanship in mechanics, 
 has served me in good stead. I have been led to the 
 same horror of it in the workmanship of the intellect 
 — in the management of the reason — and especially 
 in the use of language. An early initiation into the 
 principles of chemical analysis, has been a most helpful
 
 PREFACE XVII 
 
 weapon in fighting those 'spectres of the mind ' which 
 will always haunt the exercise of reflective thought. 
 It has impressed upon me the conviction that most 
 of the difficulties and fallacies into which men fall, 
 are due largely to bad analysis in the observation of 
 facts — to bad analysis in the recording of them — 
 and, especially, to still worse analysis in the abstracts 
 of them which are used in reasoning. 
 
 I have said so much in order to assure my readers 
 that I have not approached the subject of this book 
 from any mere formal, or dogmatic, point of view. 
 Dogma, indeed, I believe to be valuable and even 
 necessary — meaning by dogma some careful defini- 
 tions of the objects of belief. But personal observation 
 and experience of a remarkable time, did very early 
 bring home to my mind how liable such definitions 
 are to survive the right interpretation of them, and 
 even how liable they are to minister, through the 
 ambiguities and poverties of language, to the most 
 degraded misunderstanding of divine things. 
 
 I should like my readers to know that the author 
 of the three treatises of which this is the last, is one 
 who has known what religious difficulties are, and 
 who has not seldom sufifered from them. I doubt if 
 there is any one of them which has not occurred to 
 me. Each individual mind has its own separate 
 temptations and infirmities. Canon Gore has lately 
 given to the world an autobiographic and detailed 
 
 account of the processes of thought through which 
 
 b 2
 
 XVlll PREFACE 
 
 a very distinguished man of science — the late Dr. 
 George Romanes — was led first to abandon Chris- 
 tianity, then to take up for years the attitude of an 
 aggressive agnosticism, and lastly, by the exercise 
 of pure reason, to see the fallacy of his own negative 
 conclusions, and to die in the declared Christian faith 
 which for years he had forsaken ^. A more instructive 
 book has not been published for a long time. As I 
 had been led into some controversies with this ardent 
 apostle of what is called the Philosophy of Evolution, 
 I had occasion to see his genuine sincerity, candour, 
 and love of truth— qualities which give the highest 
 interest and value to this self-recorded history of his 
 changed opinions. I do not think that, at any time, 
 I could have been captivated by the purely verbal 
 dialectics, or logomachies, which Mr. Romanes had so 
 long allowed to hold in bondage alike his intellect 
 and his heart. But I have often been sensible of other 
 intellectual temptations and weaknesses which, if 
 indulged, must end in universal scepticism. No man 
 who retains the use of all his faculties, can be satisfied 
 with this result, or can fail to feel that it is the 
 product of nothing but atrophy or disease. I have 
 some confidence that the reasoning pursued, however 
 inadequately, in this volume may be of use to others — 
 as it has been to myself. I am the more hopeful of 
 this since the first of these treatises, The Reign of Law, 
 
 ' Thoughts on Religion, by the late G. J. Romanes, LL. D. ; edited 
 by Canon Gore, M.A., 1895.
 
 PREFACE XIX 
 
 in which the line of argument was first developed, has 
 had a very wide circulation at home, with a still larger 
 circulation in America ; and, so far as I know, it has 
 never been met by any attempt at refutation or reply. 
 Letters from the most distant parts of the English- 
 speaking world, from men whom I have never seen or 
 can see, have assured me of the help it has been to 
 them in grasping what The Reign of Law, in its true 
 conception, really means. Nor have I been deterred 
 from pursuing the same line of thought into the region 
 of theology by the circumstance that my implied inten- 
 tion of so doing at some future time^ was long ago 
 taken up by Professor Drummond, and executed — on 
 lines, however, very different from mine — in a work 
 which has had, I believe, a larger circulation than my 
 own. The subject is so complicated and so immense 
 that it may be dealt with from many different points 
 of view, — and, I may add, — so immense that no man 
 who tries to deal with it, can fail to be most painfully 
 impressed by the fragmentary character of his own 
 best endeavours to explore it. 
 
 One word farther I ought to say. Some who read 
 this book will probably find that one or another of 
 the doctrines of Christianity — or at least one or more 
 aspects of Christian doctrine — upon which, perhaps, 
 they may place the highest value, are either slightly 
 touched, or are altogether omitted. I must ask such 
 readers not to draw, from this circumstance, any 
 ' In the Preface to The Reign of Law.
 
 XX PREFACE 
 
 conclusions as to my own opinions concerning these 
 omitted subjects. Such conclusions would often be 
 quite erroneous, because one great object which I 
 have kept steadily in view, has been to avoid, in so 
 far as I possibly could do so, entering on questions in 
 dispute between different sections of the Christian 
 Church. But this aim has of necessity led to silence, 
 either partial or complete, on several points of immense 
 interest and importance. 
 
 ARGYLL.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 Chapter I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Its Definitions and their Results . • . . . i 
 
 Chapter II. 
 Recognitions in the Structure of Language . . 46 
 
 Chapter III. 
 Recognitions in Descriptive Science and Philosophy 113 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 Its Limitations . . . . . . .147 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS. 
 
 Chapter V. 
 On the Character of the Godhead . . . 204 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 On the Nature of Man . . . . . -252
 
 Xxii CONTENTS 
 
 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Christ as the Messiah. The Nature of Sacrifice : 
 
 OF Faith: of Inspiration: of Regeneration . 324 
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 The Nature and Foundation of Christian Ethics . 384 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 Prayer ......... 448 
 
 CHRISTIAN BELIEF. 
 
 Chapter X. 
 In its Relation to Philosophy .... 490
 
 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF 
 
 OR 
 
 LAW IN THEOLOGY 
 
 Chapter I. 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 
 
 The first demand made upon us in any discussion 
 touching the philosophy of rehgion, is to define the 
 meaning of the word Nature. On the one hand, 
 the use of it is indispensable. On the other hand, 
 the abuses of it are inveterate. We shall soon find 
 that there is no possible definition which does not 
 condemn the thoughtless assumptions involved in 
 that distinction, which has become common only in 
 modern times, between what we loosely call the 
 Natural and the Supernatural. This is no question 
 of opinion. It is purely a question of definition. 
 In the classical philosophies the word Nature played 
 a great part. But in them it certainly did not mean 
 physical phenomena alone, nor even any mere 
 aggregate of these taken as a whole. On the con- 
 trary, it meant some universal agency which was 
 
 B
 
 2 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 conceived as lying behind and above all phenomena. 
 To that agency mental characteristics were habitually 
 ascribed, and all the elements that constitute per- 
 sonality. Thus, for example, Cicero expressly says 
 that as we cannot say without impiety that anything 
 is superior to universal Nature, we must confess that 
 divine reason is contained within her ^. In this, and 
 in many other utterances of Greek and Roman 
 thinkers, it is evident not only that there was no 
 antithesis in their minds between what are now 
 called the Natural and the Supernatural, but even 
 that Nature, with them, did most especially mean 
 some universal although invisible Personality — a 
 sense closely corresponding with that which is now 
 treated as if it were a conception wholly distinct, 
 if not alien, from that of Nature. But there 
 is no possibility of defending any such distinc- 
 tion. It is true, indeed, that there is a distinction 
 obvious to us all, between mind and matter — between 
 a mental faculty and a physical force — although even 
 here the close, and apparently inseparable, connexion 
 between these two great categories, in all living 
 creatures, is as obvious as their broad distinctions. 
 There is also, in our eyes at least, a wide and 
 palpable distinction between the Organic and the 
 Inorganic — between the Living and the Not-living — 
 between a mere physical force, or any number of 
 physical forces considered in themselves, and those 
 combinations of them, in living creatures, by which so 
 many things are done, and of which the world is full. 
 
 ' Cicero, De Legibus, Bk. ii. 7.
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 3 
 
 All these distinctions are intelligible enough. But 
 those things between which they distinguish, are all 
 alike comprehended within the great system which we 
 call(^'ature7\ The word has no meaning at all except 
 as a name for the sum of all existences (y■isible^and (in-y 
 ^^Ai>^ Nature includes not_on1y the m iniij^LlIlfLllI^dlh 
 all its works j^ biiLaiso_ \vhat ever other and higher Mind 
 t here may^ be^ ^ of which his is b ut_an_emanation or 
 a fragment . No other ^sfinitiohj is possible for an y 
 of_us^^h(I_are. xaga ble of(^nalyzin ^ d:he co ntents j2f 
 our own thoughts and the me anin g of our own w ords. 
 The clear and calm intellect of Bishop Butler was 
 impatient under the fallacies that harboured in the 
 'confused and undetermined' senses in which men 
 use the words nature and natural ^. In one of the 
 most memorable of his writings he did a good deal 
 to unravel the confusions he complained of ^. In our 
 own time J. S. Mill has submitted the word Nature to 
 a rigorous and complete analysis ^. He rightly treats 
 this analysis as an essential preliminary to any dis- 
 cussion on the philosophy of religion. He shows that 
 in the proper sense ' Nature is a collective name for 
 everything that(is.' j j[t means ' the sum of all phe T" 
 nomen a with the causes which produce them .' More- 
 over, it includes ' n ot only all that happens, but all t hat 
 is j:apable of happening .' He declares that ' the unused 
 capability of causes is as much a part of the idea of 
 Nature as those which take effect.' This definition can- 
 not be gainsaid. Every logician must admit its truth. 
 
 ' Analogy, Pt. I, chap. i. ^ Sermon II on Human Nature. 
 
 ^ Three Essays on Religion. No. I, Nature. 
 
 B 2
 
 4 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 A much more recent author has adopted it in nearly 
 the same words. ' For myself, I am bound to say,' 
 writes Mr. Huxley^ 'that the term "Nature" covers 
 the totality of that which is ^.' Yet this is clearly 
 a definition which reduces the word 'supernatural' to 
 nonsense. There can be nothing outside the totality 
 of existence. Moreover, even as we commonly em- 
 ploy it, the word ' natuiVJiasjio^oundar^. And even 
 if we could think of it as having a boundary, we are 
 all conscious that no more than a mere fraction of its 
 contents, even inside that boundary, is known to us. 
 But it is obviously impossible to say of any agency 
 that it is outside of, or above, Nature, unless we know- 
 all that what we call Nature does actually include. 
 And assuredly any assumption that the system of 
 things in which we live does not include any mind or 
 will except our own, is a negative assumption as in- 
 consistent with the universal impressions of mankind, 
 as it is incompatible with science. The laws whi ch 
 science traces arenas we have seen^, essentially laws of 
 
 min d— yntelj igibl^ to ^ u^JritelTigenc^. and^.rgr-ognized 
 Cby iy only becau se of th eir c lo se relation Jto ijs^ own 
 pjTwer^ ^r\r\ t o its owu perc eptions. 
 
 There is, however, a real distinction of immense 
 importance to be observed in this matter, which has 
 been much forgotten, or has lain wholly unobserved. 
 It is one thing to say that, as a fact, Nature is fuU'of 
 ymr mind whirh ic; nfhpr p nrl (^^h'j^''^ th rl " OUT '^WP 
 
 although having some close analogies with it, whilst it 
 
 • Essays on Coiifroverted Subjects, p. 35. 
 
 ^ Reign of Law, passim ; and Unity of Nature.
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 5 
 
 is quite another thing to say that in Nature, including 
 ourselves, we can search out that other mind, as 
 regards its seat, its character, or its ultimate relations 
 to the general system under which we live. So much 
 as we can ever discover on these farther questions, 
 from visible and external things alone, or from the 
 character and constitution of our own minds, is only to 
 be reached in the form of inference — of inference, too. 
 beset with many intellectual difficulties, and not a few 
 perplexities even of a moral kind. But as regards 
 the mere existence in Nature of the essential qualities 
 of mind, as distinguished from the qualities of matter 
 and of the physical forces, it is demonstrable that the 
 ubiquitous presence of this higher agency is not 
 a matter of inference alone, but is an object of direct 
 and i mmediate recognition b y the highe st mental 
 faculties — which a rc the Jiigiigs t senses — we possess . 
 It is a pure matter of fact, as susceptible of proof as 
 any other fact, that the human mind, looking into 
 Nat-ure, sees, j in^allt he phenomena of the wo rld, a great 
 deal which is obviously of its own kind and, quality. 
 
 The most striking proof of this fact is to be found 
 in the automatic action of the mind, whether popular 
 or scientific, as recorded in the growth, in the signifi- 
 cance, and in the use, of human speech. Much has 
 been said and written on the fallacies due to language. 
 VyjBuli-iiL Uch too little has been seen or thought_ _of^e 
 s tores of <ki =:dnr n' nnd{knowledg e' ^^hich_are_often_ hi d 
 under our forms of articulate expression . Yet this is 
 really an all-important thought. As a matter of fact 
 men find it quite impossible to describe natural pheno-
 
 6 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 mena, and their lawS; without usingthelanguageof mind 
 in a thousand ways. This is all the more remarkable 
 since so many of them have taken to^rving very hard 
 to do so. But they always fail, ^he failure is to be 
 seen in (two" characteristic indications — either in the 
 continual and unconscious re lapse into the language 
 of purpose and into n^ion^iYJ2Jlj|lg^lllglJl§Jl d. JJ^lhg 
 (fesort^ to^form ^j^f (e?^)ressiotvvv^ omit altogether 
 to take any aotics of some of the most importaiyt 
 facts i n the phenomena wh ich Nature presents, and 
 which it is their duty — and professedly, at least, their 
 endeavour — faithfully to report. Of this last result — 
 that, namely, of scamping the work of the full and 
 adequate description of natural phenomena in order 
 to keep clear of the language of design — I have given 
 some striking examples in a former volume^. But 
 the other result— that, namely, of using the language 
 of design freely, for the purposes of description, without 
 any conscious perception whatever of its significance 
 in philosophy — is much the most usual result. This 
 arises from the fact that there are comparatively few 
 men who deliberately set themselves to exclude from 
 their account of facts, or from their definition of 
 natural laws, features which are the most conspicuous as 
 well as the most important of all. Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 indeed, does set himself to this attempt as an essential 
 part of his philosophy, and we see an example of 
 the consequence in the phrases he has invented, to 
 express the essence of the wonderful changes which 
 are characteristic in the development of organic life. 
 
 ' Unity of Natwr, ch. viii.
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 7 
 
 Probably no words which have ever been chosen for 
 the expression of human thought are so empty of ade- 
 quate or appropriate meaning for the true description 
 of the facts of organic development as the words he has 
 chosen for this purpose. He calls the wondrous 
 evolution of organic forms a progress from 'homo- 
 geneity to heterogeneity.' But to this we shall return. 
 In the meantime let us observe that the great 
 majority of writers on physical science , take no special 
 pains to eliminate such ideas, or such words, expressive 
 of purpose, as they may feel it to be necessary to employ 
 for the full description of the facts they have to deal 
 with. And it is most instructive to observe how 
 charged their language constantly and consequently 
 is with the recognition of purpose and design. 
 Darwin, as I have elsewhere shown ^, never takes the 
 least trouble to avoid this language ; and, as he him- 
 self told me in conversation, the presence of these 
 mental elements in organic development, was often 
 borne in upon him with overwhelming force, although 
 at other times, he added, it seemed to vanish from 
 before his eyes. Nor is this surprising. As regards all 
 its higher theological accompaniments, and its develop- 
 ments into religious belief, it is very easy and very 
 natural to forget the indelible impression which Nature 
 makes upon us of the existence of some omnipresent 
 mind. But all these supplementary conceptions of 
 theology constitute a subject quite separable from the 
 simple recognition of mind as an elementary and 
 a fundamental fact in the economy of Nature. It is 
 
 ^ Reign of Law, ch. i. pp. 37-50 (fifth edition).
 
 8 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 quite as impossible, for example, t o describe, fully an d 
 in__detail, the — structure n f_ a bird's wing, and o f 
 each individual feather in the series of it s quill|, 
 
 FTthout referr ing to the whole as an apparatus fo r 
 sustaining_flighJ^-as it would be to describe a steam- 
 engine fully, without any reference to the fact that 
 it is an apparatus for driving a wheel, or a paddle, or 
 a screw. The subserviency of structure to function, 
 and the priority in time of structural growth to the 
 actual or possible discharge of structural function, are 
 not only facts, but they are the dominant facts in the 
 whole organic world ; and the inevitable result is that 
 in them the human mind is compelled to recognize 
 the invariable law of preparation, of prevision, of de- 
 velopment in time — not by use, but for use — when it 
 seeks to find an adequate expression for its own direct 
 perceptions in the science of Biology. 
 
 Some scientific writers now speak with great con- 
 tempt of the tendency to personify the physical forces 
 and phenomena of Nature, and declare this tendency 
 to be the origin and explanation of all theological 
 conceptions. In a sense this may be true. But it 
 only throws us back upon the question as to the 
 origin and the significance of this universal tendency 
 of the human mind to personify the agencies of 
 Nature. Whence came it, and what does it mean? 
 
 Is it indeed an universal tendency, or is it confined 
 to minds in a rude condition of prijnitive- ignorance 
 or superstition^ This last is the suggestion of those 
 who denounce it. Yet these very men are themselves 
 continually inventing new phrases and forms of expres-
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 9 
 
 sion which are essentially personifications, and depend 
 entirely on that element of meaning for all the plausi- 
 bility they profess. Q Nat ural selection^ an obvious^ 
 example. In this phrase Nature i s supp osed to act 
 as a p igeon-fan cier_acts^ in so br eeding^his_ fayourit e 
 birds as to produce v arietie s^mth specially ( ^evelo pe^!^ 
 s: ^owe rs or aspecfs, ■ The whole attractiveness of the 
 phrase, and the whole aptitude it has shown for being 
 used in a (g reat variety of senses^ and as accounting 
 for a great variety of accomplished results, depends 
 upon this (^'nalogy' between the working of(^ Nature ' 
 as a personiHcation an d the personal working of 
 a bre eder of stock . This sort of language, therefore, 
 from which men cannot escape, even when they try 
 hardest to do so, would not seem to be the result 
 of any mere ignorant fancy by which we project 
 ourselves into external N_ature, but is evidently the 
 result of an ( Instinctive recogn jtionj of i"haf- sperial 
 kin d of agency which is. in d eed, fam iliarly k nown to 
 us as existing withinou rselves^. bu X-'^vhirh jj:_jLlsn 
 universally recognized and identified as ^ex isting 
 outside of us, and around us, on every side. It is 
 a reflection of that infinite Reason — that ' Logos ' — 
 of which we partake, and without which in Nature ' was 
 not anything made that was made.' All things, in- 
 cluding ourselves, are full of it. It cannot be excluded, 
 or even put aside, and yet it cannot be directly or 
 farther known otherwise than as an indisputable 
 existence, not less pervading than it is mysterious. 
 
 But there is another very curious witness to the 
 universal perception of this existence of mind as an
 
 lO 
 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 ingredient in all adequate descriptions of Nature, and 
 especially of organic forms, besides the constant 
 reference to it involved in such instinctive phrases 
 as ' exquisite adaptations ' or ' beautiful contrivances.' 
 And curiously enough this other witness is brought 
 forward by the very arguments which are some- 
 times used to condemn what are called teleological 
 explanations. There are some minds which, under the 
 influence of a modern phase of thought, are repelled 
 by the very idea of design in Nature. They feel as if 
 it were an idea founded exclusively on our own human 
 consciousness, and on the narrow limitation of our 
 powers. They cannot think of the final causes in 
 Nature as acting under like limitations as to space 
 and time, or as to any of the powers and opportunities 
 which are so conditioned. They feel as if it were an 
 unworthy notion of any supposed divine Power that 
 it should be likened to some great artificer making 
 things on the same principle on which we are com- 
 pelled to make them, in order to effect our purposes. 
 This aspect of the subject is quite intelligible, but 
 obviously it is one which has no tendency to exclude 
 the abstract conception of mind as omnipresent in 
 Nature. On the contrary, it usually takes the form 
 of representing the human idea of contrivance and 
 design as involving unworthy and inadequate con- 
 ceptions of a mind, which is regarded as, somehow, so 
 supreme as to be above such necessities of what we 
 call mechanical contrivance and invention. These, it is 
 thought, involve the idea of limitations, whereas it 
 is farther thought, we cannot suppose the existence of
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS II 
 
 any limitations on a really Supreme Will. Such sug- 
 gestions are not unnatural. There is no other objection 
 to them than this consideration — that our recognition of 
 mind must be determined by its recognizable qualities 
 as known to us, and that we must accept the evidence 
 of manifestations which are unmistakable. Our specu- 
 lative faculties are altogether untrustworthy on such 
 subjects, when they try to soar into regions with no 
 atmosphere of knowledge to sustain their wings. 
 Apart from facts, they have no foothold in the courts 
 of truth. It is a certain fact, and not a fancy, that in 
 Nature all things are done by the use of appropriate 
 means, and by the subordination of material structures 
 to future work and function. Why it should be so 
 is quite another question. That is a question which 
 rises into the domain of theology, properly so called 
 — that is to say, it belongs to the category of 
 questions touching the ultimate character and qualities 
 of the mind which is obviously concerned in the 
 phenomena of Nature. But we are now speaking 
 simply of mind in itself — of mental phenomena as 
 distinguished from the blind and mechanical action of 
 the physical forces. We may wonder, and we must 
 wonder, why it is that the mental characteristics_ 
 which we recognize in the work s of Nature should be 
 so very like^j our o vvMrLsomejoOtsiJeatmies ; and yet, 
 on the other hand, it may well occur to us that if the 
 mind that we see in Nature were wholly and abso- 
 lutely unlike our own, we should have no means of 
 recognizing it at all, and we may well surmise that 
 such likeness as we do see, may be the result of
 
 12 
 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 attributes which are inseparable from the whole con- 
 stitution of the Universe and of its Author. 
 
 Thpre^ is^however, one great and obvioiLS jdifference 
 between^^urjown worksjand the (wo rks^ of Nature^ 
 which may perhaps suggest to us the possibihty of 
 a corresponding difference in the methods of causa- 
 tion. And this difference may reconcile our speculative 
 notions of a Supreme Power with the observed facts of 
 that Power working in a way that seems so much too 
 like our own. That di fference lies m tlie^ djsti nctiQ n 
 bet\veen^mayn^^and_^eatmg^or, in other words, 
 between ^(development, and ^fnanufacture?' The last of 
 these two methods — the method of manufacture— is^ 
 always (^ur[wa^;;2£-niaking' thing,s. The first of these 
 (two piethods, namely, that of ^rowtK^ oPdeveTopmerTt ^r 
 is the {6nrversal method of Nat ure in all her works . 
 We make things by a visible handling from the out- 
 side, as it were, of matter and of the material forces. 
 In Nature all things are made, as it appears to us, by 
 an absolute taking possession of matter and of the 
 material forces, and by endowing them, as it were, 
 with an indwelling subordination and obedience. Yet. 
 if we examine closely the operation of our own 
 minds, we shall come to the conclusion that the 
 ultimate seat and centre of design, even in ourselves, 
 lies behind and above the processes of manufacture, 
 and is really as invisible and as inaccessible to 
 a full understanding of it as it is in external 
 Nature. V/ith us the act of conceiving a design is 
 a purely mental act — independent, so far as we can 
 feel or see^ of time, or space, or of any external
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS I3 
 
 matter. This is creation, or comes as near to it as 
 our faculties enable us to think of it at all. It is only 
 when we come to the execution of the design — to the 
 embodiment of it in outward form — that the differ- 
 ence arises so conspicuously between our methods 
 and the methods of external Nature. We have to 
 use our hands laboriously in preparing materials, in 
 shaping them, in combining them, in running them 
 into moulds, and when all the bits of a mechanism 
 have been so prepared, we have to put them together 
 in the necessary adjustments. In Nature all this kind 
 of visible and external handwork, is superseded. But 
 nothing else is superseded. The combinations and 
 adjustments in themselves, are not superseded; on the 
 contrary, they are always conspicuous, and the highest 
 and most satisfactory investigations of science consist 
 in nothing else than in the tracing and identification 
 of them. But they are brought about and effected 
 in a manner widely different from the only manner in 
 which we can work our way to analogous results. 
 We cannot get matter and the physical forces to 
 obey us except by an external handling. Our minds 
 cannot be immanent in them. We cannot eet, 
 as it were, inside of them, so as to inspire them, as 
 it would almost seem, with the spirit of an absolute 
 and passive obedience. Yet, none the less, in the 
 primary work of conceiving any design, in setting it 
 up in the mind's eye, in imagining it, and, it may 
 almost be said, in seeing it as it is to be when clothed 
 in form, we feel as independent of matter as are the . 
 designs which we recognize in Nature.
 
 T4 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 The history of all great human conceptions and 
 designs, whether in the fields of literature, or of art, 
 or of mechanical invention, are full of examples in 
 which we see and feel this great distinction between 
 the purelyjTientaJjfliDiik, and the later and lower_work 
 of handling and^ha^ing^matter- All great buildings, 
 some of which have raised and inspired the human 
 mind for centuries, have been so conceived — from the 
 vast cathedrals which lift their arches amidst the busy 
 haunts of men, to the lovely temples which, in the 
 wastes of Paestum or Girgente, still impress us with 
 a sense of majesty and repose. Nay, there may be, 
 and there are, other designs of the same kind, but 
 greater, which have never been embodied in any 
 material form at all, because of the immense distance 
 which separates, in us, between mental and material 
 constructions. I am myself in possession of a 
 striking example. My friend, the late Mr. James 
 Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer — an 
 instrument which has had immense consequences in 
 extending the power of man over all the work which 
 steam alone can do — was a great mechanic, and he 
 was able to embody his imaginings in material forms 
 of adjusted structure. But he was also , in conception, 
 v^ajTiighty architects He once conceived the design of 
 a Castle of Otranto, and drew the design in outline. 
 It is a superb creation. Lofty walls, with endless 
 towers and turrets, crown the summits of a great 
 precipice, and impress upon the mind the ideas at 
 once of impregnable strength, and of such power as 
 could need no defence. The work of actually erecting
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 15 
 
 such a castle would require an army of men, almost 
 such as that which built the pyramids of Egypt, 
 and for as long a time. But it would have required 
 more than this, in the work needed to embody the 
 forms of beauty with which its details abounded. 
 Yet in Nasmyth's mind this magnificent design rose 
 as a sudden inspiration, and even the comparatively 
 slight work of tracing its outlines on paper was as 
 separate from the mental operation, as intellect and 
 imagination are separate from the materials of pen, ink, 
 and paper, or of wood, and stone, and lime. The same 
 profound distinction is illustrated in the story of his 
 celebrated mechanical invention of the steam-hammer. 
 He has often told me that the idea flashed upon him 
 suddenly and in a moment when he was at tea. He 
 was so absolutely certain of its material practicability 
 and of its mechanical success, that he at once drew 
 up the specification and wrote instructions for a 
 patent. James Watt's still more celebrated concep- 
 tion of the separate condenser in the steam-engine, 
 is another example of the same kind, except that in 
 this case there was a much longer way to be travelled 
 in getting the required command over materials, and 
 over difficulties of mere mechanical construction. In 
 all these cases, and in a thousand others, the differ- 
 ence and distinction between the conceiving mind 
 and the mere artificer is a difference as wide as exists 
 between any two things cognizible by our intelligence. 
 In Nature this distinction vanishes. That which does 
 not vanish, however, but becomes, on the contrary, 
 supreme and solitary in its reality, are all those
 
 l6 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 highest functions of mind which consist in the con- 
 ceiving of results, and i n the absolute comma n d oy er 
 the means of attain inp^t hem which is i ncomprehensib le 
 to_us. It is the artificer, with his laborious work, who 
 disappears, not the designer occupying the throne of 
 ultimate conception and of effective causation. The 
 very idea of an artificer disappears in Nature, only 
 because there are no materials which seem to be re- 
 fractory in the hands of that mind which is so supreme 
 — no weights too heavy to be lifted, no forms of 
 matter which will not yield their elementary substances 
 to design except under conditions which it is difficult 
 or impossible to secure. In Nature the elements of 
 matter — analyzed — dissociated — selected — can, in 
 some cases, be actually seen rushing, through prepared 
 channels, to take their appointed place in the building 
 up of new organic structures, controlled and guided 
 by some invisible force, or impulse, entirely different 
 from any which we can yoke to our service. But 
 this difference does not alter in the least the obvious 
 relation of the results to all that we recognize as mind. 
 The same principle appears throughout the whole 
 region of animal mechanics and of organic chemistry. 
 Let us take a single example out of an endless list. 
 Some substances are capable of exerting a powerful 
 chemical action in decomposing others. But the 
 separation of compounded elements is an essential 
 step towards re-combination in new forms. All_organic 
 creatures need food ; but food cons is ts in matter de - 
 c omposed in such a way as to afford facilities fo r 
 re -combination . Npw^t.is, ^ law of chemical a ction
 
 I'J ITS DEFINITION'S AND THEIR RESULTS I7 
 
 that i n order to be ma.de_ea^ and rapidly eff ectual, 
 it must be allowed_^22ortuiiity -and <s9.dvantage,'. and_^ 
 that for this purpose the substance to be decorg- 
 posed must be so brok en up, or ground down me - 
 chanically, that its particles shall be well exposed 
 to the decomp osing agent. For this purpose, there- 
 fore, the raw materials of food must be so treated. 
 It~Ts lor^^this end that teeth, or some equivalent 
 weapons with muscles to work them, have to be 
 provided. When we have to gain the same end, 
 which is a constant necessity in every laboratory, 
 we have to use the pestle and mortar to triturate, 
 and grind down, the material which we wish to 
 decompose. This is a mechanical operation. It is 
 the work of a mere artificer. But in Nature the tritu- 
 rating apparatus grows, or is developed, with the very 
 germ of the organism which needs it — but always 
 before the need arises. And thus, we can see, and be 
 absolutely sure, that it is^/"<?^ us£^ and not^_y use, that 
 i t is developed. Some foreseeing of that which is 
 to come, presides over the whole operation. Provision 
 alway s is preceded by prevision, ([^aturalselectioii,'* 
 as an agency in deve loping structu res prioiLJa^ their 
 functional use, if it has any meaning at all, is^simpjy 
 a mental and directing choice. All the plausibility it 
 possesses, as a phrase, rests upon, and consists in, its 
 implicit reference to the analogies of mind. It is 
 plain, therefore, that the somewhat refined and subtle 
 objection to the old argument from design, that it 
 represents the mind which is supreme in Nature as 
 the mind of a mere artificer, is an objection which 
 
 c
 
 l8 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cK. 
 
 rests on incomplete analysis. It confounds the high 
 functions of a conceiving mind, with the far lower 
 functions of a mere executive mechanic. It fails to 
 recognize that divine element, existing even in our- 
 selves, which needs no external materials to work 
 with, and which seems, so far as our consciousness is 
 concerned, to be independent even of space and time, 
 and to belong altogether to the region of the invisible. 
 We have seen the instinctive witness borne by 
 scientific men in their use of language. There is 
 another powerful evidence — never hitherto sufficiently 
 recognized — that the presence of mind in Nature is 
 not a fancy, or any mere inference, but a fact of which 
 we have certain and direct perception. That evidence 
 consists not in the use o jil y, but in the very structure 
 of language, and in the etymology of words. For 
 language^_like thought itself, of which it is tjie 
 vesture, j^s^not m adey(^^but growg ^^r[ls(^deveTope9> 
 It is the automatic expression of, and the witness 
 to, that which we do really see — all the more to be 
 trusted because of the fact that it is an unconscious 
 witness. It is like the photographic surfaces, which are 
 now made so wonderfully sensitive that, when turned 
 to the sky, they become impressed with the images 
 of stars and of other heavenly bodies which escape 
 altogether from the grasp of conscious vision. So 
 it is with words. It is vain to dispute their self- 
 recording testimony. They cannot report anything 
 which does not really shine in upon the self-conscious- 
 ness of man, or, in other words, which he does not 
 really see. The structure of the physical retina is
 
 Ij ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS I9 
 
 complex and delicate, almost beyond conception, 
 and the truthfulness of its response to the impinging 
 rays of light, is perfect within a special range. But 
 the delicacy and complexity of this structure is as 
 nothing in comparison with the delicacy and com- 
 plexity of that other mental retina which Jies behind, 
 or beyond , it.— which corrects all its ^inverte d imagesL 
 and reads off its own interpretation sjol-them^jn the 
 inn er, and finer, light of min d. Hence it is that words 
 which have been moulded in that light, and have 
 been instinctively adopted as a true rendering of that 
 which men see in Nature, constitute in themselves 
 the best proof of that rendering as the direct and 
 immediate perception of a fact. Such, for example, is 
 the witness borne by the word ' organ ' for the func- 
 tional parts of the living frame in all animals. 
 ' Organo n ' is a Greek_ word, and it means an instru- 
 ment, an implement, z^^ toolj/^ the making, or moving, 
 or doing of something else ^. This is one of the 
 many words which lose much of their significance 
 and force by the familiarity of repetition. As, in the 
 case of a coin in daily use, we never think of the 
 image and superscription that are stamped upon it, 
 although to these it owes its value, so, in the use of 
 a familiar word we forget the mint in which it was 
 struck, and the precious metal of original meaning to 
 which its currency is due. Yet if we substitute some 
 other word which has not become familiar by constant 
 repetition, but which is exactly equivalent, then the 
 full significance of our language is forced upon us. 
 
 ' Scott and Liddell, Greek Diet, in voce ' Organon.' 
 C 2
 
 20 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 So it is with the VQreek' vyord Cprgan/ /as compared 
 
 with itsCLatii^ equivalent^' apparatus?^ The root idea 
 of both words is the same , namely, the idea of a nieans_ 
 to an end. Intention is of its very essence. But the 
 word ' organ ' has sunk to the level of a mere name for 
 one of the commonest of all things, without compelling 
 us to think of the reason why it has been so appro- 
 priated. The word ' apparatus,' on the other hand, has 
 never been separated from its origin in the history of 
 thought, and when we use it, we are always conscious 
 of its inseparable implications. It can never fail to 
 remind us that what we are thinking of when we use 
 it, is a mechanism contrived for a special purpose. And 
 this is exactly what all organs are, in what we call 
 the organic world. Each, and all of them, are fitted, 
 in advance, for the performance of some separate but 
 needed work in the animal economy. When there- 
 fore men speak, as they continually do, of the organic 
 world, it would be well for them to remember that 
 they are thinking of and meaning an ' apparatus- 
 world ' — of a great province in Nature in which 
 they see instinctively an inexhaustible variety of 
 mechanisms made for the discharge of special func- 
 tions, and all of them built up beforehand in anticipa- 
 tion of the duty assigned to them. It matters nothing 
 how this building is accomplished — whether by that 
 inexplicable process which we call growth, or by any 
 other. By all means let us find out what this process 
 is, if we can. Two things only are certain about it — 
 the first is, that it is absolutely different from any of 
 the processes of construction which man can use ; and
 
 l] ITS DEFIXITIOXS AND THEIR RESULTS 21 
 
 the second is, that as regards its subordination to 
 mental laws, and to the attainment of purpose through 
 the use of means, it is demonstrably identical with our 
 own contrivances. 
 
 And thus we come to see a deep and broad dis- 
 tinction between the (mental faculty of design^ con- 
 sidered initself ^and any power over the mere 
 mechanical methods by w hich_df:sig ^ may be carrie d 
 in to effect. And this is a distinction out of which 
 yet farther suggestions necessarily arise. It does 
 away altogether with the notion that some disparage- 
 ment, or unworthiness, attaches to our conceptions 
 when we attribute our own mechanical methods to 
 that supreme mind which reigns in Nature. But it 
 does more than this. It illuminates, and in a measure 
 explains, that strange mixture of seeming identity 
 and of contrast, which is so puzzling when we 
 compare and contrast the designs we see in external 
 Nature, with the designs we ourselves can form 
 and execute. In this distincti on, ther efore, lies all 
 t he difference betw^een mere (thakiii^- and <.creating7 
 There is, however, one common element in both, and 
 that is the element of preconceiving or designing. 
 But all else is different. Our power over matter and 
 the physical forces, is, as it were, at second hand. It 
 is external, not indwelling. In extent it is infini- 
 tesimally small as compared with the command over 
 them which we see in Nature ; but besides its smallness 
 in extent, it is of a lower kind. It seems as if it were 
 delegated, not original. It is narrowed, confined, and 
 made mechanical, by our inability to get free access
 
 22 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 to the physical forces, except by, as it VA^ere, mere 
 tricks and circuitous expedients. These are beset 
 with difficuhies of process, and are comparatively 
 clumsy in result. In Nature, on the other hand, the 
 power of mind over the physical forces, seems to be 
 immanent, ubiquitous, and omnipresent. The faculty, 
 in us, which sees likeness, is the same which, in the 
 very act of seeing it, must also of necessity see, and 
 estimate, difference. And if we have confidence in 
 the perception which that faculty gives us of the 
 continual presence of mental design in Nature, we 
 must give equal confidence to the perception of that 
 immense distinction between our methods of working 
 out design, and the methods which we see around us, 
 and especially in our own organism, as in all others. 
 
 The result of these considerations on the philo- 
 sophy of religion is simply this, that in our direct 
 perception of the mere presence of mind in Nature 
 we are put in full possession of a fact ; whilst in the 
 mystery — in our profound ignorance — of the seat and 
 of the methods of that mind, we are put in full 
 possession of at least a real, substantial, and stimu- 
 lating, subject of inquiry. For just as the distinction 
 of the two methods marks the difference between 
 mere manufacture and true creation, so does it 
 indicate the corresponding distinction between what 
 has been called natural, and revealed, religion. Not 
 less does it give to religion that firm basis on which 
 all knowledge must rest — the direct perception and 
 firm conviction of something which we call a fact. 
 All possible theology must rest on this foundation.
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 23 
 
 It is with the recognition of mind in Nature, as 
 a fact, that religion in itself begins. The moment it 
 is distinctly apprehended, as a fact, that there is 
 a mind in Nature, known to us by at least one of 
 its essential characteristics, namely, that of purpose, 
 then we must also apprehend the truth, that a farther 
 knowledge of that mind, in its relations to our own, 
 is not an empty quest — not a vain excursion into the 
 realms of fancy — but the highest of all pursuits, 
 because it concerns the supreme realities of the life 
 which exists in ourselves, and of the life which exists 
 in the world around us. In the full light of the con- 
 viction that a mind is somehow, as it were, breathing 
 and thinking behind the veil of all visible things, it 
 becomes impossible to think or speak of religion, as 
 it is now so common to speak of it, as a product of 
 the human mind — a structure of imaginative thought 
 developed out of an advancing culture. This idea, 
 and this language, are seen to be incongruous and im- 
 possible, the moment we do really see that the mind 
 which is the subject of all religious conceptions, is 
 a mighty and indisputable, even though it be a 
 mysterious, existence. For in the light of this con- 
 ception we cannot even tolerate the idea that it can 
 be any creation or imagination of our own. 
 
 And then, this conception of an omnipresent mind 
 in Nature being an evident and a mighty fact, carries 
 with it another conception of another reality, which 
 is quite as distinctively, and quite as certainly, a fact 
 and not an imagination. The farther conception is 
 this— that what is true of Nature as a whole must be
 
 24 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 true of our own nature as included in that whole. 
 Whatever may be our superficial impression some- 
 times, that we do in some respects stand, as it were, 
 outside of Nature, and can, more or less, look down 
 upon it as from a height above it, or look up to it 
 as from a depth below it, when we come to reflect 
 we must see and feel that we are simply part of it, 
 bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, included in all 
 its wonders, and in ourselves the very consummation 
 of all its mysteries. 
 
 Repugnant to our pride as this conception may be, 
 in some at least of its aspects, it is too broadly 
 based on a thousand facts to be really any subject 
 of dispute. The identity of principle, and of plan, 
 between our bodies and the bodies of all other living 
 creatures, is as obvious at a glance as it is to the most 
 laborious physiological or biological research. The 
 same mechanical, the same chemical, and the same 
 vital laws, which have to be subordinated to purpose 
 in the humblest and minutest homes of life, play 
 exactly the same part in our own frame. And 
 surely those aspects of this profound and important 
 truth, in which it sometimes may be imagined as 
 degrading, must fade away in those higher aspects 
 which are unveiled to us in the light of reason. For 
 it follows, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that if 
 some universal mind is visibly working in the mar- 
 vellous adaptations of animal life and instinct, it 
 must be not less certainly working in the higher, yet 
 corresponding, adjustments of our own frame, of our 
 own perceptions, of our own reason, and of our own
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 25 
 
 conscience. We have our own personal experience 
 to assure us that, although the invisibility of mind is 
 in ourselves a conspicuous fact, it has nevertheless 
 its own ways of shining through the veil of flesh, 
 and giving us true intimations of its presence in 
 a thousand forms of that which we call expression. 
 We cannot fail to be struck by the fact that our 
 bodily organs are all machines elaborately fitted for 
 the discharge of certain functions, and that — however 
 inconceivably to us — some of them are more directly 
 concerned than others in the processes of thought. 
 Nor is it of small significance to see, and know, that 
 all those organs partake of that striking peculiarity 
 of all natural things, but especially of animated 
 creatures, namely that they come into being, not by 
 processes of manufacture, but of development and 
 of growth. Let us not confound this great general 
 conception, which is one of indisputable truth, with 
 the detailed hypotheses as to the particular steps 
 or methods of that development which have been 
 propounded by Lamarck, Darwin, and others. All of 
 these hypotheses, at the very best, are obviously partial 
 and incomplete, and some of them are often grotesque 
 and even irrational. Let us keep to that grand 
 general conception — about which there can be no 
 doubt whatever — that we are born in, and out of, 
 that natural system in which we live — that we are 
 children, not aliens in its domain — partaking, in the 
 highest degree, of all its highest adaptations to 
 function, to work, to thought. 
 
 Nothing can give us so firm a trust that our
 
 26 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 faculties, when duly exercised and kept within the 
 area of their adapted powers, do really catch and 
 reflect the rays of eternal truth. All our knowledge 
 implies nothing less than this. It is a glorious im- 
 plication to those who really think of it, and follow it 
 to all that it involves. It is, as it were, a smile of 
 invitation on the countenance of external Nature — 
 a steady glance of encouragement on a face which, 
 however beautiful is always mysterious, often solemn, 
 and not seldom severe. When we have seen our way, 
 so clearly, to get rid of that confusion of ideas which 
 confounds the conception of design with the con- 
 ception of mechanical manufacture, it would be a fall, 
 indeed, to tumble back into it, by confounding the 
 great general conception of development or evolution, 
 with the feeble and irrational speculations which 
 identify it with the coarse work of the mere physical 
 forces operating undirected and alone. To us the 
 whole wealth of Nature is in its mind — and in the 
 multiform offers which that mind holds out to us, of 
 more and more intimate communion with our own. 
 
 One of the most important consequences following 
 from these conceptions, is that there can obviously 
 be no room for the vulgar distinction between the 
 Natural and the Supernatural. The sphere of Nature 
 includes the whole of that which is cognizable or 
 conceivable by us, and the most prominent of all its 
 characteristics is the presence of a mind whose 
 methods of operation are, indeed, but very partially 
 known to us, but which are obviously capable of ever 
 new forms of manifestation, and most especially, of
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 27 
 
 manifestations very nearly related to, if not identical 
 with, those of our own intellect and will. The ulti- 
 mate relation in which that mind stands to what we 
 know as matter and the physical forces, is altogether 
 unknown, and may perhaps be even inconceivable to 
 us. But this defect of knowledge ought not to 
 stagger us in accepting the evidence of our senses, 
 and of our reason, as to the mental quality of the work 
 we see done in Nature ; since exactly the same defect 
 of understanding applies to the relations of mind to 
 matter, and to the physical forces, as these relations 
 exist in ourselves. The connexion between thought 
 and the brain, or any other material organ, is quite 
 as inconceivable to us as the connexion between the 
 mind that we see in Nature, and the physical forces 
 as these are known to us. The gulf between them 
 seems wholly impassable by any wings of thought with 
 which we are furnished. There is, in our conceptions, 
 not only a difference, but a positive antithesis between 
 mind and matter, or between the energies of mind 
 and a material force. But this antithesis does not 
 seem to be greater in external Nature than it seems 
 to be in ourselves. On the contrary, it seems to be 
 rather less conspicuous in Nature than it is in us. 
 In external Nature the connexion seems to be more 
 clearly and more absolutely that of complete posses- 
 sion on the one hand, and complete submission upon 
 the other. And the nature of the command exerted 
 looks more like that of an indwelling spirit than in 
 any form which it takes with us. 
 
 Yet these are words which are little more than
 
 28 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. [CH. 
 
 words. They are drawn from the analogy of our 
 own living frame, in which this conception of an 
 indwelling mind is familiar to us. But it leaves the 
 ultimate nature of that indwelling as difficult, or as 
 impossible, a conception as ever. Still, \ve must re - 
 member that aftrue analogy,- ^ra\v n from Nature ,Js 
 
 'solid ioundation which we can have fo r 
 thought. The unity of Nature makes it so. I t is one 
 oft he most powerfu l_weapona_iiLal l scientific rese arch^ 
 In it lies the whole soul, and strength, and subtlety, of 
 human speech, as a means not merely of communi- 
 cating, but of reaching, truth. Speech is saturated 
 with the element of(metaphon, and all metaphor is 
 essentially founded on the perception of analogie s. 
 But although we never do, and never can, think of 
 our own mind or spirit as an indwelling presence and 
 power in the automatic machines which we construct, 
 we can, and we do, habitually think of our own mind 
 and spirit as an indwelling presence and power in the 
 mechanism of our own bodily frame ; and farther, as 
 that frame is not of our own construction, and is yet 
 full of mechanical adaptations, we can perfectly con- 
 ceive of the mind that is in external Nature, being 
 a living and working power in our own. In fact, the 
 most easy conception, perhaps, that we can entertain, 
 is the conception that our own mind and intellect is 
 a fragmentary manifestation of — a mere emanation 
 from — the universal mind which we see in Nature. 
 And, thg mo re we can think of ourselves as ' evolved/ 
 ojL^ developed,' and the less we can think of ourselye s 
 as a mere jnechanical manufacture, the more firmly can
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 29 
 
 we hold to a rational confidence in our own powers. 
 when acti ng in their proper sph ere. Of the limitations 
 of that sphere, indeed, we are fully conscious. Yet in 
 this very consciousness we do, in a manner, overpass 
 the boundary. That is to say, in being conscious of 
 a boundary, we become also aware of the existence 
 of a beyond. 
 
 In two chapters of a former work I have dealt with 
 the considerations which may assure us that the felt 
 limitations on our knowledge are not such as to 
 throw any doubt upon its truthfulness ^ Not only 
 is that knowledge true, so far as it goes, but, with the 
 greatest confidence, we may feel sure that the lines 
 of thought which it establishes, are lines which, at 
 the spot where they are intercepted by some barrier, 
 point steadily in a true direction to what is equally 
 truth beyond it. This is a conception of great 
 power, not only in itself, but in its immediate con- 
 sequences. It is firmly founded on our convictions 
 of the unity of Nature — a unity which everything 
 confirms ; whilst no other conception is so impressive 
 in the motive and inducement it holds out to us to 
 exhaust all that is knowable by thought, reflection, 
 and research, within the sphere which is most directly 
 accessible to us. To keep our eyes well open to all 
 that can be seen within our limits — to neglect nothing, 
 to set aside nothing, to forget nothing, that can 
 have any significance — is a vigilance not less imposed 
 upon us as a duty than held out to us as a sure hope 
 and expectation of some great reward. The feeling is 
 
 ^ Unity of Nature, chaps, iv. and v. (John Murray.)
 
 30 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 indelible in our nature, that whatever is relatively true 
 here, either continues to be true in the beyond, or else 
 has, there, some counterpart with which it stands in 
 a close analogy. What we call the love of truth for 
 its own sake, which in some poor degree is present in 
 all minds, and is a ruling passion in all minds of the 
 highest class, is a love which has the instinct of this 
 belief as its fountain and its justification. It affords 
 a full and satisfying answer to the false logic which has 
 been often used to deny and disprove all certitude as 
 attainable by us. Our knowledge, it is sa id, is derived 
 solely from our experi ence. Then the argument 
 follows, t hat as our experience is finite, it is therefore 
 incapa ble of ^ aff ording anyground J bi^jnfinite cqxi- 
 clusions. But there is a su btlefallac y in this argum ent. 
 It may be true of conclusions which involve the element 
 of time. But it is not true of conceptions in which 
 time is no element at all. No length, for example, of 
 human experience of the sunrise and of the sunset, 
 can give us an absolute certainty that they will con- 
 tinue after to-day. But ou r human reas on can and 
 does give us an^ absolut e certainty that, if they cease, 
 the cessation must be due to some cause. There is no 
 element of time in this conclusion. It rests, in a sense, 
 upon experience ; but_Jt_Js_jn__aii_Jaternal and i^ 
 tellect ual experience of that kind jajijch we call— a 
 ne cessity of thoug ht. On the perc eption of t his kind 
 of necessity all reasoning res ts. The axioms and 
 postulates of mathematics are of this kind — but 
 probably it may be said with truth that mathematical 
 axioms are the lowest of the class. Men often speak
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 3I 
 
 of mathematical demonstration as the most abso- 
 lutely certain kind of truth. But this is a great 
 delusion. The definiteness and neatness of mathe- 
 matical demonstrations, impose upon us in this respect, 
 whereas, in reality, that very definiteness is itself only 
 a result and proof of the comparative lowness of the 
 sphere within which mathematical demonstration is 
 confined. That sphere is absolutely confined to things 
 which can be handled, and divided, into measurable 
 units, and between which purely numerical relations 
 can be traced. This is tantamount to saying that 
 mathematical demonstration applies only to matter 
 and the physical forces — measurable in themselves, 
 and working measurably in time and space. It can 
 touch nothing, therefore, in the sphere of ethics, or 
 in the sphere of all those other purely intellectual 
 conceptions which are equally independent of space 
 and time, and are therefore equally incapable of being 
 concerned in the terms of measurable units. The 
 truth is that all the phenomena of life, with whatever 
 certainties it may contain, lie outside of, and beyond, 
 the reach of this kind of demonstration — and this, 
 not because of their having any lower degree of 
 certainty, but because, on the contrary, of their cer- 
 tainties being of a much higher kind. The inorganic 
 world is the home of mathematical demonstration ; 
 but the whole organic world is unapproachable by its 
 methods. Yet the certainties of our knowledge in 
 the organic world, and in the world of mind which 
 is inseparable from it, are not less, but more abso- 
 lute, and vastly more important. That two material
 
 32 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 things which are in magnitude equal to a third, 
 must be equal to each other, is not a truth more 
 certain than that stealing is immoral, and that im- 
 morality is wrong. These two kinds of truth are in- 
 commensurate — the intellectual and moral kind being 
 of an infinitely higher kind than the mathematical, 
 but yet not capable of the same kind of experimental 
 verification. That all things must have a cause is 
 to our minds an axiomatic or self-evident proposition, 
 as evidently true as any axiom of mathematics ; yet 
 it is a proposition that cannot be brought into any 
 conceivable relation with measurable units. We must 
 get rid, therefore, of the notion, which clings to the 
 mind of those engaged in physical pursuits, that 
 certainty in knowledge is only attainable by that 
 kind of reasoning which belongs to mathematical 
 demonstration. 
 
 This delusion has been intensified by the wide- 
 spread interest which, in our time, is taken in the 
 pursuit of physical research, and in the advancing 
 triumphs which that research has achieved. Through 
 this it has come about that the very name and idea 
 of science is practically confined in popular language 
 to the physical sciences. It is almost, as it were, by 
 some grace or favour that the word 'science' is ex- 
 tended to other branches of inquiry than those which 
 concern matter and its forces. And yet nothing can 
 be more certain than that the proper and full meaning 
 of the word ' science ' is simply systematic knowledge 
 — that is to say, a knowledge of things, not as isolated 
 facts or phenomena, but in their true connexion with
 
 I] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 33 
 
 each other. Our knowledge is scientific in proportion 
 as we know things in many, or in a few only, of their 
 relations to each other, and to their causes. It follows 
 that the very heights of science must be occupied by 
 any knowledge we can gain as to those relations 
 which are in themselves of the highest kind — the 
 most nearly ultimate. Yet we are very apt to be so 
 proud, and head-turned, by the achievements of mere 
 physical discovery, as to forget how small have been 
 its results in this direction. It may almost be said 
 with truth, that, as regards all the ultimate problems 
 which the human mind does always more or less 
 consciously place before itself as demanding a solution, 
 the apparently long march of physical research has 
 not even approached the goal of any one of them. 
 I do not, of course, mean to say that this long 
 march has done nothing indirectly. The very de- 
 monstration of its own incompetence to tell us what 
 we most desire to know, is a negative result of 
 immense value in enabling us to appreciate the 
 comparatively low sphere, and comparatively poor 
 significance, of all that has been reached by mere 
 physical discovery. If we examine the general result 
 carefully, we shall find that it has been mainly the 
 discovery, in greater detail, of truths which had long 
 been felt and known in terms more general and 
 abstract. This is especially true of all the branches 
 of physical science that bring us at once into closest 
 contact with the ultimate problems, the very highest 
 questions which our intellect can conceive, and which 
 our spirit can and does most eagerly desire to solve. 
 
 D
 
 34 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 I refer especially to the science of Biology in all its 
 ramifications. It is the strangest of all delusions that 
 the general conception of evolution or development 
 has any novelty at all. The only thing that is at all 
 novel has been the various theories which have been 
 recently suggested about the physical methods, or 
 steps, through which development has gone. But 
 those theories are certainly incompetent from defect, 
 and are probably largely erroneous even in direction. 
 Considering that every individual organism has been 
 visibly, and notoriously, built up by the development 
 of germs, and that this fact has found expression in 
 the language of poetry, philosophy, and theology, 
 from the earliest records of our race, it does seem an 
 almost unaccountable misapprehension to suppose 
 that there is any new discovery in the idea that, 
 as a fact, all living things are born, and grow, instead 
 of being manufactured as our own mechanical inven- 
 tions are. It may be true indeed, and it is most true, 
 that the consequences involved in this general concep- 
 tion, have not until lately been fully apprehended, and 
 that some of those consequences have come out more 
 clearly because of the farther tracing of this general 
 conception into the details of its visible manifestations. 
 For all such consequences, in thought, we ought to be 
 ever on the watch. The anticipation and expectation 
 of them is the great cause and justification of our 
 instinctive curiosity in the detection of details. But 
 it does not in the least follow that the most valuable 
 of these consequences will, as a matter of course, be 
 most speedily apprehended by those investigators
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 35 
 
 who may do the most effective, and even the most 
 splendid, work in identifying the details by which 
 they are suggested. On the contrary, it is more 
 than probable that those who are engrossed in the 
 detection of physical details, will also be engrossed 
 by the purely physical aspects of phenomena, and 
 may even have some aversion to conceptions which 
 seem chiefly to belong to another sphere. But 
 the great fact to be observed is, that, sometimes, the 
 most ancient and the most familiar and popular con- 
 ceptions on many subjects of the highest scientific 
 interest, are conceptions which include much, if not 
 all, that has been more recently discovered on the 
 same subject — as the greater includes the less. Thus, 
 for example, the common and familiar conception 
 which all men have had from the beginning of the 
 world, that the various parts and organs of the lower 
 animals, are, to a large extent identical or ' homo- 
 logous' with the corresponding parts and organs in 
 man — this is a general conception, which covers and 
 includes all that has since been done by such men 
 as Cuvier and Owen and Huxley. The heads, the 
 limbs, the eyes and ears, of beasts, have been in- 
 stinctively recognized since man existed as organic 
 parts corresponding with our own. In principle and 
 in significance there is really nothing new in the 
 latest discoveries on this kind of correspondence, 
 except in so far as those discoveries prove that 
 the old instinctive conceptions were founded on 
 a deeper and more thorough identification than 
 could by possibility have been made before. Never- 
 
 D 2
 
 36 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 theless, those discoveries are science, in the truest 
 senses of the word, because they enable us to know 
 things with greater certainty — in a larger number of 
 their true relations to each other — and, perhaps also, 
 more closely in their relation to something which lies 
 beyond, or behind, or above, them all. 
 
 It is thus that, sometimes, in the handling of the 
 details of physical research, men are brought, as it 
 were, into closer quarters than before, with those ulti- 
 mate questions which are the most baffling, and that 
 some convictions are borne in upon the mind, with 
 a power and strength than which nothing can be 
 surpassed in certainty. Such, for example, is the 
 conviction often expressed by the great physiologist, 
 John Hunter, and which is quoted and adapted 
 by Huxley as ' well founded ' — ' that life is the 
 cause, and not the consequence, of organization.' 
 I am not sure that this conviction, significant and 
 far-reaching as it is, can be affirmed to be new, or 
 the result only of modern biological research. The 
 language of all ages in expressing the conception of 
 that which we know as life, is not only in harmony 
 with this conviction, but generally implies it, more or 
 less distinctly. Never have men spoken, or thought, 
 of the separate parts of the body, as the causes of 
 the life that is in them. Nevertheless, our natural 
 sense of the true order of causation receives a new 
 basis of fact to stand upon, and rises from that basis 
 into a higher and firmer structure of definite con- 
 viction, when we are brought face to face with 
 such facts as those referred to by Huxley in this
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 37 
 
 connexion — ' for,' he says, ' in the lowest forms of 
 animal life there is absolutely nothing worthy of the 
 name of organization to be discovered by the micro- 
 scopist, though assisted by the beautiful instruments 
 that are now constructed. In the substance of many of 
 those creatures, nothing is to be discerned but a mass 
 of jelly, which might be represented by a particle of 
 thin glue. Not that it corresponds with the latter in 
 composition, but it has that texture and sort of aspect: 
 it is structureless, and organless, and without definitely 
 formed parts. Nevertheless, it possesses all the es- 
 sential properties and characters of vitality ^' 
 
 Here we find ourselves at once confronted with a 
 fact of the intellectual consciousness, which lifts us out 
 of the sphere of mere structural details, and indeed, 
 as it would seem, out of the sphere of mere physics 
 altogether. The stress here openly laid upon the dis- 
 tinction between cause and effect — the unquestioned 
 assumption that it is a real and fundamental distinction, 
 on which much depends — is in itself an invaluable 
 contribution to the certainty of our knowledge, and 
 to the truthfulness of our faculties. There have been, 
 and still are, many philosophers who deny that we 
 have any knowledge of true causation. They reduce 
 the conception, as known to us, down to that of 
 a mere order of sequence in phenomena. But that 
 our idea of causation is in itself more than this, is 
 a matter of fact, and not a mere matter of opinion. 
 In the very act of denying our right to entertain that 
 idea, its separate character and nature is confessed 
 
 ^ Huxley, Elements of Comparative Anatomy, pp. 10, 11. 

 
 38 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 and identified. The denial is a paradox— a con- 
 tradiction in terms — an admission of that which is 
 denied. Our conception of causes is a fact. The 
 argument or assumption is, that we are not justified 
 by our nature in entertaining that conception at all. 
 It is a matter of high interest to observe how such 
 men as Hunter and Huxley treat this assumption 
 with unconscious but absolute neglect, and how they 
 admit the opposite conviction as undeniable. Fresh 
 from the contemplation of the most mysterious phe- 
 nomena of Nature, and from the contemplation of 
 these at the point, as it were, when they first issue 
 from the Unseen, these men speak as if they could 
 not even entertain the notion of causation being other 
 than a fundamental reality in Nature. With the 
 mental eye they have seen it working, and they 
 find the proof of the truth of this mental vision in 
 the very fact on which they dwell, that nothing in the 
 nature of a cause is to be seen by the bodily faculty 
 of sight. Certain effects are visible to the bodily 
 eye. That which causes the effects lies in the region 
 of the Unseen, and they call it life. 
 
 The doctrine however of Hunter, that life is the 
 cause of organization, and that organization is not 
 the cause of life, cannot be allowed to rest only on the 
 particular proof and illustration to which Huxley 
 refers. The coexistence of animal life with a sub- 
 stance which to all appearance is perfectly homo- 
 geneous and destitute of structure, may be an illus- 
 tration of the doctrine which, to some minds, seems 
 most significant and conclusive. But the doctrine is
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 39 
 
 quite as securely founded on all animal life, however 
 highly organized. The truth is, that as regards those 
 lowest creatures, which seem to us to consist of nothing 
 but a formless jelly, there may be, nevertheless, a great 
 deal more ' differentiation ' than we suppose. We 
 must remember that the finest microscopes now 
 constructed are impotent to detect the molecular and 
 atomic constitution of any form of matter ; and it is 
 at least possible, if not highly probable, that in the 
 seemingly formless jelly of a rhizopod or a sponge, 
 there may be some definite arrangement of parts 
 which have corresponding relation to the functions of 
 even the lowest forms of life. But this would make 
 no difference in our conviction of the truth of the 
 Hunterian doctrine. The same apparently structure- 
 less character which belongs to the living substance 
 of a sponge, belongs to the germinal stages of all 
 other living things. Out of that living substance, 
 and by virtue of the vital forces which are at its 
 command, do all such germs build up the separate 
 organs, which, in the higher creatures, are destined 
 to separate functions. There is no visible structure 
 in the white of an egg : yet we all know what a highly 
 organized structure arises out of it, under the causa- 
 tion of vitality, and of the mechanical stimulus of heat. 
 The conviction, therefore, that vitality is the neces- 
 sary condition precedent to organization, or in other 
 words, that vitality is the cause of organization, and 
 not its consequence, is even more forced upon us 
 by those creatures whose organization is ultimately 
 high, than in those whose organization stops at
 
 40 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 the Stage of an apparently formless jelly. It is 
 particularly striking in the case of a bird's egg, 
 because of the isolation of all eggs which are 
 hatched by mere heat — outside of, and wholly sepa- 
 rated from, the parent organism. When no such 
 separation takes place — when the ova of animals are 
 hatched in the mother's womb — the process undoubt- 
 edly involves the same law, and the same principle ; 
 but it is less striking to us, because, although it must 
 be a ceaseless wonder ' how the bones do grow in the 
 womb of her that is with child,' yet the continued 
 presence of, and the continued connexion with, a highly 
 complex vitality in the mother, distracts our atten- 
 tion, as it were, from the separate vitality resident in 
 the germ. But when that separate vitality is so com- 
 pletely cut off from the parent, as it is in a bird's 
 egg, and when it can be seen from day to day 
 developing, under the mere influence of a definite 
 external temperature, all the organs of a very highly 
 complex and richly endowed creature, the witness 
 borne to the true causality of life — the building up of 
 organization — is surely even greater than in the case 
 of those lower creatures whose structureless substance 
 works out nothing but a calcareous shell, or a net- 
 work of sillcious rods. Neither, on the other hand, if 
 we come to think of it, would our conviction of the true 
 causality of life be one whit diminished if we could 
 discover, by some new means of vision or analysis, 
 that there is some more structure in the living, jelly- 
 like substance of the lowest form of life, than we had 
 supposed. If, for example, it should be discovered
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 4I 
 
 that there is always some minute granulation or 
 tendency to a nucleus in such substances, our con- 
 viction would remain the same. That granulation 
 would be necessarily regarded by us as itself the 
 effect of the vitality resident in the substance, and 
 the nucleated structure, however simple and low in 
 character, would be assigned by us, as a necessity of 
 thought, to the invisible power of that which we know 
 as life. 
 
 The familiarity of the general facts connected 
 with the external hatching of eggs by the purely 
 mechanical aid of a certain amount of heat, is a famili- 
 arity which deadens our intelligence to the inscrutable 
 mystery and wonder of the thing that is done. But 
 when an egg is opened during successive days and 
 hours of the process, the impression it must make 
 upon the mind is far greater than that which arises 
 from the fact that some of the most beautiful forms 
 in Nature are built up by the energies resident in the 
 living jelly of a ' foraminifer ' or of a sponge. When 
 we see the pulsing spot at which the work begins, and 
 the formless mass becoming gradually differentiated 
 along lines of structure which lie wholly in the invisi- 
 ble, but come gradually and slowly into sight as the 
 plan of a functional apparatus is developed, it is 
 impossible to resist that conviction which rests upon 
 the concurrent testimony of the senses and of the 
 intellect, that the indwelling power, which we know 
 as vitality, is the efficient cause of those inconceiv'able 
 results which we thus see in the actual process of 
 attainment. This conviction is all the more over-
 
 42 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 powering in the case of some birds — the whole class 
 called the gallinaceous birds — not only because of 
 the perfection and complication of the plan which is 
 worked out and accomplished inside the shell before 
 the creature is born into the world, but also on account 
 of the rapidity and perfection of that accomplishment. 
 No transmutation of one elementary substance into 
 another which was ever dreamed of by the wildest 
 alchemist in the Middle Ages, can make the most 
 distant approach to the transmutation of material 
 which takes place when the vitality in an egg, changes 
 the structureless matter in which it lies concealed, 
 into all the organs of a chick — manifesting, from the 
 moment of exclusion, many of the distinctive powers 
 and affections of mind and will, and able, in some 
 cases — as in that of the Brush Turkeys of Australia — 
 to run, to fly, and to lead the life of a perfect bird, 
 from the moment of emerging from the shell. 
 
 The same conviction would no doubt be as inevit- 
 ably pressed upon us as if we had the same means 
 and opportunities of watching the process — quite as 
 mysterious and incomprehensible — which is employed 
 in the metamorphosis of insects, of crustaceous, and 
 other lower forms of life. This is a process whereby 
 the same powers of vitality are employed to change 
 the whole structure of a highly organized and living 
 creature into another kind of being wholly different, 
 and adapted for a sphere of life and of activity abso- 
 lutely new — new in everything — new in structure, new 
 in food, new in instincts, new even in the very ele- 
 ments in which alone it can live and move. The
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 43 
 
 general fact is indeed familiar ; but the details are 
 not SO easily accessible, and few men are perhaps 
 aware of the wide range and prevalence of that stricth' 
 creative work which, in this form, is perpetually going 
 on in what we call the organic world. 
 
 Such convictions as those thus recorded by 
 Hunter and Huxley, being impressed upon the 
 mind by close contemplation of natural phenomena, 
 are convictions which constitute the highest kind of 
 knowledge. In philosophy and in religion they corre- 
 spond with the self-evident truths which^ in mathe- 
 matics, are the foundation stones of all possible 
 demonstration. For the great beauty of them is that 
 there is in them a virtue stretching far beyond the 
 subject of their immediate application. They are 
 charged with conceptions which carry us behind the 
 veil — far on into the region of the invisible. One of 
 those conceptions is that of a true causation — not 
 a mere sequence or succession of phenomena — but 
 a necessary connexion between an efficient cause and 
 one at least of its effects. Another conception which 
 is involved is, that the cause which is thus identified 
 with all the force of an instinctive recognition, is an 
 agency that is invisible. We cannot even think of it 
 as seen or seeable. We can indeed conceive the 
 possibility of some instrument being invented and 
 constructed, which might reveal to our senses some 
 minute and shadowy traces of a structure in the 
 initial substance which, at first sight, we had thought 
 of as absolutely formless. But if this were indeed to 
 happen, we should equally be compelled to go back
 
 44 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 behind it, and to think of the newly discovered traces 
 as the beginnings of an effect, and not as the visible 
 essence of that vitality which is the cause. 
 
 And all this is most important : for just as there are 
 philosophers who have tried to argue themselves out 
 of all capacity to conceive any true cause, so have 
 other philosophers tried to argue themselves out of the 
 possibility of having any conception of this particular 
 cause, namely life as a real existence. They have 
 busied themselves in the invention of words, which 
 may as much as possible eliminate this conception 
 from our language, and reduce our idea of that which 
 we call life to a mere description of some of the 
 lowest of its visible, and concomitant, phenomena. 
 This is the secret, for example, of the common sub- 
 stitution of the word ' differentiation ' for the word 
 ' structure,' and of the much more elaborate attempt 
 of Mr. Herbert Spencer to give a definition of life 
 out of which all its great peculiarities are obliterated. 
 An ' advance from homogeneity to heterogeneity ' is 
 the memorable result of this attempt so to define life 
 as to eliminate the very essence of that conception 
 which the definition pretends to cover. I call it 
 memorable, because of its obvious failure, even when 
 the attempt is conducted by a mind of great acute- 
 ness. The passage of visible ' homogeneity ' to visi- 
 ble ' heterogeneity ' in a material substance, is no 
 doubt part, although a fragmentary part, of the work 
 which we see done by life acting as a cause. But 
 there is a sense, and a much truer sense, in which 
 ' heterogeneity ' is the result of that which we know
 
 l] ITS DEFINITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS 45 
 
 as death, rather than of that which we know as life. 
 Our blood, when the life is in it, is comparatively 
 homogeneous, and we only know how heterogeneous 
 it can become when the life is out of it, and when 
 consequently its unity is broken up, and it becomes 
 decomposed into a variety of elements. The truth is, 
 that when we come to think of it closely, the very 
 words ' homogeneity ' and ' heterogeneity ' are mis- 
 used and even inverted as to their proper senses, in 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous formula for life. The 
 separate chemical materials of a living structure are 
 held together, homogeneously, by nothing except 
 a common subordination to a common force and to 
 a common end. Their heterogeneous nature and pro- 
 perties do not indeed cease to exist internally and 
 unperceived, but their separateness is masked because 
 of their adapted union in one co-operative work. That 
 which effects the union and co-operation is^ in the 
 strictest sense, the genesis of the structure, and it is 
 in the co-operative alliance that the only homogeneity 
 of the whole consists. Harmony in the discharge of 
 function is obviously the highest kind of homogeneity, 
 and thus life may most truly be said to be a con- 
 tinuous process directly the reverse of that which is 
 asserted in Mr. Herbert Spencer's formula. Life, 
 as exhibited in organic structures, is an advance 
 from elementary heterogeneity to structural homo- 
 geneity, and to the building up of that which is 
 essentially one in its functions and effects.
 
 Chapter II. 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 RECOGNITIONS IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 The definitions arrived at, in the last chapter, go 
 far to establish the dominant power of purpose as 
 a fact in Nature. Not as the result of any argument, 
 but as a direct and immediate perception, does this 
 fact stand out revealed. And is not this result of 
 analysis true in the highest sense ? Do we not all 
 feel it to be true in contemplating organic structures, 
 and is it not a truth which is reflected automatically 
 in that recorder of the deepest truths — the common 
 speech of men ? Do we not classify together in one 
 great category all living things as distinguished from 
 the not-living things — this being, indeed, the widest 
 distinction of which we have any knowledge ? The 
 essential homogeneity of life in all its forms is, per- 
 haps, the most far-reaching truth that modern bio- 
 logical science has contributed to establish, and to 
 illustrate, in an ever-increasing body of new details. 
 The whole of this subject has been confused by the 
 abuse of language — that is to say, by the employ- 
 ment of words which are kept, indeed, as articulate
 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY 47 
 
 sounds, but are emptied or discharged of their only 
 meaning. This is a trick which men play upon 
 themselves, and upon others, which has never been 
 sufficiently detected and exposed. We must there- 
 fore pursue the testimony of language a little farther 
 in the present chapter, breaking, if we can, some fresh 
 ground of illustration and of specified examples. 
 Much has been said and written since the very be- 
 ginning of philosophy, on the fallacies which lie in 
 words. Far too little has been said, and far too little 
 is ever thought, of the wealth which lies in words as 
 an inexhaustible fountain and store of truth. It is 
 the misuse of them, not the use of them, that leads to 
 error. And the greatest misuse of all is to mistrust 
 them, to fail in the recognition of them as what they 
 really are — the most faithful records accessible to our 
 intelligence of some of the most important of all 
 facts. And this they are, because words have not 
 been made by artifice, but have grown up by Nature. 
 We do not often even try to invent a new word, and 
 when some new conception, resulting from the dis- 
 coveries of science, compels us to make the attempt, 
 we are always driven to the old materials with which 
 we have been supplied by the unconscious and self- 
 recording work of many generations. Even then, 
 new coinages are apt to be fragmentary and affected. 
 But the truth is, that the real discoveries of science 
 do very rarely need the coinage of new words. So 
 intimate and far-reaching is the unity of Nature, that 
 in the vast majority of cases, new facts do not involve 
 any essentially new ideas^ but only some fresh applica-
 
 48 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 tion of old ideas which have long been familiar. The 
 consequence is, that the old words which have rolled 
 down the stream of time, and have expressed the 
 conceptions of men on some one or other of the 
 oldest and simplest aspects of Nature, are found to 
 be quite large and wide enough, to cover the newest 
 and most extended applications. 
 
 It is indeed most curious to observe how capacious 
 some of the oldest words expressing abstract ideas 
 have been found to be — how easily all newly dis- 
 covered facts fall under the meaning of some one 
 or other of them, and how little need, as well as 
 how little possibility, there is of new articulate 
 inventions. The great advances, for example, which 
 have been made by modern science in discovering 
 the real nature of heat, and light, and sound, are 
 all covered by anticipation in that wonderful Greek 
 word hepyeia — energy — a word which embraces 
 conceptions as wide as all our possible knowledge 
 of the universe. Modern science has done nothing 
 except to invest those conceptions with a more 
 definite reality, and to prove how true to Nature 
 has been the speech-making faculty in man, and 
 with what reverence we should regard its genuine 
 products. This respect is due to words because of 
 their origin and cause. Born out of the contact of 
 the universal mind that is in man. with the universal 
 mind that is in external Nature, words are the stamped 
 impression made by the greatest of all energies upon 
 the most sensitively true of all adapted surfaces. 
 I return here to the analogy before employed in
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 49 
 
 dealing with this subject, because it is an analogy 
 of the most profound significance. Words are like 
 the impressions made by the heavenly bodies upon 
 the highly ' sensitized ' paper which is now prepared 
 for the purpose of receiving and recording the faintest 
 scintillations of light coming from distances which are 
 inconceivable. Those impressions are often revela- 
 tions as to existences which cannot otherwise be seen, 
 as well as of those which can be seen in the sensitized 
 structures of the human eye. But they are all facts ; 
 and no astronomer, in reasoning on those facts, would 
 think himself at liberty to set any one of them aside. 
 Still less would they think it anything short of a high 
 crime and misdemeanour against the obligations of 
 all scientific inquiry, to eliminate from the star-maps 
 before them, any indications which they may present 
 of motion, of arrangement, of structure, and of law. 
 These, on the contrary, they feel to be the very 
 highest objects of their quest, and the slightest traces 
 of them, are treasured and pondered with a scrupu- 
 lous fidelity. 
 
 It is the same with other physical sciences. We 
 exhaust every device of mechanical ingenuity to 
 construct delicate instruments which shall indicate 
 and record automatically the movements and work 
 of the invisible and imponderable forces of which 
 the world is full. And nothing, perhaps, is more 
 impressive, when we allow ourselves really to think 
 of it, than the revelation which such instruments 
 continually afford of the constant presence and 
 power of energies around us and in us, of which we 
 
 E
 
 50 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 are wholly unconscious, and of the ultimate nature 
 of which we are still profoundly ignorant. But at 
 least we are now awake to the supreme reality of all 
 the recorded facts, and we strain our mental vision, 
 with every effort that is possible, to catch sight of 
 everything that those facts imply. The slightest 
 conscious unfaithfulness in taking due note of any 
 of those facts or indications, is inconceivable to a 
 scientific mind. The very possibility of arriving at 
 a comprehension of them, in their true relations to 
 each other, and to Nature as a whole, depends, of 
 course, upon a scrupulous integrity in the enumera- 
 tion, and in the recognition, of them all. 
 
 When we consider what the human mind is, in its 
 inborn capacities and powers for apprehending and re- 
 flecting the phenomena of Nature, because of its own 
 close relationship with these, it is surely impossible to 
 exaggerate the importance that we ought to attach 
 to automatic records of its working in the develop- 
 ment of speech. That which it so expresses has 
 been undoubtedly seen and felt. Nor less certainly 
 have all such feelings and perceptions come to us by 
 the action of external agencies upon adapted surfaces. 
 And when we consider what the origin and history of 
 our modern languages has been — how they have been 
 built up, slowly and unconsciously, from primitive times, 
 by a great number of the most intellectual races of 
 mankind, each of them contributing some affluent to 
 the main stream — each of them, too, by a true process 
 of natural selection, sifting and dropping every element 
 of conception which has become incongruous or effete
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 51 
 
 — we cannot be too deeply impressed with the great 
 realities which are enshrined in words, and with the 
 power they have in revealing truth. If it were con- 
 ceivable that primitive men, or man in any of his 
 earlier stages of civilization, could have invented the 
 art of photography, and had left pictures taken by it 
 representing all his ways, and manners, and life, we 
 can imagine with what intense interest we should 
 now study them, and trace out every faintest indica- 
 tion of light and shadow that might illustrate or 
 explain so much that we do not know. And yet 
 such pictures could, after all, have represented nothing 
 except the most external things — the form of dress, 
 the habitation — the food — the weapons — the manners 
 and customs, of our vanished ancestors. Just such 
 pictures, only carrying information that goes in- 
 finitely deeper, are the mental images which have 
 been made, and left, in words. They are nothing 
 but pictures, indelible and unfading, of the impres- 
 sions made upon men's spiritual and intellectual 
 structure, by all the phenomena of the world within 
 them and around them. The imagery, and the meta- 
 phors, which they contain, are the direct record of 
 that immediate perception of the unities of Nature, 
 which is not only most vivid but is most true, when 
 it is simple and untainted by any conscious self- 
 analysis. Words are therefore, in a pre-eminent degree, 
 that which St. Paul gives as the definition of faith— 
 they are the 'evidence of things not seen.' That is to 
 say, they are the direct embodiment and expression 
 of relations which can onl}^ be intellectually perceived. 
 
 E 3
 
 52 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 Such being the real nature and history of words, it 
 follows that there can be no greater virtue in all 
 scientific investigations than a scrupulous regard for 
 the faithful use of them. Any temptation to juggle 
 with their meaning, is above all things to be resisted 
 in ourselves, and to be detected and exposed in others, 
 as the most insidious of all endeavours to deceive 
 either our own minds, or the minds of other men. 
 In particular, to use them, and all their implications, 
 for the purposes of mere description, and then to 
 reject those implications for the purposes of abstrac- 
 tion or philosophy, is to be dishonest with ourselves, 
 and to vitiate science at its very source. If we find 
 that, practically, we cannot describe to others, or to 
 ourselves, the phenomena of Nature, without employ- 
 ing for that purpose words which have come down 
 to us through untold generations of men — words 
 minted perhaps in the earliest utterances of Aryan 
 speech, and since that time preserved and cherished 
 for constant use in the noblest forms of human 
 language, such as those of Greece and Rome — then 
 we are bound to use these words in the true sense 
 and meaning which they have so long conveyed. 
 The convenience we find in them for the purposes 
 of mere description, the absolute need under which 
 we find ourselves of using them as an instrument of 
 thought, lies wholly in that historic sense and mean- 
 ing, with all its implications. These are to be recog- 
 nized not only as facts, but as belonging to the very 
 highest class of facts accessible to man. Not only, or 
 merely, for the conveyance of thought and intelligence
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 53 
 
 from one human being to another, but for the very 
 defining of perceptions, and the preservation of them 
 as separate objects of contemplation, words are the 
 very seat and shrine of truths which would assuredly, 
 without them, be obscured and lost. 
 
 Such being the intellectual wealth — such being the 
 virtue which lies in words, and which is enshrined in 
 the very sounds and letters of their composition — we 
 can see how it is, and why it is, that an unfaithful 
 handling of them, may exert the most poisonous 
 power at the very fountain-head of knowledge. And 
 no kind of handling is likely to be so unfaithful as 
 that which is spent in trying to pick them into pieces, 
 and to reject as useless this, that, or the other, element 
 of meaning, which we may feel to be incongruous with 
 some preconceived philosophical theory of our own. 
 If words are in themselves things, and the most real 
 of all things, we must treat them as what they are — 
 the most significant facts in Nature. If they are. as 
 it were, the photographic images of perception, as 
 stamped on the mental retina of men from the be- 
 ginning of our race, every line which they record, 
 every gradation of light and shade which they have 
 preserved for our instruction, must be admitted as 
 the most unimpeachable of all witnesses in the courts 
 of truth. If, indeed, there be any words which the 
 progress of discovery has shown to have been founded 
 on erroneous analogies, then these may be amended, 
 or we may cease to use them. But to continue the 
 use of words because we are conscious that we cannot 
 do without them, and then to reject or neglect any of
 
 54 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 their implications, is the highest crime we can commit 
 against the only faculties which enable us to grasp 
 the realities of the world. 
 
 Yet this is the kind of work now constantly and de- 
 liberately done in modern philosophy when men stop, 
 and turn aside from the using of words, to the opera- 
 tion of defining them. All fidelity to fact is then 
 cast away. The function and duty of the analyst is 
 forgotten — the duty, namely, of giving a full and 
 exhaustive report on the ingredients before him. 
 I have dwelt upon this elsewhere-^ in connexion with 
 the investigation of another subject, namely the words 
 which have grown up out of the economic relations of 
 men to each other in society. But the principle 
 applies equally to the analysis of words in all depart- 
 ments of thought, and its value and importance are, 
 of course, greatest in those in which words have 
 grown up in close connexion with the highest and 
 deepest objects of contemplation. In analyzing words 
 of this class, it is our duty, as in all others, to report 
 fully to ourselves, and others^ on all the elements of 
 meaning that they do actually contain, and not to 
 leave out any of them that we can recognize or 
 detect. This is the principle of all true analysis in 
 the physical world when we try to reach the ultimate 
 constituents of material substances, and this is equally 
 the principle on which we must proceed in reaching 
 the elements contained in our own conceptions. The 
 presence of these elements of meaning is a fact, and 
 
 ' The Unseen Foundations of Society, chap. iii. (London : John 
 Murray.)
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 55 
 
 if we are to proceed scientifically, that presence must 
 be treated as what it is. Our business is to report on 
 all that is there — not on some selected parts which 
 alone we choose to look at, throwing the rest away. 
 Such conduct on the part of a chemist dealing with 
 matter would be an offence against his science and 
 his art. When all the elements have been separated 
 and determined, the commercial value of each of them 
 is quite another question. But the purely scientific 
 value lies in the knowledge of the combination as 
 a fact of Nature. So it must be with our analysis 
 of language. What all men, of many races and of 
 immemorial generations, have, as a matter of fact, 
 seen in Nature, they have unconsciously recorded by 
 a purely automatic process, in the structure of human 
 speech, and our very first business, in all philosophy, 
 is to read that record faithfully. 
 
 Let us now proceed to illustrate this doctrine, 
 and see how it applies. We shall soon see what 
 a light it casts — what a sweep it has — how great 
 have been the errors due to a neglect of it — what 
 gaps have been left in knowledge by not attending 
 to it. 
 
 In all languages that which we know as life has 
 had a word appropriated to the expression of it. In 
 all its forms, whether animal or only vegetable, it has 
 made on the human mind one great general im- 
 • pression. It is a thing directly perceived as a thing 
 by itself — separated by a wide interval from all other 
 things whatever. The modern microscopist is very 
 proud of himself when he has detected organisms of
 
 56 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 which it is difficult or impossible to say whether they 
 are vegetable or animal. All the searchers in the 
 several branches of the immense science of Biology 
 bring their several contributions to the same con- 
 clusion. The physiologist, the morphologist, the 
 histologist — all repeat in various ways, that, in its 
 last retreats, life runs up into ultimate phenomena 
 which look as if they were identical, or at least are 
 indistinguishable by us. But language knew all this 
 long ago. Human speech had identified life as — 
 through all its ranges — one. It has recorded this 
 fact as impressed upon the mind, in words which bear 
 the indelible stamp of the immediate perception 
 which they express. We speak of a living plant, 
 even if it be a moss or the lowest cryptogam, as cer- 
 tainly and as fully as we speak of a living beast, or 
 of a living man. We speak of a dead plant or of 
 a dead seaweed, with as definite a meaning as we 
 speak of a dead human being. No modern discovery 
 about the apparent likeness of cells in animal and 
 vegetable tissues, has done more than merely carry 
 down into detail that great identification which the 
 common word ' life ' has reached, ever since man has 
 begun to speak. 
 
 And now let us see what men make of this grand 
 word 'life,' when they pretend to analyze it. Of 
 course it is a legitimate exercise of thought to look 
 inwards upon our own conceptions, and to specify, 
 if wc can, the indications by which we distinguish 
 the living from the not-living. One of the foremost 
 of these indications consists in the phenomena of
 
 ll] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 57 
 
 growth. But this is only another of those grand and 
 simple words with which analyzers are not contented, 
 and which, accordingly, they try again to break up 
 into some component elements, out of which they 
 may pick and choose, and may drop what they please 
 to consider as not essential. It is here that the 
 process of self-deception begins ; and it cannot be 
 presented in a more striking case than in that fur- 
 nished by the great naturalist Cuvier, in the Intro- 
 duction to his immortal work Le Regne Animale. 
 There he seems to have thought it necessary to 
 attempt some definition of the ' essence of life,' and 
 as growth stands out pre-eminently as the most 
 universal of its characteristic phenomena, he tried to 
 define that also as a necessary step. But as growth 
 is dependent on food, and food can only be in- 
 strumental in growth when it has been eaten and 
 digested, Cuvier's next thought was to define diges- 
 tion. But as digestion involves the processes — very 
 complex — of the assimilation of certain food elements 
 and the rejection of others, Cuvier felt the need of 
 reducing this immense complexity into some simpler 
 conception, by the convenient operation of blotting 
 out from his analysis not only some of the facts, but 
 the most special of them all. Such words as digestion 
 and assimilation cannot be used without implying 
 that very word ' life ' which he was trying to define. 
 He had no resource, therefore, but to get rid of the 
 conception of a decomposing power over the sub- 
 stances of food, combined with a selective power over 
 its elements when separated and made accessible to
 
 58 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 absorption. These powers being once got rid of, by 
 being shut out from view, it became possible to form 
 a sham conception of vital growth as nothing but 
 a mechanical taking in, and a corresponding me- 
 chanical throwing out, of external matter. In this 
 way the ' Essence of Life ' could be represented to 
 the self-deceived imagination, as a mere power of 
 continuous intake, and outflow, of surrounding sub- 
 stances. Then it seems to have occurred to Cuvier 
 to ask whether there was not some analogous pheno- 
 mena in Nature which might be useful as an 
 explanatory image ? One such was obvious. It was 
 a whirlwind — a waterspout — a vortex. All of these 
 forms of a concentrated force, lifting, attracting, em- 
 bodying, and again rejecting, matter, as they rush 
 along, corresponded well with the bare and attenuated 
 and deceptive definition to which he had reduced the 
 grand, and deep, and impenetrable, mysteries of life. 
 And so this great man — gifted with the most splendid 
 genius — was brought down by an unfaithful handling 
 of words to this miserable definition : — ' Life, then, is 
 a whirlwind more or less rapid — more or less com- 
 plicated, whose direction is constant, and which 
 carries always with it molecules of the same kind, but 
 into which the individual molecules enter, and out of 
 which they depart continually, in such a manner that 
 the form of the living body is always more essential 
 than its substance ^.' 
 
 Who does not feel in reading this definition that 
 even if it can be accepted as representing one single 
 
 ' Le Regne Animale. Bruxelles, ed. 3, vol. i. p. 7.
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 59 
 
 aspect of an organized living body, it is an aspect 
 which is of the most superficial kind, and that it 
 specially avoids, and conceals from our view, some of 
 the most essential and characteristic features of that 
 great mystery which it professes to define ? And this 
 is all the more remarkable because Cuvier was not 
 seduced into this bad definition by the temptation so 
 to manipulate the meaning of words as to provide 
 a basis for some preconceived philosophical theory 
 or system. Cuvner had no such system to maintain. 
 He falls into error solely because he proceeds upon 
 a false notion of what a true definition ought to be. 
 To reduce any great general conception to its lowest 
 or simplest terms, may be a perfectly legitimate 
 operation ; but to cut out of a great general con- 
 ception, all, or any, of its most vital parts, is, in the 
 highest degree, illegitimate and fallacious. The word 
 ' life ' represents a great group of very complex ideas, 
 and to cut out a whole number of them and to sup- 
 press them altogether, is not to define the word but 
 to misrepresent and to degrade it. Nor is this all : 
 for to degrade and misrepresent a word, and especially 
 such a word as this, expressing one of the primary 
 conceptions of the mind, is to misrepresent and to 
 degrade Nature, and our own nature in particular. 
 It is to shut our eyes to fact and truth, to stifle 
 knowledge, and often to make us even proud of our 
 self-deceptions, as if they were great triumphs of the 
 abstracting faculty of the intellect. But subtracting 
 is not the same thing as abstracting. A good ab- 
 straction is a faithful epitome of some whole. But
 
 6o INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a subtracting definition is either a thoughtless, or 
 else a tricky, presentation of some fragment, as if it 
 were the whole. And very often we shall find, on 
 a close examination, that even the selected fragment 
 has its heart and soul washed out of it, and nothing 
 but a semblance — a mere skin of it — is held up to 
 our view. 
 
 All this is so eminently true in the particular 
 example I have adduced, that we must examine it 
 a little further, as a typical case of the kind of abuse 
 by which language, instead of being one of the richest 
 fountains of knowledge, may be turned into the most 
 poisonous of all the sources of fallacy. 
 
 Cuvier's reduction of our conception of life down 
 to the low level of our conception of a mechanical 
 vortex, is effected entirely by the shutting of our 
 mental eyes to the indisputable contents of two words 
 — one, the common word ' growth,' the other, the more 
 pretentious word ' assimilation.' ' Growth ' is by far 
 the more powerful and comprehensive word of the two. 
 ' Assimilation ' is comparatively artificial, being a com- 
 pound, and neither directly meaning, nor necessarily 
 implying, anything more than simple likening — the 
 making of one thing to be like another. But as there 
 are many different degrees and kinds of likeness, the 
 conception of a mere likening process, falls very far 
 short indeed of that kind of likening which is involved 
 in organic growth. There may be a likening between 
 two things in mere outward form, or in mere colour, 
 or in some other single and separate quality out of 
 many. The word ' assimilation ' has, nevertheless, been
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 6l 
 
 coined and appropriated by scientific men to express 
 that complete, and infinitely complex, kind or degree 
 of likening which is accomplished in living bodies by 
 the processes of digestion and nutrition. But this is 
 a kind and degree of likening which stands absolutely 
 alone in Nature. It is a complete identification, not 
 only in substance, but in structure. It is vastly more 
 than mere incorporation, because at least an apparent 
 incorporation takes place, for example, when a solid 
 body is dissolved in a liquid, and in all cases of 
 chemical combination. But organic assimilation, or 
 the kind of assimilation which life alone effects, is 
 vastly — even incomprehensibly — more than this. This 
 lower kind and degree of incorporation is, indeed, 
 involved in living growth, as an agency, and also as a 
 means — as the cohesive power of lime in mortar is used 
 in the building of walls, or as chemical affinities are 
 used in the making of many artificial products. But 
 living growth is an assimilation infinitely above, and 
 beyond, this lower kind. It is indeed, first, a dissolving 
 — but it goes on to be a reconstructive work ; and the 
 very essence of the structure is this — that it grows for 
 the discharge of living, or organic, functions. And thus 
 we are brought back, or awakened in consciousness, 
 to the fact, that we cannot define life without using 
 the same word itself, or its nearest equivalents, to 
 explain to ourselves what the facts of Nature are as 
 seen and expressed in speech. An organic structure 
 is another word for a living structure ; and a living 
 structure is that kind of structure which alone is at 
 once the visible seat, and the result, of life. In
 
 62 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 chemistry we cannot analyze an elementary body : 
 we can only describe its properties — its ' behaviour,' 
 as chemists call it — towards other elements when 
 brought into certain definite relations with them. And 
 so it is with life. It is an elementary conception — 
 one which resists analysis — as is clearly evidenced by 
 the alternative to which we are reduced in tiying to 
 define it — the alternative either of omitting some 
 of its essential properties, or else the alternative of 
 using it as a known thing to define its own unknow- 
 able 'essence.' 
 
 Considering the many difficulties which beset us 
 in understanding the world we live in, it is indeed 
 a terrible thing to think that many of the most fun- 
 damental truths which we do most surely know, are in 
 perpetual danger of being obscured and lost, by wrong 
 methods of trying to increase our knowledge through 
 bad definitions. Laborious efforts to cut out, or to 
 sponge away, the records of mental vision which 
 our race has left us in the rich inheritance of speech, 
 seem to present an irresistible attraction to certain 
 kinds of intellectual ambition. There could not be 
 a more remarkable case of it than the case now before 
 us. It is indeed a memorable fact that a man of 
 such genius as Cuvier, should, under the influence of 
 this temptation, have been led to conceive of life as, 
 in its ' essence,' like to a whirlwind which drawls par- 
 ticles of dust or of water into its vortex, and throws 
 them out again as it passes on. For, be it observed, 
 he does not merely use this meagre mechanical con- 
 ception as a passing image or illustration of some
 
 Il] IX THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 63 
 
 one very superficial aspect of life, but he dwells upon 
 it, and comes back to it, as if it were in the nature of 
 a real explanation of vitality in its essence, and in 
 that most peculiar of all its manifestations — namely, 
 organic structure. This structure, he suggests, is one 
 to facilitate the rotatory circulation of gaseous and 
 liquid forms of matter. Incompetent, and even 
 grotesque, as this suggestion is when it is considered 
 as a definition, or even as giving the vaguest con- 
 ception of animal life and of organic structure, there 
 is one element in it of high significance and value. 
 But this element comes in, as it were, by accident — 
 being introduced unconsciously in the implications of 
 language, and of its words. Cuvier does not say that 
 the vortex movement makes its own structure. What 
 he does say is that the structure is essential to the 
 maintenance of the movement ; and this is true. But 
 this conception at once, and of necessity, introduces 
 the idea of an apparatus — that is to say, of a structure 
 adapted to, and prepared for, the operation of the 
 vortex movement which he represents as the essence 
 of life. 
 
 The connexion of thought in Cuvier's mind is 
 quite clear — in the highest sense quite natural, and 
 consequently quite intelligible, and largely true. If, 
 he says, we examine closely all diverse living bodies, 
 we find in them a common structure — which structure 
 a little reflexion will soon convince us, is ' essential 
 to a vortex [toiirbilloii) such as the vital movement.' 
 He had previously said that the ' form of this vortex 
 is more essential than its matter.' He now drops the
 
 64 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 word ' form,' and instinctively substitutes the word 
 ' structure.' He does not seem at all conscious of 
 the enormous difference between the two words. 
 There may be a thousand things which have ' form,' 
 but which have nothing that can be called structure. 
 A whirlwind is a spiral movement in air, and a whirl- 
 pool is a spiral movement in water. A waterspout 
 also is a spiral movement in air, a movement that 
 takes, generally, a very definite form made visible by 
 the aqueous matter that it picks up and spins round 
 and round. But none of these forms of vortex move- 
 ment have any structure — in the only sense in which 
 we speak and think of it as characteristic of organic 
 forms. The particles of dust or of water that are 
 twisted about in a whirlwind or a waterspout, have 
 no mutual relations in being built up, or even shaped, 
 still less in being changed, into an apparatus. ' Form ' 
 and ' structure ' therefore are two wholly different 
 words, with a really boundless difference of meaning, 
 and quietly and silently to substitute the one for the 
 other is a perfect example of that unfaithfulness to 
 facts which lies in the abuse of words. It is true that 
 every structure must have an outward form ; but the 
 converse is not true — that every form must have an 
 inward structure in the same sense. A picture, or 
 a statue, has its very essence in a form, but it has no 
 internal structure except that of the mere materials 
 of paint or stone, and these are entirely non-essential, 
 since a great variety of materials may be, and are, em- 
 ployed to take artistic forms. Cuvier, therefore, quite 
 innocently and unconsciously passes not only from
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 65 
 
 one conception to another, but from one whole order 
 and sphere of thought to another sphere completely- 
 different, when he substitutes the word ' structure ' for 
 the word 'form,' and proceeds to deal with them as 
 identical or synonymous. A whirlwind may have 
 a form, but it cannot have any structure in the sense 
 in which we apply that word to organized or living 
 bodies. In not seeing the world-wide difference 
 between these two conceptions, this great genius, who 
 cast such a new and brilliant light on the relationship 
 between different organic forms, by a penetrating 
 power of seizing on the lines of likeness and of differ- 
 ence, showed himself incompetent to classify with 
 even tolerable correctness the product of his own 
 perceptions in the stamped impression of his words. 
 He looked upon, and argued upon, two things which 
 are wide as the poles asunder — separated from each 
 other by the whole width of possible conceptions — as 
 things that could be brought under one category by 
 the juggling use, for both of them indiscriminately, 
 of one word, ' form.' 
 
 With some philosophers this kind of juggling is 
 conscious and intentional. They wish, on principle, 
 to expunge — now from one word, now from another 
 — some essential element of meaning, because that 
 meaning is incongruous with some theory or system 
 of their own. This process of expunging they dignify 
 with the name of abstraction, and are proud of it as 
 a triumph in philosophy. But this is not the case of 
 Cuvier. He fell into this juggling with words only 
 because his attention had probably never been turned 
 
 F
 
 66 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 to them as facts demanding all the discriminating 
 care which he never forgot to bestow upon bones and 
 skulls, or on any other of the facts of comparative 
 anatomy. Yet in this case as in many others — and 
 more in his case because of the innocence of his 
 intentions — the power of language reasserts itself over 
 him, and he finds himself wholly unable to proceed 
 in his attempt to define life, without resorting to the 
 use of words which bring him face to face with the 
 real conceptions, and the real perceptions, which are 
 stamped upon our intelligence when we contemplate 
 organic structures as distinguished from any mere 
 forms of lifeless matter. Thus when he says that 
 a little reflexion will enable us to see that the ' com- 
 mon structure' recognizable in all living forms is 
 essential to such a vortex as ' the vital movement,' 
 he at once enters upon an explanation which is based 
 upon our logical perception of the reason for a thing, 
 as distinguished from our perception of its mere 
 physical cause. ' It is necessary/ he says, ' for living 
 bodies to have some solid parts in order to secure for 
 them the necessary form, and also to have some fluid 
 elements in order to maintain the movement ^. Here 
 we have at once the resort to, and the instinctive use 
 of, words which express and reflect the perception, 
 as a fact, of purpose and design. It is necessary, he 
 sees, that some one thing, or a number of very com- 
 plicated things, must be done, ' in order that ' certain 
 other results may be attained. This is the result — 
 the inevitable result of ' reflexion ' — that is to say, of 
 
 ' Le Regne Anitnale, vol. i. p. 8.
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 67 
 
 the mind turning- in upon itself, and faithfully report- 
 ing the facts of conscious perception which it finds 
 there. This — no less than this — is the evidence which 
 streams from the use by Cuvier of the words ' in order 
 that' {ponr), as the explanation of the vortex of life 
 taking to itself a structure which he had been before 
 tempted to speak of as a mere * form,' comparable 
 with the spiral rotation of a whirlwind. 
 
 Having once got upon this entirely different track 
 of thought — having once entered on the only true 
 explanation of organic structures which consists in 
 our perception of the ' Why ' — he is able to pursue his 
 path of explanation into the region of the ' How.' 
 But he only succeeds in that path, in proportion as he 
 maintains, throughout, the same language of mentally 
 perceived reasons as the final cause or explanation of 
 physically perceived results. Words which carry on 
 this meaning, and renew, as it were, its freshness 
 of application, run throughout Cuvier's endeavour to 
 explain the 'essence' of organic structures. Having 
 identified one great object which it is necessary to 
 attain, namely an adapted distribution of solids and 
 liquids ' in order to ' make a circulation possible, he 
 goes on to the idea that ' therefore ' {done) such and 
 such tissues are prepared. Now this, be it observed, 
 is the pronounced language of teleology. But it is 
 the only language capable of describing what his 
 mind actually saw. It is language which at once 
 reflects, and records, and reveals, a fact. Having got 
 hold of this clue to an idea which is at last really in 
 the nature of an explanation, Cuvier proceeds to apply 
 
 F 2
 
 68 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 it to the various functions of the various parts of 
 living structures — to the digestive, to the circulating, 
 to the breathing, and to the exhaling apparatus — all 
 of which, he points out, are characterized by their 
 adaptation to meet some separate but intelligible 
 need. Thus he explains that the solid parts are 
 needed not only as mechanical supports for a definite 
 form — not only to supply containing walls and chan- 
 nels for the liquids to be confined in, as well as to 
 guide them in their movements, but he also points 
 out, and explains, that these solids must not be rigid if 
 the purposes of circulation are to be secured, but must 
 be so far elastic as to be ' flexible ' and ' dilatable ' — 
 so that the whole parts combined are co-operative in 
 a common work. That necessary instrumentality is 
 worked out through a complexity of structure both 
 physical and chemical, which human language labours 
 to find a sufficient number of words to indicate or 
 express. This kind of structure, he explains, with all 
 its tissues, adapted and co-operative, is, or constitutes, 
 what we call organization ^. 
 
 All this is a splendid testimony to the wealth of 
 meaning contained in that one word ' organization,' 
 which many tongues use so glibly, with an almost com- 
 plete forgetfulness of all that it implies. And although 
 Cuvier's definition does contain the one essential con- 
 ception of organization — that, namely, of it being an 
 apparatus prepared for the doing of certain work, 
 which work again is a necessity for the attainment of 
 certain other ends, yet that definition, so far from 
 
 ^ Le Rigne Anivnale, vol. i. p. 8.
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 69 
 
 exhausting the facts which prove that conception to 
 be well founded, makes, after all, but a fractional 
 selection of these facts out of a number and variety 
 which science has not been yet, and probably will 
 never be, able to enumerate. Thus, when we con- 
 sider even roughly in its results, the work done in 
 what abstractedly is called ' assimilation ' or digestion, 
 — when we remember, for example, that by that work 
 the substance of common grass is built up, or rather 
 is transmuted, into that other substance which we call 
 beef, or venison, or some other kind of flesh, we must 
 see that we are handling a word which expresses the 
 profoundest mysteries in Nature, and that we are 
 committing the grossest fraud on our own intellect 
 and on the intellect of others, when we wipe out of 
 such words as much as possible of their meaning, and 
 misrepresent them by substituting for them some 
 poor mechanical resemblance. Perhaps the incon- 
 ceivable power of transmutation exerted by that 
 which we call life — a power but feebly and inade- 
 quately expressed in the word ' assimilation ' — is most 
 conspicuous in the lower forms of organic structure 
 which are elaborated by life in its lowest — that is in 
 its vegetable — manifestations. The transmutation is 
 most conspicuous in this case, because the materials 
 which are so worked up and converted into new sub- 
 stances, are what may be called the raw materials of 
 Nature in their rawest state. All animal structure is 
 transmuted out of materials which have already been 
 made up into organic combinations. But all vege- 
 table structure — all fruits and flowers^ all woods, and
 
 70 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 vegetable tissues — are transmuted into new substances 
 of exquisite beauty, directly from the bare elerhents of 
 the atmosphere and the soil. 
 
 When we recollect these facts we shall see what 
 a great duty is laid upon us in respect to words, not 
 only to avoid weakening or degrading them, but to 
 endeavour, as we can, to keep them up to the mark, 
 and to cherish above all things the deepest and most 
 penetrating conceptions which they imply. At their 
 very best they are inadequate ; they struggle — or 
 rather we struggle in them — to convey impressions 
 which, after all, are nothing more than a very small 
 part of all that we can and do mentally perceive. To 
 wipe out of them any of these perceptions is to draw 
 dowm, as it were, a curtain over our own eyes — to 
 blunt and to destroy the only instruments we have in 
 our search for truth. Cuvier is himself quite inno- 
 cent of any such intention^ although in that endeavour 
 to reach a superficial simplicity w'hich is the great 
 aim of laboured definitions, he loses hold, at moments, 
 of the great central conception which his own words 
 involve. Although he momentarily identifies life 
 with the idea of a mere mechanical movement, or 
 again with a variety of chemical reactions, he sees the 
 glaring fact that, under the power of living organisms, 
 the forces of chemical affinity are made to do work 
 which is not only different from, but is opposed to, 
 that which they can do under other conditions ; and 
 he draws the just conclusion that life cannot in itself 
 be the product of that chemical affinity which it thus 
 directs, overmasters, and employs. He sees, in short,
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 7 1 
 
 as Hunter did, that 'life is the cause and not the 
 consequence of organization ' ; or rather he sees that 
 the power or emanation which we call life, supposes 
 the pre-existence of some higher power which deter- 
 mines all the future of certain germinal ' forms.' Life 
 supposes the existence of these initial ' forms ' : it 
 cannot be awakened, he says, except in connexion 
 with them, that is to say, in organizations ' completely 
 prepared ' for it. 
 
 Here again, we have the final resort to a word 
 which has immense and special implications. ' Pre- 
 pared ' — who does not see what this word involves ? 
 In the first place it involves the idea of time in a 
 definite relation to a succession of foreseen events. 
 In the second place, it involves the idea of that suc- 
 cession as one in which the present conditions 
 are utilized for conditions which are future. But the 
 only connecting link between these is Purpose, as we 
 know it in ourselves, and as we thus recognize it in 
 external Nature. Cuvier was quite as familiar as 
 Darwin with the universal prevalence of ' develop- 
 ment ' in organic forms, as distinguished from 'making' 
 in the sense of mechanical manufacture. The origin, 
 or first ' birth ' of organic forms, is, he says, the greatest 
 mystery of Nature, since we never see the formation of 
 a ' germ,' but only the development of germs already 
 pre-existing and prepared. He believed, indeed, in 
 what is called the ' constancy of specific forms ' — 
 meaning thereby that each germ develops into a spe- 
 cific organic structure, which is persistent, stable, 
 continuous. This, indeed, was the very groundwork of
 
 72 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 all his reasoning on those homologies of the fossil 
 bones and skeletons which he was the first to establish 
 and interpret. Nor, if it should be discovered — as 
 assuredly it has not yet been discovered — that there 
 is any definite law of development, by means of which 
 one specific form can be generated out of another, 
 would Cuvier's doctrine be traversed or refuted. For 
 although he did not see any such law, yet, if it exists, 
 it would still be subject to the higher and more 
 fundamental law or conception on which he dwelt, 
 namely this — that we never see, or can even conceive, 
 the first formation of any germ, but only the separa- 
 tion of one from some parent previously existing. 
 His words remain now as true as when he wrote 
 them : ' the most profound thoughts, like the most 
 delicate observations, do but end in the mystery of 
 the pre-existence of germs.' Whether these germs 
 are capable of themselves being so much further 
 developed as to produce those varieties, which have 
 the technical value of what is called a species in 
 classification — this is a question of detail, important 
 and full of interest indeed, but involving no doubt 
 whatever on the primal conceptions expressed by the 
 great comparative anatomist, when he does his very 
 best to reach some fundamental definition of organic 
 life. 
 
 It is most instructive to observe how the endea- 
 vour to make a definition, passes, insensibly but com- 
 pletely, into an endeavour to make an explanation, 
 and how the whole idea of explanation becomes the 
 idea of indicating the ' reason why ' certain structures
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 73 
 
 must be prepared ' in order that ' certain purposes 
 may be attained. This language — this principle of 
 thought — becomes more and more marked in propor- 
 tion as he advances in his definitions to the hig-her 
 forms of life — that is to say, from the vegetable, to the 
 animal, world. Between these there are a great many 
 things in common. The need of solid parts, the need 
 of fluids, the need of the solids being arranged in 
 channels, in order that circulation may be possible, 
 the need of the vital force, whatever that in itself 
 may be, to cause the circulation, the need of it to 
 produce the inconceivably complex work of trans- 
 mutation and respiration — all these are common to 
 vegetable and to animal life. But when he comes to 
 animals, Cuvier has to face the difficulty of defining 
 that higher manifestation of life — the will— or what 
 he calls ' spontaneity.' Before this difficulty he retreats 
 by assuming, as well he may, that perception, and will, 
 are incapable of any definition at all ; that they are 
 simple, elementary, conceptions which resist analysis, 
 and are known to us as the ultimate facts of our own 
 nature and experience. But there is one thing about 
 them which, instinctively, he feels he can define, or at 
 least explain — and that is why life, which is to be 
 possessed of perception and of will, must be provided 
 with a structure adapted for movement, and for intelli- 
 gent direction. Spontaneity, he says, demands some 
 essential modifications of structure, even in those parts 
 of the animal structure which are, in respect to their 
 individual work, ' simply vegetative ' — that is to say, 
 automatic and unconscious in their action. On this
 
 74 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 principle of explaining why certain things should be 
 provided, in order that certain other things should be 
 brought about, he proceeds through the whole of his 
 remarkable Introduction. It is not in the use of indi- 
 vidual words, alone, that this principle of explanation 
 is adopted. The whole structure of his sentences is 
 moulded upon it — as representing the only medium 
 through which the facts of Nature could be conceived 
 at all in his own mind, or conveyed to the mind of 
 others. It can hardly be said that it was deliberately 
 adopted at all. It was the automatic impression 
 made by external facts upon the receptive structure 
 of Cuvier's mind. He could no more have aban- 
 doned it, or departed from it, than he could have 
 abandoned the use of speech. 
 
 It is, moreover, well worthy of observation that the 
 resources of language are largely drawn upon by 
 Cuvier, in the frequent use of those special words 
 which have been born of the teleological conceptions 
 that are irresistibly impressed upon the mind by all 
 close looking into the phenomena of Nature. We 
 have seen how he passed from using the vague word 
 
 * form ' to the much higher word ' structure,' and we 
 are now to observe that he passes, again, from the 
 word ' structure ' as applied to organs, to the word 
 
 * function' as applied to the special work, in the animal 
 economy, which that structure enables the finished 
 organism to perform. 
 
 But such a word as ' function ' is a volume in itself. 
 The very existence of it is one of the most significant 
 of all facts. It is a perfect photographic image of
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 75 
 
 one of the greatest of those otherwise invisible reah'ties 
 which were seen by him, when the sensitized surfaces 
 of his genius were exposed to the light that streams 
 from Nature. The 'function' of anything is not merely 
 something else, or anything else, which it may happen 
 to do. The function of a thing means that which it 
 was specially adapted for doing, and was made to do. 
 Thus, on the principle of explanation adopted by 
 Cuvier, the function of bones is to give solidity — to 
 preserve form — to sustain weight, and to give attach- 
 ment to muscles. The function of veins and arteries, 
 and of other tubular structures, is to provide channels 
 for the circulation of fluids. The function of the 
 digestive apparatus of vessels, is to perform the work 
 of assimilation, in which work, according to the pro- 
 found analogy which struck the mind of Cuvier, they 
 represent, in function, the external roots of plants. In 
 all these cases the word ' function ' gathers up into 
 itself, and embodies, the whole range of conceptions 
 which are involved in Cuvier's principle and method of 
 describing and defining living structures. The idea 
 of preparation — the idea of that preparation having 
 sole reference to a purpose lying in a future — the 
 idea of that purpose being one in a chain of links 
 all governed by the need for co-operative work in 
 a combined design — all these ideas are the very 
 essence of the meaning of the word 'function.' It 
 represents the mind that is seen in natural facts, 
 that mind being in itself the fact most especially 
 impressed upon our own. Not, be it observed, that 
 all animal or living structures are incapable of some
 
 76 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 lower definitions and descriptions which are founded 
 on some lower principle. They can all be defined and 
 described, for example, according to their chemical 
 composition, or according to the mechanical pro- 
 perties of their substance, or according to the 
 embryotic elements in which they first appear, and 
 out of which they are developed. This last aim and 
 object of research — ' histology ' — has become very 
 common in recent years, and in pursuing it some 
 men seem to think they get very close indeed to the 
 ultimate secret of living organisms. Yet it is most 
 obviously, in itself, of very inferior rank in the 
 hierarchy of our conceptions. The elements out 
 of which organs are built up, — the mechanical or 
 chemical properties which that building gives to 
 them, — the earliest distinguishable parts in germs 
 out of which they grow — all these have their own 
 subordinate interest. But they all He in the region 
 of the How, whilst research into ' function ' lies 
 altogether in the higher region of the Why. Another 
 superiority of function is well seen in the notorious 
 fact, that one and the same substance, chemically, 
 mechanically, and morphologically, may neverthe- 
 less have entirely separate functions in one and the 
 same organism. The feathers of birds are a beautiful 
 example of this diversity of use in purpose, coupled 
 with identity in all the inferior categories of de- 
 finition. The function of some feathers is that of 
 warm clothing merely, for which purpose this sub- 
 stance is the most perfect in the world, owing to its 
 non-conducting properties in respect to heat. The
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 77 
 
 function of other feathers is for the splendid and 
 wonderful purpose of sustaining aerial flight, for 
 which purpose a modification of the same substance 
 supplies imperviousness to the passage of air, together 
 with a combined maximum both of lightness and of 
 elasticity ; whilst yet another modification of the 
 same substance, and of the same structure, discharges, 
 in the 'auriculars' of birds, the opposite function of 
 allowing the freest passage to air in the conveyance 
 of sonorous vibrations to the auditory apparatus. 
 
 Such being the meaning of the word ' function,' the 
 constant necessity of resorting to the use of it, in 
 conveying to one mind the perceptions of another, 
 is an indisputable witness to the highest element in 
 these perceptions as a fact. It is not arrived at as 
 the result of any argument ; it does not represent 
 an inference. It represents the direct perception of an 
 objective existence. It is as much a ' seeing of that 
 which is invisible,' as when we speak of any other 
 conception in the region of intellectual, or moral, 
 or religious, truth. 
 
 Still more obviously, although not more absolutely, 
 does this character apply to another word much 
 resorted to by physiologists, in describing living struc- 
 tures — namely, the word ' plan.'' This is especially 
 appropriated by those who attempt to describe what 
 they see in comparing one organism as a whole with 
 another as a whole, and especially in describing the 
 correspondence of parts between the most diverse 
 organic forms. But the word ' plan ' refers to a kind 
 of correspondence which is quite peculiar. It is
 
 78 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a correspondence which has no reference to likeness 
 of material, or even to likeness in function. It is 
 a correspondence in that purely mental conception 
 or product which we call a plan, and for which there 
 is no other word or name. We know it only as 
 existing in ourselves, and we know it in others by 
 the external indications which it produces. These we 
 recognize, when we see them, as facts which are the 
 vesture of the higher fact behind them. There are 
 many other correspondences in Nature, to which we 
 should never dream of applying the word ' plan/ — 
 correspondences, for example, in colour, or in mere 
 outward form, or in motion such as attracted the 
 attention of Cuvier, in different forms of vortex 
 movement. But no such correspondences are in the 
 nature of a ' plan.' Neither do we usually, or indeed 
 ever, apply the word ' plan ' to any mere arrangement 
 which is destitute of obvious or immediate utility, 
 service, or intention. The arrangement of material, for 
 example, in crystals of various kinds, is an arrange- 
 ment very obvious, and very beautiful. But we do 
 not naturally think or speak of any such arrange- 
 ment as a plan. And why not ? Simply because, as 
 a matter of fact, the mind does not see in crystals 
 that kind of arrangement which it means and knows 
 by the word ' plan.' It may be — indeed it must be 
 true — that the ultimate, or so called 'molecular' 
 forces which work on matter, and which determine 
 crystalline forms, are forces which have their use, 
 and without which, perhaps, even nothing could be 
 done. But no reason is obvious or known, why
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 79 
 
 different elementary substances should each have some 
 separate and definite crystalline form — why sugar, and 
 salt, and water, should all take their own particular 
 shape, when they solidify from solutions. Exquisite 
 as these forms are in many cases, definite and deter- 
 mined as we know them to be by natural laws, they 
 never strike us as in the nature of a plan, and we 
 never speak of them or think of them in this con- 
 nexion. Crystals have no structure in the organic 
 sense. They are cases of aggregation merely, of the 
 mere cohesion of identical particles according to 
 a particular pattern. 
 
 Let us, therefore, clearly understand each other, 
 and above all let us understand ourselves, in this 
 matter. Let us be honest with our own minds when 
 we find ourselves driven to the use of words which 
 have implications of special depth and value. Is it, 
 or is it not, in these very implications that the whole 
 force of them lies ? Is it not precisely because of 
 these implications that we find them to be not only 
 useful but even necessary? If so, let us treat them 
 as what they are, as the very highest and truest 
 intimations we can receive from Nature, as coming to 
 us through channels of approach, which the finest and 
 most faithful of the organs by which we apprehend 
 the realities of the system in which we live. Nor 
 could there be a better illustration of this than the 
 circumstances in which the great mind of Cuvier 
 finds itself under the necessity of resorting to the 
 use of the word ' plan.' He does not resort to it at 
 all so long as he is confining himself to the definition
 
 8o INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 of life in the most simple, and therefore in the most 
 abstract, of its outward manifestations. What he 
 does when he is concerned with no higher aim than 
 this, is, as we have seen, to use other forms of speech 
 which do indeed imply the conception of a plan, but 
 which do not give to that conception its own definite 
 and proper name. 
 
 The essential idea conveyed in the word ' plan ' is 
 the idea of some voluntary action, taken by some 
 voluntary agent, with a view to secure some ulterior 
 mental purpose or design. It may be the plan 
 embodied in the simplest weapon, in the preparation 
 of a spearhead out of flint, or of a bow and arrow cut 
 out of the boughs and branches of a tree, or of a vessel 
 out of clay, or of a fish-hook out of a shell, or of a net 
 out of vegetable fibre. Or it may be the more com- 
 plicated plans which arise from the growth of civilized 
 needs, such as the plan of a house, or the plan of 
 a military campaign, or the plan of a great ship. The 
 embodiments of 'plan' are endless, but in every one 
 of them the root idea of the word is the same. It is 
 the idea of some mental purpose formed, and of some 
 action taken, in pursuance of its intention or its aim. 
 This idea may inspire the whole grammatical con- 
 struction of a sentence without the word ' plan ' being 
 used at all. Accordingly, we see how completely this 
 is the case with Cuvier's attempts to describe the 
 phenomena of life in its most abstract characteristics. 
 The idea animating his whole language is this — that, 
 in order that some result may be attained, it is 
 necessary that such and such a structure should be
 
 n] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 8l 
 
 provided. If some definite form is to be kept, some 
 solid framework must be suppled. If liquids are to be 
 contained, some vessels must be prepared for holding 
 them. If fluids are to circulate, those vessels must be 
 partly tubular to direct and guide the stream — and so 
 on, and so on. But the moment we attend to this 
 structure of sentence, we see that it is in itself a 
 channel with containing walls for the circulation and 
 application of one steady stream of thought, namely, 
 that which assumes that whatever is reasonably re- 
 quired for certain purposes, must accordingly be 
 provided, and therefore have appeared. 
 
 But whence this connexion between a reasonable 
 argument, and an actual, physical, supply? What is 
 it but the connexion of a mind with creative con- 
 ceptions, making itself manifest in creative power? 
 The English word ' because ' marks, as no other word 
 does, the insensible steps of thought by which we 
 pass, often quite unconsciously, from the Why to the 
 How, from the reason of a thing, to its physical cause. 
 ' Because ' means both ' by the means of,' and also ' by 
 reason of When we say that the snow melts because 
 the temperature has risen, we speak of a purely 
 physical cause — we mean that snow must melt if the 
 temperature rises above 32° Fahrenheit, or zero in the 
 scale of Reaumur. But when we say that we shoot 
 a deer or a grouse because we want food, we mean by 
 the word ' because,' that a certain motive impelled us 
 to the act. And it is curious to observe that the idea 
 of purely physical causation is so subordinate an 
 element in our conceptions generally, that in common 
 
 G
 
 82 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 parlance the word ' because ' is much more frequently 
 used to give an explanation of the reason why things 
 are done, than of the physical causes — the how — 
 through which they are brought about. Cuvier's 
 language about living structures is entirely moulded 
 on this conception of things being done by reason of 
 their necessity for certain corresponding results. And 
 so when he comes to feel the necessity of summing 
 up all this reasoning in the shorthand notation of 
 a single word, he suddenly awakes, as it were, to his 
 own meaning in all he had said before, and to the 
 transition from one order of thought to another which 
 it implies. Accordingly he introduces the word ' plan ' 
 with a sort of apology to himself and his readers in 
 the formula 'so to speak' [pour ai?tsi dire). He 
 seems quite unconscious that in reality he has been 
 ' so speaking ' through many previous pages, and that 
 the only change he is making is to substitute one 
 expressive and comprehensive word for the elaborate 
 equivalents he had been dealing in before. 
 
 And now let us observe when it is, and how it is, 
 that Cuvier finds himself compelled to quit these 
 equivalents, and to use, at last, the definite and appro- 
 priate word. It is when he passes from the abstract, 
 to the concrete, in his description and definition of 
 living forms ; it is when his mind comes into closest 
 contact with the facts of Nature, and tries hardest to 
 convey to other minds that which his own penetrating 
 genius makes plain to him. It is, in short, when he 
 passes from dealing with the generalities which all 
 animal structure implies, and when he undertakes to
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 83 
 
 expound the specialities of structure on which the 
 subordinate classification of animal forms must de- 
 pend. He says that in considering the animal kingdom 
 on the principles he now laid down— that is, according 
 to their adapted or organized structure — and casting 
 aside mere circumstances which are accessory or sub- 
 ordinate — we shall find that there exist only four great 
 leading forms of such structures. It is to these forms 
 that he first applies the name of ' plan.' ' There are,' 
 he says, ' as it were, four general plans.' ' After these 
 forms, or upon them,' he goes on to explain, 'all 
 animals seem to have been modelled.' And all the 
 subdivisions which naturalists had established were 
 nothing more than slight modifications of these four 
 fundamental plans, due to the developrrient or addi- 
 tions of certain parts, which modifications ' in no way 
 change the essence of the plan ^.' 
 
 The lines of division drawn by Cuvier between 
 these four plans have not been found to be quite 
 sufficient, since the progress of biological science has 
 been more advanced. Supplementary lines of division 
 have had to be added — not only in the nature of 
 subdivisions, but in the nature of, and of the same 
 rank as, some of those which are indicated by him. 
 But not only does the principle on which he drew 
 those lines remain untouched, but the particular points 
 along which he drew them remain in some cases as 
 fixed as ever. The divisions he established were, 
 first, the Vertebrata — creatures with an internal 
 skeleton framed on the plan of a central longitudinal 
 
 * Le Regne Animale, p. 29. 
 G 2
 
 84 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 bony axis enclosing the brain and the nerve-trunk. 
 Second, the Mollusca — creatures all soft, and with no 
 bony skeleton at all, such as shell-fish. Third, the 
 Articulata, represented by all insects. And, fourthly, 
 the creatures, such as Starfishes, in which the bilateral 
 arrangement gives place to another plan— that of 
 organs radiating from a centre — a division to which 
 Cuvier gives the name of Radiata. 
 
 It is when we contemplate the enormous variety 
 and range of living forms which are included under 
 each of these plans of structure, that we begin to 
 estimate, with some distant approach to an adequate 
 appreciation, the wonderful wealth of resources which 
 lie hid and undeveloped, for example, in the vertebrate 
 plan of structure. In all the plans which men can 
 form, whether in mechanical invention, or in the 
 conduct of afifairs, the range of our purpose is com- 
 paratively narrow. If the mechanism we may invent, 
 or if the scheme of conduct we may form, attains the 
 immediate end we have in view, we are well content ; 
 and if other and secondary benefits are found to 
 follow, these we consider as accidental, however 
 fortunate. But in that living plan of structure — the 
 Vertebrate — which we identify as one and the same 
 in a vast series of animals, we see that by slight 
 modifications of some one, or some few, of its 
 elementary or fundamental parts, these parts have 
 had a potential adaptability to varieties of life and 
 function which are of the widest dissimilarity. The 
 Vertebrate arrangement is seen, as a fact, to be 
 equally adaptable to flying in the air, and to burrow-
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 85 
 
 ing in the ground, and to swimming in the waters, 
 and to any degree and kind of movement in these 
 very different scenes of Hfe. The mole and the bat, 
 the whale and the humming-bird, creatures aerial and 
 creatures earthly, creatures swift and creatures slow, 
 the quick hare and the creeping tortoise, the rapid horse 
 and the sluggish newt, and a thousand other creatures 
 equally discrepant, are all ranged or classified together 
 because of the fact that the framework of their bodies, 
 however utterly dissimilar in outward form, in habits 
 of life, in aptitudes and powers, in food, in home or 
 sphere of action, is nevertheless made on that one 
 same plan of structure, the basis of which is a vertebral 
 column and a skull, with appendages all occupying 
 the same relative place, however different may be 
 their function or their use. 
 
 This doctrine of Cuvier has been elaborated since 
 his time. Indeed, during his own life, and even 
 before the age of his great celebrity, some of the most 
 far-reaching and profound of its applications had 
 flashed, about the same time, on two great minds, 
 the poet Goethe and the physiologist Oken, in their 
 recognition of the skull of all the Vertebrates, as 
 structurally, or in plan, nothing else than a largely 
 developed and modified vertebra. Cuvier himself 
 never did accept many identifications of this kind, 
 which he seems to have considered fanciful and 
 transcendental. But the fundamental doctrine he 
 laid down in the passage above quoted, is indepen- 
 dent of all disputes about a few of the specific or 
 detailed applications of it. It has been followed and
 
 86 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 illustrated in many details, and has been thoroughly- 
 established as indisputably moulded on the facts of 
 Nature. It never had escaped altogether the in- 
 stinctive and unconscious perceptions of the human 
 mind. On the contrary, it had been universally 
 recognized and expressed in the universal forms of 
 human speech. The correspondence between our 
 various organs which are the most conspicuous — our 
 heads, our limbs, and our backbones — with the same 
 parts in the lower animals, was a correspondence 
 universally seen, and handled in familiar words. But 
 Cuvier carried the idea much farther, and established 
 it as the scientific conception of a universal law ; and 
 no subsequent investigations have gone beyond the 
 principle of his grand generalization that ' we can 
 follow the degradations (gradations) of the same plan 
 from man to the lowest fish ^.' 
 
 In the expression of this conception, for the 
 conveyance of its essential idea from one mind to 
 another, a new word has since been invented, as 
 usual out of old materials, and by the application 
 of ideas long familiar to this newly perceived em- 
 bodiment. And what was the new word? It was 
 taken from that language which is the richest in 
 the world for the expression of abstract conceptions, 
 moulded, as it was, on the thoughts of the most 
 thoughtful and intellectual race which has ever repre- 
 sented the mind of man. Some word was wanted to 
 express an idea which, though not wholly new as 
 a vague impression, was practically new as a sharply 
 
 ^ Le Regne Animah, p. 29.
 
 ll] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 87 
 
 defined conception. That conception was not one 
 of mere likeness, whether in shape or in use, but of 
 sameness or identity in the elements of an arrange- 
 ment of parts, which arrangement was for a purpose, 
 or rather for many purposes, and was therefore 
 essentially a plan, or an ideal structure framed for 
 ulterior ends. And so the word ' Homology' came to 
 be coined, as a combination of the two words in 
 Greek which represent sameness or identity, and 
 reason in the highest senses in which that word 
 can be used. Two bones, or two elements in one 
 bone, are said to be ' homologous ' with each other, 
 not because they may be like in shape or in function, 
 but because they are seen to be so placed as to be 
 identical in their ideal relation to the skeleton as an 
 ideal whole. We all know the high place occupied 
 by the word Logos in the history of human thought, 
 how it came to express the highest attributes of 
 mind, even in the Supreme. Yet this is the word — no 
 poorer a word would do — now admitted and adopted 
 by the scientific world as the only proper and 
 adequate expression of that kind of sameness which 
 exists, for example, between the bones of the swim- 
 ming paddle of the whale, or the grubbing paw of 
 the mole, and the long slender bones between which 
 the leathery wings of the bat are stretched for the 
 purposes of flight. 
 
 There can be no better illustration, therefore, than 
 this word ' homology,' of the automatic evidence and 
 record which language contains of the intellectual 
 impressions made by Nature upon the human mind,
 
 88 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 when that mind is compelled, or induced, to read off 
 what is written indelibly on its own sensitized and 
 receptive surfaces. It is an illustration all the more 
 valuable because men have been obliged, by the 
 progress of biology as a science, to form a new word 
 for the purpose of this reading off, or report upon, 
 the facts as intellectually perceived ; and thus an 
 opportunity has been afforded of escaping, if it was 
 possible to do so, from a faithful transcript, and of 
 inventing some other word or form of speech, which 
 might leave out, drop, or obliterate, such part of the 
 record as grated on the ear of special philosophical 
 theories and preconceptions. But practically this 
 has been found impossible ; and so we possess, en- 
 shrined in the very language of modern biological 
 science, a fundamental word which embalms in an 
 everlasting form the great idea of living structures 
 being all moulded on a mental plan, and this too in 
 a sense so definite, so tangible, and so clear, that 
 every bone and every rudiment of a bone, and even in 
 some cases the absence of a bone, can be referred 
 with certainty to one ideal plan, susceptible of almost 
 endless modifications for the fitting discharge of 
 special functions. 
 
 And now let it be noted that this persistency of 
 general pattern in the organic framework of living 
 creatures, through such a wide and various range of 
 being — although it is a great mystery as regards the 
 How — can hardly be said to be any mystery at all 
 as regards the Why. The very fact of the immense 
 adaptability of this plan to various uses, proves in-
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 89 
 
 disputably that it is founded on some inherent 
 necessity for meeting certain physical, and chemical, 
 and galvanic, conditions which are concerned in the 
 machinery of organic life. And on this principle of 
 explanation, which is the principle adopted by Cuvier, 
 it is not difficult to see the reason, however difficult it 
 may be to trace the physical causes, of the vertebrate 
 plan. The seat, the centre, and the throne of vitality 
 — whatever in itself this may be — is identified above 
 all things with the nervous system. It is the nerves 
 which animate the whole frame, with the brain as 
 their great reservoir, and the spinal cord as their 
 great trunk and root. All their branches ramify 
 from these, and they are the channels of that energy 
 by which life and movement is conveyed to every part. 
 It is easy to see the reason why the larger nerve- 
 centres must be specially protected. The substance 
 of which they are composed is of the softest and most 
 delicate consistency, as well as of the most tender 
 molecular structure. Some bony structure, or con- 
 taining walls, are absolutely needed to protect the 
 brain from external injury, and the same mechanical 
 necessity applies to the spinal cord, which is 
 a prolongation of the same substance. The brain- 
 box is therefore rigid, but if the protecting tube 
 of the spinal column were equally rigid, movement 
 would be impossible, or would be restricted within 
 the narrowest limits. The jointed structure of the 
 vertebra is thus perfectly explained on the principle of 
 its being a plan for the meeting of certain necessary 
 conditions, which are in themselves insuperable.
 
 go INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH, 
 
 They can be met and managed, but they cannot be 
 overborne. 
 
 Owen, in his work on the Homologies of the Ver- 
 tebrate Skeleton (1848), has investigated this great 
 subject with the immense advantage of not writing 
 under any theoretical or philosophical preconceptions 
 which could induce him to reject any intimation from 
 external Nature, or to mutilate the language in which 
 his own intellectual nature instinctively led him to 
 clothe the impression made by them. He makes, 
 indeed, little or no use of the mere word — plan. 
 ' Type ' is the word he chiefly uses to express the 
 same idea ; type, meaning that sort of arrangement 
 of material which indicates a definite pattern, after 
 which, or according to which, the different parts of 
 a structure are arranged. He tells us that ' his 
 studies in Comparative Anatomy had led him to see 
 the evidences of a greater conformity to type, espe- 
 cially in the bones of the head of the vertebrate 
 animals, than the immortal Cuvier had been willing 
 to admit ^.' He points out the great distinction 
 between mere analogy and homology. Analogy 
 refers to mere similarity in respect to use or func- 
 tion ; homology refers solely to identity or sameness 
 of place, or position, in a common structure. Parts 
 which are homologous in two animals may or may 
 not be also analogous in the use to which they are 
 put. Very often the two classifications agree ; but 
 very often also they disagree. For example, there 
 is a little lizard which can fly, but its flying organ is 
 ' Homologies, &'c., Advertisement.
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 9I 
 
 not its fore-limbs, but a membrane stretched all down 
 its side from the fore-limbs to the hind-limbs. This 
 is to a certain extent, for the purposes to which it is 
 applied, analogous to the wing of a bird ; but it 
 is not homologous with that wing ; because the wing 
 of the bird, like the wing of the bat, is the forearm of 
 the creature specially adapted for flight. On the 
 other hand, the fore-fin of the flying fish is both 
 analogous and homologous with the wing of the 
 bird, because it is both that part of the fish which 
 corresponds to the forearm or foreleg in other Verte- 
 brates, and it is also put to something like the same 
 use of sustaining flight through the air. Owen, 
 moreover, makes a much more significant distinction 
 in his definition of homology — a distinction which at 
 first sight may seem too subtle to be of any practical 
 value even in classification, still more in philosophy. 
 But when we come to grasp it, this distinction is full 
 of meaning. Parts in a common plan, or pattern, or 
 type of structure which do really correspond with, or 
 are homologous with, each other, are also identical in 
 their origin, that is to say, they grow or are developed 
 in the egg or germ in the same order, by a strictly 
 similar process, and out of the same parts of the 
 germ, as soon as any parts become visibly separated 
 from each other at all. Now, Owen throws out this 
 kind of similarity from his definition of homology, 
 quite as decidedly as he throws out mere similarity 
 in functional use, or in shape, or in substance, or in 
 any other comparatively superficial points of view. 
 The relationships of homology, he insists upon it,
 
 92 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 ' are mainly, if not wholly, determined by the relative 
 position and connexion of the parts, and may exist 
 independently of form, proportion, substance, func- 
 tion, and similarity of development ^.' Owen does 
 not point out this distinction in connexion with any 
 argument or in support of any theory. He simply 
 points out as a fact in Nature that certain bones, for 
 example, in the skull of man and of fishes, which 
 bones are certainly homologous — that is to say, are 
 corresponding or answerable parts in the common 
 type or pattern of skull structure — are nevertheless 
 not developed in the same way, or out of the same 
 embryo materials. Owen specifies, as another case 
 of the same principle, that one leg-bone in a cow is 
 certainly homologous with the corresponding bone in 
 the leg of a crocodile, although in the cow it is 
 a single bone developed from one centre of ossifica- 
 tion, whilst in the crocodile it is a composite bone, 
 built up by the coalescence of no less than ' four 
 separate ossific centres^.' But when the coalescence 
 of these four separate bits of bone has been effected, 
 then the united bone is none the less the homologue 
 of the leg-bone of the cow by reason of the fact that 
 it then takes its exactly corresponding place in the 
 number and arrangement of leg-bones in these two 
 widely separated creatures. 
 
 The scientific value of every fact in Nature is in 
 proportion as it suggests some thought. Now what 
 is the kind of thought suggested by the fact that 
 corresponding or homologous parts in one common 
 
 ' Homologies, ^S^■f., p. 9. ■ Ibid. p. 5.
 
 IlJ IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 93 
 
 plan of structure are nevertheless sometimes, or often, 
 built up in different ways, when we look to their 
 origin in the development of germs? Clearly the 
 thought suggested is this — that pattern, or plan, or 
 type of general structure must, somehow, be one of 
 great importance, since means so complicated are 
 employed in adhering to it, in following it, in the 
 building up of all skeletons according to it. The 
 principle of Cuvier's explanation of all animal structure 
 iS; as we have seen, and as Owen expresses it, ' the 
 subserviency of the parts so determined to similar 
 ends in different animals.' But Owen himself is 
 staggered by the numerous facts which show that 
 actual use, or functional duty, cannot be always 
 directly connected with this conformity to one pattern 
 or plan of structure. He instances the case of the 
 human skull being built up by the coalescence of 
 a great number of small bones with separate points 
 of origin, whilst the utility which has been shown to 
 arise from this structure is the consequent com- 
 pressibility which facilitates the processes of birth. 
 But then he also points out the fact that in birds the 
 skull is built up also of precisely the same number of 
 originally separate bones, whilst this structure is in 
 them absolutely divorced from all reference to utility 
 of the same kind, seeing that there is no such use in 
 a birth by the cracking of an eggshell. And yet, he 
 says, the alternative conclusion that such homologies, 
 such identities in a common structure, are ' matters 
 of chance, is a conclusion which will be entertained by 
 no reasonable mind \' Owen, therefore, takes refuge 
 
 ^ Homologies^ &^c., p. 73.
 
 94 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 in the general abstract conception of an organic con- 
 formity to some higher type ' on which it has pleased 
 the Divine Architect to build up certain of these 
 diversified living works.' With this explanation 
 Owen is satisfied — at least in the meantime. It is, 
 of course, an explanation which shows his entire free- 
 dom from any theory or philosophic dogma adverse 
 to the immediate perception of mind in Nature. It 
 fully admits and includes all the implications which 
 are involved in the word ' plan,' or other feebler equi- 
 valents, such as type or pattern, as obviously 
 applicable to organic structure. But, on the other 
 hand, it is no explanation at all in the sense of any 
 answer either as to the How or the Why. It refers us, 
 indeed, back to some act of a supreme Will, but it 
 does not even profess to suggest any explanation 
 either as to the instrumentality employed, or as to the 
 reason for so employing it. It is a purely arbitrary 
 Will that is invoked, a will without an aim or a pur- 
 pose, and without even the suggestion of any reason. 
 But this is more inconceivable than that which we 
 call chance, and Owen expressly excludes mere 
 chance as an alternative which can be entertained by 
 any reasonable mind. But ' chance ' is not a word 
 which means the absence of purely physical causes. 
 In this sense no such thing as chance exists or is 
 even conceivable. Nobody doubts for a moment 
 that the falling of dice, when thrown, is always due 
 to some cause. What we mean by chance is the 
 determination of any event by causes absolutely 
 undirected by a reasonable mind. The abstract con-
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 95 
 
 ception of mere adherence to a type, some law of 
 mechanical conformity to a pattern, as in itself a 
 reasonable motive of a reasonable mind, is a con- 
 ception not only quite as irrational as pure chance, 
 but a great deal more so. What indeed may be 
 meant and what, unperceived, is probably really meant 
 by such language as Owen here employs, is a very 
 different thing — namely this, that ' conformity to type ' 
 is in itself a purpose governed by an aim which is 
 wholly unknown to us. This is a perfectly reasonable 
 conception, and if we have to submit to it as ultimate, 
 and admitting of no further investigation, it may indeed 
 leave us dissatisfied and restless ; but it does not leave 
 us confounded, or with faculties outraged by any 
 denial of the legitimacy of their aspirations, and of 
 the very existence of that for which they seek. It is 
 one thing to teach that the reason of any phenomena 
 in Nature is beyond our reach, and quite another 
 thing to teach that there is no such thing as a reason 
 to be sought after at all. 
 
 It is, however, satisfactory to find that the facts of 
 Nature, and especially the facts of a unity of structure 
 in all the Vertebrates, do not leave us in this position 
 of being utterly helpless to see any possible reason, 
 however much convinced we may be that some good 
 reason must nevertheless exist. Another set of facts 
 quite as certain, and far more obvious, even at first 
 sight, than the facts establishing unity of structural 
 plan, establish also a concurrent adaptation or adap- 
 tability to special functional uses. What is quite 
 certain is that the one set of facts does not interfere
 
 96 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 with the other. On the contrary, they are inseparably 
 interwoven, only in such a manner that two homo- 
 logous parts in two separate animals may be, and 
 often actually are, applied to totally dissimilar uses. 
 For example, the vertebral column ends in all the 
 Vertebrata in some form of tail, whether it be highly 
 developed or almost wholly suppressed. Totally 
 wanting it never is. Even in man it is represented 
 by six well-developed caudal vertebrae as terminal 
 bones. But in no class of Vertebrates, except one, 
 is this end of the vertebral column used as a loco- 
 motive organ. In some monkeys, indeed, it is made 
 to be prehensile, and by taking hold of the branches 
 of trees it greatly helps the limbs in taking the 
 swinging leaps which are most useful in an arboreal 
 life and habitat. But in one great class of Verte- 
 brates — the class of fishes — the end of the vertebral 
 column, furnished with an appended fin, is the one 
 great locomotive organ of the whole of them ; and, 
 what is still more remarkable, it is devoted to the 
 same use in a large number of other and higher 
 Vertebrates which have to live and move in the same 
 medium — water. In all these creatures the bones or 
 parts which are homologous with the four limbs in 
 other Vertebrates, are reduced in size, sometimes to 
 a mere rudiment, and are in all cases mere adjuncts 
 for locomotive purposes to the one great propelling 
 organ, the tail. The same principle of the special 
 adaptation of identical parts, as regards the general 
 plan, to uses and purposes of the widest difference, is 
 a principle which runs throughout the whole organic
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 97 
 
 world. Finger-bones are suppressed and glued 
 together to support the flying feathers in birds. They 
 are shortened and thickened to give burrowing 
 strength in the mole. They are elongated and 
 attenuated to support with elasticity a flying mem- 
 brane in the bat — and so on through an endless 
 variety of cases, where the one fundamental verte- 
 brate plan has all its several parts turned to separate 
 uses, without ever losing their traceable, and often 
 obvious, identity with each other as corresponding, or 
 answerable, parts in relation to the structure as 
 a whole. 
 
 In the light of these admitted facts it is not easy 
 to see how the principle of Cuvier's explanation of 
 organic structure, should appear inapplicable or in- 
 sufficient, merely because, in some cases, or even in 
 a thousand cases, we may discover particular features 
 in the common plan, which do not seem to stand in 
 connexion with any immediate use to the particular 
 species possessing them. What we do see most 
 clearly in the vertebrate series as a whole, is the 
 almost infinite plasticity of its fundamental plan, 
 the pliability of all its parts to some use — actual or 
 potential — in some one animal or another, so that 
 what seems quite useless in some cases becomes very 
 often not only useful but even essential in other 
 members of the same great class or sub-kingdom 
 among living things. If this be the fact, as it most 
 unquestionably is, then the principle of Cuvier's ex- 
 planation not only stands good, but it is raised to a 
 higher level, and endowed with a larger and wider 
 
 H
 
 98 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 significance. It shows that the vertebrate type or plan 
 of structure has in it always a potential, in addition 
 to an actual use, not only as a whole, but in all its 
 separate parts. Thus the first of the five fingers 
 which is the typical number of digits in all the 
 Vertebrates, and is of little or no special use in any 
 of the lower animals, becomes at once the most 
 essential and characteristic of the parts which raise 
 the paw or foot of the beast into the hand of man. 
 Thus also with the same digit in the foot, it becomes 
 the one essential fulcrum by which man keeps his 
 erect position. The illustrations of this principle are 
 endless, and no fact of comparative anatomy, nor 
 any conception founded on its facts, is more certain 
 or more significant than this universal adaptibility 
 of all the parts of the vertebrate skeleton to various 
 forms and kinds of use, as these have arisen in time, 
 and in the course of that development which its plan 
 has, somehow, undergone. 
 
 Accordingly we find that the mind of Owen, just 
 like the mind of Cuvier, does, in the progress of 
 his own most interesting treatise, come round by 
 another route to the recognition of the same ultimate 
 principle of explanation which was the only one con- 
 ceivable to the great French naturalist. Owen does 
 not, because he cannot, rest in the abstract idea of 
 a mere conformity to type as the only explanation of 
 the homologies he has traced. The subordination 
 of this plan or pattern of structure to special adapta- 
 tion in one particular but most salient case, is thus 
 expressed by Owen : the ' high characteristics of the
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 99 
 
 human arm and hand are manifested by the sub- 
 ordination of each part to a harmonious combination 
 of function with one another ^' And summing up 
 the reflections which are inevitably suggested by the 
 detailed analysis of parts and functions, he says : 
 ' The satisfaction felt by the rightly constituted mind 
 must ever be great in recognizing the fitness of parts 
 for their appropriate functions ; but when this fitness 
 is joined, as in the great toe of the foot of men 
 and the ostrich, by a structure which, at the same 
 time, manifests a harmonious concord with a common 
 type, the power of the one great Cause of all organ- 
 ization is appreciated as fully, perhaps, as it is 
 possible to be by our limited intelligence ".' From 
 the wording of this passage it is not quite clear 
 whether, in Owen's mind, the apparent necessity of 
 conforming to one type of structure was regarded 
 as a help, or as a hindrance, in the creative work 
 of special development and adaptation. The idea 
 of the creative power being more striking in this 
 point of view than in any other, would rather seem 
 to indicate that conformity to type v/as regarded 
 by him as an obstacle to be overcome by extra- 
 ordinary power. But the opposite idea, of a typical 
 form of fundamental structure being in itself a reser- 
 voir of potential adaptability, is the conception which 
 best corresponds with the facts of Nature, and carries 
 back to the farthest conceivable extent the one great 
 idea of method as always subservient to foresight 
 and design. 
 
 ^ Homologies, p. 196. * Ibid, p 197. 
 
 H 2
 
 lOO INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 It is important to remember that this idea leaves 
 untouched the whole question of the physical causes 
 through the agency of which the method is pursued. 
 That the ordinary physical forces, as well as the 
 ordinary physical elements of what we call matter, 
 are concerned in the building up of all organic 
 structures, there can be no doubt whatever. But 
 when yoked to the service of that which we only 
 know as life or vitality, these physical forces do what 
 they never do in any other service. There is a wide 
 gulf between the organic and the inorganic world, 
 and our language and ideas are very apt to be self- 
 deceptive when we speak of chemical affinity, or 
 of galvanic or polar forces, as concerned in producing 
 any vital phenomena. That they are concerned in 
 some way is indeed certain. But the subordination 
 to some master power, under which they work, is as 
 conspicuous as their presence in that subordinate 
 capacity. How far we can attribute to them anything 
 of the rigidity and uniformity of effects, which are 
 characteristic of the work done by the physical forces 
 when not so subordinated, is a very difficult and 
 a purely speculative question. Nevertheless it is 
 impossible not to suspect that possibly the tool-mark, 
 as it v/ere, of the physical forces may be traced in 
 the mechanical arrangements of parts according to 
 a definite pattern. This is a common effect of the 
 physical forces acting on ponderable matter, as in 
 the formation of crystals, and in other analogous 
 phenomena. Owen is attracted by an idea of this 
 kind, and suggests it as a possible clue to the linear
 
 Il] IX THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE lOI 
 
 arrangement and repetition of like parts in the verte- 
 bral column, and in what he calls the 'vegetative 
 repetition' of segments, and of serial parts, in plants. 
 But there is this tremendous and fundamental dif- 
 ference between any repetition of like parts in an 
 organism, and every repetition of like parts in the 
 geometric forms of crystals, or in the arrangement 
 which inorganic dust takes under the discharges of 
 electricity — that in the organic world every bit and 
 fragment of the material employed has, not merely 
 a molecular constitution in the chemical sense, but 
 also always an internal structure which is organic, 
 that is to say, which is constructed on a plan with 
 a view to farther growth, and to adaptation for the 
 discharge of function. Therefore, in our guesses and 
 speculations as to the physical forces employed in 
 building up organic structures, we must take care to 
 place ourselves under the severest discipline of mind, 
 so as to avoid confounding things which are essentially 
 distinct, things, indeed, which are separated from each 
 other by the whole width of conceivable existence. 
 
 Whatever life or vitality may be in its ultimate 
 source and nature, it is certainly a power which makes 
 the physical forces perform a kind of work which they 
 never perform in the world of the not-living. But 
 so long as we keep firm hold of this fact, and of 
 the corresponding idea of a mere subordinate instru- 
 mentality as essentially their position in organic 
 structure, then, indeed, it is possible for us to think 
 without self-deception of the physical forces of at- 
 traction, repulsion, and polarity, as concerned in the
 
 I02 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 disposal of organized matter along lines of deposit, 
 and in segments, and according to definite patterns or 
 types of arrangement. This becomes most easily- 
 conceivable in the case of certain animal forms of 
 the lowest kind, such as many animals belonging 
 to Cuvier's great division, the Radiata. Owen tells 
 us that in the starfishes we can detect the mineral, 
 lime, out of which their shell is constructed, taking 
 the characteristic crystalline form which belongs to 
 it in the inorganic world. And, indeed, the very 
 idea of a radiated arrangement of material is one 
 which suggests the agency of such crystalline forces 
 as determine the exquisite stellate forms which are 
 common among crystals. There are none more 
 beautiful than those of common water when it is 
 frozen or solidified in flakes of snow. It is quite 
 possible, it may even be probable, that this analogy 
 may be a true one — an analogy which indicates a real 
 connexion between like effects, so far as mere ar- 
 rangement of material is concerned. But the moment 
 we attempt to push this analogy one hair's-breadth 
 beyond the idea of purely mechanical arrangement, 
 the attempted explanation breaks down completely. 
 It becomes a pure self-deception, and may very 
 easily be converted into a sophistry. There are, 
 perhaps, no animal forms existing in the world, in 
 which the merely mechanical arrangement of separate 
 parts is made more strikingly subservient to an 
 organic use than in the forms of many marine animals. 
 The wonderful beauty, as to mere form, which we 
 appreciate in snow crystals, gives way to another
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE IO3 
 
 kind of beauty not less grateful to the eye, and far 
 more satisfying to the mind. No utility is seen, or 
 is perhaps conceivable, in the crystalline forms of 
 snow. But in the calcareous plates of the Echini, 
 or Sea-urchins, elaborated as they are by the work 
 of living matter which is as formless as a pure jelly, 
 we see a method and a plan for overcoming a great 
 mechanical difficulty, namely, the problem how to 
 reconcile the possibility of expansion and growth 
 with a hard external shell of definite size and shape, 
 and made of a rigid material. When we have grasped 
 — which it is not very easy to do — all the purely me- 
 chanical difficulties which the solution of this problem 
 involves, and when we come to see some, at least, of the 
 complex contrivances by which those difficulties are 
 met and overcome, the exclamation ' how beautiful,' 
 which the mind must utter in thought, if not in words, 
 is transferred from the loveliness of the mere radiate 
 arrangement of plates and spines, to the comparatively 
 hidden intellectual beauty of the special adaptation 
 to development, growth, and function, which is as 
 conspicuous as it is wonderful in the whole structure. 
 If, again, we can trust our own minds to keep a firm 
 footing on the slippery slopes of an imperfect analogy, 
 there is another group in the animal world in the 
 structure of which we may well imagine that we can 
 almost see and touch the direct agency of the physical 
 forces in the arrangement of a house of life. That 
 group is constituted by the Sponges. In those with 
 which we are most familiar, the horny sponges, there 
 is little or no beauty of form, although there is a most
 
 T04 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 wonderful beauty of adaptation to a very special 
 function. In that function lies their usefulness to man 
 — these sponges being the only one of the animal 
 series so low in the scale of life which has any 
 economic use for him. That use lies in the truly 
 extraordinary power they possess of holding water 
 in channels and passages of their substance, through 
 the subordinated force of capillary attraction. The 
 only explanation of this structure is an explanation 
 framed on the principle adopted by Cuvier. That 
 principle seizes on the fact of some absolute need 
 which must be met, and points to the necessity of 
 providing for it by the construction of some definite 
 apparatus. The animal life of sponges is maintained 
 by the digestion of food contained in the currents of 
 sea water, and an ever fresh and continuous supply 
 of those currents is therefore a necessity of life to 
 sponges. It is to meet this want or need that the 
 complicated porosity of the spongy skeleton is devised, 
 and in ordinary sponges there is no obvious symmetry 
 or beauty in the arrangement of the innumerable 
 orifices through which the water is sucked up and 
 passed. There is, however, another division of the 
 sponges which are of no economic use to man, but 
 which possess a skeleton of such wonderful beauty 
 and complexity, that the contemplation of them fills 
 every eye that looks upon them with astonishment 
 and admiration. These are the silicious sponges, 
 whose skeletons are composed of glass, woven and 
 spun into forms of the most exquisite patterns. The 
 function or use of those astonishing structures is less
 
 U] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE I05 
 
 obvious at first sight than in the structure of the horny 
 or leathery sponges, although on reflection we see that 
 they are all referable to the same great mechanical 
 need, namely, that of providing channels of access 
 through which currents of water may be brought into 
 contact with the internal surfaces of the vital and 
 digesting jelly of the animal. 
 
 But when we fix our attention on that which 
 is indeed most conspicuous, namely, the exquisite 
 regularity and beauty of the patterns assumed by 
 the glassy matter of the skeleton, we cannot help 
 feeling that what may be called the sub-agency 
 of the physical forces is at once suggested to 
 the mind. The Why is quite clear ; and the How 
 is in a measure unusually probable. The arrange- 
 ment of the glassy rods and spiculae, according to 
 numerical groups, and according to angles of position, 
 is an arrangement which reminds us a good deal of 
 the arrangements which are determined by the 
 crystallizing forces in mineral matter. For example, 
 there is one arrangement of the glassy elements 
 characterized by the number six, just as some minerals 
 and other substances crystallize in forms which are 
 hexagonal. So prominent is this number in the 
 pattern of this group of sponges, that naturalists have 
 chosen it as the basis of their classification in respect 
 to genuine characters. The group is called the 
 Hexitenellidae, which may be translated as the six- 
 stitched sponges. The wonderful beauty which results 
 in these forms is quite indescribable in words. In 
 one of the splendid volumes of the Report of the
 
 Io6 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 Challenger Expedition, they can be seen and studied 
 in delineations which more than exhaust all the words 
 in which we can express the sense of beauty. But 
 be it observed that, although these wonderful forms 
 are, in some points of view, eminently suggestive of 
 the action of the polar or crystalline forces, the pro- 
 duct, not only as a whole and considered as an appa- 
 ratus, but in all its separate elements, has characters 
 which distinguish both the whole and all its parts 
 from the inorganic world. In the first place, even 
 the initial process of segregating out of sea-water the 
 infinitesimally small amount of soluble silex which it 
 contains, is in itself an essentially vital operation. 
 Chemical and galvanic forces are, no doubt, concerned, 
 and even decaying animal matter may sometimes de- 
 termine the deposition of soluble matter from the sea. 
 But the selection or segregation of silex, and the deposit 
 of it along certain definite lines of structure, is an 
 operation in which the mere chemical and polar forces, 
 if they are employed at all, are seen working in strict 
 subordination to a vital end. Then, in the next 
 place, the forms of the elementary spiculae of these 
 wonderful sponges are forms never seen except as the 
 product of that power which we call organic. It is 
 true that they are rigid, largely though not uniformly 
 rectilinear, and the patterns they assume are often 
 geometric. But, on the other hand, they have curved 
 and, as it were, ornamental terminations, which remind 
 us rather of the form of some flowers, such as the 
 Flench ' fleur-de-lis.' The pattern of a cross is very 
 largely used. The fundamental form in all the six-
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE I07 
 
 rayed sponges seems to be that of three straight rays 
 crossing each other at right angles. But this is 
 modified in various ways in different species, and for 
 different organic uses. The pattern of an anchor is 
 wonderfully common, and it appears to be connected 
 with the same functional use as that to which the 
 human implement is applied. In short, the inorganic 
 or physical forces, although they here obtrude upon 
 us more in some aspects than in most other animal 
 structures, are manifestly mere servants under the 
 control and direction of vitality, doing, under that 
 direction, what they are nowhere else seen doing in 
 the inorganic world. 
 
 We must be on our guard, upon this subject, 
 against the subtle effects of theoretical preconcep- 
 tions, whether in ourselves or others. Any disposition 
 or desire to reduce the phenomena of life to the 
 same level as the phenomena of the physical forces, 
 operates powerfully in the direction of leading us 
 to exaggerate the likeness between true crystalline 
 forms and those organic forms which are merely, in 
 some ways, like them. Professor Haeckel, whose 
 bias in this direction cannot be disputed, has invented 
 a new word, or rather a new compound of words, in 
 order to reconcile the facts, as far as possible, with 
 the two diverse conceptions of organic, as distinguished 
 from inorganic, work. He calls the work done in 
 sponges ' bio-crystallization,' which is a sort of verbal 
 compromise between the idea of ordinary mineral 
 crystallization, and the very different organic products 
 of the living protoplasm of the creature. But this
 
 lo8 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 mere verbal hybrid casts no light upon the subject, 
 unless it be interpreted as meaning some force 
 vaguely analogous to crystallization, which is wielded 
 by vitality. ' Triaxial ' and ' tri-radiate ' are the words 
 employed to designate this theoretically, or ideally, 
 fundamental form. Haeckel's own language, when 
 he attempts to explain his compound word, shows 
 that the plastic or directing power is conceived as 
 resident in the living matter, and if this be so, the 
 part played by the crystalline forces can only be 
 purely instrumental and subordinate. He speaks of 
 the ' bio-crystals occupying a medium position between 
 an inorganic crystal and an organic secretion, and in 
 their origin expressing a compromise between the 
 crystallization of the lime (or silex) and the formative 
 activity of the fused cells of the syncytisum ^.' When 
 we cross-question this language it appears at once 
 that the only definite idea it contains is the idea of 
 the vital activity being the origin and the cause 
 of the forms imposed upon the materials supplied, 
 and the image of a ' compromise ' taken from the 
 analogy of two human disputants or antagonists, is 
 plainly a misleading metaphor. 
 
 On the other hand, Professor Schulze of the Uni- 
 versity of Berlin, to whom, as the foremost authority 
 on the subject, the task was entrusted of drawing up 
 the ' Report on the Sponges taken by the Challenger 
 Expedition/ has, in that splendid Monograph, declared 
 his conviction that any attempt must be vain to refer 
 the skeleton of sponges to the mere crystallizing 
 
 ' Challenger Reports, vol xxi. p. 499.
 
 Il] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE IO9 
 
 tendencies of lime or silica ' by way of origin or 
 explanation.' He points out as fatal to any such 
 explanation, that the spicules are never really crystal- 
 line at all in their molecular constitution. They are 
 always, when silicious, composed of ' amorphous 
 hydrated silica or opal,' as proved by the analysis of 
 their effects on light. This in itself is fatal to the 
 mere mechanical or crystalline theory. Then also, 
 marked curvatures are common, at variance with the 
 laws of defined crystalline axes. Professor Schulze, 
 therefore, concludes that ' the formative forces are in 
 no essential way different from those which are every- 
 where exhibited in the shaping of the living organism 
 and its parts ^.' 
 
 But this is not all. Professor Schulze goes back to 
 the principle of Cuvier — the principle of basing all 
 explanation of organic structure upon the recognition, 
 as a fact, of organic functions. Whatever a structure 
 actually does, is to be considered as that which it was 
 made for doing. And conversely, wherever we can 
 see any natural or physical necessity for any particular 
 arrangement of structure, there we are to look for the 
 explanation why it is actually provided. This prin- 
 ciple is the best science, because it is the best common 
 sense, and because it is the only principle on which 
 organic structures can be made intelligible at all. On 
 this principle of explanation the physical forces are 
 not neglected. On the contrary, the demands they 
 make upon our recognition as a consequence of their 
 universality, and of their inherent and imperative 
 
 * Challenger Reports, vol. xxi. p. 500.
 
 TIO INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 authority, are demands conceded as lying at the 
 very root of the explanation which is to be sought 
 for. They are not regarded as enemies or opponents 
 with whom some compromise must be made, but as 
 tools, or implements, or instruments, by whose sure 
 and trusty co-operation some great object can only be 
 attained. Looking steadily at the facts in the light 
 of this principle, Professor Schulze has no difficulty 
 in showing that the exquisitely beautiful structure of 
 the vitreous or glassy sponges can easily be explained. 
 In them, just as in the higher animals, weight has to 
 be supported. The living protoplasm of sponges con- 
 sists of ponderable matter. But being soft, gelatinous, 
 and almost fluid, the skeleton which supports it, and 
 holds it together in some definite form, has need to be 
 a skeleton permeating its substance with some in- 
 tricate network of sustaining structure. Such is the 
 physical or mechanical need — if a certain work is to 
 be effectively performed ; and such accordingly is 
 the framework which is actually supplied. Professor 
 Schulze shows that in a soft substance more or less 
 divided into spherical units which lie and press one 
 upon another, the surfaces of contact are deformed by 
 the mutual pressure, and the whole mass, unless 
 mechanically sustained, must be incapable of coherence 
 in any erect or definite form. He shows further that 
 for the purpose of meeting this need the intercalation 
 of triaxial spiculae, at the proper intervals or inter- 
 spaces, is precisely the structure which effects the 
 object with the greatest economy of material. The 
 diagram by which this is shown is as beautiful, in the
 
 ll] IN THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE III 
 
 intellectual sense, as the resulting pattern or plan 
 of these silicious sponges is beautiful to the eye of 
 sense. 
 
 Nor is it less important to observe that Professor 
 Schulze regards, and rightly regards, this principle of 
 explanation as not only compatible, but as the only 
 one which is at all consistent, with the idea of de- 
 velopment as the method pursued in Nature in the 
 building up of organic forms. Development is an 
 abstract conception and an abstract word without any 
 definite meaning, unless it be coupled with some idea 
 as to that which is developed. There may be a develop- 
 ment of chaos as well as a development of order — a 
 development of destruction as well as a development 
 of construction. If function be that which is, above 
 all other things, the object of development in organic 
 forms, then the principle of explanation, which makes 
 serviceability, or adaptation to actual use, the key to 
 the explanation of them, must be the highest attain- 
 able to our intelligence. Professor Schulze puts this 
 principle as a general proposition, thus : ' If one can 
 distinctly demonstrate a natural and necessary con- 
 nexion between the form and disposition of a skeletal 
 element and the function which it discharges, one has, 
 from the standpoint of utility and natural selection, 
 rationalized the appearance of that form and dis- 
 position ^.^ Acting on this principle and applying it 
 to the analysis of the visible facts of skeletal structure 
 in these wonderful organisms, he says, ' I am decidedly 
 of opinion that it can be shown with convincing 
 
 ^ Challenger Reports, vol. xxi. p. 500.
 
 112 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY 
 
 probability that such a necessary relation does exist 
 between the structure of the soft parts in each of the 
 three principal groups of sponges, and the charac- 
 teristical forms of spiculae, which we regard, on 
 anatomical and developmental grounds, as primitive 
 and fundamental in each group.' The whole of this 
 language is teleological in the highest degree, and it 
 specially involves the idea of development in time, 
 from simpler to more and more complex structures, 
 so that prevision and adaptability to needs which 
 have not as yet arisen, are provided for, in the primi- 
 tive or typical forms, by means of elements developing 
 along predetermined lines. Professor Schulze traces 
 the progress of their adaptation and development 
 through different families and species, until we reach 
 the exquisitely beautiful and complex structures of 
 the Euplectella ; and he explains the relation between 
 such a highly developed form and the earlier spicule 
 by saying, ' It thus appears to me evident that in 
 these circumstances no more advantageous form of 
 spicule for the support of such simple, loose body, 
 could be devised than the regular hexacts disposed 
 in such a way that one radial ray unites the bounding 
 lamellae ^.' And so at last a latticed network is pro- 
 duced, affording all the needed facilities for mechanical 
 support, together with an ample provision for the 
 innumerable orifices through which the currents of 
 water may be sucked in, and brought into contact 
 with the living and digesting ' sarcode.' 
 
 ' Challenger Reports, vol.xxi. p. 504.
 
 Chapter III. 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 RECOGNITIONS IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is most instructive to observe that the immediate 
 perception and recognition of mental work in Nature, 
 is often most remarkable in the language of those 
 in whom it is more or less unconscious, or is, at least, 
 wholly unconnected with any theological preconcep- 
 tions. Writers of this class are perpetually using 
 forms of expression, as well as individual words, 
 all of which are literally charged with teleological 
 meaning. Men, even, who would rather avoid such 
 language if they could, but who are intent on giving 
 the most complete and expressive description they 
 can of the natural facts before them, find it wholly 
 impossible to discharge this duty by any other 
 means. Let us take as an example the work of de- 
 scribing organic structures in the science of Biology. 
 The standard treatise of Huxley on the Elements 
 of Comparative Atiatomy affords a remarkable ex- 
 ample of this necessity, and of its results. The 
 constant use and repetition of teleological words, 
 phrases, and grammatical constructions, all of which 
 
 I
 
 114 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 express and embody the idea of mental preparation 
 and design, is conspicuous throughout that . most 
 interesting volume. On the very first page he starts 
 by calling all animal organs by the name of ' physio- 
 logical apparatuses.' This word, apparatus, has, and 
 can have, only one meaning — that, namely, which cor- 
 responds with its etymology. It is an example of 
 those many invaluable words which are stamped with 
 the die of some one simple and universal thought — 
 a thought familiar to all men since first they made 
 a fish-hook, an arrow, or a spear. Ad-paratus 
 means any thing made ' for ' the doing of some- 
 thing else — ' for ' the accomplishment of some end 
 which has been thought of, and foreseen. When it is 
 coupled, as in Huxley's use of it in this case, with 
 such a word as ' physiological,' it has an immense 
 and indeed an immeasurable sweep and meaning, 
 because the functions discharged in physiology, range 
 from the lowest to the highest rank ; from motions 
 which seem to be almost purely mechanical, to move- 
 ments of thought and genius which we cannot even 
 conceive of as being connected with matter in any 
 form. When, therefore, all animal organisms are 
 designated as ' physiological apparatuses/ we do not 
 need to ask any question as to the intention of the 
 writer who uses this language, as we analyze its 
 meaning. That meaning is indisputable, whatever 
 may have been his intention ; and its significance is 
 all the greater in proportion as it is separable from 
 any conscious deliberate purpose. It stands forth 
 as expressing a fact of mental perception and recog-
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY II5 
 
 nition. more surely representing a truth than the 
 photographic record of a heavenly body — otherwise 
 unseen — upon a surface sensitive to Hght. 
 
 But there is no reason to suppose that Huxley 
 uses this language without a full consciousness of 
 its meaning, since it is observable that he varies 
 it with synonyms, which are, if possible, even more 
 direct. Thus, throughout the whole volume of his 
 Elements, he perpetually and systematically uses the 
 word ' plan ' as the best word he can employ, and 
 indeed the only word he can find, to designate the 
 arrangements of organic structures. But ' plan ' is 
 a word which has no other meaning whatever than as 
 designating that peculiar mental operation of which 
 ' apparatuses ' are the fruit. The whole volume is 
 specially devoted to the consideration of animals as 
 ' fabrics,' each of which is built upon a certain 'plan^.' 
 It is impossible to claim the right and the advantage 
 of using such a word for purposes of description, and 
 yet to disclaim its special and characteristic meaning 
 in the reasonings of philosophy. A plan means only 
 one thing — namely, an arrangement of matter, or of 
 conduct, which has been preconceived with a view to 
 some definite aim or purpose. It is a word which 
 has no meaning at all except as applied to this well- 
 known class of mental operations. No man in his 
 senses would apply it to any arrangement, either of 
 matter or of conduct, which is purely fortuitous, or 
 determined alone by physical forces operating under 
 no guidance or control. 
 
 ^ Elements, p. 2. 
 I 2
 
 Il6 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 It is a curious circumstance, but it is nevertheless 
 unquestionably true^ that the disposition to relegate 
 this purely mental character of physical and physio- 
 logical ' apparatuses ' to the category of theological 
 ideas, and to dismiss it consequently from the 
 category of scientific facts, is — at least in some 
 minds — a disposition which is itself entirely due to a 
 purely theological preconception. That preconception 
 is that the very idea of design is essentially what is 
 called ' anthropomorphic,' and therefore cannot pro- 
 perly be applied to the Divine mind, in which, it is 
 further preconceived, that the element of time can 
 have no place, and which, besides, cannot be supposed 
 to be under any necessity of attaining its ends by 
 what we know as contrivance. Whatever may be the 
 value of these two assumptions as to what may be, 
 or may not be, consistent with the nature of the 
 Divine mind, or worthy of it, it is at least certain that 
 such preconceptions belong to the region of theology 
 and not to the region of what is called science. Nay 
 more, it is clear that such assumptions, in so far as 
 they are used to suppress, or to evade, obvious facts, 
 are chargeable with that very error which is com- 
 monly, and no doubt sometimes justly, charged against 
 theologians — namely, the error of refusing to recognize 
 certain ascertained physical truths, merely because 
 they are supposed to contradict theological doctrines. 
 It is wholly irrational to doubt or explain away the 
 natural facts which indicate all animal frames to 
 be, what Huxley calls them, * apparatuses ' and 
 ' plans,' because by doing so we may be alleged to
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY II7 
 
 involve ourselves in conceptions about the nature of 
 the Divine mind, which we choose to assume to be 
 unworthy of it. What we have to deal with in science 
 are facts, and, as such, with all the mental aspects and 
 relations of phenomena to each other, and to ourselves, 
 which may be accessible to us. When any of these 
 relations are distinct and clear — more especially when 
 any of them are so distinct and clear that we cannot 
 even describe what we see, otherwise than in words 
 which are full of the recognition of mind and of its 
 work — then the rejection of them, on theological 
 assumptions, is the widest possible departure from that 
 love of truth, at whatever cost, which is the very 
 essence of the scientific spirit. 
 
 How unreasonable it is to set aside, or to explain 
 away, the full meaning of such words as ' apparatuses ' 
 and ' plans,' comes out strongly when we analyze the 
 preconceived assumptions which are supposed to be 
 incompatible with the admission of it. The notion, 
 for example, that time represents a purely human 
 idea, and can have no place in Nature except as 
 a mere condition, or a mere infirmity of human 
 thought — this notion is, in the strictest sense of the 
 word, nonsense. Whatever else time may be, it is 
 at least confessedly a necessity of human thought, 
 and, if it be so, it is plain that we cannot have any 
 conception of anything whatever into which time 
 does not enter. Consequently no reasoning can be 
 founded on the assumption that time is a delusion. 
 If it be indeed a necessity of our thought, the pre- 
 sumption is that, in some way or another, it does
 
 Il8 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 represent some reality, even though that representa- 
 tion should be an approximation only. But, even 
 apart from this presumption, it is obvious that at least 
 any opposite presumption is unwarrantable ; and the 
 deliberate setting aside of the evidence which proves 
 that organic structures are apparatuses for the accom- 
 plishment of certain ends, because this evidence 
 involves the conception of time, is therefore wholly 
 irrational. 
 
 There must be some very specious plausibility 
 about the notion that our conception of time is a 
 mere delusion attaching to our humanity — since 
 it has found expression in many forms, and it has 
 been used for many purposes — not being at all 
 confined, or even specially connected with, those who 
 seek to avoid and evade the evidence of mental 
 purpose in the works of Nature. And yet it ought 
 to stagger all who have any regard for the interests 
 of truth as a thing which even in any degree is 
 accessible to us. If any conception, which is to us 
 a true necessity of thought — a condition absolutely 
 inseparable from the working of every faculty of 
 observation or of reasoning which we possess — is to 
 be looked upon as probably, or even possibly, a mere 
 incident of our human weakness and limitations, then, 
 obviously, an element of paralysis is introduced into 
 all our mental operations, which is destructive of our 
 confidence in any one of them. It is an idea which 
 lands us, and leaves us, in a state of universal and 
 hopeless scepticism. Every conviction we have, or 
 can have, rests upon our confidence in those primary
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY II9 
 
 truths which hold the rank of absolute necessities of 
 thought. If they fail us, if they are conceivably mere 
 delusions, mere ' forms,' as they are sometimes vaguely 
 called, then the whole structure of human knowledge 
 crumbles into dust. There can be no such thing as 
 science. The idea of causation must be banished along 
 with the idea of time. They cannot be divided. Again, 
 the idea of right and wrong, as inseparable from the 
 very conception of conduct and of its consequences, 
 must be equally abandoned. Logical necessities, 
 and moral obligations, fall together in one universal 
 ruin. The idea of development, now so popular among 
 scientific men, is of course condemned as specially 
 dependent on a true reality in the element of time. 
 In short, if it be indeed true that our idea of time is 
 nothing but an infirmity of the fleshly mind, then 
 neither knowledge nor virtue can be attained by man. 
 When consequences so grave are involved in the 
 indulgence of vague surmises, such as those often 
 expressed in reference to time, they ought to be sub- 
 mitted to rigorous examination. This particular 
 surmise is, indeed, almost incapable of expression in 
 lang-uaee which is rational or coherent. But the 
 element of plausibility which must belong to it can 
 be traced clearly enough to that one great source of 
 fallacies which is so fruitful, namely, the ambiguities 
 of language. What happens to us is this : in the 
 first place, we use the word ' time ' not for the mere 
 idea of duration, but for all the many agencies which 
 work in time ; in the second place, we associate with 
 the abstract idea of time the limitations which in time
 
 I20 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 are set upon our own life, and upon our own processes 
 and opportunities of acquiring knowledge. Thus the 
 abounding elements of metaphor in the language of 
 poetry, of religion, and of common life — the elements 
 of mere omission, that is to say — of things left out but 
 quite implied and understood — all these have com- 
 bined to confuse our thoughts and to vitiate our 
 philosophy. We speak of time as if it were an active 
 agent in doing this, that, and the other. Yet we are 
 quite conscious, when we choose to think of it, that 
 when we speak of time in this sense, we are really 
 thinking and speaking, not of time in itself, but of the 
 various physical forces which operate slowly and con- 
 tinuously in, or during, time. Apart from these 
 forces, time does nothing. And when an_ of these 
 physical causes are suspended or impeded in their 
 operation, then the effects, loosely attributed to the 
 mere idea of duration, are often altogether suspended. 
 There was lately found in an Egyptian tomb, and 
 acquired by the British Museum, a little deposit of 
 articles used for a woman's toilet. Amongst other 
 items there was a small pot of some ointment. The 
 whole was enclosed in a wooden box, divided inter- 
 nally into small compartments adapted to the size 
 and shape of the various contents. All who saw it 
 were instinctively led to conclude, that whilst the 
 articles themselves were very ancient, the wooden box 
 must have been made recently for the safer carriage 
 of the contents. But it was not so. The box looked 
 as fresh, and the wood was as sound and resonant to 
 touch, as if it had been made yesterday in any
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 121 
 
 carpenter's shop. Yet the whole deposit was assigned, 
 by the date of the tomb, to the middle of the sixteenth 
 century B.C. In other words, the box was not less 
 than about 3,400 years old, and that long period of 
 time had produced no decay whatever, whilst probably 
 a tenth part of the same time would be sufficient, in 
 our climate, to make the box crumble into dust. 
 When we speak thus, we mean, not that the mere 
 time has done anything, but that the aqueous vapour 
 in our atmosphere would have rotted the wood if it 
 had had a continuous operation of 300 years. It is 
 the economics of speech which lead us to forget these 
 truths. For shortness, we speak of time as including 
 and expressing the physical agencies which work in 
 time. But this is not due to any real infirmity in out- 
 mental capacities. When we choose to exercise the 
 necessary reflection, the distinction is quite apparent, 
 and the idea of time ceases to be identified in our 
 minds with an agency of change. 
 
 Still more deceptive is the careless identification 
 we are apt to make between time, and that tract or 
 division of time which we call the future. The con- 
 sciousness of our ignorance of this tract, weighs upon us. 
 It colours all our thoughts. The truth that we know 
 not what a day may bring forth, is quite sufficient to 
 make us confound the idea of time with some agency 
 which of necessity limits knowledge, and cannot even 
 conceivably coexist with omniscience. But this again 
 is a pure delusion, which dissolves in thin air the 
 moment we look at it steadily. The idea of time has 
 no necessary connexion whatever with the idea of
 
 122 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a limited faculty of foreseeing. On the contrary, 
 even our own small experience of foreseeing indicates 
 clearly that knowledge confers the power of fore- 
 seeing in direct proportion to its completeness. It is 
 not only conceivable that to absolute knowledge the 
 future might be far more absolutely known than 
 either the present or the past can be known to us, 
 but it is even inconceivable that any other result could 
 arise from omniscience. It is evident, therefore, that 
 there is no antecedent presumption whatever against 
 the truthfulness of those interpretations of Nature 
 which regard animal organs as preparations in point 
 of time, and apparatuses in point of purpose, for the 
 accomplishment of definite ends, or, in other words, 
 for the discharge of certain functions. 
 
 It is quite true that there are some conceptions of 
 which we cannot get rid — which mingle with much 
 that we think, and with all we do — but which, never- 
 theless, are connected with nothing but transitory 
 conditions, and are conceptions, therefore, which we 
 must regard as representing no absolute existence. 
 Thus, for example, in our relations with space, we 
 cannot shake off the conception of high and low, of 
 upwardnessand downwardness, of elevation and depres- 
 sion—a conception which meets us everywhere, and 
 finds expression in innumerable metaphors, applicable 
 to our very highest thoughts of virtue and of wisdom. 
 Yet nothing can be more certain than that the whole 
 of these conceptions are founded on facts and distinc- 
 tions which are purely local, passing, and in a sense 
 accidental. Downwards and upwards are words which
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I23 
 
 have no meaning at all in absolute and empty space. 
 That which is downwards to us in England, is upwards 
 to our colonists in the Antipodes. Downwardness 
 means simply the direction in which gravitation exerts 
 the strongest pull. The approach of another body to 
 our earth, might reverse that direction in a moment. 
 Our conception, therefore, of downwardness, although 
 no delusion^ is a conception which corresponds only 
 to a contingent fact — to relations which are purely 
 local and conditional. But the very power we have 
 of seeing this, is a proof of the great distinction between 
 such a conception in respect to space, and the very 
 different conceptions which are our own in respect to 
 time. Neither the abstract idea of space nor the 
 abstract idea of time, can possibly be explained away 
 as we can explain away some particular relations in 
 which we stand to both, as a consequence of particular 
 conditions. Our very idea of motion implies space, 
 and our very idea of life, and thought, and action, 
 implies motion. And so it is with time. Things 
 thought of, and things done, must all be thought of 
 and done as in succession ; and when we use such 
 poetical phrases as ' when time shall be no more,' we 
 can only mean when some existing conditions shall 
 cease to be, and when other conditions shall take 
 their place. 
 
 There is, therefore, not the slightest justification 
 for the vague surmise that our conception of time 
 is a delusion, and that our nature is deceiving us 
 when it imposes that conception upon us as an abso- 
 lute necessity of thought, any more than that it is
 
 124 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 deceiving us in any of the other postulates of reason 
 or of conscience. All fears, consequently, and all 
 suspicions which may inspire us with scepticism as 
 to any aspects of Nature, however obvious, and how- 
 ever immediately recognized, because those aspects 
 involve the idea of time, must at once be set aside 
 as morbid and irrational. Such aspects of Nature 
 are indelibly recorded in the instinctive use of the 
 words 'plan' and 'apparatus' by men like Huxley, 
 whose one duty and aim is to describe, as fully and 
 as accurately as they can, the phenomena which they 
 actually see. For the important point to be noted 
 about this language is, that it is used, not at all 
 as expressing an argument or an inference, but as 
 describing a fact, just as much as form, or colour, or 
 weight, or any other natural relation can be pre- 
 dicated as a fact in describing any natural object. 
 The relation between any apparatus and the work 
 it is fitted to perform, is quite as much a fact — quite 
 as much an object of immediate perception — as any 
 relation which it can bear to light, or to space, or to 
 gravitation. 
 
 Nor is it less worthy of observation that, through 
 the special science of embryology, the element of 
 time contributes largely to any confirmatory evidence 
 which may be at all needed for the full justification 
 of such teleological words and forms of speech, as 
 those which comparative anatomists are compelled 
 to use. In completed organs we see an accomplished 
 end, and a preparation finished for its purpose. But 
 in the growth of embryo organs, we see them in the
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I25 
 
 course of preparation — during processes of develop- 
 ment which are dissociated from all actual use, and 
 are yet inseparably united with uses which are yet 
 to be. We can see those organs in the course of 
 being moulded through changes which may be often 
 watched from day to day, and in which a continuous 
 relation to the future is not only observable, but is 
 the most characteristic and most obvious feature. 
 The consequence is that, even when the use of such 
 words as 'plan' and 'apparatus' is evaded, the 
 whole language of embryological descriptive science 
 is constructed on the principle of describing pur- 
 pose. For example, the use of the prepositions 
 'to' and 'for' — meaning 'in order to' and 'for the 
 purpose of — is perpetual among biological writers in 
 describing the destination of incipient organic struc- 
 tures. Just as in shipbuilding we describe the initial 
 laying down of a long bar of iron 'to' form the keel, 
 so in the building of a vertebrate organism, we have 
 to describe the laying down of a primitive or initial 
 furrow ' to ' be the bed and mould of the spinal 
 column. Hence embryology is a science possessing 
 the highest value, as revealing facts which are apt 
 to be forgotten. There are some illusions of the 
 mind very similar to those which are known as 
 spectral illusions of the bodily eye, and some of 
 those illusions become impossible in the clear light 
 of embryology. When we see physiological appa- 
 ratuses in full work and operation, the nature of the 
 connexion between the work done and the implem.ent 
 that does it, is a connexion which is liable to be
 
 126 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 forgotten or misconceived. The perfect ease with 
 which the work is done — the complete unity which, 
 when seen together, they seem to constitute — is very 
 apt to suggest a connexion of purely physical cause 
 and effect, as if the thing to be done was the pro- 
 ducing cause of the apparatus by which it is accom- 
 plished. That, for example, the waters somehow 
 give rise to the fins that swim in them, or that the 
 air somehow gives rise to the wings that cleave it, 
 may be a natural suggestion, securing the passive 
 acquiescence of careless or languid thought. For, 
 indeed, in one sense it is a true suggestion, inasmuch 
 as the laws of aqueous and of aerial resistance, do 
 constitute the need for those physiological appa- 
 ratuses being produced. But the bond of connexion 
 between these laws and the actual supply of the imple- 
 ments which they need, is a bond that demands an 
 intermediate agency which is cognizant of the need, 
 upon the one hand, and of the means, upon the other 
 hand, by which alone that need can be supplied. There 
 is a physical vacancy or gap between the need and 
 the supply, which the automatic action of the physical 
 forces cannot fill up. This is the vacancy or gap 
 which becomes visible, even to the bodily eye, when 
 an implement or apparatus is seen by itself, not only 
 divorced from function, but in a yet imperfect state — 
 in the state of being slowly prepared for work which 
 lies before it, perhaps, in a yet distant future. And 
 such is the power and subtlety of language, that 
 the whole difference between these widely separate 
 ideas as to the nature of the bond uniting a physio-
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I27 
 
 logical apparatus and its function, is a difference fully 
 measured and expressed in the two separate pre- 
 positions, 'for' and 'by.' An apparatus is always 
 made for doing a certain work. It is not made by 
 doing it. This is plain enough in logic ; but it is 
 only when we can follow the steps of its embryological 
 development in time, that this wide difference is 
 brought home to us as a visible and objective fact ; 
 and, accordingly, it is when describing that fact in its 
 various aspects that the comparative anatomist is 
 compelled to recognize it in the use of the purest 
 teleological language, even if this employment be 
 only in the constant employment of the teleological 
 prepositions 'to' and 'for.' 
 
 This feature of purely teleological language is 
 specially remarkable in Huxley's book on the Ele- 
 ments of Comparative Anatomy^ when it becomes his 
 duty to describe the embryonic development of the 
 great class of the Vertebrata. The element of time, 
 and the dominance of that tract or aspect of time 
 which we call the future, is the most prominent char- 
 acteristic in the visible phenomena. Let us take, 
 for example, a single passage, in which the author 
 describes the laying down of the vertebral column 
 in the development of a hen's &^g : ' A well-defined 
 though shallow straight groove, the primitive groove, 
 bounded at the sides by a slight elevation of the 
 blastoderm, indicating the position of the future 
 longitudinal axis of the body of the chick. Soon, 
 the lateral boundaries of this groove, in what will 
 become the anterior region of the body, grozv up into
 
 128 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 plates, the dorsal laminae, at length uniting, enclose 
 the future cerebro-spinal cavity, the blastoderm, be- 
 yond the region at which the dorsal laminae are 
 developed, grows downward to form the ventral 
 laminae, and where the margins of these pass into 
 the general blastoderm, the outer serous or epidermic 
 layer rises up into a fold which encircles the whole 
 embryo ; and the anterior and posterior parts of this 
 fold, growing more rapidly than the lateral portions, 
 form a kind of hood for the cephalic and caudal ends 
 of the body respectively^.' No language could be 
 more telling than this for the purpose of expressing 
 the visible subordination of each step in an organic 
 growth to the building up of a preconceived and 
 predestined structure. It is repeated in the same 
 work, with much emphasis, when the author comes 
 to deal with one of the most important of all organic 
 structures, the skull — that which is made for holding 
 and protecting the brain. He speaks of the ' plan 
 discoverable in the noble construction,' and of the 
 ' plan,' as separable from the ' connexions and ar- 
 rangements of the bony elements,' by which the 
 ■ complex whole ' is visibly built up by processes 
 which are marked off by a definite order in time. 
 For the purpose of illustrating this, he returns to the 
 example of the embryo chick, and resumes his de- 
 scription of that march of events which he finds it 
 impossible to explain without a constant reference 
 to results lying in the future: — 'A peculiar cellular 
 cylinder, tapering off at each end, the notochord, is 
 
 ^ Elements, pp. 65, 66.
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I29 
 
 soon discovered, occupying the bottom of the groove,' 
 previously described ; and then follows a striking 
 enumeration of the steps by which this future ter- 
 mination in a skull is brought about : ' A laminar 
 outgrowth of the convex summits of the ridees, which 
 bound the primitive groove, now takes place in that 
 part of the embryo w^hich will eventually become 
 the middle region of the head ; and the dorsal 
 laminae, thus produced, extending forwards and 
 backwards, like parapets, upon each side of the 
 primitive groove, lay the fotmdations of the lateral 
 walls, not only of the skull, but of the spinal column \' 
 Again, from certain rudimentary bones certain ' carti- 
 laginous' plates are developed which foreshadozv the 
 forms and relations of some parts of the completed 
 structure^. 
 
 But perhaps the most striking evidence of the 
 impossibility of eliminating from our minds the 
 impression made upon them of some other related 
 mind being at work in Nature, is afforded by the 
 elaborate attempt of Mr. Herbert Spencer to effect 
 this elimination in his Principles of Biology. He 
 describes his own aim to be ' the interpretation of 
 all phenomena in terms of matter, motion, and force.' 
 And this is his avowed object in framing his defini- 
 tion of organic life, whether in its lowest, or in its 
 very highest manifestations. 
 
 These words, 'in terms of matter, force, and 
 motion,' would seem to bear only one interpretation, 
 and to indicate a purely physical explanation of 
 
 ^ Elements, pp. 136, 137. « Ibid. p. 142. 
 
 K
 
 130 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 everything, as the highest and most adequate repre- 
 sentation of all we can see and know. But Mr. 
 Spencer adds to these words two explanatory declara- 
 tions, in order to mitigate their obvious meaning : 
 the first is that, in making this attempt to reduce 
 everything to matter, force, and motion, he has no 
 other aim than that of ' reducing our complex symbols 
 of thought to the simplest symbols.' The second 
 declaration is that his words are not intended to have 
 any bearing on ' the ultimate nature of things,' in the 
 way of being either materialistic or spiritualistic, 
 since he holds his symbols to be equally compatible 
 with both these opposite philosophies. But neither 
 of these two explanatory declarations can be accepted 
 as consistent with the process he adopts. The first 
 of them can be shown to be a declaration which he 
 does not fulfil ; and the second of them can be shown 
 to be irrelevant and illogical. As regards the first, 
 it is not true, as a fact, that matter, motion, and force 
 are more ' simple ' words, or symbols of thought, than 
 purpose, intention, or design. On the contrary, the 
 abstract words matter, force, and motion, are infinitely 
 more complex, and more inconceivable to us, than 
 the mental phenomena of plans, purposes, and designs. 
 This can be tested at once by observing the extreme 
 difficulty with which the abstract properties of matter 
 and its forces, such as inertia, energy, gravitation, &c., 
 can be fully explained, or can be conceived, or 
 grasped, even by educated men, and, still more, by 
 the ignorant and the illiterate ; whilst, on the other 
 hand, there is no child or savage in the world who
 
 Ill] IX DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I3I 
 
 has any difficulty in conceiving of the mental powers 
 by which he forms and executes his designs. As to 
 the declaration that matter, force, and motion, may 
 be conceived of as in their ultimate nature, as pheno- 
 mena of mind, all that need be said is, that this is 
 a mere assertion not only unproved, but condemned 
 by the evidence of consciousness. To us there is 
 no bridge across the gulf w^hich seems to separate 
 mind from matter ; and a vague surmise, or even an 
 abstract conviction of the probability that there must 
 be some such bridge between them, does not amount 
 to a spiritualistic view of things, and does not prove 
 any compatibility between such a view and the as- 
 sumed possibility of reducing all phenomena into the 
 terms of matter, motion, and force. 
 
 But the special point on which I have to dwell here, 
 is the striking fact that Mr. Spencer does not succeed 
 in his endeavour to reduce the phenomena of life to 
 terms of matter, force, and motion, or to eliminate 
 from his own language the symbols of thought which 
 he desires to set aside as too complex. He makes 
 a strenuous endeavour indeed to do so, but he fails 
 completely, and is driven, in spite of himself, to fall 
 back upon words, phrases, and grammatical construc- 
 tions, which entirely depend for all their force and 
 significance, on the teleological conceptions which he 
 is seeking to avoid. After four chapters and some 
 seventy pages of subtle and laborious endeavour to 
 expunge from the definition of organic life every 
 element which is not as purely mechanical as Cuvier's 
 first notion of a vortex, Mr. Spencer at last sums up 
 
 K 2
 
 132 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 his definition thus : ' Life is the definite combination 
 of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and 
 successive.' But having got this far, the definition 
 is no sooner enunciated, than he confesses that it is 
 ' essentially defective' ; that it not only fails in ' giving 
 a complete idea of the thing contemplated,' but that 
 it ' fails from omitting the most distinctive peculiarity ' 
 of life as known to us ^. Accordingly he proceeds, in 
 his fifth chapter, to supplement the definition by 
 explaining what this distinctive peculiarity is. It is 
 in this explanation that he breaks down by falling 
 back, at last, upon the ordinary ' symbols of thought'; 
 that is to say, upon the ordinary words which embody 
 the instinctive perceptions of his mind. He is quite 
 honest in avowing that he seeks to ' avoid any teleo- 
 logical implication ' ; and therefore he begins by 
 giving to the active functions of living organs the 
 name of ' responses ' to stimulus. But then he admits 
 that in all organic reactions, not only is there some 
 response, but always that one particular kind of 
 response which is characterized by ' fitness.' Here 
 we have the first step taken in the rapid retreat which 
 follows. Fitness is a word expressing a certain 
 definite kind of relation between two, or more, things ; 
 and this relation, as a perceived fact, constitutes the 
 whole meaning of the word. Therefore we must ask, 
 ' Fitness for what ? ' The answer is, fitness for some 
 work lying in the future, fitness for producing some 
 changes which have ' manifest relations ' ' to future 
 external events.' He confesses that in the inorganic 
 
 ' Principles 0/ Biology, cli. iv. pp. 70, 71.
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I33 
 
 world, by contrast with the organic, any changes or 
 reactions which take place owing to physical causes, 
 
 * have no apparent relations to future external events.' 
 In vital changes he admits that, on the contrary, 
 
 * such relations are manifest.' Therefore Mr. Spencer 
 is obliged to drop the vague abstract word ' responses,' 
 which he had adopted only to avoid ' teleological im- 
 plications,' and to adopt other forms of grammatical 
 construction. But in these other forms the teleological 
 implication comes on us with a rush. He tries all he 
 can to wash out as much of this implication as possible, 
 by resorting again to vague generalities in defining, 
 or describing, the kind of adaptation which applies to 
 the case. He calls it ' an adaptation of living changes 
 to changes in surrounding circumstances ^.' But, con- 
 scious, once more, of the inadequacy and incompetence 
 of these vague generalities to express the facts of 
 organic adaptations, he goes on with an elaborate 
 endeavour to supply the missing elements by using 
 such forms of speech as may still keep at arm's length 
 the teleological implications which he is so anxious 
 to avoid. Thus, he says that in using the word 
 'adaptation' he means to indicate that ' the constant 
 actions occurring within an organism imply some 
 constant actions occurring without it.' Here the 
 abstract word ' changes ' is used in order to avoid 
 using any definite word more adequate to express 
 that particular kind of ' change,' which he calls an 
 organic function ; whilst, further, the abstract word 
 ' imply ' is used in order to avoid expressing that 
 
 1 Principles of Biology, ch. v. p. 73.
 
 134 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 particular kind of ' implication ' which is visibly and 
 exclusively teleological. Yet all these precautions 
 are vain. Mr. Spencer is compelled to introduce the 
 word ' processes ' as explanatory of the vaguer word 
 ' changes,' and he is also compelled to use the words 
 ' special relations ' as supplementary of the connexion 
 between the changes which are without, and the 
 changes which are within. Even with these supple- 
 ments it is no advance, but a relapse, for the thinker, 
 who has got so far as to use the words fitness 
 and adaptation, to fall back into the comparatively 
 meaningless words which need all these circumlo- 
 cutory additions to make them intelligible at all. But 
 Mr. Spencer is so pleased with the careful devices by 
 which teleological implications can thus, for a moment, 
 be kept out of sight, that he goes on to identify our 
 conception of life with this formula of words : ' The 
 definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both 
 simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with 
 external coexistences and sequences.' 
 
 It would be difficult to invent any formula of words 
 which illustrates so well the abuse, as distinguished 
 from the use, of language. If the great gift of speech 
 be indeed given to us for the expression of thought, it 
 cannot be well used when it is employed, with con- 
 scious ingenuity, for the concealment and suppression 
 of it. Still more violent is that abuse when language 
 is carefully selected so as to obliterate, or omit, those 
 direct perceptions of the mind, which it is the special 
 function of our words to recognize and record. The 
 highly artificial character of this formula must be
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENXE AND PHILOSOPHY I35 
 
 obvious at a glance. It requires a sustained effort 
 to comprehend even its narrow meaning. But on 
 examination, it becomes at once apparent that it is 
 appHcable to innumerable, inorganic processes, as well 
 as to those which are the work of life, and therefore 
 that it fails to specify those characteristics, the selec- 
 tion of which is the sole duty of a true definition to 
 bring out into their due prominence. The processes 
 through which an organized body goes to dissolution 
 and decay, are equally a 'definite combination of 
 heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and suc- 
 cessive, in correspondence with external co-existences 
 and sequences.' The falling to pieces of one set of 
 chemical combinations consists essentially in recom- 
 binations, which are both simultaneous and successive, 
 so that the formula is utterly useless as any definition 
 at all. And the sterility of the formula is thus seen 
 to be due to concealments which are intentional — 
 that is to say, to the deliberate omission of some direct 
 perceptions of the mind, which are impressed upon 
 our intellectual retina, when we contemplate the 
 peculiar phenomena of life. 
 
 It is a striking evidence of the force and indeli- 
 bility of these impressions, that Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 awakes to their presence and to their power the 
 moment he has got his wooden formula completed, 
 and he begins to see and to feel its shortcomings. In 
 particular he feels that the vague ' correspondence ' 
 needs to have ' its full significance ' explained, by 
 going on to trace out, and to enlarge upon, the 
 particular kind of correspondence which connects
 
 136 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH, 
 
 life, as distinguished from other things, with external 
 coexistences and sequences. It is in his endeavour 
 to do this that we find the truth gaining its appro- 
 priate triumph over him. Just as we found Cuvier, 
 in his explanation of Life, advancing from the rude 
 mechanical image of a vortex, to the most purely 
 teleological conceptions of the reasons why organic 
 structures must be such as they are in order to effect 
 certain necessary ends, and to discharge certain neces- 
 sary functions, so do we find Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 falling almost unconsciously into the same line of 
 argument as the only possible explanation of organic 
 structures. The reason why, not the mechanical 
 cause how — things are done, and apparatuses are sup- 
 plied, this is the root-idea of his language through 
 many successive pages. ' That a protozoon may con- 
 tinue to exist, the assimilation (of external matter) 
 must keep pace with, or exceed, the oxidation.' 
 ' That a creature of this order may continue to live 
 it is necessary,' &c., &c., and then follow two specific 
 necessities demanded for the same purpose — some 
 external form of matter capable of digestion, and 
 some decomposing fluid capable of effecting solution 
 and reintegration in a new form. This idea of ex- 
 planation is repeated over and over again. ' Unless ' 
 some specific thing is done, the polype would die. 
 And then, just like Cuvier, he goes on to explain 
 why it is that a ' circulating system ' is a necessity 
 for certain purposes, which purposes must be attained 
 if some further consequences are to be avoided. This 
 line of explanation is pursued from the lowest to the
 
 Ill] IX DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I37 
 
 highest form of organic life, including the highest 
 intelHgence of man. Then, in trying to keep up 
 the necessary distinction between the organic and the 
 inorganic world, Mr. Spencer is led again to dwell on 
 that all-important element of futurity, which organic 
 adaptations always involve. In the inorganic world, 
 he explains, ' a change produces a change and there 
 it ends.' But it is not so, he points out, in the world 
 of life. There the primary change in the organism 
 always ' anticipates' some other secondary change in 
 external things ; and this anticipation is always in the 
 nature of an adjustment. This idea of ' anticipation,' 
 not as an effect, which follows mechanically on a 
 cause, but as a structure so pre-arranged as to meet 
 some needed fitness and harmony with outward 
 things, — this is teleology in its purest form. 
 
 As Mr. Spencer advances in his illustrations, and in 
 spite of a constant endeavour to be as mechanical as 
 he can, his language becomes more and more deeply 
 coloured by this intuitive preconception. He speaks 
 of the ' process of evolution ' as one during which the 
 organs of the embryo are fitted to their prospective 
 functions, and he is, like every one else, obliged to 
 have recourse to the word ' adjustments ' ^ as the best 
 word to describe those continuous changes which are 
 effected in its growth. But it is not even in this 
 necessary recourse to the old familiar words which 
 the usage of mankind has consecrated to the expres- 
 sion of purpose, that the teleological idea comes out 
 most strongly. It is strongest in many passages 
 
 ^ Principles of Biology, p. 8x.
 
 138 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 where such words as adaptation or adjustment are 
 carefully avoided ; but where, nevertheless, the whole 
 explanation of organic structures is founded on some 
 argument to show the Why, and not the How. ' In 
 order that ' the creature may be enabled to live, some 
 obvious requirement ' must ' be met. ' In order that ' 
 food should be digested, some solvent fluid ' must ' be 
 provided. ' In order that ' the blood should circulate, 
 some ramifying vessels 'musf" be laid down. 'In 
 order' that blood should be oxygenated, some appa- 
 ratus ' must ' be prepared in which the blood may be 
 exposed to the air in some network of pervious ducts. 
 Statements such as these are, indeed, conclusive argu- 
 ments. But, quite obviously, they are arguments 
 addressed to our own reasoning intelligence as ex- 
 plaining the operations of another intelligence having 
 some close relation with itself. It is an argument 
 which assumes the existence and the recognition of a 
 mental motive. This is the most familiar and the most 
 complete of all possible explanations of a certain 
 class of occurrences. Such an argument could not 
 be applied to the explanation of any purely physical 
 phenomena — that is to say, of any phenomena which 
 are wholly unconnected with any idea of arrangements 
 for a purpose. For example, the use of water in 
 pipes for the supply of a house, and the bursting of 
 these same pipes from exposure to frost, or from 
 excessive pressure, are both physical phenomena, due 
 to physical causes. But we could not rationally say 
 that the frost or the excessive pressure were needed 
 to make them burst ; whereas we must say, if we
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I39 
 
 intend to explain the distribution of water in the 
 house, that pipes were needed for that purpose. Ac- 
 cordingly, when we find any writer compelled to 
 resort to this form of language in explaining organic 
 structures, we detect in it, whether he is conscious of 
 it or not, the instinctive perception and acknowledge- 
 ment of a mental purpose, as the presence, and the 
 power, which alone explains the structure he describes. 
 For example, Mr. Spencer gives us an explanation 
 of the very complicated structure through which the 
 heart's action is sustained in the higher animals. 
 And in this explanation we have a typical illustration 
 of the grammatical construction which expresses that 
 kind of relation which exists between a mental purpose 
 and an apparatus specially constructed to attain it. 
 It is as follows : ' that the heart may act it must, 
 from instant to instant, be excited by discharges from 
 certain ganglia ; and the discharges from these ganglia 
 are made possible only by the conveyance to them, 
 from instant to instant, of the blood which the heart 
 propels ^' The evidence, which language such as this 
 affords, is all the more striking because it is in- 
 voluntary, and, indeed, because it is rendered not 
 only without the will, but against it. For it is to be 
 noted that this evidence comes from language the 
 very object of which is not to describe to us facts as 
 they occur in Nature, but to define them in an artificial 
 abstract, which is not only a conscious, but is even 
 a laboured exercise of intellectual ingenuity, framed 
 with the express purpose of eliminating, as far as 
 
 ^ Principles of Biology, p. 163.
 
 140 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 possible, that element of purpose which, in spite of 
 every care, is thus found insinuating itself into the 
 very structure of the sentences employed. 
 
 The failure is as signal as it is deserved ; because, 
 in philosophy, it is not a legitimate aim, in framing 
 abstract conceptions, to make abstracts which are in- 
 tentionally defective. The formation of abstract ideas 
 is the most glorious power possessed by the human 
 intellect ; but it is a power, like every other, which 
 must be exercised under laws of absolute fidelity to 
 the actual phenomena which are thus abstracted and 
 interpreted. An abstract conception, to be true, must 
 be a faithful abstract of that which is called the con- 
 crete, a representation in the light of mind of the 
 essential characteristics of the natural facts. Just as 
 in framing an abstract or epitome of any human docu- 
 ment, it would be illegitimate and deceptive, if we were 
 to do so on the principle of omitting some element 
 of meaning, which we do not like and do not choose to 
 recognize ; so, in forming our abstract conceptions of 
 natural phenomena, we can do nothing but deceive 
 ourselves and others, if we proceed upon any similar 
 principle. It is fortunate that the tell-tale character of 
 language interposes an insuperable obstacle in the way 
 of such attempts. Language is full of abstract con- 
 ceptions, but in that medium they are automatically 
 formed, and not artificially concocted, and therefore 
 they retain the true impress of the indelible impressions 
 which Nature makes upon the receptive and uncon- 
 scious mind. Hence it is that when men set them- 
 selves to the task of wiping out any of these old and
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I4I 
 
 ingrained impressions, they find no implement ready 
 to their hand. They have to use the only tools and 
 weapons which exist for the work of human thought, 
 and these tools and weapons have been fashioned and 
 moulded upon perceptions which make their presence 
 felt in spite of every effort to keep it out. If, indeed, 
 we think that we have discovered some wholly new 
 idea, for which human language has no adequate ex- 
 pression, it would become our duty to go back con- 
 stantly to the actual facts of Nature, or to what 
 philosophers call the concrete, and to question it more 
 closely, in order to see whether the known forms of 
 human speech are indeed deceptive, whether they 
 insert into our conceptions of phenomena any ideas 
 which are not really true, but are the product only of 
 some delusion of our own. This may be a legitimate 
 operation : it is an operation which generally not only 
 confirms the truthfulness of language, but very often 
 supplies new and striking testimony to its inherent 
 and penetrating power. To go back to Nature, and 
 to look steadily into her face, is always a good and 
 a fruitful thing to do — to compare our abstracts with 
 her facts, her workings with our conceptions of them. 
 Accordingly it is a memorable and striking fact that 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, in defining that which is called 
 ' function ' in organic structures, makes the broad and 
 unhesitating admission that when we go to the con- 
 crete facts of Nature, and leave the region of artificial 
 and concocted abstracts, we find ourselves face to face 
 with the facts of special adaptation, and with the 
 absolute necessity of employing its characteristic
 
 142 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 forms of speech. ' Physiology,' he says, ' in its 
 concrete interpretations, recognizes special functions 
 as the ends of special organs ; regards the teeth as 
 having the office of mastication ; the heart as an 
 apparatus to propel blood ; this gland as fitted to 
 produce one requisite secretion, and that to produce 
 another ; each muscle as the agent of a particular 
 motion ; each nerve as the vehicle of a special sen- 
 sation, or a special motor impulse ■^.' 
 
 Here at last we have the language of Nature, the 
 language of common sense, because it is the language 
 of direct and immediate perception. But it is at the 
 same time the language of the most pronounced 
 teleology. The whole sentence is saturated with, and 
 vitalized by, the idea of mental purpose as the ultimate 
 agency concerned in organic function. Both in the 
 use of individual words which have no other meaning, 
 and in the grammatical constructions which imply it, 
 this idea stands confessed. Special functions are the 
 ' ends ' of special organizations. And this is spoken 
 of not as the result of an inference, but as the ' recog- 
 nition ' of a fact. The doing of their work is described 
 as the performance of an assigned ' office.' The heart 
 is an apparatus ' to ' propel. Each gland is described 
 as ' fitted ' to produce some secretion which is ' requi- 
 site' for doing something in particular, and so on. 
 And all this language, in all its individual words, 
 and in all its grammatical structure, so full of rich and 
 various implications of mind and purpose, is, we are 
 expressly told, the language which the physiologist 
 
 ^ Principles of Biology, pp. 155, 156.
 
 Ill] IN DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I43 
 
 must use when he looks at the facts ' in the concrete ' ; 
 that is to say, when he looks at them as they actually 
 occur in Nature, and not as represented in some 
 expurgated edition of them made by ingenious mani- 
 pulation. We cannot, indeed, value too highly the 
 abstracting faculty in our minds. But we must not 
 mistake for its genuine work something which is in 
 truth a counterfeit. It is that faculty, acting auto- 
 matically according to its own inherent laws, that has 
 developed such words as ' function,' and ' office,' and 
 ' recognize,' and ' ends ' used in the sense of aims, and 
 ' apparatus,' and ' fitted to,' and ' agent,' and innumer- 
 able others, all of which represent abstract ideas, but 
 with this important difference, that whereas the speech- 
 making faculty in man makes abstracts which are 
 full, real, and true, the self-conscious philosopher is 
 very apt to make abstracts which are empty, artificial, 
 and deceptive. 
 
 It would be easy to fill a volume with passages 
 from scientific descriptions of organic structures which 
 are charged with the same principle of interpretation, 
 as one which cannot be evaded or avoided, because 
 the connexion which it sees between preparations in 
 the past, or in the present, for uses which lie in the 
 future, is not a connexion which is any matter of 
 mere inference however sure, but is a connexion which 
 is directly visible as an objective fact. One of the 
 most striking and instructive passages that I have 
 seen in any writer is to be found in a recent declara- 
 tion made by Huxley in respect to the animating 
 spirit of his own biological work in the past, and to
 
 144 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 the broadest results it has left upon his mind. It 
 is well known that this distinguished man had for 
 some years abandoned his special work of observation 
 and discovery in the world of organic life, and had 
 devoted himself to philosophical essays on a great 
 variety of subjects. In the course of one of these he 
 supplies us with the following invaluable bit of work in 
 self-analysis : ' the only part of my professional course 
 which really interested me was physiology, which is 
 the mechanical engineering of living machines ; and 
 notwithstanding that natural science has been my 
 proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the 
 genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, 
 and species-work was always a burden to me. What 
 I cared for was the architectural and engineering part 
 of the business — the working out the wonderful unity 
 of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse 
 living constructions, and the modifications of similar 
 apparatuses to serve diverse ends.' It is impossible 
 to mistake this language. It positively labours under 
 the instinctive need and desire to pile together 
 words strong enough, and definite enough, to convey 
 the most teleological conceptions of Nature, and to 
 impress them on other minds as the only conceptions 
 which are of any dignity or worth as representing 
 facts. 
 
 There is, of course, no philosophical value whatever 
 in such quotations as a mere means of convicting in- 
 dividual writers of some personal inconsistency. The 
 sole value of them lies in that aspect of language which 
 regards it as — what it is — as much a natural product as
 
 IIIj IX DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY I45 
 
 any other organic growth, and which demands the rigid 
 examination or analysis of its actual contents, as the 
 very highest instrument of our research. And it is to 
 be observed that the progress of modern physiological 
 discovery, shows no tendency whatever to make the 
 use of this language more rare, or to diminish the in- 
 stinctive necessity under which men feel themselves 
 obliged to have recourse to it, in describing what 
 they find and see. It is quite the contrary. The new 
 methods and instruments of examination, the higher 
 microscopic powers, the inventions by which the finest 
 animal tissues can be now preserved in hardened 
 glycerine, and can be cut into thin sections revealing 
 the minutest details of organic structures — all these 
 have no other effect than to show how all-pervading 
 is that relation which consists in the preparation 
 of some fitting apparatus for the future discharge of 
 some special function. Not even the most mechanical 
 speculative theories, can shake off this perception or 
 long maintain any forms of speech which are com- 
 petent to exclude it. The idea of development in all 
 its logical forms is not antagonistic to, but in perfect 
 harmony with, the idea of purpose. Design from first 
 to last, from its first conception to the attainment of 
 its farthest aims, is, and so far as we know must be, 
 a process of development. That development may 
 be slow, or it may be quick and sudden in its steps. 
 It may be effected in ways widely various, as by out- 
 ward building, or by inward growth ; but its one 
 essential character remains unchanged. It is a peculiar 
 relation of cause and effect operating in time, and 
 
 L
 
 14b INTUITIVE THEOLOGY 
 
 exhibiting this one essential characteristic — of having 
 been directed in the past, and of being continuously 
 directed in the present, to some end which is future, 
 the direction being of that nature which we instinc- 
 tively and accurately call an aim.
 
 Chapter IV. 
 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 ITS LIMITATIONS. 
 
 It is, however, most important to observe that the 
 intuitive recognition of the existence of aims, or of 
 design, as a fact in Nature, does not stand at all 
 on the same footing as many farther conclusions 
 that have been, or may be, founded upon that fact. 
 Design, and what is called ' the argument from 
 design,' are two very different things. Such argu- 
 ments may be good or they may be bad, in various 
 degrees. But they all lie in the region of arguments 
 and of inferences, and not in the region of pure and 
 simple fact. This is a distinction which has not 
 generally been observed, although it is quite clear, 
 when it is pointed out, and is obviously one of 
 cardinal importance. It is true that the existence 
 of design, as a fact, must have its own consequences, 
 for there is no observed fact in Nature which stands 
 alone, unconnected with others which can be reached 
 by inference. But it does not follow that our in- 
 ferences are always sound, nor does it follow that 
 even conclusions which are true can be proved from 
 any one or two facts, however large and sugges- 
 tive they may be, or however directly and certainly 
 
 L 2
 
 148 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 perceived. It does not follow that because the kind 
 of order, of arrangement, and of adjustment among 
 physical forces, which prevails in Nature, is clearly 
 that characteristic kind which belongs to mind, there- 
 fore we can solve any of the innumerable problems 
 which arise as to the Being or Beings in whom that 
 mind may reside. A purpose or intention may be 
 the most certain and visible of all facts, while He 
 who purposes, or intends, may be otherwise absolutely 
 unknown. There may remain unknown to us, for 
 example, all those ulterior aims and ends which we 
 most desire to understand. Unknown to us may be 
 the rank and place in the general system of things 
 which is really occupied by all the carefully prepared 
 contrivances and apparatuses we see around us. 
 Unknown to us may be the extent of the contriving 
 power, whether it is limited or unlimited. Unknown, 
 above all, may the Contriver be in His relations to 
 those moral qualities which are the highest in our 
 own minds. All these questions, with a thousand 
 others, constitute the immense region in which what 
 are called the difficulties of natural religion arise. 
 Nor can it be denied that those difficulties are pro- 
 found. But they do not, in the least, affect the 
 certainty of that one fundamental fact which we see 
 so clearly, that we cannot escape from the recognition 
 of it in the mere act of describing the commonest 
 phenomena of Nature. The difficulties belong alto- 
 gether to another category. They are not difficulties 
 in the recognition of mental purposes, for, on the 
 contrary, the only difficulty in this region is to avoid.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I49 
 
 or to evade, the continual use of the appropriate 
 language of that conception. The difficulties, real or 
 supposed, are all in the region of the inferences and 
 presumptions which arise out of that fact, and not in 
 the region of the fact itself. Having faculties which 
 not only enable us to see, but which compel us to 
 the perpetual confession of, the obvious fact that in- 
 numerable structures and arrangements of Nature, 
 have been prepared in time for the accomplishment 
 of certain immediate purposes, we are most naturally 
 led to feel as if the same faculties must be sufficient 
 to lead us on and on, until much fuller, if not final, 
 explanations are attained. 
 
 But it is in these onward steps that we find our- 
 selves baffled at every turn. There is no room for 
 any doubt as to the point where the difficulties begin. 
 That point is fixed by the universal experience of 
 mankind. No early race, so far as we know, and no 
 early school of human thought, has ever had the 
 slightest difficulty in seeing mind in the world around 
 us. It never occurred to any of them to doubt it. 
 The very idea of an ' argument from design ' as either 
 a supporting, or a defensive, argument on the subject, 
 is the product of a later age. The development of 
 human thought on this subject in history has been 
 plain enough. On the one hand, all men everywhere, 
 however rude, have felt and seen in themselves and 
 around them, the agency and the power of mind and 
 will ; on the other hand, they have never seen anywhere 
 anything to tell them where that mind resided, nor 
 the person or persons, whether few or many, amongst
 
 150 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 whom it was distributed ; nor the limits or conditions 
 of its action, nor more than a very few of the im- 
 mediate purposes of its work, nor, finally, its precise 
 place and function in the general system of Nature. 
 The fact of its universal presence was the only 
 certainty. To fancy, therefore, and to the unrestrained 
 exercise of the imagination, all else concerning it was 
 absolutely left. This is the simple and the necessary 
 origin of all mythologies. The fancies and imagina- 
 tions of each people reflected, of course, their own 
 condition of mental culture, and their own powers, 
 however undeveloped, of observation and of reasoning. 
 The result was inevitable. The mythologies of all 
 races, with some common features inseparable from the 
 very conception of the existence of minds other than 
 their own, were a confused mass of childish, or of 
 hideous superstitions : and in all cases of which the 
 history is known, the evidence is clear that the path 
 of development has lain in deepening degradation. 
 Elements indeed of great poetic beauty, or of pic- 
 turesqueness, appeared in the poetical mythology of 
 the Greeks, and abundant traces of profound thought 
 remained in all the great meditative religions of the 
 East. But everywhere, whether among the rudest 
 savages or the most civilized nations of the world, 
 we see, on the one hand, the universal perception 
 of mental or spiritual agencies in the world other 
 than, and higher than, our own ; and, on the other 
 hand, an equally universal incompetence to give to 
 that perception, any rational embodim.ent or form. 
 The mere fact, and the inferences founded on that
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS l:;i 
 
 fact, have been sundered by a gulf which has proved 
 to be impassable by reason. 
 
 And there is no better proof of this than the course 
 which human reason took when it first awoke to the 
 exercise of its highest powers in the early Greek 
 philosophy. It rebelled, not against the idea of the 
 existence of gods, or of spiritual agencies in Nature, 
 but against all the gross conceptions which poetic 
 mythology had embalmed in the popular belief, as 
 regarded the attributes of such Beings, and the parts 
 they played in the government of man and of the 
 world. Epicurus never dreamed of denying the 
 existence of Divine Beings any more than the great 
 Latin poet Lucretius, who has set forth his philosophy 
 in imperishable verse. It may well be questioned, 
 indeed, whether the counter-idea which they con- 
 ceived of the nature and life of the gods, and which 
 has been popularized, in verse not less beautiful, by 
 Tennyson, is not an idea quite as irrational as any 
 of those conceptions which it was intended to displace. 
 It was, however, at least much less corrupting. It 
 was better to think of the gods enjoying a life of 
 imperturbable inactivity and repose, than to think 
 of them as animating men with the fiercest passions, 
 or demanding bloody sacrifices for themselves. But 
 the necessity which the Epicurean philosophy felt to 
 form some conception or another as to the nature 
 of such spiritual Beings, is a signal testimony to the 
 impossibility which they also felt of denying their 
 existence altogether. This was an alternative which 
 apparently never entered into their minds as even
 
 152 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cif. 
 
 conceivable. And this is all the more remarkable, 
 since any influence, even the most unconscious, from 
 what we now call the argument from design, was 
 absolutely cut off in the case of gods who were 
 divorced from all cares and from all activities. But 
 the Epicurean philosophy affords a still more splendid 
 proof of the impossibility of casting off from the human 
 intellect the indelible impression of mind as the active 
 agency in Nature. Materialistic as that philosophy is 
 supposed to be, and as in a certain sense it intends 
 to be, it is nevertheless in reality entirely spiritualistic 
 in its ultimate conceptions. This is specially true of 
 almost all that is most beautiful and attractive in 
 the language of Lucretius, whose exposition of it 
 has never lost its hold on the admiration of the 
 world. For it is well to remember that this admira- 
 tion has long rested on nothing but the vigour and 
 beauty of the Lucretian verse. The system of 
 thought which it represents satisfies no surviving 
 school. In its negative aspect, indeed, in so far as 
 it lends itself to the denial of what men call the 
 supernatural, the Epicurean philosophy has still its 
 own attractions for a certain number of minds ; but 
 as a system of philosophy which is in any degree 
 constructive, which meets any intellectual difficulty, 
 or satisfies any moral aspiration, it is as dead as the 
 worship of any of the hideous divinities of the heathen 
 world. ' To us,' says the best English editor and 
 translator of Lucretius, ' the truth or falsehood of his 
 system is of exceedingly little concern, except in so 
 far as it is thereby rendered a better or a worse
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I53 
 
 vehicle for conveying the beauties of his language, 
 and the graces of his poetical conceptions \' But 
 there is more to be said than this — far more, indeed — 
 in favour of Lucretius. Poets do not live so lone as 
 this poet has lived, on the strength merely of musical 
 rhythm, of melodious measures, or even of striking 
 images clothed in expressive words. Not even 'all 
 the grace of all the Muses flashing in one lonely word ' 
 can do more than adorn some elements of thought 
 which are beautiful only because they contain some 
 element of truth. 
 
 Accordingly, when we come to analyze the poem 
 of Lucretius, nothing is more remarkable than that 
 same inconsistency which we have traced in the 
 physical teachers of our own day, who try hardest 
 to eliminate from their descriptions of physical phe- 
 nomena, every element that involves the agency of 
 purpose, personality, and design. Lucretius does not 
 even try to do this, nor does he seem to be even 
 conscious at all of the incongruity of his language 
 with the speculative denials which it is the great 
 aim of his poem to establish. He begins it with an 
 invocation to the goddess, Venus, to inspire his verse. 
 The Roman Venus is the Phoenician Astarte, the 
 Ishtar of the Babylonian temples, and the Aphrodite 
 of the Greeks. This may well seem to be a strange 
 invocation for a poet whose passionate invective was 
 directed against all the gods of heathendom. But his 
 invective was directed entirely against the characters 
 attributed to them, and to the results on human 
 
 ' Munro's Lucretius, vol. ii. p. 96.
 
 154 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conduct which were the direct consequence of their 
 worship. The famous h'ne tantum religio potuit 
 suadere nialonini, ' such the desperate evils to which 
 men have been persuaded by religion/ is a line 
 perhaps more applicable to the worship of Venus 
 than to the worship of any other of the gods whom 
 Lucretius so hated and denounced. One excuse 
 which has been made for Lucretius, in this matter, 
 has been that he wrote his invocation simply in 
 compliance with the conventional form or fashion 
 taken by all ancient poetry. But this is no suffi- 
 cient explanation unless we go deeper and ask 
 how that customary form arose. It had become 
 established simply from the universal belief of the 
 ancient world that all poetry, and rhapsody, and 
 song, could only be produced under the inspiration — 
 the afflatus — of minds other and higher than their 
 own. 
 
 The effect of one mind upon another in exciting, 
 lifting, animating, and directing, must have been 
 known and felt by all men since the race was born 
 with an immense range of diverse qualities and gifts. 
 It was one of the most obvious and universal facts 
 observed and experienced in the world, and as the in- 
 spiring mind could only be conceived as a personality, 
 some name representing a personality had always 
 been found or invented for it. Nor was the recourse 
 of Lucretius to this kind of invocation really so incon- 
 sistent as, at first sight, it may seem to be, with some 
 of the fundamental doctrines of the Epicurean philo- 
 sophy. One of those, and one of the best, was the
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I55 
 
 doctrine that the very essence of that which we call 
 an explanation, must lie in bringing everything that 
 we find it difficult to conceive, into the closest possible 
 relation with all that is known and familiar. This is 
 the secret of the universal tendency of mankind, even 
 in its lowest conditions, to that kind of religious 
 superstition which has been called 'Animism,' the 
 tendency to see in all natural forces the working of 
 that one great force of which we are conscious in our- 
 selves, and by means of which we know that we can 
 do much that seems closely analogous to the works 
 of Nature. It was in perfect consistency with this 
 doctrine that the idea of mind acting upon mind 
 should be instinctively accepted by Lucretius, and 
 that he should invoke some spiritual agency higher 
 than his own, to inspire his verse. It was indeed far 
 less inconsistent in him to do so than it is for any of 
 us to deny and repudiate the very existence of what 
 is called the supernatural, and yet to go on thinking 
 and speaking of ' plans ' in Nature as a necessity of 
 thought, when we are endeavouring to explain the 
 apparatuses, and contrivances, of which it is full to 
 the brim. And it is of high interest to observe how 
 largely the beauty, and power, and passion, of the 
 Lucretian poem, depend on the genuine enthusiasm 
 with which it is inspired by the conception of some 
 personal mind as the ultimate agency in things. 
 There is no finer passage in the whole poem than 
 this opening invocation to Venus. But all its power, 
 its passion, and its pathos, are inseparably connected 
 with a Divine impersonation who is addressed as the
 
 156 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 ' sole mistress of the nature of things ^.' There can 
 be no better example than this beautiful invocation 
 of the wide distinction between the most angry revolt 
 against the popular theology as to the nature and 
 character of the gods, and the impossibility of even 
 thinking of, or describing, the system of things in 
 which we live, as under any guidance other than that 
 of mind. Rising above all the grosser conceptions of 
 mythology respecting the Goddess of Love, the poet 
 addresses her as the animating spirit of the whole 
 animal and vegetable world — the transmitter, if not the 
 creator, of all beauty, life, and joy, as well in heaven 
 as on earth. She becomes, in fact, in the poet's 
 imagination, a supreme Divinity, with all the inalien- 
 able attributes of an active, living, all-pervading spirit. 
 Nor is it less remarkable to observe what it is that he 
 hates in the popular beliefs which were called religion, 
 as well as what it is in nobler spiritual conceptions 
 that he practically adores. He breaks ground at 
 once in his attacks upon what he calls ' religion,' by 
 specifying, in a passage of much power and pathos, 
 the horrid practice of human sacrifices, which in 
 many forms was so familiar to the ancient world, 
 and was specially connected with the worship of the 
 Asiatic Artemis. The slaughter of Iphigenia by her 
 father on the altar of that goddess, is the typical 
 legend which he accepts and denounces as a dreadful 
 example of the cruel and impious rites w^hich were 
 inspired by the worship of the gods. 
 
 But the indignant denial of the existence of spiritual 
 
 ' Munro's Lucretius, vol. i. p. i.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I57 
 
 beings with such attributes as these did not leave to 
 the Epicurean philosopher or poet no other alternative 
 than the denial of all spiritual agencies whatever. He 
 had two resources open to him. First, he could, and 
 he did, rely on the innate power of the human spirit 
 itself in the exercise of its own reason ; secondly, he 
 could, and he did, rely on the help afforded to that 
 spirit by a close communion with that other and 
 supreme personality, which was thinly veiled under 
 the great name of Nature. In both these conceptions 
 he finds expression for his noblest poetry in praise of 
 the Reason of man, and of that other Reason whose 
 responsive aspects were conspicuous in the order, and 
 in the law, of the external world. In the personality 
 of his favourite philosopher, ' that first of the Greek 
 race,' who first taught men to exercise their own 
 intellect and conscience in revolting against the gods 
 of the popular Pantheon, he recognizes a mind and 
 spirit before which he pours out all the incense of 
 a veritable worship. In the very act of praising him 
 for delivering men from the fear of the gods, he 
 testifies to his own consciousness of some higher con- 
 ception of the Divine nature, by choosing the word 
 ' god-like ' as the highest expression he can use for 
 expressing admiration. This, however, is but the 
 smallest, and, as it were, the most merely incidental 
 part of the testimony borne by Lucretius to the 
 supremacy of mind. It is indeed impossible for him 
 to do otherwise than to deny what is now called ' the 
 supernatural,' for the simple reason that by the terms 
 of his definition of ' Nature ' it is a word for the sum
 
 158 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of all existence. It is an obvious contradiction in 
 terms to conceive of anything outside of that sum ^ 
 We are thrown back on the question — What did he 
 see in Nature, as part, and the most essential part, of 
 its vast and eternal whole ? The answer is not ambi- 
 guous. He denied — not indeed mind, but any supreme 
 power of mind — in the Beings whom he called ' the 
 gods,' but only to erect another agency, supreme over 
 them as well as over all other beings, to which he 
 gave the name of Nature ; and to this supreme agency 
 he habitually refers in the terms of personality, and 
 as possessing every attribute which can go to make 
 up one supreme Divinity. He speaks of Nature as 
 the ' sole mistress - ' of the constitution of things ; 
 as creating them out of elements, and dissolving them 
 again : as ' not allowing ' this, that, or the other ; as 
 'jealously concealing' certain things; as 'governing 
 things by secret bodies ' ; as ' preparing and fixing 
 limits ' ; as the agent of assimilation in the building 
 up of organic structures; as 'adjusting' the relations 
 between things ; as bringing the living out of the not 
 living ; as guiding and governing the heavenly bodies ; 
 as having set the first patterns or moulds for created 
 things ; in short as the universal ' parent and creatrix 
 of things.' 
 
 But this is not all. Not only is Nature a per- 
 sonal Being endowed with commanding mind and 
 intellect, but it is a personality to whom the highest 
 moral feelings and desires are equally ascribed. 
 Nature is spoken of as 'craving happiness for men/ 
 
 » Bk. V. 360, 361. 2 Bk. i. 26.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS. I59 
 
 and as herself ' wanting no greater solace ' than the 
 taking away of pain. In that great Being the highest 
 power is thus coupled with the highest benevolence. 
 Nor is even this all that betrays in Lucretius the 
 ineradicable conceptions which he derives from Nature 
 of the presence and the power of a personal mind. 
 Thus, just as in the English language the only word 
 by which we can express the orderly rules under 
 which we see that things are actually governed, is 
 the word ' law ' — the primary conception of which 
 is that of an authoritative determination — so in the 
 Latin language the word used by the poet is always 
 ' ratio,' the primary conception of which is that 
 of a reasoning, and a reasonable, will. Nor is it 
 only in what may be called the scaffolding and 
 machinery of speech, that this conception is repre- 
 sented. It penetrates, and permeates, the whole argu- 
 ment of the poem, and all the thoughts which that 
 argument involves. Amidst the universal flux of 
 things he sees that there must be something that 
 is eternal. If there were not, he argues, every- 
 thing would be confusion. He tries very hard to 
 conceive of those eternal things as material atoms. 
 But in making this attempt he is compelled to invest 
 them with properties which do not belong to matter. 
 They have extension, and yet they are without parts, 
 and are incapable of division. In their purely physical 
 aspect he describes them in terms closely correspond- 
 ing with the modern scientific definition of a gas. 
 They are infinitely small, and smooth ; and they dart 
 about in all directions with immense velocity. But
 
 l6o INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 in their flight and in their colhsions they are con- 
 ceived of as ' trying ' all possible combinations with 
 each other, until at last they hit upon some which 
 are fitting foundations for farther and higher adjust- 
 ments. But the philosopher being conscious that this 
 'trying' cannot be fortuitous or unguided, escapes 
 under the plea of Nature's being endowed with some 
 powers utterly unknown to us ^. The very name he 
 uses for them indicates this. His English translator 
 always renders that word as the ' first beginnings ' of 
 things. But neither these two words, nor the word 
 ' elements ' give a full rendering of the stereotyped 
 expression used by Lucretius throughout his poem. 
 The word he uses is always ' primordia.' But a 
 • primordium ' is more than a mere element ; and it 
 is more than a 'first beginning' — unless we under- 
 stand that phrase as meaning a first beginning, not 
 of matter, nor of its elements^ but of its adjusted 
 combinations. A ' primordium ' means a first-ordered 
 thing — a first adjustment of mere elementary material. 
 In this respect it stands on a level with the modern 
 word invented for the same idea, ' protoplasm,' or 
 the first moulded thing. But both these words assume 
 as a preconception an ' ordering ' or a ' moulding ' 
 agency. They are words denoting a first step in a 
 particular direction, but they are no words at all for 
 the higher agency which takes the step. That agency 
 Lucretius does emphatically deny to have been the 
 design or counsel of ' the gods ' of the Pantheon, 
 connecting as he does their designing with all that 
 
 * Bk. i. 779.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS l6l 
 
 was trivial and corrupt in the spurious fancies of the 
 popular mythology. But, in substitution for this hated 
 association, he assumes the existence of a supreme 
 reason and foresight in that great personality whom 
 he calls Nature. Nothing can be finer than many of 
 the conceptions which he reaches when looking at the 
 resulting order of things from this point of view — 
 nothing can be more penetrating, occasionally, than 
 his interpretations. Some of them not only seem to 
 anticipate by a sort of inspiration the most recent 
 discoveries of physical science, but they see them in 
 a higher and truer light than that which is only too 
 familiar among ourselves. The mind of Lucretius is 
 full of the idea of creation by development, that is to 
 say, of creation by steps prepared in Time. But it is 
 not less full of the conception that those steps had 
 a rational direction such as alone would avert chaotic 
 results. If the earth had been left to herself she 
 would have produced monsters of all kinds. But 
 Nature set limits on such confusion, and provided 
 means whereby such hideous births should be brought 
 to a speedy end. He has even a strange, but a clear 
 vision of those 
 
 ' dragons of the prime 
 That tore each other in their sHme,' 
 
 which were actually produced in former ages of the 
 world. He sees that many of these must have existed, 
 but have perished. Nor is he unacquainted with 
 everything that is really true in the idea of ' natural 
 selection ' as an agency in the hands of Nature, for he 
 points out the inherent qualities in each living creature 
 
 M
 
 l62 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 which enable it to survive, and he sees especially the 
 significant fact of the development of the domesticable 
 animals as creatures which have survived because 
 they have been ' consigned to the protection of man ^ ' 
 by reason of their utility to him. Nor does he fail 
 to have a glimpse, dim but effective, of that most 
 mysterious of physical laws which has been unveiled 
 to science — the great law of Chemical Affinity — in 
 virtue of which the elements of matter have special 
 attractions for each other in such fixed and definite 
 ways, that they can be relied upon to produce special 
 combinations by being placed in special relations of 
 juxtaposition. This most powerful of all the tools or 
 instruments of purpose in the production and building 
 up of organic forms, is in principle clearly indicated 
 by him. In his mind everything has depended on 
 how the elements have been brought together. The 
 idea of adjustment inspires his whole conception. 
 And all this has been done, not by the gods, but 
 by that one all-embracing creative mind which he 
 calls Nature. 
 
 It is not difficult to see that although he con- 
 demned the belief in the immortality of the individual, 
 because it was identified with the popular religion 
 which to him was the source of all evil, he never- 
 theless assigned the highest value to the reason 
 and the soul of man. Not only in the glorification — 
 little short of worship — which he pours out upon the 
 individual mind of his favourite philosophers, but in 
 the idea he forms of the nature of intellect in itself, 
 
 1 Bk. V. 855-875.
 
 iv] ITS LIMITATIONS 163 
 
 he assigns to it not only an exalted, but an extravagant 
 elevation. It may be said, indeed, that one of the 
 great flaws in all his reasoning, is that he makes the 
 power of our possibly conceiving anything the measure 
 of its possible reality. That which is inconceivable 
 to the human mind is, of necessity, impossible in fact. 
 He thinks, moreover, that the human will is so free 
 as to be in itself uncaused, so that it represents an 
 absolute beginning, or initiative, in its purposes and 
 designs ^ This is indeed a striking testimony to the 
 inconceivability of any other final cause than that 
 which we are conscious of in mind, and if this agency, 
 so supreme and uncaused, as it seems to us to be 
 within its own little sphere, be only connected with 
 the farther idea of our own mind being a derivative 
 from another mind which is universal, infinite, and 
 supreme, then the thought of Lucretius is revealed 
 to us in all its great significance. And, strange to 
 say, he did very nearly attain to this conception, 
 because in addition to his idea of the power of the 
 human mind, he had a farther idea as to its source 
 and origin, which supplies all that is needed for 
 the most exalted theism. He says that we are all 
 from ' celestial seed,' thus repeating that saying of 
 certain Greek poets quoted by St. Paul in his speech 
 at Athens, 'for we also are His offspring.' He speaks 
 of a great 'intellect as Godlike^,' and he regards all 
 the order and bearing of the world as the work of 
 that which he enshrines in ' Nature.' All the most 
 beautiful passages in his poem, are those which are 
 
 Bk. ii. 266-280. 2 j^ij iii jg 
 
 M 2
 
 164 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 inspired by this idea. They are indeed immeasurably 
 inferior to the innumerable passages in the Hebrew 
 prophets and Psalmists, which express the same con- 
 ception carried to its only consistent and intelligible 
 result, namely, the will and agency of one only 
 God. But although so inferior, they breathe never- 
 theless as much of the same spirit as was attainable 
 by a mind to which this idea had not been fully 
 brought out into the light of consciousness. It is 
 only checked and apparently contradicted by the 
 poet's just detestation of the popular theology — that 
 is to say of the inferences as to the seat and nature 
 of the Divine mind, which had been embodied in the 
 heathen Pantheon, and in the heathen worship. But 
 when he can get rid of this baleful association, and 
 when he struggles to express his own higher concep- 
 tions, his language universally assumes that the highest 
 reason is also the highest cause of things. 
 
 His principle of interpretation is often the same as 
 that which we have heard in the language of Cuvier— if 
 certain adjustments had not been made, then certain 
 consequences must have followed. But as these con- 
 sequences would have been disasters, the adjustments 
 were in due course provided. This is, obviously, the 
 language of teleology, and of nothing else ; and so 
 high does he rise in his conception of the beauty, and 
 order, and significance of Nature, that he compares 
 its infinitely subtle adjustments to those by which 
 individual words can be worked up into a poem. 
 This is indeed a powerful and far-reaching analogy. 
 When we remember the unfathomed mysteries of
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 165 
 
 human speech — how in its essence and function it is 
 universally the same, and yet how in its mere forms 
 it is so various and local ; how its elements as mere 
 sounds are functions of an elaborate organic apparatus ; 
 how its combinations of those elements into vocables 
 and words, are so closely and exclusively the work of 
 mind that Professor Max Miiller considers language 
 to be identical with thought — we can appreciate the 
 profound significance of the identification which has 
 forced itself upon the thought of the great Epicurean 
 poet and philosopher. That the system of Nature 
 should present itself irresistibly to that most sceptical 
 intellect, as best imaged in the structure, origin, and 
 import of man's highest speech to man, is a striking 
 testimony indeed to the true character of that 
 system as estimated by one of the most powerful 
 minds of the heathen world. It corresponds exactly 
 to the Christian conception of Nature which the 
 American poet Longfellow presents to us in his 
 address to the great naturalist Agassiz, on one of 
 his birthdays — 
 
 And Nature, the old Nurse, took 
 
 The child upon her knee, 
 Saying, ' Here is a story-book 
 
 Thy Father has written for thee. 
 
 Come, wander with me," she said, 
 
 ' Into regions yet untrod. 
 And read what is still unread 
 
 In the manuscripts of God.' 
 
 The truth is that everything of mental power which 
 Lucretius denies with passion to the Beings whom 
 alone he knew as ' the gods,' he attributes, with
 
 l66 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 infinite additions, to that one agency which he calls 
 Nature. To that agency the gods themselves were 
 subservient, their very existence due to it, and all 
 the peace and serenity in which he supposed them to 
 abide^. There is one most remarkable passage where 
 Lucretius in the very conduct and conception of his 
 argument against any belief that the world has been 
 framed by design on the part of the gods, betrays his 
 full consciousness of the necessity, as a fact, that 
 design in the very highest definition of it, must have 
 existed somewhere, and must have presided over the 
 creative work. What, he asks, could possibly have 
 induced the gods to trouble themselves with such 
 a work when they were in the enjoyment of perfect 
 happiness, in a passive yet satisfying enjoyment ? 
 Then follows a sketch of the conditions under which 
 alone such a work could have been begun or carried on. 
 There must have been some far-reaching exercise of 
 forethought, some preconception as to what it would 
 be desirable to make, and some guide to the steps to 
 be taken in the making. ' Whence,' asks the poet, 
 ' was first implanted in the gods a pattern for beget- 
 ting things in general, as well as the preconception of 
 what men are, so that they knew, and saw in mind, what 
 they wanted to make ? ' Then Lucretius puts the 
 farther question which carries one step farther the 
 evidence that he did not regard the necessary in- 
 strumentality of physical causes, as any difficulty 
 whatever in this true and just conception of that in 
 which design essentially consists, namely, the fore- 
 
 ' Bk. iii. 23, 24, &c.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 167 
 
 thought of a conceiving mind. * In what way,' he 
 asks, ' was the power of the primordial elements ever 
 ascertained, and what could they effect by a change 
 in their mutual arrangements ? ' These striking words 
 seem almost to anticipate the special idea of chemical 
 affinity, by which, perhaps, more is done than by any 
 other in the mechanism of creation. But the words 
 point to, or embrace, a larger and wider conception 
 still, namely this — that it is by special combination of 
 the elementary bodies and the elementary forces, that 
 all design must work as we know it in ourselves, and 
 that all design appears to us to work as we know and 
 see it, as a fact, in Nature. Accordingly, the solution 
 suggested by Lucretius is that which makes Nature 
 the one supreme agency which alone can account for 
 the system in which we live. The gods must have 
 been helpless, he argues, ' unless Nature herself gave 
 the model for makino' thin"-s\' 
 
 The truth is that the passionate hostility felt by 
 Lucretius, against all that he understood by the word 
 ' religion.' was an hostility directed, not at all against 
 the mere conception of mind as the supreme power in 
 Nature, but against those embodiments of the concep- 
 tion, and those representations as to the character and 
 action of the gods in whom that mind was supposed 
 to reside, which inspired the popular ideas of worship. 
 These, in all the forms they took as known to him, 
 he despised and abhorred. By a process of reasoning, 
 which is by no m.eans clear, or rather probably from an 
 accidental association of ideas, which had come to be 
 
 ' Bk. V. 180-186.
 
 l68 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 inseparable in his mind, he connected all those forms 
 of worship, and all the motives which actuated the 
 conduct of men in connexion with them, to the belief 
 in the immortality of the individual soul. The 
 evidence which his language affords, of the extent 
 to which the terrors attached to this belief affected 
 the heathen world in his day, is very curious, and in 
 some respects very surprising. He represents almost 
 all men as habitually under all sorts of imagined horrors 
 respecting the fate of their souls after death. The 
 picture he presents of this fear, of its prevalence and its 
 power, corresponds very closely with the language of 
 the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he 
 speaks of those ' who through fear of death were all 
 their lifetime subject to bondage \^ It is not easy 
 to understand how Lucretius could think that the 
 idea of annihilation by death, would tend to make 
 men more virtuous. The argument as affecting con- 
 duct seems rather to lie in the opposite direction — 
 ' Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die.' But 
 then it is to be remembered that those higher motives 
 which we connect with the belief in the immortality 
 of the individual soul, are due entirely to those other 
 and farther conceptions connected with the con- 
 sequences of virtue in another life, which are in- 
 separably connected with our ideas of a supreme mind 
 which delights in justice, goodness, and truth. If we 
 couple the belief in our immortality with the 
 farther belief that both in this world and in the 
 next, we arc to be under the rule of Beings so cruel, 
 
 ' Heb. ii. 15.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 169 
 
 corrupt, violent, and capricious, as the heathen gods 
 were continually represented to be in the popular 
 religion, then, indeed, we understand the intense feel- 
 ing of Lucretius that the belief was nothing but an 
 unmitigated source of evil, and that the first duty of 
 reason and philosophy was to disabuse the human 
 mind of such a pestilent superstition. But the dis- 
 belief in the immortality of the individual soul, 
 however destructive it may be to all our own ideas of 
 religion in its best influences on men, has nothing 
 whatever to do with any disbelief in mind as the 
 supreme agency in ' Nature.' It may be according 
 to the will and design of that mind that the life of 
 man should be as evanescent as the life of a gnat 
 is always conceived by us to be. This is theoretically 
 conceivable, and yet it is touching to notice that even 
 in this matter Lucretius unconsciously betrays his 
 instinctive feeling that some persona! and individual 
 immortality is the only fitting destiny of a great and 
 good man. This comes out in the poet's enthusiastic 
 eulogium on Epicurus as the one great deliverer of 
 humanity from the curse of religion in the promul- 
 gation of his philosophy. For this great service to 
 his kind he deserved the highest conceivable reward 
 — and what was that ? It was no other than that 
 immortality of life which it was his boast to have 
 banished as a motive from the world. 
 
 But the inconsistency of ideas which the language of 
 the poet on this point implies, is only part, and a very 
 small part, of the insuperable difficulty which he could 
 not overcome in avoiding the language of design in
 
 lyo INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 his laborious attempts to depict and account without 
 it for the beauties and harmonies of the world. It is 
 the same insuperable difficulty which we have traced 
 throughout even the most guarded language of 
 modern physicists, and which, when the attempt is 
 cast aside by those who do not seek to avoid or sup- 
 press what they do actually and really see in Nature, 
 gives place invariably to the most full and pro- 
 nounced teleological descriptions of all its phenomena. 
 Neither the theory of development or evolution, nor 
 any other theory respecting the steps or processes of 
 creation, can touch the evidence of mind in Nature. 
 The development of intention pursues us everywhere 
 as the most conspicuous of all the facts hitherto dis- 
 covered. The very idea of fortuity is repugnant to 
 true science. And we must always remember what 
 fortuity means. It does not mean the occurrence 
 of phenomena which have no physical cause, because 
 none such exist, and the existence of such is strictly 
 to us inconceivable in thought. What fortuity means, 
 is the occurrence of phenomena where physical causa- 
 tion is under no intelligent guidance or direction, no 
 guidance which regards the future, and which pro- 
 vides for it, so that development shall take an orderly 
 and foreseen direction. But this guidance is precisely 
 one of the great characteristics which science, as we 
 have seen, has identified as inseparable from all 
 organic evolution. This is the characteristic which 
 makes the presence of mind in Nature, a fact, and not 
 an inference, one of the self-evident truths which are 
 directly and intuitively perceived by the human mind
 
 iv] ITS LIMITATIONS I7I 
 
 whenever it attempts to record in speech that which 
 it sees and knows in Nature. 
 
 Science has done a great service of late, in carrying 
 this fact back into the history of a past which in- 
 deed is certainly not infinite, but which is nevertheless 
 inrimense. The history of animal life as a whole has 
 been revealed to us in geology as having run a course 
 analogous to the development of the individual 
 organism. It has been an orderly march from low to 
 higher forms, though the steps in detail have not been 
 traced, nor the exact method of the transitions. Some 
 agency beyond, and above, the mere mechanical idea 
 of natural selection, has certainly provided, beforehand, 
 the fittest adaptations for survival, and has seen to it 
 that they took a definite direction. This has been 
 strikingly expressed in a recent work, by one of the 
 most eminent of the younger school of paleonto- 
 logists, in the following passage of his History of 
 the Mammalia : ' The evolution of a family like the 
 Titanotheres, presents an uninterrupted march in one 
 direction. While apparently prosperous and attaining 
 a great size, it was really passing into a great " corral " 
 of inadaptation to the grasses which were introduced 
 in the middle miocene. So with other families and 
 lesser lives, extinction came in at the end of a term 
 of development and high specialization. With other 
 families no cause for extinction can be assigned, as 
 in the lopping off of the smaller miocene baisso- 
 dactyls. The point is that a certain trend of 
 development is taken, leading to an adaptive or 
 inadaptive first issue. But extinction or survival
 
 172 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of the fittest, seems to exert little influence e7i 
 route. The changes en route lead us to believe 
 either in predestination, a kind of internal perfecting 
 tendency, or a kineto-genesis. For the trend of 
 evolution is not the happy resultant of many trials, 
 but is heralded in structures of the same form all 
 the world over, and in age after age, by similar 
 minute changes advancing irresistibly from inutility 
 to utility. It is an absolute, definite, and lawful 
 progression. The infinite number of contemporary, 
 developing, degenerating, and stationary characters, 
 precludes the possibility of fortuity. There is some 
 law introducing and regulating each of those varia- 
 tions, as in the variations of individual growth^.' 
 
 This is a great pronouncement, and the power of 
 the analogy which it asserts illuminates all the facts 
 as no other could, because it is the very essence of 
 the growth of every individual organism, that it is 
 a plan — a structure beginning in the complete absence 
 of any function, but steadily advancing to more and 
 more complete adaptations for functional work, which 
 is yet lying in the future. It is in this one great aspect 
 that the history of organic life, as a whole in the past, 
 is seen and recognized by the eye of science as strictly 
 analogous to the growth and development of the 
 individual in the present time, and thus we have a 
 new evidence of a direct and immediate perception 
 of the work of mind. It is the ultimate result of 
 
 ' Professor Osborne, Rise of the Maminalin in North America, 
 1893. Address to American Association for the Advancement of 
 Science, August 17, 1893.
 
 iv] ITS LIMITATIONS I73 
 
 the highest generalizations on the history of life in 
 our world — a work beginning in a time immeasurably 
 remote, and carried on through steps, and through 
 cycles of change, which we are wholly unable to follow 
 in detail. All the recent theories of development 
 or evolution which have made so much noise in the 
 world, whether in the hands of Lamarck, or of Darwin, 
 or of Weissman, are simply endeavours to guess what 
 the steps have been, and how the direction of them 
 has been determined. As regards the general fact 
 that they have been somehow directed under the 
 operation of some law, it matters nothing how far 
 those guesses have been imperfect or erroneous. That 
 they have been both, in a high degree, seems quite 
 certain. But except in so far as they are aimed at 
 the substitution of fortuity for purposiveness, they 
 may be treated as of no significance in our present 
 inquiry. It matters nothing, as regards the pur- 
 posiveness of results, whether the steps to attainment 
 can be followed more or less imperfectly, or not at all. 
 There is, however, an important distinction to be 
 observed between the relation of each organ to its 
 own special work in the plan of every individual 
 creature, and the corresponding relation of new 
 species to any special work in the general plan of 
 all organic life. That connexion between any living 
 apparatus and its work, to which we give the name 
 of function, is a connexion perfectly definite, clear, 
 and certain. It is no matter of reasoning or of mere 
 inferences. It is always more intelligible, and generally 
 more true than any of those relations to time, or space,
 
 174 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 or force, of which the physical sciences take special 
 note. But the connexion between any creature as 
 a whole, and the rest of creation in the present and in 
 the future, is seldom, if ever, so definite or so certain. 
 Thus, for example, the relation between teeth, or sets 
 of teeth, and the function of seizing prey and tearing 
 their flesh, is an object of direct perception and of 
 indisputable certainty. But the relation between an 
 age in which almost all carnivorous animals were 
 reptiles, and the general plan of organic life, is by no 
 means so obvious. This is one of the many facts 
 which indicate a process, but not directly or imme- 
 diately any purpose. At first sight, at least, it does 
 not even indicate what Professor Osborne calls a ' pro- 
 gress from inutility to utility,' because the reptiles of 
 the secondary ages in geology were as usefully con- 
 structed for their own living as any other creatures. 
 But the age of reptiles does indicate one stage in the 
 steps of a progress from low, to comparatively higher, 
 organisms in the evolution of life. And in this pro- 
 gress we see correspondences and adaptations which 
 again bring purpose into view, because nothing is 
 more striking in the history of organic life, than the 
 growing adaptation between the new forms of life 
 and the function which many of them do now actually 
 discharge with reference to man. We can hardly 
 estimate how different this life of ours would have 
 been, and would now be, if the beasts and birds which 
 are capable of domestication, were omitted from the 
 world. Without sheep and oxen, and without the 
 horse, we could not use or enjoy life as we do now.
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I75 
 
 Yet we know that all of these were introduced very 
 recently, and in a special correlation, as to time, with 
 the introduction of our own species. Fortuity is 
 indeed, as Professor Osborne says, inconceivable in 
 such a case as this ; and it becomes all the more 
 inconceivable since the long gradations have been 
 discovered which connect the horse, for example, 
 with forms which would have been useless to men 
 for the purposes which no other animal is capable 
 of fulfilling. The truth is that the immense and 
 exclusive part played in human life by the ruminants, 
 and by the horse, corresponds more nearly than any 
 other adaptation to the definite and certain relation- 
 ship in which the function of individual organs 
 consists. 
 
 There is a wide gap, in this respect, when we pass 
 from the organic to the inorganic world. The adapta- 
 tions in the inorganic world are as pervading as in 
 the organic, and are indeed, to a large extent, the 
 same, inasmuch as the adaptation of organisms is, 
 and must be, an adaptation to conditions in the 
 external world. They are parallel and correlative. 
 But, in the inorganic sphere, they are what we may 
 describe as general, and not particular. The adapta- 
 tions of mineral carbon, for example, in the shape of 
 coal, to the wants of man, is a conspicuous example. 
 Coal is, indeed, in its origin an organic product. 
 But it belongs to the inorganic world now. The 
 preparation of it and the storage of it as a source of 
 energy in the bowels of the earth, has had an obvious 
 purpose in the function it now discharges. But we
 
 176 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 cannot see any law, either mental or material, in the 
 selection of the very partial areas where it , was 
 produced, or of those from which it has been swept 
 away by subsequent denudation. On the other hand, 
 when we come to look at the much larger questions 
 connected with the atomic and molecular constitution 
 and combinations of the material elements of the in- 
 organic world, the more we know, and the more we 
 have lately discovered, the more clear it is that those 
 elements and combinations are governed by laws which 
 are distinctly and emphatically purposive. They are 
 extremely complicated, and involve differences of 
 inherent properties, and of forces operating between 
 them, on the nice adaptations of which the whole of 
 the organic world depends. In that higher world 
 itself, as we have seen, purposive adaptation is no 
 matter of mere inference, but is so much the object 
 of direct perception that the most ordinary descrip- 
 tions of phenomena, as well as the most recondite 
 and scientific^ cannot escape from the recognition 
 of it. But the indisputable unity of Nature pre- 
 cludes us from supposing even the possibility of this 
 characteristic being confined to one region of Nature 
 alone. What Professor Osborne says so forcibly of 
 the organic world, is equally true of the inorganic, 
 when we regard it in all its parts, namely, that the 
 infinite complexity of its arrangements and adapta- 
 tions ' preclude the possibility of fortuity.' The 
 organic is in this matter the key to the inorganic. 
 Life, as the highest thing we know in Nature, is the 
 explanation of all its elementary laws, and of all their
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I77 
 
 combinations. It is the interpreter of them in the 
 highest sense, because it constantly throws a clear 
 light on the 'Why' when the 'How' remains shrouded 
 in an impenetrable secrecy. 
 
 One of the causes which has prevented us from 
 seeing clearly the objective reality of purposive 
 adaptation in Nature, has been the confusion of 
 thought which leads us to assume that purpose 
 cannot be seen at all unless it is seen exhaustively — 
 that unless all the purposes are seen which any given 
 adaptation serves, no one result can be identified as 
 in itself purposive at all. This is one of the many 
 ideas which are accepted not only as difficulties, but 
 very often as insuperable barriers in the way of 
 conclusions which would otherwise be certain. But it 
 is an idea which is quite unsound. Even in human 
 contrivances and apparatuses there are often parts 
 which have more than one function, and discharge 
 more than one duty, in the working of the whole. 
 And if this be true of the machines by which we 
 accomplish our narrow and bounded aims, how much 
 more must it be true of the machinery of Nature, 
 all parts of which are both the products of an infinite 
 past, and also links with an inexhaustible future. 
 Instead of being puzzled or surprised by finding that 
 we never can see, or follow, more than a mere frac- 
 tion of the ends secured by natural laws, and by the 
 adaptations of them, we ought to feel and understand 
 without difficulty how this must be so, and how power- 
 less the fact ought to be to shake, in the least, our 
 confidence in the relation between means and ends, 
 
 N
 
 178 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 when they can, in any instance^ be clearly seen. 
 This would be a sufficient argument even if it stood 
 alone, and if it were impossible for us to understand 
 the case of complicated, and even in a sense, of 
 opposing purposes, being provided for in the operation 
 of natural laws in combinations which are perfectly 
 intelligible to us. A signal example is presented 
 to us in one case taken by Tennyson to illustrate 
 the difficulties which lie in purposes which seem 
 to be not only unfulfilled but frustrated. It is the 
 case, beautifully expressed, in section LV of In 
 Memoriam, where the destruction of life, and of the 
 seeds of life, which is one of the great features of 
 the organic world, is referred to as a difficulty in our 
 trust and hope that 
 
 Nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete. 
 
 Then follow the words in the section referred to : 
 
 That I, considering everywhere. 
 
 Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
 
 And finding that of fifty seeds 
 She often brings but one to bear, 
 
 I falter where I firmly trod, &c. 
 
 Now here we have the idea that, because the 
 primary purpose of all seeds is undoubtedly that 
 they should ' bear,' that purpose seems to fail when 
 they are otherwise disposed of. Yet when we come 
 to think of it for a moment, we must see that unless 
 more seeds were produced than are enough for the 
 purposes of reproduction, another purpose, quite as 
 obvious, could never be attained, inasmuch as the
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I79 
 
 whole sustenance of a large, and of the highest part, 
 of the organic world, consists in the overplus of seeds 
 produced beyond the needs of reproduction. What 
 would become of bread — the staff of life — if, for 
 example, the cereals did not produce even more 
 than ' fifty seeds ' for consumption to every one seed 
 required for reproduction ? It is the same in innumer- 
 able other cases. The millions of ova produced by 
 a herring and by other fishes, are the main nourish- 
 ment of higher creatures, and our reason has no 
 difficulty in such cases in seeing that a great variety 
 of purposes may be — and in the system of Nature 
 must be — secured by contrivances, which at first sight 
 seem to have only one. 
 
 This, indeed, is no exception. It is the universal 
 law which we see prevailing now, and which geology 
 enables us clearly to see has prevailed through all 
 the past ages of creation. It is a mere confusion of 
 thought which regards various, opposite, and even 
 apparently contradictory purposes, as inconsistent 
 with the objective reality and certainty of that in- 
 trinsic relation which connects an apparatus with 
 its special work. It is a relation which in its own 
 nature belongs to the realm of mind ; and the 
 only conclusion suggested by the facts of variety, 
 and of complexity, is that the mind which we see 
 exhibited in Nature is one so vast and so far- 
 reaching, that its working, its aims, and its methods, 
 can only be very imperfectly understood. There 
 is nothing incongruous, still less contradictory, in 
 the two parts of this conception. On the contrary 
 
 N 3
 
 l8o INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 they are thoroughly natural, and consistent with all 
 that we see and know around us, and it may. well 
 be added, with all that we see and know within us. 
 There are many things concerning ourselves of which 
 we are absolutely certain, whilst of their history in 
 the past, of many of their relations with the present, 
 and of their consequences in the future, we are as pro- 
 foundly ignorant. But although the conception and 
 the consciousness of very limited and very imperfect 
 knowledge, is familiar to us, and does not in the least 
 affect the certainty with which many things are per- 
 ceived and known, the form which this conception 
 takes as regards theology, is very striking, and one 
 full of far-reaching consequences. For it is the result 
 of all the evidence we have adduced, that, whilst it is 
 certain that the system in, and under, which we live, 
 is a system governed by, and saturated with, the power 
 of mind, we have no similarly direct and certain 
 evidence as to the seat of that mind, or as to any of its 
 characters, other than those of power and purpose, 
 or, above all, as to its relations with our own heart, 
 and intellect, and will. This is seen to be the final 
 result of all close inquiry into what is called natural 
 religion, but which is here called Intuitive Theology. 
 It cannot accurately be said to be religion at all, 
 because the bare conception of the existence of 
 a supreme mind, does not constitute a religion. 
 What is universally meant and understood by that 
 word is some system of belief, however vague or rude, 
 concerning those relations between that mind and 
 our own which, we admit, ought to influence us
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS l8l 
 
 more or less, whether in worship or in conduct. 
 At first sight it might appear that the only cer- 
 tainty which we have established — the universal 
 presence and power of mind in Nature, is one not 
 worth establishing, as being in itself a barren and 
 unfruitful truth. Even if this could not be denied 
 we should be none the less bound to admit that 
 truth on the one hand, and to keep within it on the 
 other. But the alleged barrenness of this certainty can 
 be denied, and can be disproved. It is one of the 
 blessed results of the unity of Nature that there are 
 in it no such things as isolated and unfruitful truths. 
 Every truth has its own inseparable relations with 
 many more, and it is so above all, as we shall see, with 
 that truth which we have been concerned with here. 
 
 The great truth which has been reached by the 
 preceding analysis is this — that the universal presence 
 and power of mind in Nature, which has been well 
 called in one word its purposiveness, is not a mere 
 inference, or the result of any conscious reasoning, 
 but is a fact apprehended by direct, immediate, and 
 self-evident perception ; so much so that the perpetual 
 acknowledgement and expression of it cannot be 
 escaped in describing natural phenomena, even by 
 those who are most desirous of avoiding or sup- 
 pressing it. 
 
 It is so important to define to ourselves the exact 
 bearing and boundaries of this proposition that it may 
 be well to compare it with, and to distinguish it from, 
 other propositions with which it may easily be con- 
 founded. It must not be confounded, for example,
 
 l82 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 with the famous argument of Locke on the evidence 
 of a God, or with any other similar form of reasoning 
 resorted to by theistic writers. Locke's argument 
 may be perfectly sound, but it is an argument, and 
 does not even profess to represent the direct force of 
 a self-evident proposition. His argument does indeed 
 start from, and rest upon, as all reasoning must do, 
 certain self-evident propositions ; and these proposi- 
 tions do stand in close connexion with that one direct 
 perception of purposiveness in Nature which is asserted 
 here. But Locke's fundamental proposition is essen- 
 tially different. It is that we are directly conscious 
 of ourselves, and of an external world. This is his 
 fundamental postulate or axiom. His next step is, 
 that the self-existence of which we are thus directly 
 conscious is the self-existence of an intelligent and 
 reasoning being. His third step is, that as mind and 
 reason cannot be conceived by us as coming from 
 dead matter, it follows that our intelligence must 
 have come from another intelligence, which is the 
 source and origin of all others. Whether this argu- 
 ment is sound or not, it is obviously in the nature of 
 an argument ; and the conclusion it arrives at, how- 
 ever valid, is certainly not one reached by a direct 
 perception. In affirming the self-evident existence 
 of an internal world it does indeed touch the borders 
 of the special proposition which we have dwelt on 
 here. But it fails to notice or to grasp it. If an 
 essential part of that other and external world, which 
 we do also certainly perceive, be its purposiveness, 
 then we have no need to seek for any argument,
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 183 
 
 however sound, in favour of the existence of some 
 other mind than our own. We do not conclude, but 
 we see, and absolutely know, that purpose is one 
 of the most characteristic of all the manifestations of 
 mind as we know it in ourselves ; and even if we 
 were to admit as possible or conceivable that our 
 own mind may have had some separate origin from 
 that other mind which we see in Nature, still the 
 perception of that other mind remains unshaken, as 
 an indisputable fact. 
 
 If Locke had thoroughly analyzed all that is meant 
 by, and included in, what he calls the external world, 
 he need not have gone any further, so far as the mere 
 existence in that world of a supreme mind is con- 
 cerned. He would have seen that it is independent 
 of any argument, that it is the essential element in 
 all that is the subject of our self-evident perceptions. 
 And then, if he had gone one step further in that 
 analysis, he would have reached the highest point to 
 be attained in this region of self-evident propositions. 
 He could not have failed to see that the distinction, 
 which he assumes between the external world and 
 ourselves, is a distinction which cannot be logically 
 maintained. Both in body and in mind we are cer- 
 tainly parts of Nature, and the alleged externality of 
 it as regards us — that separability of it from our- 
 selves — which is assumed, breaks down the moment it 
 is examined. This is no obscure doctrine of meta- 
 physics. It is reflected in the common language of 
 life. We all habitually speak of our bodily frames 
 as being, in many of their most obvious aspects, part
 
 184 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of the external world to us. We know that they are 
 as full of mechanical and chemical purposiveness as 
 the bodies of the lower animals. Incomprehensible 
 as the connexion is between our inner and outward 
 selves, we know, as a fact, that our senses and our 
 reason are under the same conditions of adaptation 
 to purpose in the discharge of functions ; so that in 
 ourselves the external and the internal worlds meet, 
 and we are the image and embodiment of both. The 
 presence of purposiveness, which is so striking else- 
 where, is nowhere more striking than in the structure 
 of our own organism, with all its separate apparatuses 
 for the discharge of separate and special functions. 
 What we see, therefore, by direct perception in that 
 province of Nature which we loosely call external, is 
 also seen by us not less evidently by the same direct 
 perception as internal in ourselves — namely, the pre- 
 sence and the power of mind as the supreme agency 
 which is concerned in the production and co-ordina- 
 tion of all our own faculties and powers. 
 
 Nor are the whole contents of our direct perception 
 fully exhausted until we have brought home to our 
 own understandings what is meant by mind as ex- 
 hibited in all purposeful arrangements. The recogni- 
 tion of a mind is the recognition of something that 
 we know, and the one leading feature by which we 
 do so recognize it, is purpose. We know this better 
 than we know anything else in the world. It is 
 identified with the ordinary action of our will. It is, 
 in short, all that constitutes what we call ourselves, 
 our individuality, our personality. It differs essen-
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 185 
 
 tially from all that we can see in the physical forces, 
 and it agrees with all that we do most certainly know 
 as characteristic of ourselves in the use we make of 
 these forces, as the only tools with which we can work 
 out our own designs. Here, therefore, we see again, 
 not as a consequence worked out by argument, but 
 as a part of the fact which is directly seen, that we 
 have the distinct conception of a personal mind as an 
 object of our immediate recognition in the whole of 
 Nature. 
 
 This appears to me to be the summit level in the 
 path towards religion to which we are carried by 
 the certainties of direct and immediate perception. 
 It may be well, therefore, to rest for a moment at 
 the point we have thus attained, and to estimate as 
 clearly as we can its exact bearing and elevation. 
 Again, we must recognize the fact that our self- 
 evident truth does not constitute religion. It 
 does not in itself include any further and more 
 definite conceptions or beliefs on our own relations 
 with that personal mind of whose existence we are 
 so well assured. Yet it is in such further conceptions 
 and beliefs that religion, properly so called, alone 
 consists. On the other hand, let us not mistake the 
 breadth and solidity of the foundations which are laid 
 in, and by, the assured apprehension, as a fact, that 
 in Nature, ourselves included, we are in the presence 
 of a mind which has all the elements of what we 
 know as personality in ourselves. It at once illu- 
 minates Nature with the light of an impressive and 
 dominating conception. It involves the idea — not as
 
 l86 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a consequence reached by reasoning, but as part of 
 its own nature and contents — that we are always in 
 the presence of a mind which has some such close 
 relations with our own, that we can recognize, at 
 least, its constructive powers as analogous to our 
 own ; and can identify these, as exerted in our own 
 organism, as the highest type known to us of their 
 working and effects. 
 
 Again and again let it be repeated that this power- 
 ful conception does not, in itself and undeveloped, 
 constitute religion. But it does raise to the high 
 level of a self-evident truth that one fundamental 
 fact with which all religious feelings and beliefs must 
 begin, and on which alone they can and always do 
 repose. The moment this truth is apprehended in 
 its fullness, it becomes impossible to set religion aside 
 as belonging to a region of mere fancy or imagination, 
 with no substance in it. The very first inference that 
 follows from it, hardly less self-evident than itself 
 is that there must be some other relations between 
 us and the universal mind, than that only of our 
 being a product of its constructive skill. There 
 must be some spiritual and ethical relations cor- 
 responding to the ethical and spiritual faculties of 
 which we are conscious in ourselves. For these, too, 
 like all others, we know to be gifts inseparably con- 
 nected with our special organization. The subject, 
 therefore, of these other relations rises upon us as 
 not only a region in which facts must abound, but 
 as a region filled with the very highest class of facts 
 which we can ever reach. In their very essence they
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 187 
 
 must be the supreme facts of the universe. They 
 must be the facts on which some fuller knowledge is 
 the most to be longed for — by all to whom the quest 
 of truth is the one pursuit of supreme interest and 
 importance. This is a consideration of high signi- 
 ficance. For as there is no kind of doubt so para- 
 lyzing, in any subject of inquiry, as any — even the very 
 least — suspicion that perhaps, after all, there is nothing 
 in it to be inquired about— that the very pursuit of it 
 is in itself a delusion, a mere dream, a phantasy — so, 
 on the other hand, there is nothing so inspiring as 
 the certainty, in any such inquiry, that we are dealing 
 with veritable realities, and are handling problems 
 which concern facts indisputable, and, if indisputable, 
 then all-pervading. And when this certainty is per- 
 petually receiving, as we have seen it is receiving, 
 ever fresh and accumulating illustrations from the 
 analysis of all around us, it silences and extinguishes 
 for ever any suggestions that in theology we can 
 possibly be dealing with mere subjective phenomena, 
 the unsubstantial products of our own imaginative 
 faculties. Whether this extreme form of doubt is widely 
 prevalent, it would be hard to say. But it clearly 
 forms a large ingredient in the philosophic scepticism 
 of many writers both old and new. It is under the 
 influence of this extreme form of doubt that such 
 vehement antagonism exists to the recognition of 
 purposiveness in Nature, and that so many attempts are 
 made to resolve it, and dissolve it, into such deceptive 
 ambiguities as those which are hid under the phrases 
 of development and evolution. But no element of
 
 l88 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 fact which does really exist in these phrases is in- 
 compatible with, or even antagonistic to, the one 
 great fundamental perception of the universal pur- 
 posiveness in Nature which we have now identified as 
 a self-evident truth. On the contrary, the idea of all 
 purposes being attained generally, at least, by gradual 
 steps and slow degrees, and always by the employ- 
 ment of appropriate means, whether these be slow or 
 rapid, is an idea not only strictly cognate with, but is 
 an inseparable part of, the purposiveness which we see 
 and know in Nature as a self-evident characteristic 
 of all its operations. There can be no question, 
 therefore, of the power of this fundamental truth to 
 dispel, and disabuse our minds of, that extreme form 
 of doubt — that misgiving, if it be nothing more —which 
 relegates all theological conceptions to the region of 
 fancy. There can be no doubt of its immense 
 intellectual value in establishing theology as a science, 
 that is to say, as a branch of knowledge, which not 
 only concerns some realities, but concerns the very 
 highest realities of life and of the world. Whether 
 these realities can in any greater measure become 
 known to us, and, if so, in what measure and by what 
 means — this is a further question, not directly decided 
 by the one self-evident proposition which we have 
 identified, but needing further consideration and 
 inquiry. 
 
 It would, however, be of little value to us to see 
 as a self-evident truth the existence around us, and 
 within us, of this one great fact of supreme interest 
 and importance, if we think that we have no faculties
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 189 
 
 which can possibly enable us to appreliend its con- 
 sequences even in the least degree. And this is 
 undoubtedly the idea which distresses and paralyzes 
 many minds, whilst others are reconciled by it to an 
 attitude of complete indifference. But we have not 
 exhausted the contents of the one self-evident truth 
 which we have come to recognize as such, unless we 
 see that these contents do bear directly on this para- 
 lyzing idea, and are strong enough to redeem us from 
 it. What are all self-evident truths ? They are the 
 results of an intimate adjustment between our reason- 
 ing faculties and the ultimate truths of Nature. As 
 such, therefore, they carry with them, into the inner- 
 most recesses of our own mental structure, that same 
 character of purposiveness which we have identified 
 as supreme in all things around us. They rest on 
 perceptions which are intuitive — that is to say, which 
 are born with us, and in us, as the natural consequences 
 of an adapted structure. This is a conception which 
 has the widest application to our powers of apprehend- 
 ing truth. There is no reason to believe that it has 
 any limit. For, at least, if there be limits, we do not 
 know them, seeing that such limits as we do know, 
 and of which we have much painful experience, are 
 obviously rather limits of opportunity than absolute 
 limits of power. Moreover, they never give us the 
 impression of even suggesting any doubt on the 
 truthfulness of our knowledge up to the point at 
 which they stop us. They are barriers on further 
 advances for the time, and perhaps sometimes for 
 ever. But they throw no backward shadows on past
 
 igO INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 Steps SO far as they have gone. On the contrary, 
 they leave untouched, or even confirmed, all the 
 combinations of reason by which these steps have 
 been established. 
 
 It is on this high question — namely, the natural 
 adjustments between our own reason and the laws 
 of what is called external Nature — that a splendid 
 light has been thrown by the advance of the physical 
 sciences. We call them by that name because their 
 subject-matter lies in that region which we distinguish 
 as physical. But we must remember that they are 
 also metaphysical in a very high degree. More and 
 more the physical sciences have come to involve, and 
 rest upon, some of the most difficult abstract concep- 
 tions of the mind which it is possible for us to enter- 
 tain. Yet we find these abstract conceptions safe 
 guides in the interpretation, and even constantly in 
 the prediction, of phenomena of the most complicated 
 kind. Nor is it less remarkable that the physical 
 sciences have made us familiar with the idea that 
 these abstract conceptions are not less absolutely safe 
 and true because, beyond a certain point, they may 
 be absolutely inscrutable. We handle them and 
 employ them without knowing even in the least degree 
 their ultimate origin or nature. This is true of all 
 the sciences which deal with the relations of matter 
 to space, to time, to force, to energy, and above all to 
 our own mental constitution. In all these concep- 
 tions we very soon reach limitations on our knowledge 
 which are insuperable, and which leave in the deepest 
 mystery much that we do most earnestly desire to
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I9I 
 
 know. Nevertheless this does not seem in the least 
 degree to render our use of these conceptions to be 
 doubtful, or our knowledge of them to be inap- 
 plicable. 
 
 We are dealing, therefore, with an established fact 
 and principle, in all departments of our knowledge, 
 when we say that the limitations upon it do not affect 
 its truthfulness, or our just confidence in its certainty. 
 And when we apply this principle to the self-evident 
 proposition of the purposefulness of Nature, we may 
 be sure of that application being not only legitimate, 
 but of its being absolutely demanded by the facts. 
 The very existence of self-evident truths has a direct 
 bearing on theology, which it has not in any other 
 science whatever, because it throws a special and 
 far-reaching light on the possibility of further know- 
 ledge being arrived at through means which are 
 strictly analogous. The instinctive and intuitive per- 
 ception of any truth is in the nature of what we call 
 inspiration, that is to say, it is not the result of con- 
 scious reasoning. On the contrary, it is the basis on 
 which all such reasoning itself reposes. Obviously, 
 we can conceive it to be exalted to any extent, since 
 we see in it, as a fact, the existence of some inborn 
 means of communication between the mind which we 
 recognize in Nature and the derivative intelligence 
 which we feel to be our own. 
 
 There are some truths which, when clearly seen, 
 and firmly grasped, have a power over our conceptions 
 out of all proportion to the mere logical consequences 
 which are apparent at first sight. This power lies,
 
 192 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 not merely in the cognate ideas which such truths 
 render familiar, but especially in the antagonistic 
 ideas which they expel. They change, and may often 
 reverse as it were, the whole attitude of the mind on 
 certain subjects. They open it to perceptions which 
 had been before asleep, and they close its doors 
 against adverse preconceptions which had been only 
 too active. The sense and the conviction that both 
 in what we call external Nature, and also in our own 
 internal nature, we are in the constant presence of 
 a personal mind other than our own, is one of these 
 powerful truths. In the light of it that vulgar dis- 
 tinction which has become so common in modern 
 thought, between ' the natural ' and the ' supernatural' 
 vanishes in a moment. It shows that we are not 
 called upon to believe in any presence or power out- 
 side of what we call Nature, which we do not also see, 
 as a self-evident fact, inside of Nature. It makes us 
 feel at once that instead of there being any antecedent 
 improbability of there being divers degrees and 
 methods of communication between the universal 
 mind and our own, the antecedent probability is alto- 
 gether in the opposite direction, because it reveals 
 this mind of our own as itself an adapted apparatus — 
 a product of that other mind which is infinitely great 
 to us, and of whose contrivances it is a direct result. 
 The high origin to which this connexion traces the 
 very structure of all our intellectual powers, and of 
 all our spiritual aspirations, carries with it a most 
 firm and rational confidence that when these faculties 
 are carefully and conscientiously used, they may come
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I93 
 
 under illuminations which are cognate with the light of 
 our other intuitions, and may then be competent to 
 carry us to higher and higher knowledge of those 
 other and still more important truths which we know 
 do and must exist, but which, to a great extent, are 
 veiled from our previously unopened eyes. 
 
 And this very hiddenness — its nature and extent — 
 has an immense significance for us. In fact we cannot 
 exhaust the full contents of that one truth on which 
 we have been dwelling so long, until we have defined 
 to ourselves what its limitations are. It is no separate 
 truth, but an essential part of the same truth, that 
 the direct and intuitive recognition of a personal 
 mind, does not of itself amount to any acquaintance 
 with the nature of that mind, beyond its possession 
 of knowledge, and of will, and of power, and of con- 
 structive ingenuity — all to an extent, and under the 
 control of methods, which are inconceivable to us. It 
 is part of its direct contents that this universal mind 
 is — to employ the strong old English word — the Maker 
 of the world, and of ourselves as part of it. But it 
 does not, with the same directness, tell us anything 
 of any characteristics of that mind, nor of any of its 
 relations to our own, other than those of constructive 
 origin or authorship. But this limitation is in itself 
 a part of the fact so intuitively seen, which throws a 
 powerful light on the methods to be pursued in any 
 dealing with those further problems which nearer 
 relations must involve. If on these further problems 
 no light is cast by the intuitive faculty which recog- 
 nizes nothing but a mere constructive mind, even 
 
 o
 
 194 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 although practically infinite in its ingenuity and re- 
 source, then we become conscious of a limit beyond 
 which lies a vast region where our natural ignorance 
 is profound. This consciousness is the legitimate 
 foundation of a true and genuine agnosticism. Its 
 first rational consequence is to inculcate upon us an 
 almost measureless humility in the use and applica- 
 tion of our faculties to the problems which lie within 
 that region. But it does not demand, nor does it 
 even permit, the abdication of those faculties ; nor does 
 it even consist with the notion that no such faculties 
 exist. The natural ignorance of which we are conscious, 
 although indeed profound, is not absolute. If it were 
 absolute we could not be conscious of it. We do, at 
 least, know this about the region of our ignorance, 
 that it is not empty. We know that it must be full of 
 facts inseparably connected with those which run 
 up to the boundary and margin of the unknown, and 
 which are presumably cognate with them. The dis- 
 position, therefore, or attitude of mind, which our 
 consciousness of ignorance ought to take, is humility, 
 but not cowardice. It ought to give us a high sense 
 of the difficulty of using our arms with effect. It 
 ought never to tempt us to lay them down. Our 
 desire of knowledge does not cease where our unaided 
 powers of acquiring it seem to stop. It is according 
 to all the analogies of our intellectual experience that 
 recognition is possible in respect to truth, where to us 
 discovery would have been impossible. 
 
 It is not, therefore, any total distrust of our own 
 faculties, in the highest regions of thought, that is im-
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I95 
 
 pressed upon us by the humility of a true agnosticism ; 
 but it is a total distrust of one particular method of 
 employing them. They cannot spin out of their sub- 
 stance and structure, abstract and purely speculative 
 propositions which can be employed as tests of truth. 
 Abstract conceptions we do, indeed, continually form 
 in the physical sciences, but the validity of these con- 
 ceptions depends entirely on the truthfulness and ac- 
 curacy with which they are abstracted from objective 
 facts. In the absence of such facts they could not 
 be reached at all, and they are only trustworthy in 
 so far as they are found to correspond always with 
 observation and experience. We must be aware of 
 first admitting, and even claiming, total ignorance of 
 objective truth in any region, and then assuming such 
 deep knowledge as enables us to lay down abstract and 
 dogmatic conceptions so clear and valid, that on the 
 strength of them we can refuse to believe the evidence 
 of our senses and of our reason. Yet this is what we 
 do when the facts of adaptation and purpose in Nature 
 are admitted as undeniable, and when, nevertheless, 
 their true and obvious character is repudiated on the 
 strength of some absolute knowledge, which is assumed, 
 that the appearance of purpose must be a delusion, 
 because any mind which can possibly be in Nature 
 must of necessity be so totally different from our 
 own that no possible similarity in methods of opera- 
 tion can be conceived as existing at all. Some minds, 
 perhaps many — entangled in this web of sophistical 
 reasoning — half conscious of the inconsistency it in- 
 volves, and wholly conscious of the helpless confusion 
 
 O %
 
 196 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 to which it leads — have imagined that the only escape 
 from it is to turn round upon their own reason, and 
 to abandon it as an incompetent weapon in the 
 whole region of religious thought. This, however, is 
 nothing but the old story of the bad workman com- 
 plaining of his tools. Our tools are good enough if 
 we use them rightly. Our logical faculties cannot be 
 dispensed with in any department of thought, least 
 of all in that which is the highest. But they them- 
 selves tell us emphatically that they are like a loom, 
 which is absolutely dependent for the character of its 
 product upon the materials which are supplied to it. 
 If we put shoddy into a loom the web it weaves 
 will be shoddy too. Our logical faculties must have 
 solid data to work upon, facts of objective truth, 
 or general axioms of undoubted and self-evident 
 authority derived from these. But no such character 
 belongs to the abstract conceptions which have been 
 employed to choke off our reason from the legiti- 
 mate exercise of its powers in the sphere of religious 
 thought. 
 
 There is no self-evident truth — there is, on the con- 
 trary, self-evident fallacy — in the dogma that the mind 
 which is in Nature must of necessity be so absolutely 
 different from the mind that is in man, that there can 
 be no recognizable relations between them. This 
 dogma does not represent any verifiable fact. Still 
 less does it represent any abstract conception drawn 
 from such facts. It is purely the invention of a corrupt 
 verbal metaphysic. Such meaningless phrases as ' the 
 absolute' or ' the unconditioned ' are invented and used
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 197 
 
 as if they not only had intelligible meaning — which 
 they have not — but as if they expressed some obvious 
 and axiomatic truth. Both parties in the theistic 
 controversy have been guilty of making use of this 
 bad reasoning — those whose notion is that in religion 
 we must believe anything we are told by some external 
 authority, and those, on the other hand, whose notion 
 is that nothing can be believed at all. But our reason, 
 legitimately exercised, rejects both these conclusions 
 as the spurious results of spurious material supplied 
 to our rational apparatus. It is not true that we can 
 know nothing of a thing unless we can know all about 
 it. If this were true it would play havoc as much 
 with science as with religion. There is nothing in the 
 physical sciences of which our knowledge is complete ; 
 nothing, indeed, which does not raise many ulterior 
 questions with which our consciousness tells us we are 
 incompetent to deal. And yet all science is founded 
 upon, and assumes, the intelligibility of Nature within 
 the limits of scientific thought. Beyond these limits 
 we know that there are facts and truth in abundance, 
 some, at least, of which perhaps even a very moderate 
 extension of our faculties, or even only of our oppor- 
 tunitieSj would enable us to apprehend. This is the 
 consideration which, when applied to the correspond- 
 ing sphere of religious thought, inculcates as the 
 highest wisdom the modesty and the teachableness 
 of a true agnosticism. The absolute and instinctive 
 certainty with which we recognize the work of mind 
 in Nature, assures us with an equal certainty of the 
 reality of the existences with which our religious
 
 198 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conceptions are concerned. It assures us that those 
 faculties have an appropriate subject-matter on which 
 there must be ever more and more to be known, if 
 only it can be reached ; whilst at the same time, as 
 regards those faculties themselves, it ought to inspire 
 us with a modest, yet with a confident and a watchful 
 spirit of expectation. The very existence of self- 
 evident truth proves to demonstration that our mind 
 and spirit can have, and actually has, direct knowledge 
 conveyed to it which is of fundamental authority. We 
 cannot say, on any a priori grounds, how much further 
 such intuitions may be carried when our mental appa- 
 ratus is educated and developed by the habitual 
 cultivation of its highest adaptations. But of one 
 thing we may be sure, that all true theology must 
 have its teaching and conceptions continually brought 
 into contact, at a thousand points, with the whole 
 phenomena of Nature, so that congruities and incon- 
 gruities must be liable to gradual discovery. 
 
 The substitution of a genuine for a spurious agnos- 
 ticism is, indeed, a happy result of recognizing the 
 strict limitations which affect the great self-evident 
 truth which we have been tracing and vindicating as an 
 intuitive element in the minds of all men, even of those 
 who are most eager to hide it out of sight. That self- 
 evident truth has, however, many other functions in the 
 innumerable problems which have been started in the 
 history of religious thought. One of these problems it 
 solves completely — or rather it would be more correct 
 to say, it removes it out of the way — as in reality no 
 problem at all. The supposed problem is the ques-
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS I99 
 
 tion on which men have written so laboriously — what 
 is called the origin of religion. Religion — from the 
 lowest superstition of the lowest savages to the elabo- 
 rate mythologies of the most cultivated nations of anti- 
 quity, which so excited the hatred and indignation of 
 Lucretius — reveals itself to be simply the imagina- 
 tive and misguided guesswork of the human mind, in 
 the presence, continually felt, of mental or spiritual 
 agencies other than its own. It is simply the result 
 of men's instinctive endeavours to fill up what is felt 
 to be wanting in our knowledge of those agencies, in 
 respect to character, to dispositions, and to will. It 
 is the certainty of their existence and of their power, 
 in abiding contrast with the comparative uncertainty 
 as to all else concerning them, that, taken together, 
 explains at once the universal prevalence, and yet 
 often the incoherent nature, of those conceptions and 
 beliefs which we call religion. There is, therefore, no 
 mystery at all about its origin. It has the same origin 
 as all other human conceptions and beliefs, namely, 
 our instinctive desire to know more about the inner, 
 and invisible, but ultimate, realities of that system 
 of Nature in which we live. In vain do sceptical 
 schools from time to time arise who deny that any 
 such realities exist at all. Such thoughts have been, 
 and always must be, helpless against the universal 
 consciousness of mankind, that mind and will are 
 everywhere within us and around us, and since their 
 seat, and their character, and their rules of action are 
 not known, all such conceptions about them have to 
 be constructed as best they may, out of traditional
 
 200 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 beliefs, or out of such new imaginations as have been 
 evolved from them. 
 
 The tremendous power of those imaginations can- 
 not be denied. They are still, and ever have been, the 
 one efificient origin and cause of all the most cruel 
 actions and customs which have cursed whole races 
 and generations of mankind. Never did any poet 
 conceive a more pregnant truth than Lucretius when 
 he wrote the famous line — 
 
 Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 
 
 If we hear of any action or custom more foul or cruel 
 than another among, for example, the negro tribes of 
 Africa, or the savages of the South Sea Islands, we 
 may be quite sure to find that it has arisen from some 
 hideous imagination of what is due to spiritual 
 agencies in order to gain their favour, or to deprecate 
 their wrath. It has been so ever since the world 
 began, and it is so still. On the other hand, the 
 total negation of all belief in any spiritual power, is 
 the parent of a most unrestrained ferocity, and cor- 
 ruption, which has emerged in our own time. All 
 these facts, patent and undeniable in the history of 
 the world, cannot fail to impress us with the special 
 conditions under which our intellectual and moral 
 faculties are placed in dealing with the truths which 
 involve all our relations with the universal mind : 
 whilst, at the same time, they impress us quite as 
 much with the paramount power of all conceptions 
 on the subject, over the conduct and the life of men. 
 
 Such a contrast between the supreme importance 
 and effect of this great branch of knowledge, on the
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 20I 
 
 one hand, and the apparent inaccessibility of its facts 
 and principles, on the other hand, is a contrast of 
 which we can never think too much. It cannot 
 shake, even for a moment, our confidence in the self- 
 evident existence which, as we have seen, is so 
 universally impressed upon us ; neither can it shake 
 our confidence in the reality of those other relations 
 with that existence, which must prevail, because they 
 are involved in our very conception of it. But it does 
 carry home to us the truth that, for any advance in 
 our knowledge of those relations, the very highest 
 faculties of the mind must be called into action, and 
 must be employed under all the conditions of care 
 and thought, and of systematic work, on which all 
 other branches of knowledge depend. 
 
 It would be a great error to suppose that in the 
 physical sciences any more than in religion, we ever 
 do, or ever can escape from the consciousness of 
 limitations on the faculties with which we work — 
 limitations of opportunity, at least, which render it 
 quite impossible for us really to grasp or understand 
 a multitude of conceptions with which, nevertheless, 
 we are made familiar as representing unseen realities of 
 the highest rank. There is not one of those sciences 
 in which we can escape from being confronted not 
 only with questions that are insoluble, but with con- 
 ceptions that are seen ' as through a glass darkly.' 
 In physics the nature of gravitation lies hid in the 
 deepest mystery. In chemistry the nature of that 
 selective attraction which we call affinity is equally 
 unknown. In light the nature of the medium which
 
 202 INTUITIVE THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conveys it, involves conceptions which are not only- 
 difficult but seem as if they were contradictory. 
 Dr. Thomas Young, in whose truly inspired mind the 
 conception of the ether arose, said of it that we must 
 think of it as permeating all matter as freely as the air 
 passes through a grov^e of trees. Yet we are also told 
 that we must conceive of it, none the less, as far more 
 rigid than steel, because of the velocity with which it 
 transmits vibrations. We are now daily and nightly 
 handling electricity in many of its forms of energy, 
 yet we are as ignorant of its ultimate nature, and 
 as unable to conceive the causes of its properties, as 
 when Volta first noted the convulsions of a dead 
 frog's legs on an iron balcony in Bologna. And so 
 it is through all the physical sciences. Yet in all of 
 them these prison bars, pressing, as it were, upon our 
 very faces, are compatible with the most absolute 
 certainty of the reality and truthfulness of such 
 measure of knowledge as we have reached. That 
 truthfulness and reality is carried home to us by 
 a thousand corroborations from phenomena which, 
 in some real measure and degree, our knowledge is 
 sufficient to explain, since it often enables us to re- 
 produce them, and still more often to foresee them. 
 Profound as are the differences between every purely 
 physical, and every purely spiritual conception, there 
 is yet this one common property which belongs to all 
 conceptions whether of one kind or another, namely 
 this, that no truth stands alone, solitary, unrelated to 
 other truths in the same region of thought. Every 
 true conception has, and must have, many points of
 
 IV] ITS LIMITATIONS 203 
 
 contact with other truths, which may, or may not, be 
 seen. The consequence of this is, that deep-seated 
 relations between truths which outwardly may seem 
 to be wholly separate, are perpetually coming out 
 and, as it were, betraying themselves in the progress 
 of discovery or of speculation. And in proportion as 
 they emerge into the light of our recognition, they 
 build up a structure of mutual support and corrobora- 
 tion which, more than anything else, gives a sense of 
 certainty to our knowledge. This accords with our 
 experience in all departments of investigation, and 
 it must be especially characteristic of any true con- 
 ceptions of our relations to that mind which we see 
 and know to be so all-pervading. It is upon that 
 mind that the obvious unity of Nature must depend, 
 and any conception concerning its character, which 
 is true at all, must have its truth continually tested 
 and confirmed by its observed conformity with other 
 conceptions derivable from every part of the system 
 in which we live. A true theology, like a true cos- 
 mology, must therefore shine by its own internal 
 light. It cannot be expected, indeed, to solve all 
 mysteries, or to make plain to our very limited under- 
 standings, things which may well be inconceivable to 
 us. But, so far as it goes, it ought to be found fitting 
 in with all that we can discover or conceive of the 
 co-ordinated laws which we see prevailing in ourselves 
 and in the world around us.
 
 Chapter V. 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS. 
 
 ON THE CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD. 
 
 Christian theology is founded upon, but expands 
 and glorifies, the older theology of the Jewish Church. 
 No word, or name, which has been used to express 
 the central thought of other religious systems, con- 
 veys any adequate conception of the essence of that 
 theology. It is not mere Theism. It is not mere 
 Monotheism. Still less does it partake, in the least 
 degree, of the thought of Pantheism. Mere Theism 
 and m.ere Monotheism may be, and generally are, 
 bare and bald conceptions of a Being having no 
 known or knowable relations with the world or with 
 man. Pantheism is essentially materialistic, leaving no 
 natural or consistent place for spiritual things. The 
 Jewish conception of the Divine Being, was absolutely 
 different from all of these. He was above all things 
 knowable, not indeed in His ultimate essence, but in 
 all those relations which are familiar to ourselves as 
 constituting Personality. He is indeed the Author 
 of Nature. But Nature was never thought of as con- 
 stituting Him. He is the Father of our spirits, but 
 He was never identified with their weaknesses or
 
 CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 205 
 
 corruptions. Such independence of will as we are 
 conscious of possessing, this theology does not deny 
 to us, but, on the contrary, asserts and dwells upon 
 as essential to our understanding of Divine things. 
 The God of the Jews was, indeed, the supreme Ruler 
 of the world, and the ultimate triumph of that rule is 
 the perpetual hope and prophecy of the faithful. But 
 He is always represented as encountering, in the mean- 
 time, the opposition of rebellious wills. And one of the 
 most striking parts of this theology, is its conception 
 of the nature and methods of the Divine government 
 under these conditions. That conception was essen- 
 tially the conception of one universal reign of law, 
 so that nothing was, or could be, done except by the 
 use of some appropriate and appointed means. Even 
 the Divine Will itself was conceived as submitting 
 to its own laws, and as, in regard to them, incapable 
 of any ' variableness or shadow of turning.' Without 
 attempting to penetrate into a region which is 
 obviously inaccessible to our powers, namely, the 
 ultimate relation between the Divine Mind and those 
 rules or laws according to which it works, the theo- 
 logy of the Jews did reach and teach this grand 
 conception — that those laws are not only ultimate and 
 immutable, but constitute the very life of Nature, the 
 source of its authority, the one sole cause of all its 
 order and all its beauty, and the one only guide to 
 its purposes and interpretation. 
 
 Our familiarity with the books of the Old Testa- 
 ment is very apt to dull our perception of the unique 
 phenomena which in this high matter, they present in
 
 2o6 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 the history of religious thought. So far as the mere 
 incidental forms of their language are concerned, it is 
 largely local, ancestral, tribal, national. The Divine 
 Being is emphatically the God of Abraham, of Isaac, 
 and of Jacob. His worship is in Jerusalem, the 
 capital of a narrow country between the Jordan and 
 the sea. His habitation is on Mount Zion. He is 
 the God who has done great things for the children 
 of Israel as a chosen and a peculiar people. Although 
 this language, when interpreted in the sense which is 
 determined by a thousand contexts, is perfectly con- 
 sistent with the central idea of the Jewish theology, 
 there is at first sight a seeming contradiction. Yet 
 there can be no doubt as to what that central idea is. 
 It is that Jehovah is not only the God of the whole 
 earth, but of the whole universe of created things. 
 This is the emphatic teaching of the sublime Cos- 
 mogony which stands at the opening of the Jewish 
 Scriptures. It stamps as secondary and derivative 
 every later word which dwells on special aspects of 
 the relations between the Almighty and the beings 
 whom He has formed. These special aspects are, 
 indeed, not only consistent with, but they are a neces- 
 sary consequence of, the dominant idea that Jehovah 
 is not an abstraction but a Person — not a mere symbol 
 of something vaguely designated by such words as 
 Nature, but a Being possessed of that which we know 
 in ourselves as Will — One who works for ever, and 
 works unceasingly, in the maintenance and govern- 
 ment of the system which we see. 
 
 It is a necessary consequence of that idea that
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 207 
 
 special aspects of His work, of His character, and of 
 His will, should be impressed upon us in the different 
 phases of our own human life, as well as in different 
 aspects of what we loosely call external Nature. But 
 in the Jewish theology the great principle which con- 
 nects these aspects with each other is never missed. 
 That principle is the universal reign of laws which we 
 can see and know to be intelligible and righteous. In 
 that theology there is no playing with words which are 
 confessedly ' unthinkable,' but which are nevertheless 
 deliberately coined, and then used, as if they were 
 capable of serving a useful purpose in the cause of 
 knowledge and of rational thought. God is not ' the 
 Unconditioned' nor 'the Absolute,' nor any other 
 inconceivable and irrational contradiction. He is the 
 God of Nature as a whole, and of man in particular as 
 the only one of His creatures, so far as known to us, 
 who is capable of having towards Him the conscious 
 relations of knowledge and of love. It is an essential 
 part of this conception that the Divine Being works 
 always, whether we see it or not, through the employ- 
 ment, as means, of those methods and agencies which 
 are known to us as natural laws. It sets aside with 
 a lofty and supreme contempt the notion that this 
 principle of government implies what are called 
 'limitations,' and that any such limitations are in- 
 consistent with some pretended knowledge which we 
 have reached by mere thinking, as to the ultimate 
 nature of the Godhead. In this idea the theology of 
 the Jews is strictly scientific in its spirit ; that is 
 to say, it takes the system of Nature as it is seen
 
 2o8 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 to be. It sits, as it were, at the feet of fact. It do'es 
 not pretend to any abstract or a priori knowledge 
 of the uhimate nature of things, which is incon- 
 sistent with intelHgible interpretations of observed 
 phenomena. Instead of starting with the absurd 
 postulate that the mind of man can have no analogy 
 with the Supreme Mind, from which nevertheless it is 
 presumably derived, it accepts the obvious truth that, 
 as a matter of fact, the whole creative and constructive 
 work carried on in Nature exhibits, everywhere, that 
 continual adjustment of means to ends, which is not 
 only perfectly intelligible to us, but is the familiar 
 principle on which alone we can work ourselves. 
 
 We have seen how universal and instinctive — 
 although often unconscious — is the recognition by all 
 men of this principle in Nature — how it permeates 
 and inspires even the very structure of human speech. 
 It is in the light of this principle that we can see the 
 perfect consistency with which the language of Jewish 
 theology passes constantly from the largest, to the 
 most local, aspects of the Divine dealings with man- 
 kind. It is perfectly true that it is perpetually 
 referring to Him as the God of Israel, and to the 
 children of that ancestor as His chosen people. But 
 it is equally true that it continually explains that 
 choice as having had a reason in the past, and as having 
 a purpose in the future. The reason was the oppor- 
 tunity offered by the existence of an exceptionally 
 faithful and devout mind in one individual man and 
 in his family ; whilst the purpose was that through 
 this man and his descendants, an exceptional recog-
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 209 
 
 nition and knowledge of the true God should become 
 the universal inheritance of mankind. This conception 
 of the purpose and of the reason for the call of 
 Abraham is no afterthought, or mere development 
 of religious consciousness in the theology of the Jews. 
 The announcement of it stands in the forefront of the 
 narrative which enshrines the earliest history and 
 tradition of the race. The promise to Abraham, ' I 
 will make of thee a great nation ^/ does indeed come 
 first ; but in its own nature it is a lesser promise than 
 that which follows, ' and in thee shall all the families 
 of the earth be blessed^.' There is nothing unin- 
 telligible either in the reason given, or in the 
 instrumentality employed, or in the purpose declared, 
 in this explanation of the origin of the Jewish people 
 and of the Jewish Church. But the whole of it does 
 essentially imply, and rest upon, the idea that for the 
 accomplishment of purpose, even the Divine Being 
 operates through what we know as causes, and not 
 by mere arbitrary or capricious exercises of irresistible 
 power. 
 
 The selection of one man, and the perpetuation of 
 one family inheriting from him not only special gifts 
 and graces but some definite beliefs, is an adaptation 
 to the highest uses, of many facts that are familiar to 
 us in the secular history of our race. The sudden 
 appearance, even in very corrupt societies, of indi- 
 vidual men endowed with an extraordinarily high 
 character, both intellectually and morally, has occurred 
 over and over again in the course of history. Marcus 
 
 •* Gen. xii. 2. ^ Gen. xii. 3. 
 
 P
 
 2IO THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 Aurelius among the Roman emperors, Akbar among 
 the Mogul rulers of India, are well-known examples. 
 Nor is it less important to note that the failure of 
 such men to establish any lasting improvement in the 
 happiness of the world, was due mainly in the first 
 place to the complete detachment or separation of 
 their own personal aspirations from all belief in any 
 definite spiritual facts, and in the second place to bad 
 social and political institutions which could not em- 
 body or transmit the good influences due to mere 
 individual character. Tender, touching, and beautiful 
 as were the sentiments of the greater Stoics in classical 
 times, and even sublime as were the conceptions 
 inspired by the pure abstract IMonotheism of the 
 Moslem in the mind of Akbar, nothing in the his- 
 tory of religion is more marked than the absolute 
 sterility of both these schools of thought, as influences 
 for good in, and upon, the world. And the simple 
 explanation is that neither of them had any hold on 
 the conception either of definite facts, or of definite 
 laws, as existing and prevailing in the spiritual world. 
 They might almost be compared, in organic Nature, to 
 an elaborate set of muscles and of all the softer tissues, 
 without any points of attachment to a framework of 
 solid bones, or to the strings and pulleys by which the 
 leverage of living activities is worked. The faith of 
 Abraham, however we may suppose it to have come 
 to him, was on the contrary a living and practical 
 belief in the greatest of all realities — the existence of 
 a living and personal God who is the Author of Nature, 
 the Father of men, and who can and does speak to
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 211 
 
 them in audible voices of direct and positive com- 
 mand. This was a belief which it was indeed worth 
 while to organize in the continuous tenure of an 
 hereditary family — of a growing tribe — and finally of 
 a settled nation, reminded in every stage of its 
 development of the special gift conveyed to it, not 
 for its own sake only, but for the sake of the whole 
 race of man. 
 
 It is this conception which glorifies and transfigures 
 all that language of the Old Testament which seems 
 at first sight to be purely local, and to minister to 
 nothing but the pride and vainglory of a small and 
 presumptuous people. This note is struck, as we have 
 seen, at the very beginning of the historical books, and 
 it swells in volume and in the magnificence of its 
 tone, throughout the whole series of the prophets 
 and of the singers of Israel. Considering the fierce 
 passions of pride and of exclusiveness which were 
 undoubtedly connected with the claim and conscious- 
 ness of the Jews that they and they alone enjoyed the 
 Divine favour — considering the thorough sympathy in 
 at least one aspect of this claim which was felt by their 
 sacred writers — it is remarkable how the abuse and 
 misconception of it was made by them the subject of 
 continual condemnation and rebuke, and how all the 
 fire of their own enthusiasm bursts perpetually out 
 in their visions of a universal Church, of which their 
 own Zion was but the passing symbol. Very often 
 the two strains of language are used in the closest 
 juxtaposition, as not only consistent, but in their 
 minds identical in their significance for the future of 
 
 P 3
 
 212 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 the spiritual life. Among the innumerable passages 
 of the Old Testament which illustrate this, there is per- 
 haps none more typical than the opening verse of the 
 fiftieth Psalm. Nothing, on the one hand, can be more 
 absolute and majestic than the words which express 
 the universality of the call which the Jewish people 
 were commissioned to announce to all nations — ' The 
 mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called 
 the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going 
 down thereof.' Nothing, on the other hand, can be 
 more personal and touching than the national and 
 local sentiment expressed for that loved spot on 
 earth — that radiant point — whence this voice was to 
 become most clearly audible to men : — ' Out of Zion, 
 the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.' 
 
 The Jews never thought or spoke of themselves 
 as a nation which had chosen its own God or its own 
 religion. They spoke always of one only God, the 
 one only object of religious thought, who had chosen 
 them as His own nation. He was not conceived as 
 taking the place among them which among other 
 peoples was taken by Bel or Ashtoreth and the 
 other innumerable divinities whose special favour was 
 claimed in return for a special worship. The tribal, 
 and ultimately the national, existence and polity of 
 the Hebrews, was to be in itself wholly founded upon, 
 and constituted only for, a Divine reason and with 
 a Divine purpose ; the reason being primarily a special 
 aptitude for the reception of the highest truths in 
 the hereditary character of one great mind and soul. 
 Not because of their numbers, or of any mere military
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 213 
 
 Strength, were they chosen, since even when at the 
 height of their power they were, as compared with 
 other nations round them, and as their own prophets 
 took care to remind them, 'the fewest of all people.' 
 They were chosen solely to enshrine a true belief, 
 a belief in the greatest of all facts, and to save that 
 belief from being lost in a world which had become 
 to the last degree ignorant, brutalized, and rebellious. 
 And the reality and vividness of this belief was kept 
 up not only by a political organization which was 
 peculiar, but also by a long series of special dealings 
 through which the idea of Divine interposition and 
 guidance was burnt in, as it were, into the very blood 
 and marrow of the chosen race. 
 
 The employment and adaptation of means to ends 
 for the attainment of purpose, is of the very essence 
 of the whole of this history. And be it remembered 
 that it is a history w'hich in all its main outlines has 
 been established on evidence as continuous and as 
 certain as any other series of events within our know- 
 ledge of the past. It is a series of events of which 
 one great physical fact remains the outstanding witness 
 to the present day — namely, the still continued pre- 
 servation of the Jewish people under conditions which 
 stamp it as a solitary fact in the annals of mankind. 
 That what are called natural causes have been the 
 agency employed there is no reason to doubt, and no 
 occasion to dispute. The sacred writers of the Jews 
 never admitted for a moment that irrational distinction, 
 which is purely modern, between what we choose to 
 call the natural and the supernatural. Between the
 
 214 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 physical and the spiritual they did, indeed, constantly 
 distinguish ; but they habitually regarded all .purely 
 physical forces as servants of the one Supreme and 
 Universal Mind. They were never shy of referring to 
 the use made of them, even in the most apparently 
 miraculous events, however apparently inadequate are 
 the causes sometimes mentioned, when considered 
 in the light of mere physical explanations. Thus, in- 
 ordinate rains, and, in addition, some great physical 
 catastrophe which is described under the striking 
 formula of ' the breaking up of all the fountains of 
 the great deep,' are the proximate and physical causes 
 assigned by the writer of Genesis 'to that wide sub- 
 mergence of the land under the waters of the sea 
 which is known to us in the tradition of the Flood ^. 
 Thus, again, the passage of the Israelites through the 
 Red Sea in their flight from Egypt, is still more spe- 
 cifically connected with the employment of a purely 
 physical cause — ' And the Lord caused the sea to go 
 back by reason of a strong east wind all that night ^.' 
 Nor in the cases where the Hebrew writers do not 
 mention any physical cause in connexion with the 
 wonders which they relate, is it safe or even reason- 
 able to assume that none such were used. Thus the 
 arrest of a great river in the fullness of its flow, is 
 a greater physical wonder than the temporary retire- 
 ment of an arm of the sea from its accustomed shores. 
 And yet the passage dry-shod of the Jordan-bed by 
 the Israelites under Joshua, is narrated in the Old 
 Testament without any allusion to any physical 
 
 ' Gen. vii. ii. ^ Exod. xiv. 21.
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 215 
 
 agency whatever to account for an event so strange. 
 Nevertheless it is now known that a similar event, 
 precisely, occurred again in the thirteenth century of 
 our era, at the same place, and is explained by the 
 Arabian historian who records it as having been due 
 to the falling of a great mass of earth and gravel into 
 the bed of the river some miles above the point where 
 its effects were seen. 
 
 The story of the Flood has no exclusive connexion 
 with the Hebrew people, except this, that although 
 traditions of some such great catastrophe are, as the 
 French Orientalist, Lenormant, has well established, 
 so widely spread that they may almost be said to 
 be universal, yet it is in the Hebrew literature alone 
 that it assumes a character which even pretends to 
 be historical. The Babylonish account looks very 
 like a corrupted edition of the same story. The 
 modern science of geology has, until very lately, 
 almost assumed its purely mythical character, or, 
 at least, that it represents nothing but the enormous 
 exaggeration of some merely local inundation. And 
 this has been assumed upon the ground that no 
 physical cause is known, or is conceivable, which 
 could have produced the described effects. Gradually, 
 however, in recent years, some geologists, of the 
 highest rank in the science \ have opened their 
 eyes to see the presence of abundant physical 
 evidence of the fact that amongst the most recent 
 of all the causes which have determined the super- 
 ficial phenomena of the earth's surface, there must 
 
 ^ Notabl}' Sir Joseph Prestwich.
 
 2l6 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 have been, not indeed a universal deluge over the 
 whole globe at any one time, but a transitory sub- 
 mergence of the land beneath the waters of the 
 sea — a submergence, however, so wide in area as to 
 include apparently the whole northern hemisphere 
 down to the latitudes of the Mediterranean. The 
 death in millions of an older fauna, and the mode in 
 which their remains are aggregated, and huddled, 
 and packed, into rents and fissures of the rocks ; the 
 distribution also of rolled gravels in some areas, and 
 of quiet muddy sediment in others — these, with the 
 phenomena of glaciation in special districts, leave no 
 doubt in my mind that such a submergence did 
 actually take place, and has been the very latest of 
 all the great agencies of change which have operated 
 on the surface of the globe. The physical causes to 
 which such a movement may have been due, are as 
 yet to us a pure matter of speculation and of inquiry. 
 But they are by no means inconceivable. There are 
 tremendous forces locked up in the bowels of the 
 earth; and we know that our habitual confidence in 
 the stability of the sea level, and of the permanence of 
 its relations to the solid land, is a confidence founded 
 on an infinitesimally short experience. As regards all 
 the longer periods of the earth's history, it is con- 
 tradicted by innumerable facts. The uniformitarian 
 doctrine, once so confidently taught, has ceased to 
 hold the field. We have learned to discriminate 
 between the permanency or continuity of causes, and 
 any supposed uniformity in their effects. It has come 
 to be admitted that the most sudden and violent
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 21 7 
 
 effects may be the result of causes which have been 
 operating with the most perfect continuity for ages 
 without any visible results. Moreover, further re- 
 flection has opened our eyes to see that effects which 
 appear to us to be enormous in amount, may in 
 reality be very small and even minute, on the scale 
 on which our globe is made. A submergence to the 
 extent of, say, 2, coo feet would be more than enough 
 to produce all the distinctive effects ascribed to the 
 Deluge, and would nevertheless be absolutely invisible 
 to a spectator stationed at a very small distance in 
 space outside our planet. But the main point to be 
 observed here is that in the Hebrew theology even 
 this catastrophe, with its tremendous effects on living 
 things, is represented as having been brought about 
 by physical causes, and that these again are shadowed 
 forth under forms of language wonderfully adequate 
 to cover and convey the largest conceptions of their 
 possible nature. 
 
 And this continues to be characteristic of the 
 language of the Hebrew Scriptures throughout their 
 whole variety and extent. Many indeed of the 
 occurrences and events connected with the original 
 selection and the continuous development of the 
 children of Abraham, which appear to us to be so 
 abnormal as to be either mythical or what are 
 commonly called miraculous, were in reality quite 
 according to the ordinary course of things under the 
 then existing conditions of human society. The idea 
 of one man with his family being suddenly moved to 
 leave his kindred and his country in order to seek
 
 2l8 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 elsewhere a new home wherein he might found 
 a new nation ; the idea of such a migration having 
 been determined by some purely religious motive, such 
 as disgust with surrounding wickedness, or the audible 
 call of some Divine voice ; the idea of such a family 
 settling in a country as yet unoccupied but fertile, 
 and there multiplying by mere breeding for four 
 centuries until they had grown into a considerable 
 people ; the idea of their being not conquered and 
 expelled, but simply enslaved by the native rulers of 
 the country ; the idea of their seeking to escape in 
 a body from a land which had become a land of bond- 
 age, of their wandering for many years in regions 
 comparatively barren ; the idea of a whole nation 
 being carried away captive by a conqueror, being 
 kept separate in captivity, and then suddenly allowed 
 to return to their old land ; — all these constitute 
 a series of transactions and events so absolutely 
 different from any of which we have any experi- 
 ence in modern times, that we are very apt to think 
 of it as unreal, and as so contrary to the ordinary 
 course of human events as to be difficult of belief. 
 But when we remember our absolute ignorance of the 
 ages, however many or however few, which must 
 have elapsed between the first introduction of man 
 upon the earth and the very earliest dawn of any- 
 thing that we can accept as authentic history ; when 
 we remember the wonderful facts accomplished during 
 that dark time in connexion with the multiplication, 
 distribution, and dispersion of mankind — facts which 
 meet our eyes when the curtain first rises on the
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 2I9 
 
 scene ; when, further, we consider the fresh and 
 authentic evidence which the decipherment of ancient 
 inscriptions has lately cast upon primitive times, we 
 must come to the conclusion that all those events and 
 transactions were such as did certainly characterize the 
 genesis and birth of nations in their earlier dealings 
 and fightings with each other. And so the idea 
 becomes familiar to us that natural causes may 
 well have been used first to constitute, and then to 
 localize, in one nation, certain characters of mind 
 and soul, and a certain knowledge of spiritual facts, 
 which were to be of infinite value to the whole world. 
 This, at all events, is the consistent idea which inspires 
 the whole literature and religion of the Hebrews, 
 and which rose to its loftiest expression in the face 
 of the most immanent and the most overwhelm- 
 ing national calamities. In the songs and prophecies 
 of Israel there is a most wonderful combination of 
 those two conceptions which other religions have 
 found it so impossible to combine — an adequate 
 conception, on the one hand, of the power of God, 
 and a profound conviction that His power is always 
 used through the use of appropriate means. It was 
 this that saved their sense of national glory from 
 swelling into pride, and that gives a character of 
 truthfulness and sublimity to their predictions which 
 stands absolutely alone in the history of human 
 thought. 
 
 But there is another conception about the method 
 of the Divine action on the world, which is quite as 
 important, and quite as peculiar to the Hebrews, as
 
 220 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 their idea of the universal reign of law — and that is 
 the idea of the Divine laws being intelligible to man, 
 and of their being recognizable by him as having 
 a moral character, from their being in themselves 
 just and righteous. 
 
 Here again we are apt to miss one of the most 
 striking facts connected with the Hebrew theology 
 from the double sense in which the word ' law' is used. 
 ' The Law,' as is well known, is the technical name 
 given by the Jews to one whole division of their 
 sacred books, that in which we have the account of 
 the promulgation both of the moral and of the cere- 
 monial code, much of which was peculiar to them- 
 selves. But this is not the sense in which the Divine 
 law is referred to always, or even principally, in the 
 language of the Old Testament. Just as in the case 
 of the apparent national narrowness and exclusive- 
 ness of the Jews, we are apt to forget the purpose of 
 it, so in the particular code of observances laid down 
 for them, we are equally apt to forget that element 
 of universality which it was intended to embody and 
 enshrine. Yet here also, just in the one case as in 
 the other, the distinction is indicated from the begin- 
 ning, and the moral and universal meaning and value 
 of every form of worship and of ceremonial, is 
 shadowed forth in the simplest and earliest touches 
 of narrative and of allusion. In relating the two very 
 first recorded acts of sacrifice, the Hebrew writer 
 takes care to intimate that there was nothing arbitrary 
 or capricious in the preference shown to one over his 
 brother worshipper, but only the necessary result of
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 221 
 
 that eternal difference which must always divide 
 between the acts of worship of a faithful and of an 
 unfaithful heart. *^And the Lord said unto Cain, Why 
 art thou wroth ? and why is thy countenance fallen ? 
 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and 
 if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door^.' 
 
 This early vindication of the Divine law which 
 determines the acceptableness of all worship in beings 
 who have a moral and responsible nature, is a typical 
 example of the note which sounds more and more 
 loudly as we advance in the developed theology of 
 the Jews. Behind and beneath all the language of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures which refers to the ceremonial 
 or ritual system of the nation, there is always the 
 underlying principle asserted that the whole system 
 of natural laws, whether in the physical or in the 
 spiritual world, is nothing but the supreme expres- 
 sion of a Divine Will which is not only all-powerful 
 but all-righteous. Nothing can be more striking 
 than the persistence with which this conception is 
 carried through in the lofty spirituality of the prophets 
 and of the Psalms. It is true that the symbolism 
 of the Levitical ritual is constantly referred to, but 
 it is not less true that this reference is one of con- 
 demnation, and even of disgust, whenever the symbols 
 are regarded only in themselves, or as divorced from 
 the spiritual realities which they were intended to 
 express. So strong indeed is the language used on 
 this subject by the sacred writers of the Hebrews, 
 that it is difficult to reconcile it with even any 
 
 ' Gen. iv. 6, 7.
 
 222 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 tolerance of the national forms of worship. Barbarous 
 and impossible as the practice of animal sacrifice seems 
 to us now — horrible and revolting as is the very 
 idea of the altar of God reeking with the blood 
 of victims as an acceptable offering to the Most 
 High — it is a real difficulty to believe or to under- 
 stand how, or why, forms of worship so gross could 
 ever have formed part of institutions which were 
 Divinely commanded or even Divinely tolerated. 
 Nothing but the comparative innocence and com- 
 parative purity of these forms of worship, when 
 contrasted with the hideously cruel and licentious 
 rites of surrounding and kindred nations ; nothing 
 but the conception that the guidance of man in 
 religious knowledge has been, somehow of necessity, 
 conducted through steps and stages of instruction — 
 nothing but this can reconcile us to practices of 
 worship which made a slaughter-house of the temple 
 of the living God. It is, therefore, an unspeakable 
 comfort and satisfaction to find that those great 
 thinkers of the Hebrew race, who were undoubtedly 
 the highest interpreters of its theology, attacked 
 animal sacrifice not only as in itself useless when 
 unaccompanied by the spiritual devotion which was 
 of its very essence, but that they attacked in its very 
 principle the fundamental conception on which all 
 external acts of sacrifice were founded, whether those 
 acts were the slaughtering of beasts or the presenta- 
 tion as a gift to God of any other material thing. 
 They represented and exposed the futility of any 
 creature thinking that it could make an acceptable
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 223 
 
 present to the Creator of anything whatever out of 
 a materia] world which was all His own: — ^I will 
 take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of 
 thy folds. For every beast of the forest is Mine, and 
 the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls 
 of the mountains ; and the wild beasts of the field 
 are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee : 
 for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof \' This 
 language goes to the root of the whole conception 
 of sacrifice considered as an offering of anything 
 that comes from the material world. It condemns that 
 conception as obviously carnal, and as involving ideas 
 of the Divine Nature which are not only inadequate, 
 but irrational, and unworthy. 
 
 The habit, which is conspicuous in this passage, of 
 appealing to the human reason as a power having the 
 very highest functions to discharge in the sphere of 
 religious belief, is a habit persistent in the great 
 teachers of the Jewish Church. It is inseparably 
 connected with the conviction under which they spoke, 
 that the truths which they proclaimed were facts and 
 not imaginations, that these truths were the expres- 
 sion of natural and necessary laws, and that they are 
 self-luminous in the eyes of men when once those 
 eyes have been opened to the understanding of them. 
 This conviction, and its corresponding language, never 
 fails the prophets or the singers of Israel, and it leads 
 them to the profoundest utterances, not merely in 
 denouncing what was obviously wrong, but in pro- 
 claiming what ought to have been obviously true. 
 
 1 Ps. 1. 9, II.
 
 224 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 And this is pre-eminently remarkable in their teach- 
 ing on the dark and difficult subject of sacrifice. The 
 ground of reason on which they denounced the formal, 
 or what may be called the superstitious, view of it, 
 was, as we have seen, the supreme power and owner- 
 ship of Jehovah over all the creatures of His hands, 
 so that it was irrational, if not blasphemous, to suppose 
 that He could be gratified by external or material 
 gifts. 
 
 But the Hebrew writers had firm hold of another 
 fact in Nature, and that is the free will of man. His 
 heart, his affections, and his obedience, were at least 
 sufficiently his own to enable him to give or to with- 
 hold them. When these were freely given they were 
 in reality and in truth acceptable to the Most High. 
 This is the universal conception and language of the 
 prophets. In all their denunciations of the outward 
 practices of sacrifice, they never failed to dwell on the 
 counterpart which was indeed genuine and of ines- 
 timable value. They always represented this distinc- 
 tion, too, as founded on the nature of things. They 
 never abandoned, indeed, the conception of the power 
 of the Supreme Being even over the wills of men. 
 They speak of the hearts of kings being in His hands 
 and of His turning them wheresoever He will. But 
 they assume the perfect truthfulness of that conscious- 
 ness of at least a limited and delegated freedom which 
 is universal in man — which is the indispensable con- 
 dition of all his moral judgements — and which is all 
 that speculative philosophy can reconcile with the 
 phenomena of human life. They see, and feel, and
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 225 
 
 know as a fact, that this delegated freedom does exist, 
 and constitutes a natural and necessary responsibility 
 in its use. The one thing which man possesses as 
 his own, and the one thing, therefore, which he has 
 it really in his power to give — that one thing when 
 freely rendered to the Creator — is always represented 
 as not only a true, but as the only true sacrifice which 
 he can render. Hosea, one of the earliest of those 
 teachers, heralds it as a universal truth : ' For I 
 desired mercy, and not sacrifice ; and the knowledge 
 of God more than burnt offerings \' Amos is still 
 more emphatic : ' Though ye offer Me burnt offerings 
 and your meat offerings, I will not accept them : 
 neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat 
 beasts. . . . But let judgment run down as waters, 
 and righteousness as a mighty stream ^.' 
 
 This distinction, and contrast, runs through the 
 whole of the prophets. Samuel proclaims it in 
 the most absolute terms: ' Behold, to obey is better 
 than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams ^.' 
 Isaiah enforces it in detail under the form of an ex- 
 hortation to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, to 
 whose proverbial corruption he thus likens the wicked- 
 ness of the Jews, in spite of all their sacrifices and 
 other ceremonial observances. He calls upon them 
 ' to listen to the law of our God ' as the one essential 
 condition of all true worship, and then bursts out into 
 the indignant question : ' To what purpose is the 
 multitude of your sacrifices unto Me ? I am full of 
 the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; 
 
 ^ Hos. vi. 6. ^ Amos v. 22, 24. ^ i Sam. xv. 22.
 
 226 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH, 
 
 and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of 
 lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear 
 before Me, who hath required this at your hand, to 
 tread My courts ? Bring no more vain oblations ; 
 incense is an abomination unto Me^.' Jeremiah, in 
 the terrible arraignment which he brings against the 
 unrighteousness of life which had come to prevail 
 among the Jews in his time, puts into the sharpest 
 contrast the only true sacrifice which men can 
 give, and even the costliest material offerings which 
 they could offer from their native flocks, or such 
 precious things as they could procure from foreign 
 lands. Moreover this conception so dwells on the 
 mind of the great prophet that he heralds it with 
 a summons to attention which is addressed not 
 to Jews only, but to all nations : * Therefore hear, ye 
 nations, and know, O congregation, what is among 
 them. Hear, O earth : behold, I will bring evil upon 
 this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because 
 they have not hearkened unto My words, nor to My 
 law, but have rejected it. To what purpose cometh 
 there to Me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane 
 from a far country? your burnt offerings are not 
 acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto Me ^.' 
 
 In these words we have one of those touches 
 of far-reaching penetration into the ultimate nature of 
 things, which are common in the sacred writers of the 
 Hebrews, and which, perhaps, more than anything 
 else, enables us to understand that in which special 
 inspiration consists. For not only does this passage 
 
 ' Isa. i. 11-13. 2 Jer. vi. 18-20.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 227 
 
 indicate the law — at once natural, rational, and divine 
 — on which all true sacrifice must depend, but it indi- 
 cates also the law on which sin depends, and under 
 which the punishments of it are brought about. The 
 evil which was to be brought upon the people is 
 described as ' even the fruit of their own thoughts ' in 
 the rejection of ordinances which were recognizable 
 as Divine. So thoroughly had these repeated utter- 
 ances of the prophets, on the nature of sacrifice, gained 
 acceptance as establishing a fundamental doctrine of 
 the Hebrew theology, that we find another emphatic 
 expression of it among the epigrammatic sayings 
 which, on account of their wisdom, are ascribed to 
 Solomon in the Book of Proverbs : ' The sacrifice of 
 the wicked is an abomination to the Lord : but the 
 prayer of the righteous is His delight^.' But on this 
 doctrine, as on most others, it is in the Psalms that 
 we find Hebrew theology rising to the highest 
 level of spiritual conception : ' Offer the sacrifices of 
 righteousness, and put your trust in the Lord ^.' 
 ' Sacrifice and burnt offering Thou didst not desire ; 
 mine ears hast Thou opened : burnt offering and sin 
 offering hast Thou not required. I delight to do Thy 
 will, O my God : yea, Thy law is within my heart ^.' 
 ' The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit : a broken 
 and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise ^.' 
 
 The whole group of ideas which are thus deeply 
 rooted in the theology of the Hebrews, is a group 
 inseparably connected with the doctrine that religion 
 is founded, not on mere sentiment or speculation, but 
 
 ' Prov. XV. 8. ' Ps. iv. 5. ^ pg. xl. 6, 8. * Ps. li. 17. 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 on the perception of certain objective truths which 
 are the great realities of the spiritual world. They 
 go deep into the nature and character of the Godhead, 
 into the relations between man and his Creator, and 
 into one, at least, of the most fundamental principles of 
 the Divine government. That government it repre- 
 sents as essentially a reign of law, and the supremacy 
 of a causation which is as natural as the causation 
 seen in organic structures, inasmuch as it can be 
 recognized as worked, and working, in the same great 
 service of an assigned order and of an ultimate 
 purpose. 
 
 But there is another element in the Hebrew theology 
 which opens up still further vistas in the same direc- 
 tion, and that is the noble interpretation which it 
 puts on the word law, as expressing the highest object 
 of human knowledge and belief, next to the Personal 
 God whose will it is. The indignant repudiation by the 
 sacred writers of the idea that the shedding of animal 
 blood, or the pretended offering of any material thing 
 whatever, could ever be any atonement for rebellion 
 against the Supreme Will, is a part only, and a small 
 part, of the sublime intimations which escape from 
 them when they speak of the Divine Law. On this 
 subject they rise, as it were, out of the atmosphere of 
 precept altogether. They do not seem even to think 
 of mere commands that have to be obeyed, but rather 
 of some beatific vision of a central radiance which in 
 itself, when really seen, has an absorbing and trans- 
 forming power over the intellect and the heart of men. 
 Mere submission is not in question, nor mere con-
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 229 
 
 formity, unless indeed that word be understood as 
 a complete transfiguration. In the material world 
 the absolute changes which are effected through the 
 mysterious laws, or forces, of chemical combination, 
 are perhaps the nearest analogues of those spiritual 
 effects upon the human soul which are ascribed to the 
 absorbing contemplation of the Divine law. No con- 
 ception short of this can explain or satisfy the lan- 
 guage of the prophets, and especially of the Psalms — 
 language which goes so far beyond any possible 
 reference to the life of any one man, even though 
 that man were the chosen king of a chosen people. 
 
 In this, as in other matters, literary criticism has 
 done good in redeeming us from too literal an in- 
 terpretation of the personal and historical circumstances 
 and occasions with which the language of the Psalms 
 has been so often laboriously associated. It is better, 
 and not worse, for us that we have come to under- 
 stand how certain it is that the language of the 
 Psalms, is the language of a whole Church, and of 
 its theology during many centuries, and not merely 
 the language of one man, or of a few men, however 
 great their figures may have been in their own day. 
 No twisting of personal incidents, however special, can 
 possibly bring down the language of the Psalms upon 
 the great central conception of the Divine law, to 
 the measure of any local, or individual, experience. 
 That language constantly transcends not only all 
 human experience, but all previous human concep- 
 tions so far as known to us. Neither the prohibitions 
 of the Decalogue, nor the rigid commands of the
 
 230 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 Levitical ritual, can possibly have constituted that law 
 of which the prophets and singers of Israel always 
 speak with the most intense love and longing, as the 
 one only inexhaustible object of highest contemplation 
 alike to the human intellect and to the human heart. 
 It is regarded as the fountain of all knowledge, and 
 as the standard of all righteousness. In their theology 
 a perfect acquaintance with God's law would be the 
 knowledge of all truth, and a perfect love of it would 
 be perfect goodness. It was a subordinate incident in 
 that truth, that to the Jews was intrusted the special 
 unveiling of a significant and important part of it, 
 and this the sacred writers were always proud to 
 remember, and always grateful to record. But it 
 never induced them to forget for a moment that this 
 partial and local revelation was only to be explained 
 as means to a greater end — that the truths proclaimed 
 from Zion were universal truths, and would yet come 
 to be seen as such by all nations. 
 
 One of the most glorious visions of Isaiah of the 
 universality of the blessings which would be the ulti- 
 mate inheritance of the world, is heralded by the 
 words, ' For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and 
 the word of the Lord from Jerusalem^.' And this 
 character of universality was not connected, in their 
 minds, with any mere triumph of a conquering race 
 imposing its own religion on a subject world. It was 
 always distinctly and emphatically connected with 
 that quality of absolute righteousness and truth, which 
 was the indelible nature of the Divine law, with a light 
 
 ^ Isa. ii. 3.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 23I 
 
 in it which was self-revealing, and which must at last 
 secure its own spiritual triumph. As expressing this 
 conception, we have the constant use of words which 
 served to identify the law with absolute truth in one 
 or other of its many forms or aspects — in the form 
 of knowledge of objective fact — in the form of per- 
 fect righteousness — in the form of absolute justice. 
 Thus Isaiah, again speaking of some Great One who 
 was to represent in His own Person and work the 
 whole mission of the Hebrew people, says, ' He shall 
 bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail 
 nor be discouraged, till He have set judgment in 
 the earth : and the isles shall wait for His law^.' 
 And again, but with special reference to the nature 
 of the law in itself, rather than with reference to its 
 heralds : ' The Lord is well pleased for His righteous- 
 ness' sake ; He will magnify the law, and make it 
 honourable^.' 'Hearken unto Me, ye that follow 
 after righteousness, ... for a law shall proceed from 
 Me, and I will make My judgment to rest for a light 
 of the people ^.' 
 
 Not less frequent and emphatic is the language 
 used to express the conception that the law is truth in 
 all its aspects, as well as righteousness and justice 
 in conduct : ' Open ye the gates, that the righteous 
 nation which keepeth the truth may enter in **.' And 
 all this virtue and excellence in the law, is thought 
 of, and spoken of, as coming from the personal cha- 
 racter of a personal God : ' Thou, most upright, dost 
 
 * Isa. xlii. 3, 4. ° Isa. xlii. 21. ^ Isa. li. i, 4. 
 
 * Isa. xxvi. 2.
 
 232 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 weigh the path of the just^' It is in the light of 
 this conception that a spirit of personal devotion 
 becomes a natural and necessary consequence: 'Yea, 
 in the way of Thy judgments, O Lord, have we 
 waited for Thee ; the desire of our soul is to Thy name 
 and to the remembrance of Thee. With my soul have 
 I desired Thee in the night ; yea, with my spirit within 
 me will I seek Thee early : for when Thy judgments 
 are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will 
 learn righteousness^.' It is, however, in the Psalms 
 again, that we find the most frequent and profound 
 expressions of this spirit of personal adoration of 
 a personal God, who is conceived as constituting in 
 Himself the one only centre alike of all that we can 
 love, and of all that we can desire to know. Nowhere 
 else, even in the Hebrew books, can we find such 
 intense expression given to the conviction that the 
 law of God meant nothing less than the sum of all 
 truth, and the farther conviction that because of this 
 fact it must be the highest object of human know- 
 ledge and meditation. 'The law of the Lord is 
 perfect, converting the soul : the testimony of the 
 Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes 
 of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the com- 
 mandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. 
 The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever : 
 the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous 
 altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, 
 yea, than much fine gold : sweeter also than honey 
 and the honeycomb. Moreover by them is Thy ser- 
 
 * Isa. xxvi. 7. = Isa. xxvi. 8, 9.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 233 
 
 vant warned : and in keeping of them there is great 
 reward ^' 
 
 All the resources of language seem to be exhausted 
 in this catalogue of the essential characteristics of the 
 law of God as embracing every conceivable perfection 
 in every sphere of feeling, of knowledge, and of action. 
 It holds within it more than all the wonder, the 
 admiration, and the intense desire for fuller light 
 which have sometimes animated both ancient philo- 
 sophers and modern men of science, in contemplating 
 the beauty and order of what they call Nature. But 
 it crowns these purely intellectual perceptions and 
 desires, with the completing and interpreting element 
 of a personal adoration and of a personal love. It is 
 not chargeable with the logical inconsistency of setting 
 up in our minds a sort of spurious Personality in 
 material things, and then of denying the belief in the 
 existence of any real Personality at all. It does not 
 vainly endeavour to attach ethical emotions to purely 
 mechanical conceptions of the causes of all beauty, of 
 all order, and of all adaptations in the universal system 
 under which we live. It sees in that system, both as 
 regards the material and the spiritual world, a vast 
 system of those manifestations of a Mind having 
 close relations with our own minds, which can alone 
 constitute even the intelligibility of it to us, and which 
 still more can alone be any object of our affections 
 or desires. 
 
 The whole of the 119th Psalm is one continuous 
 song of adoring recognition of this fact that Jehovah's 
 
 ^ Ps. xix. 7-1 1.
 
 234 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 law is the law of all Nature, and especially of man's 
 nature ; that it is the pure expression or emanation of 
 His will — a wall all perfect, all true, and all righteous. 
 If we could only walk in that law, we should be so 
 pure as to belong to the absolutely 'undefiled^.' 
 Nor would it be any walk of bondage, but a walk 
 'at liberty-.' If only we could really understand 
 that law, it would so reveal the secrets of creation 
 as to m.ake them the engrossing subject of our con- 
 templation; we should ' talk of His wondrous works-'.' 
 If only we loved it and implicitly obeyed it. there 
 would be an end of all the vices that afflict society. 
 It would expel all pride and all covetousness, as well 
 as all untruthfulness in its innumerable forms. Through 
 its precepts all true understanding is acquired, and 
 therefore they who love it 'hate every false way*.' 
 The law is conceived as the ' statutes,' as the ' testi- 
 mony,' as the 'judgments,' as the very 'word' of 
 one God, even of the Most High. It is conceived as 
 founded upon, or rather as coincident with, the very 
 nature of things — so that it is both self-revealing and 
 self-enforcing. It will be the ultimate reward, as it 
 is now the comfort and stay, of the righteous, and 
 it will finally be the destruction of the wicked. Its 
 inherent beauty is recognizable by us, and our love 
 and our obedience are due because of this relation 
 between it and faculties of perception which are our 
 own. That love and that obedience are not to be 
 confounded with mere submission to arbitrary au- 
 thority. They have a reason, and are the natural 
 
 '- Ver. I. - Ver. 45. "' Ver. 27. * Ps. cxix. 104, 128.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 235 
 
 consequence of a truth, ' Thy word is very pure : 
 therefore Thy servant loveth it^' ' Thy righteousness 
 is an everlasting righteousness, and Thy law is the 
 truth 2.' And yet, notwithstanding this magnificent 
 identification of the supreme law with the whole 
 constitution and course of Nature, there is never in 
 Hebrew theology, the least taint of that confusion 
 of thought which identifies that which we know as 
 mind, and character, and will, with that which we 
 know as matter, or as the physical forces which 
 prevail in it. The laws which govern the stars in 
 their courses, and the laws which govern the con- 
 dition and the fate of men, are all equally placed 
 in the same category of agencies subordinate to one 
 Almighty Being who is to us a Person. 'All are 
 Thy servants^ ' — such are the comprehensive words in 
 which this idea is expressed. 
 
 It is in these fundamental conceptions of the Divine 
 Nature, and of its relation to all other existences, 
 that the theology of the Hebrews stood, and still 
 stands, alone. It is in them that it, alone, offers an 
 adequate object to the religious instincts and affec- 
 tions of man, and it is in them that it, alone, presents 
 an adequate basis for a consistent and satisfying 
 philosophy. It accounts for that universal reign of 
 law which is the goal alike of all physical inquiry, 
 of all mental analysis, and of all sense of ethical 
 obligation. It represents our desire both of spiritual 
 and of physical knowledge, and the very existence 
 of all our speculative faculties, with all their powers 
 
 ^ Ver. 140, - Ver, 142. ^ y^j. ^^
 
 236 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 and functions, as having at once an inherent explana- 
 tion, and that satisfying justification which consists in 
 reasonable grounds of a confident and expectant hope. 
 In the worship of Jehovah, and in meditation on His 
 law, it is not dreams that we are pursuing — no mere 
 shadowy and purely subjective impressions that we 
 have to deal with — but a whole universe full of fact, 
 and of absolute truth. Our powers and our aspira- 
 tions have a real, a substantial, and an organic 
 connexion with the whole system which excites them 
 to natural and instinctive action. The knowledge 
 which we desire to possess, is, in greater and greater 
 measure, attainable by the employment of the appro- 
 priate means. In the purely intellectual sphere this 
 assurance is expressed in the profound words, ' In Thy 
 light we shall see light'; whilst in the sphere of 
 moral and religious thought it is expressed in words 
 not less simple and majestic : * O send out Thy light 
 and Thy truth : let them lead me ^.' 
 
 And yet with all this intense conviction of the 
 absolute reality of the knowable in everything around 
 us and within us, there is in the Hebrew theology no 
 hiding of the fact, that wide regions of that law which 
 we are so encouraged to investigate, are, and must 
 be, inaccessible to us. Many of the most pathetic 
 passages in the prophets and in the Psalms, are 
 devoted to the expression of this fact, and to an 
 outpouring of the emotions arising out of our sense 
 of it as not only always present, but as often painful 
 and oppressive. ' Verily Thou art a God that hidest 
 
 * Ps. xliii. 3.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 237 
 
 Thyself \^ is the exclamation of Isaiah, 'Thy way is 
 in the sea, and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy 
 footsteps are not known-,' is the testimony of the 
 Psalmist in some day of trouble. The difficulty of 
 understanding the prosperity of the wicked, and the 
 licence they often enjoy to persecute the righteous is 
 a special subject of perplexity: 'When I thought to 
 know this, it was too painful for meV There are, 
 however, two striking characteristics to be observed 
 in these and many other passages expressive of the 
 same thought. The first is, that the sense not only 
 of actual ignorance, but of inevitable ignorance, due 
 to the limitation of our faculties, is never allowed to 
 cast the smallest doubt on the certainties which are 
 clearly knowable and are actually known. The 
 second is, that even the difficulties which do really 
 beset us, are always regarded as soluble in the light 
 of revelation, and as incapable of even weakening 
 a reasonable and undoubting faith in the final triumph 
 and vindication of the Divine law. Thus, as regards 
 the first of these characteristics, Isaiah, in the same 
 breath in which he speaks of God as hiding himself, 
 addresses Him nevertheless as the known ' God of 
 Israel,' and as ' the Saviour.' And so, as regards the 
 second characteristic, we find the Psalmist rejoicing 
 that his ignorance was oppressive to him only ' until 
 he went into the sanctuary of God,' for then, and 
 there, he came to understand the ultimate end of 
 wickedness. He even pours contempt on his own 
 previous condition of mind, ' I was even as a beast 
 
 * Isa. xlv. 15. - Ps. Ixxvii. ig. ^ Ps. Ixxiii. 16.
 
 238 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 before Thee.' Moreover, it is to be observed that the 
 sense of ignorance in the Hebrew sacred writers, is 
 due quite as much to their estimate of the over- 
 whelming magnitude and comprehensiveness of that 
 which they understood as God's law, as to any mere 
 consciousness of limitations in themselves. They 
 always longed, and hoped, for greater light, and they 
 always relied on Divine help in attaining to it ; — ' Open 
 Thou mine eyes that I may behold the wondrous 
 things contained in Thy law.' And then, as if to 
 complete the picture of the wise and reasonable use 
 which these writers made of our sense of ignorance 
 and of limitation, we have in the 131st Psalm the 
 expression of that profound humility which is surely 
 the most rational lesson it ought to impress upon us. 
 ' Lord, my heart is not haughty . . . neither do I 
 exercise myself in great matters, or in things too 
 high for me ^.' We know quite enough to carry 
 home to us the conviction that there are certain 
 regions of fact, and consequently of speculation, in 
 which any satisfying knowledge is wholly unattain- 
 able to us. It seems as if they are covered, as it 
 were, by an atmosphere in which we have no wings 
 to rise. And we must know, too, that these regions 
 are not far away, but, on the contrary, so close to us 
 in all things — that they seem not only to touch us, 
 but to press, as it were, on our very faces, at every point 
 in the whole circumference of our knowledge. 
 
 By nothing is this omnipresence of the unknown 
 made more conspicuous than by that very advance of 
 
 ' Ps. cxxxi. I.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 239 
 
 the physical sciences of which we are tempted to boast 
 so much. All our discoveries in these lie, as it were, in 
 one plane, above which there lie other planes that are 
 too high for us, because to them we have no ladders 
 of ascent. The word is a bad one that is commonly 
 applied by philosophers to describe the comparatively 
 low level above which this plane never rises. They 
 say that we can only know what they call ' pheno- 
 mena,' a Greek word which denotes only things that 
 do appear. But it is not true that our knowledge, 
 even in the purely physical sciences, is limited to 
 things which are ' apparent ' only to any bodily sense, 
 or to all the bodily senses put together. No man 
 has seen, or touched, or heard, the laws of motion, or 
 the law of gravitation, or the law of chemical affinity, 
 or many other of those abstract conceptions which 
 are called laws, and have been reached, and are 
 securely held, by faculties of a purely intellectual 
 kind. Not one of these conceptions belongs, accu- 
 rately speaking, to the class of phenomena. They 
 are the causes of phenomena, but it is a blunder to 
 confuse them with their visible effects. When we see 
 the daily tides we see millions and millions of tons of 
 water moved by a force which is not only invisible, 
 but is in its own nature, and even in its method of 
 operation, utterly unknown, and is perhaps incon- 
 ceivable to us. All that we know about it is that 
 its work has an ascertained numerical relation to 
 mass, or quantity in matter, and to distance in space. 
 But these relations are not phenomenal. They are 
 not apparent ; they do not appear. They are purely
 
 240 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 intellectual conceptions, reached by purely intellectual 
 powers, whose function it is to correlate, to compare 
 and to analyze mere phenomena, and to find out 
 invisible laws to which these phenomena are sub- 
 ordinate. It is important to grasp this distinction 
 firmly, because nothing is more important than to 
 define to ourselves, as best we can, the true nature of 
 the limitations which do really beset us. What we 
 cannot reach is the ultimate nature or origin of any- 
 thing whatever. We can, and we do, continually reach 
 causation, which is perfectly real and true, but is 
 never ultimate. And this we can feel and see to be 
 a limitation which is insuperable. We may hope 
 and expect to discover much in the physical sciences 
 which is now involved in apparently impenetrable 
 mystery. It is, for example, quite within the range 
 of possibility that we may discover the physical 
 causes of what we call gravitation. But if we do, 
 that discovery will still be on the same plane with 
 all previous discoveries on the correlations of the 
 physical forces. What these forces are in themselves, 
 and how these forces have come to be so correlated, 
 are questions on which the physical sciences have cast 
 no light whatever. 
 
 There are some cases, indeed, and one in particular, 
 in which the discovery of physical causes has cast an 
 important light on at least one source of ignorance, 
 and of conceptual infirmity in ourselves. Our fathers 
 found it impossible to conceive an antipodes, not 
 because they had any difficulty whatever in con- 
 ceiving a great ball or globe, with surfaces looking
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 
 
 241 
 
 in various and opposite directions, but only because 
 they could not conceive the existence of men, or of 
 other creatures, standing and living on that ball with 
 their heads ' downwards.' But this difficulty lay en- 
 tirely in their ignorance of that in which downward- 
 ness and upwardness consists. If they had known 
 that these words have no meaning at all except as 
 expressing directions consonant with, or opposed to, 
 an attractive force which we now call gravitation, 
 they would have had no more difficulty than we have 
 in conceiving an antipodes. And this case may give 
 us an important hint on one, at least, of the causes 
 which constitute what we call inconceivability. That 
 cause is simply the weakness and the ambiguity of 
 words. It is just as inconceivable to us now, as it 
 was to our ancestors formerly, that a world of living 
 things should exist with everything topsy-turvy. The 
 whole difficulty lay in not knowing the purely relative 
 and contingent sense in which such words as ' down- 
 wards ' and ' upwards ' have any meaning at all. And 
 this kind of ignorance,, or of thoughtlessness, may be 
 now affecting our conceptual faculties to a very large 
 extent, not only in physical, but in spiritual, matters. 
 It may be out of this source of confusion and bewilder- 
 ment that many of our difficulties arise. It is, indeed, 
 impossible to doubt that it must be so with, for 
 example, that darkest problem of all, the origin of 
 evil, and our difficulty of reconciling it with the 
 Divine omnipotence and the Divine goodness. Thus, 
 again, in all our conceptions involving time, such as 
 those concerning Divine foreknowledge and decrees, 
 
 R
 
 242 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 or those concerning the possibility of true predictive 
 prophecy as a gift to men, or those concerning the 
 ultimate nature of what we call causation, and in 
 many others, it is possible, and even certain, that we 
 are often like children talking nonsense, because they 
 do not know the narrow meaning of the words they 
 use, nor more than a fraction of the facts to which 
 they relate. 
 
 This is an idea which, when we grasp it, makes it 
 not only possible, but easy, to combine the most 
 absolute humility of mind and teachability of spirit, 
 with the firmest confidence in the trustworthiness of 
 our faculties when they are properly informed. The 
 theology of the Hebrews is full of this feeling and 
 idea. It absolutely identifies knowledge with all the 
 virtues of conduct, and all the graces of spiritual life. 
 Everything with them that is good, and everything 
 that is true, rests, in their conception, upon realities 
 and facts, not on mere sentiments or abstractions. 
 Its sacred writers repeat this idea over and over again 
 in every variety of form. Perfect knowledge would 
 be inseparable from perfect conformity with a perfect 
 law, which again is nothing but the authority and ex- 
 pression of a perfect will. Even the highest of all con- 
 ceivable spiritual operations, namely, the overcoming 
 and conversionof rebellious wills, is identified by Isaiah 
 with the working and the effects of knowledge : ' By his 
 knowledge shall My righteous servant justify many ^.' 
 And so, throughout the Prophets and the Psalms, we 
 have the same profound combination of an abiding sense 
 
 * Isa. liii. II.
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 243 
 
 of ignorance and of limitation, coupled with an abso- 
 lute confidence in the truthfulness of the knowable 
 and the known. On the first of these, the sense of 
 ignorance, rested a deep and a most rational humility. 
 On the second of these — our confidence in known 
 truth — rested a most triumphant faith. The cry that 
 ' clouds and darkness are round about Him ' did not 
 even for a moment shake their serene belief that 
 nevertheless 'justice and judgment are the habitation 
 of His throne.' 
 
 This confident belief concerning the Unseen was 
 firmly rooted in the perception of correlated truths 
 which we can, and do, plainly see. That one only 
 hVing and true God, whose will and character were 
 reflected in the beauty and order of the world, and 
 most of all in spiritually minded men, is seen, in the 
 light of this belief, as the Author of that highest of all 
 adaptations or adjustments, which consists in the power 
 we possess to see and recognize necessary truth. The 
 power of seeing certain concepts to be self-evidently 
 true, cannot be the product of our own conscious 
 reason, because conscious reason must, and always 
 does, assume it before a single step can be taken in 
 any reasoning process. It is a power born with us as 
 part of our organization, and is essentially, therefore, 
 in the nature of inspiration. That is to say, it is part 
 of the creative work done in us, and for us, and then 
 handed over to us for use. It establishes the closest 
 of all possible relations between our minds and the 
 mind of the Creator. It is inspiration in its own 
 measure and degree, and it must obviously be, in its 
 
 R 2
 
 244 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 very nature, capable of indefinite extension at His 
 will and under His conditions. It is He that giveth 
 understanding in the least, as well as in the highest, 
 degrees. 
 
 A well-known modern thinker, who was deeply im- 
 pressed by the phenomena presented in the Hebrew 
 Prophets, asked himself with wonder the question from 
 what possible source they could have derived in a 
 rude age, and in a half-barbarous people, their splendid, 
 and their obvious, spiritual insight. One of those 
 prophets himself answers this question in the only 
 way in which it can be answered ; that is to say, the 
 only way in which it can be explained according to 
 natural laws. ' The Lord,' says Amos, ' revealeth 
 His secret unto His servants the prophets ^.' The 
 prophets never think of themselves as gifted with any 
 mere poetic or imaginative faculty, or as preaching 
 sentiments which are detachable from facts. What 
 they do claim is nothing more than lifted eyelids, and 
 a seeing of that which was invisible to minds that are 
 either idle, or corrupt, or both. Hence, too, they 
 represent the sins and vices which they denounced 
 in their own people, as due to sheer blindness. ' And 
 the vision of all,' says Isaiah, ' is become unto you 
 as a word of a book that is sealed, which men 
 deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, 
 I pray thee : and he saith, I cannot ; for it is sealed ^.' 
 The national sins of the Hebrew people are always 
 conceived and described as a rebellion against the 
 whole order of Nature, and as therefore certain to 
 
 ' Amos iii. 7. ^ Isa. xxix. 11.
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 245 
 
 entail retribution and calamity. No more forcible 
 expression of this idea can be conceived than the 
 words of the same prophet, ' Surely your turning of 
 things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's 
 clay ^' The gift of the prophets was an 'open vision' 
 of facts which were secrets only to those that 'erred 
 in spirit,' although these also could ' come to under- 
 standing.' For, when proclaimed, those secrets can be 
 recognized as truth by all who exercise their faculties 
 with an open heart and an honest discrimination. 
 
 This is a mo.st rational belief. It assumes and 
 rests upon that continuity and consistency between 
 facts which are familiarly known, and other facts which 
 lie beyond them, on which all progress in knowledge 
 depends, and in which, indeed, all knowledge may 
 be said essentially to consist. It is a system of 
 teaching and belief which affords ample room for all 
 that is really justifiable and true in what is now called 
 Agnosticism. Both the sense of actual ignorance 
 and the consciousness of inherent limitation, are fully 
 realized, and often even painfully expressed. But, on 
 the other hand, it is never allowed to paralyze or 
 confuse the great certainties which can be, and are 
 actually reached, nor to shake our conviction that 
 inseparable harmonies must and do link these cer- 
 tainties with all that we desire to know. Philosophy, 
 as that term is generally applied, is not religion, and 
 many systems of what is called philosophy have been 
 consciously and intentionally antagonistic to the fun- 
 damental conceptions on which religion, and even 
 
 ^ Isa. xxix. r6.
 
 246 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 morality, depend. But, on the other hand, it is obvious 
 that any true theology must be also a philosophy in 
 proportion to its recognition of the highest and most 
 universal facts in Nature. And in this connexion it 
 is most instructive to observe how the theology of 
 the Hebrews solves and reconciles many of the mere 
 intellectual antagonisms of the schools. In its 
 immense richness of conception, in its wide grasp and 
 fulness, it takes into due account all the bits and 
 fragments of truth which have given whatever strength 
 they had to captivate different thinkers in different 
 ages of the world. The passionate admiration for 
 Nature v.'hich colours and warms the poetry of Lu- 
 cretius and the tenets of the Epicurean philosophy, 
 is fully accounted for, and largely even justified. The 
 sublime intuitions which inspired the Platonic school 
 are seen in their true aspect as flashes of a genuine 
 internal light. The sad but beautiful sentiments of 
 the Stoics, are largely adopted, purified, sanctified, 
 and confirmed. The two great by-paths of thought 
 which have never ceased to divide speculative thought, 
 the materialistic and the spiritualistic, have each their 
 proper place assigned to them. Even the weari- 
 some wranglers, who in the Middle Ages kept up the 
 fight between Nominalism and Realism — even those 
 disputants are seen to have had, each of them, little 
 fragments, as it were, of true flesh and bone to tear. 
 That great procession of thinkers in modern times, who 
 have walked head and shoulders above lesser men in 
 the slippery path of metaphysical analysis — Descartes, 
 Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant — all these are seen
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 247 
 
 to have been minds which had a firm grasp of some 
 special aspects of the truth — aspects which are all 
 comprehended, or are all comprehensible, within the 
 wide area of the theology of the Hebrews. 
 
 If the great progress of the purely physical sciences 
 in recent times has roused again some of the most 
 materialistic and deceptive interpretations of pagan 
 thought, and has allied itself in some minds with 
 speculations which are unmistakably the same, and 
 are as old as the wanderings of Greek philosophy, we 
 have, on the other hand, the striking and reassuring 
 fact that many of the very foremost men in the 
 field of modern scientific discovery, see no reason to 
 think that, in that field, anything has become known 
 that turns into darkness the Light that has gone 
 forth from Zion. For the most part, their latest 
 discoveries have been as irrelevant as other physical 
 facts and laws with which we have been long 
 familiar. But there are a thousand rays streaming 
 from their pursuits, which are in perfect harmony 
 with the theology of the Hebrews. The very first 
 intuitive conviction which animates all their investi- 
 gations, and excites all their enthusiasm, is the con- 
 viction of the intelligibility of Nature. And this is 
 nothing less than a conviction of some inherent and 
 pre-established correspondence between our own 
 minds and the Mind which, in Nature, is ubiquitous 
 and supreme. The idea of a universal reign of law 
 is the most familiar of all ideas to them, whilst yet in 
 the devising and conduct of their own experiments 
 they must see and feel that it is the constancy of
 
 248 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 physical laws that alone makes them such pliant 
 agents and instruments of purpose. They know that 
 the same principle alone can explain the innumerable 
 mechanical and chemical apparatuses in the organic 
 world. They know that they themselves never fail 
 to resort to language full of this principle, when they 
 have to describe and to explain its facts. On the 
 other hand, no class of men can be so constantly im- 
 pressed by the sense both of ignorance and of limita- 
 tion, as the investigators of the physical sciences. 
 There is not one of the elementary forces, which they 
 so constantly both handle and subordinate, that does 
 not present to them problems which are insoluble. 
 Thus the close proximity of the known and of the 
 unknown, must be, to them, one of the most familiar 
 of all conceptions. Nor does it ever occur to them to 
 doubt the truth and certainty of such knowledge as 
 they can and do reach, because of the farther mysteries 
 .vhich surround it and with which it is inseparably 
 connected. They have an intimate conviction, which 
 is ever present in their minds, although it may be 
 largely unconscious, and wholly unexpressed, that 
 what lies beyond the range of actual or even of 
 possible discovery, will be in perfect harmony with 
 the conceptions which result from accurate observa- 
 tion and sound reasoning within that range. 
 
 Above all, when the devotees of physical science 
 come face to face with psychology as an inseparable 
 part of biology — that is to say, when they deal with 
 the structure and functions of living organisms — when 
 in themselves, as a part of Nature, they gaze into what
 
 V] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 249 
 
 has been well called ' the abysmal depths' of their own 
 personality, and of its action on external things, they 
 must see and feel that our own minds and wills can 
 be most rationally conceived as a type and model 
 of other agencies, which are not only higher but 
 supreme. And this conception, under modifications 
 dictated by other facts yet to be noticed here, may 
 well condemn as a delusion those objections to what 
 is called ' Anthropomorphism,' which are often referred 
 to as if they were insuperable. Anthropopsychic is 
 the proper word for the conception, not anthropo- 
 morphic. It is not the form of man, but the spirit 
 and the mind of man, that casts light upon the con- 
 stitution of the universe. It is in the correlations 
 of that mind and spirit with the whole constitution of 
 things, that the intelligibility of Nature consists. 
 The language which we have traced in the descriptions 
 of physical science, is a perpetual witness not only 
 to the possibility of entertaining this conception, but to 
 the practical impossibility of entertaining any other, or 
 of explaining anything without it — either to ourselves 
 or others. And this is the very conception which 
 is fundamental in the theology of the Hebrews. It is 
 easily distinguishable from those references to the 
 mere bodily form of man, which are avowedly meta- 
 phorical when applied to the Divine Being, and are 
 indeed to a large extent metaphorical even when 
 applied to ourselves. When we speak of the ' work 
 of our hands,' we do not mean the mere mechanical 
 effects of bones and sinews, of what physiologists call 
 the ' manus,' an organ which is made on one model
 
 250 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 throughout a large part of the whole living world 
 from the lowest fish up to man. What we mean by 
 hands, when spoken of in this sense, is the directing 
 agency of the mind, which both determines the work 
 to be done, and guides the muscles and tendons of 
 the hand in the doing of it. And this is the manifest 
 interpretation to be put on what is called the anthro- 
 pomorphic language and conceptions of the sacred 
 writers. Sometimes the habit they had of repeating 
 one idea in two or more forms, exhibits very distinctly 
 this use of imagery. Thus in the eighth Psalm, where 
 the writer indicates most clearly a sense of the vast- 
 ness of the heavens, and of the number of the bodies 
 that move in them, v\^hich immeasurably transcends 
 any mere astronomical knowledge of the Hebrews, 
 he speaks of them as 'the work of Thy fingers' and, 
 alternatively, of them as things which ' Thou hast 
 ordained.' 
 
 In this lies the full explanation of all other lan- 
 guage of the same kind. There is no pride and no 
 presumption in the imagery which in their writings 
 takes our own acts and thoughts as types of the 
 Divine. There is no reason and no true humility in 
 assuming this relation to be incredible. The most 
 absolute confidence in the truthfulness of the indi- 
 cations given to us by Nature, is perfectly consistent 
 with the most profound sense of the ultimate mysteries 
 they involve. True humility lies in the longing for 
 more knowledge, but not in undervaluing that which 
 has been attained — in shutting our eyes to its great 
 significance — or, least of all, in disparaging those
 
 v] CHARACTER OF THE GODHEAD 25I 
 
 faculties which have such manifold relations to the 
 objects of our desire. Surely all the facts of the case, 
 and the most reasonable construction to put upon 
 them — the one hope of science not less than of 
 philosophy and religion — is expressed in the pro- 
 found exclamation of the Psalmist, ' In Thy light 
 we shall see light.' And this hope implies the 
 conscious possession of adapted organs of understand- 
 ing and of vision. Nor is it less according to the con- 
 stitution and course of Nature, that a longing for 
 greater knowledge should be in itself a qualification, 
 and even a condition, for the attainment of it, both 
 in the sphere of morals and of intellect. Suggestions, 
 in many forms, do often come to those who look 
 hard for truth with an open mind. And this im- 
 portant law, which stands alike to reason and to 
 experience, is perpetually referred to in the theology 
 of the Hebrews, notably in that wonderful image in 
 Psalm 97, • Light is sown for the righteous \' 
 
 Ver. 1 1 .
 
 Chapter VI. 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS. 
 
 ON THE NATURE OF MAN. 
 
 The conception of Jehovah as the universal God, 
 as the Creator of all things, as He whose will con- 
 stitutes what we call the Laws of Nature, as a Being 
 whom we must think of as a Person who acts and 
 speaks and rules as a Living God — whose Law is the 
 Truth — whose Government is perfect righteousness — 
 this is undoubtedly the very essence of the theology 
 of the Hebrews. This was the one far-reaching con- 
 ception which it was the special function of the Jewish 
 nation to presei^ve in a world where no such conception 
 had survived. But there was in that theology another 
 conception not less peculiar. It concerned the special 
 relations of man to that one Creator. A true idea 
 of the character of the Godhead, must be at the very 
 root of all religion. But a true idea of the nature of 
 Humanity, must be not less essential, if indeed it may 
 not rather be regarded as an inseparable part of the 
 same idea. Accordingly, in the Hebrew theology, 
 teaching of the most peculiar and definite kind is laid 
 down on this subject. Man, it declares, on the one
 
 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS 253 
 
 hand, was created ' in the image of God,' and ' after 
 His likeness ^.' But that image and Hkeness, it declares 
 not less emphatically, on the other hand, has been 
 since much defaced, although not irretrievably de- 
 stroyed. The first of these two propositions, besides 
 being specifically asserted in its account of Creation, 
 is constantly and consistently mai!itained and pre- 
 supposed in all its appeals to the moral and intel- 
 lectual faculties of man as capable of seeing Divine 
 truths — of appreciating the Divine law — and of 
 loving Him who is the Author of it. These inborn 
 capacities are uniformly assumed not only as parts 
 of his original organic constitution, but as parts of 
 it which are indestructible. They are a fact in 
 Nature. God is the rock out of which man was 
 hewn ^. And this is asserted not only of His chosen 
 people^ but of the universal family of mankind. He 
 not only ' looketh on all the inhabitants of the earth,' 
 but, ' He fashioneth their hearts alike^.' The unity 
 of the human species is uniformly asserted, or assumed, 
 throughout the sacred writings, and the Divine gifts 
 which belong to it are represented as the common 
 inheritance of the race. It may be said with truth 
 that ' theopsychism ' attributed to man, is the real 
 explanation of what is called the anthropomorphism 
 attributed in the Hebrew scriptures to the mind and 
 will of God. The laws of mind governing human 
 action, were in a measure applied to the Divine will, 
 only because those laws were conceived to be the 
 representatives or expressions of a Divine original. 
 
 ^ Gen. i. 26, 27. ^ Isa. li. i. ^ Ps. xxxiii. 15.
 
 254 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 And in this respect the whole human family was 
 always spoken of as one. However difficult it may 
 sometimes be, even for us, to think of all the widely 
 separated races of the globe as belonging to one 
 species, the sacred writers never doubted it. They 
 always asserted the universal brotherhood of man as 
 the correlative of their assertion of the universal 
 fatherhood of Jehovah ; and this is only one example 
 of the light which a true theology casts, and must 
 cast, indirectly on problems which are often claimed 
 as the exclusive property of the physical sciences. 
 Our own wider knowledge of the geographical dis- 
 tribution of man over the most widely separated 
 regions of the globe, has increased the difficulties which 
 this doctrine involves, even although it be true that, 
 after all, only additional evidence in its favour has 
 been the final result of scientific investigation. Charles 
 Darwin has recorded the wonder with which he saw 
 how easily, and how soon, even a typical savage of 
 the lowest grade from Tierra del Fuego, became 
 acclimatized with, and assimilated to, the mental 
 atmosphere of civilized Europeans. Their minds and 
 hearts, however widely sundered in habits and in 
 manners, in knowledge and in conditions of faculty, 
 were nevertheless evidently ' fashioned alike' in all the 
 fundamental characteristics of potential powers. The 
 space — wide and almost immeasurable, as it may 
 seem — which separated Charles Darwin from the savage 
 who played and laughed with English sailors in the 
 forecastle of the Beagle^ was after all only a space 
 evidently arising out of circumstance and opportunity.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 255 
 
 The abstracting and speculating intellect which in 
 Darwin was so deeply exercised in fathoming, if it 
 were possible, the secret origin of organic life, was. 
 after all, the same instrument of thought and of 
 aspiration, which had always enabled the savage 
 Fuegian to form some few abstract ideas, and was 
 then enabling him daily to take in a few more, such 
 as could never be taught to beasts. That intellect, 
 poor and undeveloped as it was, led him constantly 
 to exhibit, in new applications, the universal human 
 emotions of wonder, of curiosity, and of a desire to 
 know. 
 
 These are the identities in quality and in kind of 
 mental structure, which, like the corresponding iden- 
 tities in physical structure of the body, establish the 
 universal brotherhood of man, in spite of the widest 
 differences of functional exercise or activity. These, 
 too, are the identities which establish man's place in 
 Nature, and demonstrate those close and intimate rela- 
 tions between his mind and the Mind that is intelligible 
 there, which, in spite of still vaster differences, reveal 
 how high that place is, and how indefinitely higher it 
 may come to be. The prophets and singers of Israel 
 in all their denunciations of the worse than brutality 
 and wickedness of the surrounding nations, never forgot 
 that higher aspect of humanity which thus links man 
 with the Divine. They never for a moment aban- 
 doned to doubt, far less to despair, that account of 
 him which had been handed down to them, that, in 
 a most true and real sense, man had been made 
 in the likeness and image of his Creator. On this
 
 256 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 doctrine were founded all their denunciations of sin, 
 all their exhortations to virtue, all their appeals to 
 reason, and all their prophetic hopes of a more and 
 more perfect knowledge. 
 
 But deeply as this doctrine was imbedded in the 
 theology of the Hebrews it was accompanied and 
 qualified by another doctrine concerning the nature 
 of man, which was not less constantly enforced. That 
 other doctrine was that in man the Creator's image 
 had come to be so terribly defaced that the restora- 
 tion of its truthfulness and beauty, can only be 
 attained by the use of appointed means, and is always 
 a work of watchful and laborious effort. This doc- 
 trine of the corruption of man's nature, like its cor- 
 relative doctrine of his splendid powers, is nothing 
 but a recognition of indisputable facts. We are so 
 accustomed to think of it as a theological, or religious, 
 dogma, that we fail to note its coincidence with all 
 observation and experience. The universal law which 
 otherwise prevails in Nature, is that every living crea- 
 ture has instincts fully corresponding to its structure, 
 and guiding it in the due discharge of its inherited 
 functions. In man alone this perfect co-ordination 
 fails. Or rather, it would be more correct to say 
 that in man alone it is crossed, checked, and to 
 a terrible extent actually reversed, by another ten- 
 dency — the tendency, namely, to misuse all his 
 powers, and to turn all the natural instincts of his 
 mind, and the natural functions of his body, into 
 sources of misery and destruction to himself and 
 others. Familiarity with this fact has dulled our
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 257 
 
 sense of the wonder of it and of its absolutely ex- 
 ceptional character in the universal order. And so 
 far has this blindness gone that by many philosophers 
 it has been accepted as so much according to the 
 constitution and course of Nature, that they reject as 
 incredible any idea that it can ever have been other- 
 wise with man. They are specially hostile to the idea 
 that when he first appeared upon the scene, he can 
 possibly have been born in a condition more nearly 
 like the condition of all other creatures — which is 
 always a state of congenital harmony between their 
 endowments and the use they make of them. These 
 philosophers have got what they call ' evolution ' on 
 the brain, and they think that it can only work 
 mechanically and in one direction — that of raising and 
 elevating the subject on which it works. The fact 
 does not seem to occur to them that it must work in 
 all directions, and that seeds of evil, as well as seeds 
 of good, bring forth some thirty, some sixty, some 
 an hundredfold. They will have it that the first man 
 must have been at least as low, or far lower than 
 the lowest savage now is, not only in respect to 
 knowledge, but in respect to character and habits. 
 He must, from the first, have done, to his own 
 damage and to the damage of his descendants, things 
 which no beast is so savage or so stupid as to do. 
 
 The sacred writers of the Hebrews did not believe 
 this original and congenital corruption either as 
 a necessity or as a fact. They believed and taught 
 that man was created, as all other living things 
 have undoubtedly been created, in possession of 
 
 S
 
 258 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 gifts which were all in harmony with each other, 
 and with surrounding conditions. Yet as one of 
 these gifts, at least in measure and degree, was 
 peculiar to man, namely, the range of freedom in 
 his will, corresponding with the range and quality of 
 his conceptual faculties, they saw that as sin could 
 not be committed by the beasts, so neither could 
 virtue exist in man, if he were as mechanically saved 
 from disobedience and from vice. Thus the higher 
 original rank connected with free will, involved of 
 necessity the possibility of lapse. Accordingly, what 
 they believed and taught, was that such a lapse 
 had actually taken place. They thus accounted 
 for the obvious and innumerable facts which pro- 
 claim the perverse blindness and wickedness of 
 men, and the violent contrast presented by them 
 alone between their splendid gifts and the actual 
 results which were only too manifest in the world. 
 They noted, too, as specially instructive, the signi- 
 ficant fact that many of the most hideous and de- 
 structive practices among surrounding nations, were 
 directly due to false notions, and foul imaginations, 
 concerning the Divine Nature. If they had known as 
 much as we do of the most distant races of the world 
 they would have known that this is not an accidental, 
 but a universal, truth. Looking, as they always did, 
 for the explanation of every fact in the self-enforcing 
 consequences of one supreme law, they would have 
 seen, in this discovery, only another illustration of the 
 doctrine they so firmly held, that as the worst evils of 
 humanity do now actually come from superstitions
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 259 
 
 and false theologies, so all hope of recovery and of 
 good, can only come from a theology which is true. 
 
 The form into which they threw the narrative of 
 the Fall, like the form into which they threw the 
 narrative of the Creation, is full of allegory. As no 
 human writer could have been present at the one 
 operation, so none is even supposed to have left any 
 record of the other. Certain great general ideas on 
 the essential nature of both events, are conveyed in 
 a series of vivid and impressive images. In the case 
 of Creation those images conveyed the special idea 
 that the result was attained through stages of time, 
 and in ascending steps of work. The introduction of 
 man was expressly represented as the last step of all. 
 He alone is said to have been made in the image of 
 God, although in all the mere physical structures 
 requisite for the embodiment of organic life, the bodily 
 frame of men and of the beasts, is so obviously made 
 on a common plan. This identifies the conception 
 of the Hebrew writers in respect to man's special 
 Divine relationship, as referring exclusively to those 
 gifts of mind and spirit in which we see, as a fact, 
 that he does actually stand aloft, and alone, among 
 organic beings. In conveying these leading ideas, 
 allegorical expressions are largely used, as indeed 
 they are constantly used in the everyday language 
 of life. The whole structure of human speech is full 
 of allegory. It assumes, however, of necessity a more 
 prominent form in dealing with conceptions which 
 lie beyond the range of actual observation and of 
 personal experience. The Spirit of God ' moving on 
 
 S 2
 
 26o THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 the face of the waters,' and the execution of the 
 Divine purposes in the mere pronouncement of .certain 
 spoken words, these are transparent allegories. In 
 like manner, but of necessity to an extent still more 
 elaborate, the account given of man's first disobedi- 
 ence, is allegorical in all details. ' The tree of the 
 knowledge of good and evil ' is a powerful but an ob- 
 vious metaphor, to express the relation between a free 
 and a responsible will, and that sense of obligation 
 which is conscious at the same time of the possibility 
 of disobedience. The representation of an evil spirit 
 under the form of a serpent, and of evil suggestions 
 as coming through its spoken voice ; the image of 
 the Creator ' walking in the garden in the cool of the 
 day;' of His missing Adam hidden among the trees; 
 the colloquy between the Lawgiver and the violator of 
 the Divine command ; the expulsion from a terrestrial 
 paradise ; the angels with flaming swords to prevent 
 return — all these are indeed splendid and telling 
 images, but they are images none the less. And 
 there is one remarkable feature in what they tell us 
 which is in perfect harmony with a similar feature in 
 the story of the Creation. In that story it is obvious 
 that immense blanks are left. Nothing but the most 
 general outline is given. And yet what is given has 
 been so expressed and conceived as wonderfully to 
 avoid any clashing with the later fillings up of sub- 
 sequent scientific discovery. The narrative, in its 
 first and simplest form \ does not enter into any of the 
 
 ' Gen. i. What is here said of this first account in Genesis cannot 
 be said with equal confidence of the second, or alternative account,
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 261 
 
 childish or grotesque inventions of which all other 
 cosmogonies are full. It does not commit itself to 
 any explanations as to time and methods, which may, 
 or may not, be accessible to later investigation. In 
 like manner it is remarkable that the story of the Fall 
 does not involve the widespread but fond imagination 
 of some golden age, neither does it imply any kind or 
 degree of acquired primeval knowledge. On the con- 
 trary, it asserts that it was the very first creature 
 endowed with a free will that used it in the spirit of 
 disobedience, so that the processes of corruption must 
 have begun at once. No facts establishing the 
 universal savagery of mankind in all later genera- 
 tions, even if such facts could be clearly ascertained, 
 can involve of necessity any contradiction of the 
 doctrine laid down by the Hebrew writers that all 
 such degrees of vice and savagery are due to original, 
 and continuous, and increasing, violations of the 
 Divine law. 
 
 It is impossible to deny that in this doctrine we 
 have a rational and consistent explanation of the 
 strangely contrasted facts which are obvious and 
 notorious in the condition of humanity : on the one 
 hand, the elevation of its powers, so far above those 
 of all other living creatures ; on the other hand, the 
 failure of its instincts to keep man from vices which 
 lower him far below the level of the beasts. Every 
 aspect of the facts, as we actually see them in the 
 
 which follows in Gen. ii. The differences between these two 
 accounts have been exaggerated. But the detail entered into respect- 
 ing the separate creation of woman, as well as some others, seem 
 obviously mythical (Gen. ii. 21, 22).
 
 262 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 world, is thus comprehended within the large philo- 
 sophy of this Hebrew doctrine. There can be no 
 doubt that, by a natural law, evil does propagate and 
 intensify itself. Nor can there be any doubt that the 
 most fruitful of all evils is false and corrupt imagina- 
 tions as to the character and demands of the Supreme 
 Being. It is well worthy of note that, so far as we 
 know, the writers of the Old Testament were never 
 brought into contact with any of the races to which 
 we usually apply the name of savages. No allusion 
 is made by any of them to men in that condition. 
 They never saw such representatives of humanity as 
 the natives of Australia or of Fuegia. If they had 
 seen them they would certainly not have recognized 
 them as the nearest types of the condition in which 
 man can have been born into the world, any more 
 than they did recognize in the same capacity any of 
 the cruel and ferocious nations with a high civilization 
 by whom they were surrounded. Their conception of 
 the state and condition of the first man was evidently 
 that of a child in knowledge and acquirements, but of 
 a child, also, in simplicity and innocence. And this 
 conception undoubtedly corresponds more closely 
 than any other to the analogies of Nature. It is 
 a conception which simply assumes that man's first 
 condition was like that of all other living things, the 
 condition of a perfect natural harmony and adaptation 
 between his interests and his powers as an inheritor 
 of organic life. And if this conception does not 
 explain what we call the origin of evil, at least it does 
 give a profound definition of its essence in defining
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 263 
 
 the real nature of that which is its opposite, namely, 
 all goodness and virtue. The obedience of a will 
 really free, and conscious of obligation to the laws 
 of a living God who is the God of all flesh, and the 
 Father of all spirits — this, they taught, was the only 
 righteousness, and the only true object of moral 
 approbation. But that very freedom on which the 
 whole depends, is, to us, as inseparable in thought 
 from the possibility of, and from temptations to, dis- 
 obedience, as the existence of light is inseparable 
 from the phenomena of shadows, and from the possi- 
 bility of utter darkness. 
 
 With this great clue to the contrasts and enigmas 
 of human character and conduct, the prophets and 
 singers of Israel could look in the face all the facts of 
 life. With perfect truth and with perfect consistency 
 they could say, ' Thou madest him a little lower than 
 the angels ; thou crownedst him with glory and 
 honour, and didst set him over the works of Thy 
 hand,' and yet they could also say, ' Behold, I was 
 shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive 
 me.' Nor is it less evident that this doctrine, besides 
 being consistent with reasonable conclusions as to 
 the past, and with all the evidence of the present, is the 
 only doctrine on which any hope for the future can 
 be founded. It asserts for man an inborn capacity 
 for the recognition of truth — if only it can be presented 
 to him. It asserts the abiding presence of the same 
 spiritual agency from which that capacity has been 
 originally derived. It assumes the possibility of per- 
 sonal communion with that Spirit through a rational
 
 264 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 confidence in the Unseen which rises into faith. It 
 asserts that as the result of such communion with 
 many chosen servants of Jehovah during a long 
 course of history, the Divine law has been largely 
 made known to men. It asserts that the goodness 
 and beauty of that law is self-revealing to those who 
 meditate upon it, and that the devout contemplation 
 of it has a transforming power over the minds and 
 hearts of men. 
 
 No part of the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures 
 rests more evidently on a natural law than this. 
 Even as between man and man, nothing can be more 
 certain than the powerful influence of one spirit upon 
 another. The contagion of example is notorious and 
 proverbial. The purifying and elevating influence 
 of a great character rises in proportion to its own 
 greatness and to the study, the love, and the admira- 
 tion, with which we regard it. It is therefore all 
 according to the constitution and course of Nature that 
 the admiring and loving contemplation of a Divine 
 Being, vividly believed in as the Author of all truth, 
 should be the only possible regenerating power in the 
 restoration of a corrupted world. So also is it in 
 entire accordance with the nature of things that such 
 a Being should respond to His creatures' adoration by 
 favouring manifestations of His character and of His 
 spiritual presence. There are no natural laws more 
 certain in their operation than those which pertain 
 to the working of a mind willing and acting under 
 the highest motives conceivable to man. Accord- 
 ingly the possibility of a close personal communion
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 265 
 
 with Jehovah is an inseparable part of the Hebrew 
 theology. ' Speak, for Thy servant heareth ^ ' were 
 the words of the prophet Samuel. ' Show Thy 
 marvellous loving-kindness, O Thou that savest by 
 Thy right hand them that put their trust in Thee^,' 
 are the words of the Psalmist. Nor does he, or 
 other sacred writers, forget the correlative truth, 
 that such communion does and must transform and 
 glorify the man who thus adores and prays — ' As 
 for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness : 
 I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy like- 
 ness ^' 
 
 There is another aspect of the same series of con- 
 nected truths, which plays a large part in the theology 
 of the Hebrews. The special elevation and illumina- 
 tion which was attributed, as a natural consequence, to 
 such communion with the Mind of God, was conceived 
 to carry with it a high and far-reaching power of 
 interpretation over social phenomena, and over coming 
 political events. This was, indeed, the constant theme 
 of prophecy, and the constant exercise of its func- 
 tions. It is strange that this conception seems to be 
 hard of acceptance now. It is specially strange that 
 the difficulty of it seems greatest to those who dwell 
 most on the reign of what they call ' invariable laws.' 
 The 'abstract predictability' of all events is one of 
 the most plausible of the phrases in which the central 
 idea of the Necessitarian philosophy has been ex- 
 pressed. It seems impossible for any of us to get 
 rid of that idea altogether. We must think that 
 
 ^ I Sam. iii. 10. ^ Ps. xvii. 7, * Ps. xvii. 15.
 
 266 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 whatever happens has happened because of a con- 
 catenation of causes, the Hnks of which could have 
 been traced by perfect knowledge. Fatalism in its 
 grossest forms has always been founded on this phase 
 of thought. It often finds expression even in the 
 popular mind, among men who do not think them- 
 selves fatalists, and who have never dabbled in philo- 
 sophy. But the abstract predictability of events 
 makes concrete, or occasional, predictability, at least 
 more natural and more easy to conceive as possible. 
 If we believe that the whole course of Nature is 
 governed by law — by the apparently self-working 
 operation of both physical and spiritual causes — it 
 must be possible that a glance of unusual spiritual 
 penetration into the present, should be able, with 
 various degrees of certainty, to predict the future. 
 The extent of this power, the sweep and distance 
 of the predictive vision, must depend on the nature 
 of the subject, and on the rank and power ot 
 the special laws on which each particular vision 
 rests. 
 
 It is in direct connexion with the unreasonable and 
 unphilosophical preconception against the possibility 
 of prediction, that great efforts have been made to 
 eliminate from Hebrew prophecy the purely predictive 
 element, and to reduce the whole of it to mere preach- 
 ing. For this purpose elaborate arguments have been 
 used to bring down the date of the prophetic writings 
 to a comparatively late period, so that mere seeing, and 
 not any foreseeing, may be made the explanation of 
 their language. But in so far as this effort has been
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 267 
 
 really successful and has rested on historical facts 
 well ascertained, it has been quite inadequate for 
 its purpose. If not a line of Hebrew prophecy had 
 been written till after the captivity of the Jews in 
 Babylon, there is a mass of matter remaining which 
 must have been as purely predictive in substance as 
 it is in form. The future destruction of the great 
 monarchies and cities of the East, and the future 
 utter desolation even of the very lands on which they 
 were erected, cannot be explained away. Resort has 
 been had in this case to a priori arguments, and to 
 abstract doctrines which assume that we have some 
 independent knowledge of the Divine character, and of 
 the methods which alone can or cannot be attributed 
 to Jehovah. Thus it has been said that the idea of 
 His visiting upon a whole region of the earth, in the 
 form of utter desolation, the sins of certain particular 
 generations of men who lived there, is an inconceiv- 
 able idea. Yet nothing can be more certain than 
 that this argument is in the teeth of facts and of 
 natural laws, which, on a smaller scale, we see in con- 
 tinual operation. Men can, and do, bring causes into 
 operation which are very lasting, if not absolutely 
 permanent, in their desolating effects. Mere bad 
 husbandry will impoverish and exhaust land for many 
 years, whilst recuperative operations may be indefi- 
 nitely postponed by injurious economic legislation, or 
 by depopulating wars. The hundred and seventh 
 Psalm, which is full of the essential righteousness of 
 all Divine judgments, sees no impeachment of that 
 righteousness in the fact that Jehovah ' turneth a
 
 268 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of 
 them that dwell therein \' 
 
 There is really no sense or reason in the argument 
 that those truly Divine judgments which are brought 
 about by the natural consequences of Divine laws, 
 must fall on the individual men alone, or on the his- 
 torical generations alone, that were themselves person- 
 ally guilty of violent and hideous transgressions. For 
 this kind of guilt, and nothing short of this, was 
 the accusation of the Hebrew prophets against the 
 people and monarchies of Babylon and of Nineveh. 
 These were not rebuked merely for making con- 
 quests — seeing that military conquests have con- 
 tinually been the origin of the greatest and happiest 
 nations — seeing especially that the Hebrews had 
 themselves been conquerors, and always held them- 
 selves to have been, therein, both the executors of 
 Divine judgments and the future instruments of Divine 
 purposes. But what they saw and denounced in 
 Nineveh and Babylon, was very different. They saw 
 Powers which not only had no good seed in their 
 hands to sow for the future benefit of the world, but 
 Powers which in everything made for evil and not 
 for good. Their conceptions of the Divine Nature 
 were destructive to virtue — their worship was foul 
 with unspeakable abominations — their practices in war 
 were exceptionally ferocious and cruel even in a cruel 
 age. They were the very incarnations of vainglorious 
 pride, with nothing to redeem their vicious influence 
 on the future of our race. Such is the picture of them 
 
 ' Ps. cvii. 34.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 269 
 
 drawn by Isaiah and Jeremiah, and it has been con- 
 firmed to the very uttermost by the recovered records 
 of their own confessions. No more terrible story has 
 ever been brought to hght of the hideous corruption 
 of human nature. The great boast of the Assyrian 
 monarchies, as recorded by their inscriptions, was in 
 the multitudes of other nations whom they had reduced 
 to slavery — in the number of prisoners of war whom 
 they had impaled or crucified ; in the wide areas of 
 country they had reduced to utter ruin — and espe- 
 cially in the number of forests and fruit trees which 
 they had cut down and destroyed for ever. These 
 were the triumphs which they desired to be held in 
 perpetual remembrance by tablets of enduring mate- 
 rial, so that to the latest generations their glory might 
 be known ^. And they have succeeded — but only in 
 a sense which they did not anticipate. The waters 
 of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the rains of heaven, 
 crumbling at last the sunburnt bricks of their gigantic 
 palaces, have revealed, for the everlasting instruction 
 of the world, what demons men may become in the 
 downward progress of corruption, and in ever-widening 
 circles of departure from the laws of the only living 
 and true God. They have succeeded too in proving 
 how full of truth was the tremendous image em- 
 ployed by Isaiah in the denunciation of them. Hell 
 was described as claiming them for its own, and as 
 rising to meet them with its hideous welcome : — ' Hell 
 was moved to meet thee at thy coming,' says the 
 
 ' See Records of the Past for many translated inscriptions which 
 more than justify this description.
 
 270 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 great prophet when he foresaw and foretold the fall 
 of Babylon, and that utter desolation of one of the 
 richest countries in the world which is still a solitary- 
 example of such complete and lasting ruin. 
 
 It is impossible to controvert with any success the 
 evidence which these prophecies afford of the truthful 
 revelations on the inevitable working of Divine laws, 
 even in secular events, which were vouchsafed to the 
 prophets who believed in those laws, and who medi- 
 tated upon them day and night. It is unavailing to 
 contend that some of their corresponding visions in 
 respect to other cities and nations, do not seem to 
 have had an equally literal fulfilment — that Da- 
 mascus, for example, whose utter destruction was 
 also predicted ^, has been a city always, and is a city 
 still. Damascus has been taken and partially ruined 
 many times, and its political power has been utterly 
 destroyed. But Abana and Pharpar have never 
 ceased to flow, and such an oasis, in such a desert, 
 could never cease to attract inhabitants. The de- 
 nunciations pronounced against Egypt ^ seem to be 
 a striking picture of the subsequent history of that 
 mysterious empire, and of the fate of its people during 
 many generations. It is probable, however, that no 
 secular prophecy of the future was ever absolutely 
 unconditional — that changes of people, and of con- 
 duct, were always possible, which might affect the 
 reasons for which retributions are deserved, and 
 consequently the causes through which they were 
 brought about. In the case of the great military 
 
 ' Isa. xvii. I. ^ Isa. xix.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 27I 
 
 monarchies of Mesopotamia, it is remarkable that the 
 monumental evidence is strongly in favour of a con- 
 tinuous descent in the deepest depths of human 
 corruption. The inscriptions of the earliest Baby- 
 lonian kingdom, do record the execution of great 
 works of irrigation as deeds of which the monarchs 
 had reason to be proud. But the later inscriptions 
 of the Assyrian kings, are generally wanting in any 
 reference to such useful and beneficent works. Their 
 whole thoughts seem to have been set on deeds of 
 the fiercest cruelty and of the most insane pride. 
 This is both the why and the how— the reason and the 
 cause — of the results which the prophets saw and 
 foresaw. Such wickedness led to the results pre- 
 dicted by necessary steps of consequence in a world 
 governed by natural laws which are the laws of an 
 everlasting kingdom, and of a dominion which en- 
 dureth throughout all generations. 
 
 But there is another feature of Hebrew prophecy 
 far more remarkable than the foresight which was 
 due to insight into the deeper seated causes de- 
 termining political events. Although all the sacred 
 writers asserted strongly the possibility of a personal 
 communion between the spirits of faithful men and the 
 Spirit of the One Creator — although in various degrees 
 they felt it, had comfort in it, and spoke of it as the 
 one greatest joy in life — yet from the earliest times 
 they had a sense of the difficulty of attaining it under 
 the actual conditions of the world, and they looked to 
 some great change in those conditions which would 
 make such communion more accessible, and far more
 
 272 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 widely prevalent. ' Oh that Thou wouldest rend 
 the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down,' was 
 the exclamation of Isaiah^. And the actual occur- 
 rence of some such coming down, in some form 
 or another, was an expectation and a hope which 
 is the perpetual theme of prophecy. In the Songs 
 of Israel, indeed, we seem to listen to men who, 
 in this region of spirituality, had reached the very 
 highest elevation. The valuable compendium of 
 the Psalter prepared by Mr. Gladstone gives a short 
 heading of the main subject, or prevailing thought, of 
 each Psalm. Of these three are specified as directly 
 devoted to 'communion with God;' but the truth is 
 that a very much larger number of the whole col- 
 lection, are nearly, if not quite, as prominently expres- 
 sive of the same aspiration and of the same experience. 
 Yet along with this sense of a privilege already in the 
 full possession of spiritually-minded and faithful men, 
 there are, as is well known, certain Psalms which, 
 however obscurely and indefinitely, indicate some 
 vision of a new means of access, and of a new 
 exhibition of Jehovah's power in the manifestation of 
 His character and of His law. These Psalms, together 
 with innumerable other passages, much more definite, 
 both in the historical and in the prophetic books, 
 establish as an historical fact the early and lasting 
 expectation of the Jews of the coming of some great 
 One whom they called the Messiah. And this 
 expectation, although often expressed in images of 
 earthly benefits to the Hebrew race and nation, has 
 
 ' Isa. Ixiv. I.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 273 
 
 this special peculiarity about it, that it is mainly 
 an expectation of a signal triumph over evil by 
 means of some new revelation of spiritual truth 
 to the whole of mankind. The rod of Jehovah's 
 strength was to be sent out of Zion in the person 
 of some one whom the Psalmist called ' his Lord,' 
 and to whom Jehovah gave a commission with com- 
 manding strength to discharge it. Through that 
 strength he was to ' rule in the midst of his enemies.' 
 And yet this rule was to be a rule over reformed and 
 willing minds. ' Thy people shall be willing in the 
 day of thy power.' Moreover that power was to 
 consist essentially in perfect goodness and perfect 
 truth. It was not seen as the power of mere strength 
 exerted arbitrarily. It was seen ' in the beauties of 
 holiness from the womb of the morning.' The trans- 
 lation in the English Prayer Book makes the con- 
 ception more clear, and its expression more beautiful. 
 ' In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee 
 free-will offerings with an holy worship ; the dew 
 of thy birth is of the womb of the morning ^.' And 
 thus it is a characteristic of all the passages on which 
 the Jewish expectations were founded, that the writers 
 rise above the mere national hopes and ambitions of 
 their race, and see in the coming One a revealer of 
 Divine truth to all men. Jerusalem and its people 
 are always treated as the pulpit, or as the immediate 
 congregation, in which the Great Revealer was to 
 appear. The second Psalm is specially clear on this 
 conception, ' Yet have I set my King upon my holy 
 
 1 Ps. ex. 
 
 T
 
 274 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 hill of Zion. I will preach the law ; ' and then adding, 
 ' Desire of Me, and I shall give thee the heathen for 
 thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth 
 for thy possession.' 
 
 The same thought is still more conspicuous, and is 
 more explicitly expressed, in the prophetic books. If 
 ever we are inclined to be sceptical about the appli- 
 cations made of passages in the Old Testament by 
 the writers in the New — if we are ever inclined to 
 think them arbitrary or fanciful, and to ascribe our 
 own acquiescence in them to mere early habit and 
 association — there is no more instructive lesson than 
 to read the Messianic passages in the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures with a sustained effort to think of them, and to 
 interpret them, as we should do if they had been just 
 discovered and deciphered like so many other Eastern 
 ' Records of the Past.' Instead of losing in wonder and 
 significance, we shall find that they gain immensely. 
 Even if, in the Book of Job — which is not Jewish at 
 all, and which is an elaborate parable in the form of 
 a dramatic poem — one celebrated passage, assuming 
 the expectation of personal immortality^, can be ex- 
 plained away by ingenious variations from the received 
 translation of certain Hebrew words, assuredly no 
 such process of denudation can wipe out from whole 
 chapters in the recognized Hebrew prophets, or from 
 many cognate passages in the historical books, the 
 intense reality of the Messianic vision. If we try 
 hard to make the utmost possible allowance in our 
 own minds for Christian preconceptions, we must be 
 
 ' Job xix. 25-7.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 275 
 
 equally clear-sighted and firm in discounting precon- 
 ceptions coming from an opposite direction. We know 
 that the Jews did not even then hold that revealing 
 visions of Divine truth were confined to the seed of 
 Abraham. And this agrees with all that we should 
 expect if there be a God at all, and if man has in- 
 herent faculties responsive to His creation, which is 
 what we call Nature. There is therefore no reason in 
 the preconception that in such a splendid allegory as 
 that which has come down to us in the Book of Job 
 there cannot have been any literal meaning in the 
 words, ' I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that 
 He will stand in the latter days upon the earth.' If 
 the attempts to explain away this passage are 
 governed at all, or mainly, by any such preconception, 
 these attempts must be under a corresponding sus- 
 picion of fundamental error. The simplicity and 
 majesty of the Authorized Version are strong internal 
 evidence of its truth. The complexity and feebleness 
 of all the attempted corrections, are equally strong 
 internal evidence of their artificial character. The 
 late revisers of the Old Testament have seen no 
 reason to make any, except the most trifling, verbal 
 change, and they have fully confirmed the old Version 
 in the lines of sequel which are in magnificent har- 
 mony with those preceding : ' Yet from my flesh 
 shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and 
 mine eyes shall behold, and not another.' 
 
 But as regards the well-known Messianic chapters, 
 and innumerable individual passages in the Hebrew 
 books, all attempts at any substantial changes are 
 
 T 2
 
 276 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 obviously futile. There are, indeed, some passages 
 in Genesis which are so purely figurative and abstract, 
 that probably no reader without previous knowledge 
 of the Jewish history, could even guess what they may 
 mean, or rather what they may cover. Such is the 
 promise recorded, that the seed of the woman shall 
 bruise the serpent's head ^. This is, indeed, a striking 
 figure when it has been explained ; but the explana- 
 tion could hardly suggest itself to a reader with no 
 previous knowledge or associations. But such passages 
 only stand around the edges and the fringes of the 
 great web of prophecy which unfolds its tissues, all 
 shot through and through with this wonderful thread 
 of gold. And just as in the conception of sacrifice 
 we find the highest spiritual doctrine laid down by 
 one of the oldest prophets, Hosea, so in the conception 
 of some great coming deliverance, we find the same 
 prophet, in the midst of his denunciations against the 
 prevalence of the grossest corruptions, pausing to give 
 utterance to this expectation in the most triumphant 
 language : ' And I will betroth thee unto Me for ever ; 
 yea, I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness, and 
 in judgment, and in loving-kindness, and in mercies 
 . . . and thou shalt know the Lord ^.' The whole of 
 the older prophetic books are full of utterances of the 
 same type, wholly vague, not only as regards time, 
 but also as regards means, and containing no indica- 
 tion of any personal Deliverer. Three leading features 
 are conspicuous — first, terrible pictures and rebukes of 
 the corruptions of their own nation ; secondly, the 
 
 ' Gen. iii. 15. ^ Hos. ii. 19, 20.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 277 
 
 continual assertion that these corruptions were the 
 reasons for, and the causes of, national chastisement ; 
 thirdly, fierce denunciations of the still greater wicked- 
 ness and corruptions of the surrounding heathen 
 nations who were the enemies of Israel ; fourthly, 
 distinct, and very definite, predictions of the success 
 of those nations in the infliction of the most dreadful 
 calamities then associated with defeat in war ; and 
 lastly, in the midst of these convictions as to an early 
 and a terrible future, the most confident and joyful 
 visions of some great ultimate triumph which was to 
 bless, not the Hebrew people alone, but the whole 
 world. 
 
 Never in the history of man did a proud and intense 
 spirit of patriotism find utterance, or take a form, in the 
 least like to these. The prophets themselves who saw 
 these visions, were sometimes as alive as any modern 
 sceptic to the moral difficulties which they suggested. 
 Thus Habakkuk is sorely troubled by the Chaldean 
 triumphs over his own people, which nevertheless he 
 foresaw as the instruments employed for the chastise- 
 ment of Israel, Wicked and rebellious as his brethren 
 had become, were not the Chaldeans far more wicked 
 still ? Why should the worst men be allowed to sub- 
 due and destroy other men who were at least better 
 than themselves? Would not such a triumph do 
 more harm than good both in itself and as an example 
 unto the world? Would not the Chaldean be con- 
 firmed in all his hideous idolatries ? Would not his 
 offensive pride become more offensive still, 'imputing 
 thus his power unto his God ' ? All this the prophet
 
 278 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 feels and speaks ^ But he bows to fact — to the system 
 of government which he sees to be established in a 
 world rendered mysterious by the universal lapse of 
 man from submission to the Divine law. But although 
 the mystery, and the wonder, does not for a moment 
 shake his splendid confidence in the ultimate triumph 
 of that law, yet in his agony of mind he cannot help 
 bursting out into this tempestuous exclamation : ' Art 
 Thou not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, mine 
 Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, Thou hast 
 ordained them for judgment ; and, O mighty God, 
 Thou hast established them for correction.' And then 
 follow words which seem almost words of reproach 
 against Jehovah : ' Thou art of purer eyes than to 
 behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity ; wherefore 
 lookest Thou upon them that deal treacherously, and 
 holdest Thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the 
 man that is more righteous than he - ? ' Yet in spite 
 of this terrible misgiving which cuts so deeply into 
 the moral government of the world as we see it now, 
 there is no prophet who has given more magnificent 
 expression to an absolute confidence in the final 
 triumph of Jehovah's righteous kingdom. It is to 
 him that we owe that great verse : ' For the earth shall 
 be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, 
 as the waters cover the sea'^.' His contemporary, the 
 Samarian Amos, presents us with exactly the same 
 phenomenon of foreseeing the most dreadful of all 
 national calamities — utter defeat and captivity in a 
 foreign land — coupled with the same certainty of some 
 
 ' Hab. i. 10, II. ^ Hab. i. 12, 13. ^ Hab. ii. 14.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 279 
 
 future complete deliverance. Closely similar language 
 is used by the prophets Joel, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, 
 all of whom carry us back to the seventh century 
 before the Christian era. 
 
 If we try to read these books without preconceptions, 
 there are three prominent characteristics which cannot 
 fail to strike us — first, that whilst some actual and 
 physical restoration of the Jews as a nation from 
 calamity and captivity or dispersion, is always, so to 
 speak, the framework of the prophetic vision, it always 
 seems as if this framework were too narrow for the 
 contents put into it. The predicted blessings are 
 always described in language which depicts them as 
 extending to all mankind. No mere restoration of 
 the Hebrew people could possibly satisfy or even 
 explain the language used. The widest extension of 
 political power ever attained by the Hebrews, was in 
 the days of Solomon, and his dominion was after all 
 even at its best a small one between the Mediterranean 
 and the Euphrates. But when any specific words are 
 ever used at all to indicate the kingdom which was to 
 be restored, they make no reference to such foreign 
 conquests as those of Solomon. The small Davidic 
 kingdom is always taken as the type of the happiest 
 aspirations, and its restoration as representing the 
 most blessed hope of Israel. When any person is 
 mentioned in connexion with the national Messianic 
 expectation, it is always David. The second charac- 
 teristic of all these prophecies is that the restoration 
 is always identified with some profound moral and 
 spiritual reform which was to seat righteousness on
 
 28o THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 the throne, and make the Divine law as widely known 
 as, at last, it will come to be universally obeyed^ The 
 third characteristic of these visions, is that they always 
 represent the wide and the finally universal blessings 
 of the Messianic age as essentially consisting in this 
 spiritual triumph, and the Hebrew people, the Hebrew 
 country, and the capital of the Hebrew worship, as 
 merely the people and the spot from which this great 
 light was first to shine upon the whole world. 
 
 It is impossible to deny the sublimity of this con- 
 ception. It is impossible to deny the solitary place it 
 occupies in the history of human thought. No other 
 literature — no other philosophy — no other religion, 
 presents us with anything even like in kind. It casts 
 down to the ground all the pride of race, which was 
 naturally intense in a people which believed itself to 
 be a chosen race. It sees — through an immediate 
 future which was to be calamitous and dreadful in 
 the highest degree — some distant future in which the 
 Hebrew people were to be little more than a passive 
 instrument in a new and wide illumination of the 
 world. Nor is it possible to mistake the root idea 
 out of which this conception came. It was the idea 
 of a kingdom which was an everlasting kingdom, 
 governed by righteous purposes which would assuredly 
 work out their own results through intelligible laws, 
 and the use of adapted means. It contemplated 
 with mourning, indeed, and sometimes with a sense 
 of difficulty and of wonder, but yet always without 
 dismay, the apparent success of wills, rebellious, and 
 for a time triumphant, over Jehovah's eternal statutes.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 281 
 
 Nor, in the earlier days of prophecy, had they any 
 vision, even of the vaguest kind, of the means through 
 which their hope and expectation could be attained. 
 But when we follow the stream of prophecy as it runs 
 down the course of history, the wonder of this Hebrew 
 conception must increase upon us. Not only with 
 national destruction and personal captivity foreseen 
 as certain, but under the actual endurance of these 
 calamities, the prophets kept up their confidence, and 
 rose to the highest elevation in their conception of 
 the nature of the change which was to come. More- 
 over, now, for the first time, they saw the nature of 
 the chief agency that was to be employed. Before 
 the great Babylonish Captivity, during its continu- 
 ance, and after their return, they became more and 
 more distinct in the prediction of that agency as 
 a Person. The prince of these prophets is Isaiah. 
 Modern criticism has maintained that many indica- 
 tions of internal evidence point to another authorship 
 as commencing at the fortieth chapter of the whole 
 book now called by his name, and continuing through 
 the remaining chapters. It may be so ; and it is 
 evident that the mention by name of one individual 
 man, Cyrus, a king, who was not born till 250 years 
 later than the date claimed for the whole book, is 
 against the analogy of prophecy, and at variance with 
 its habitual and natural avoidance of details. It is 
 therefore extremely probable that at least additions to 
 the book have been made in what is called the post- 
 exihc age. But this can make no difference what- 
 ever in the lesson we are now trying to learn as to the
 
 282 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 characteristics of Hebrew theology. The latest date 
 assigned for the supposed 'second Isaiah' after the 
 Captivity, is as good for our purpose as the earlier 
 chapters which purport to be written in the reign of 
 Hezekiah, 750 B. c. After all, the date of the Captivity 
 of Judah is still 588 B.C., and of the Return only seventy 
 years later. Five hundred and thirty-six years is a long 
 period in the history of any nation. It is as long as 
 that which separates us from the reign of Edward III. 
 If, therefore, the whole Book of Isaiah and not one 
 half of it only, had been written after the Exile, it 
 would make no difference at all so far as our present 
 investigation is concerned. But the fact is that both 
 portions of this book have exactly the same special 
 marks, namely, an immense advance in the prophetic 
 vision concerning the great agency to be employed 
 in the blessings of the coming Messianic age. That 
 agency was now, more and more, definitely seen to be 
 a Person ; and the position and character assigned to 
 him have all the same mysterious peculiarities. Never- 
 theless this vision comes in close connexion with 
 exactly the same ethical doctrines, and with the same 
 spiritual application of them to the established Hebrew 
 worship, which we have seen to be remarkable in the 
 earliest prophets. The bloody animal sacrifices of the 
 Levitical ritual are spoken of with denunciation and 
 disgust : — ' To what purpose is the multitude of your 
 sacrifices unto Me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the 
 burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; and 
 I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or 
 of he goats . . . Bring no more vain oblations ; incense
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 283 
 
 is an abomination unto Me ^' The coming reform 
 was to be one of a spiritual nature. ' Zion shall be 
 redeemed with judgment, and her converts with 
 righteousness'-.' It was not to be confined to the 
 Jews. No local hill, however sacred, or however 
 typical in the past, was to be the seat of the new 
 reign. ' The mountain of the Lord's house ' was to 
 be ' established in the top of the mountains ' and to be 
 ' exalted above the hills,' and all nations were to 
 'flow unto it.' And the reason is explained, 'For 
 out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of 
 the Lord from Jerusalem^.' 
 
 Then it is in the first, or older, division of Isaiah, not 
 in the second, that we have the mysterious exclamation, 
 ' For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given : 
 and the government shall be upon his shoulder : and 
 his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The 
 mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of 
 Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace 
 there shall be no end *.' Again it is, in the same 
 earlier division, that, coupled with these visions of 
 a glorious future which must have appeared utterly 
 enigmatical to the prophet's contemporaries, we have 
 the most striking and conclusive evidence of strictly 
 predictive prophecy in respect to mere external and 
 political events. They are all the more striking if 
 they were written during, or soon after, Babylon had 
 made her long-established power felt by the Jews in 
 the capture of Jerusalem and in the captivity of its 
 people. The conquest of Babylon by Cyrus might, 
 
 ' Isa. i. II, 13. ■ Isa. i. 27. ^ Isa. ii. 2, 3. * Isa. ix. 6, 7.
 
 284 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 indeed, be well concluded to be a final fall of her 
 dominion, and of her power to afflict surrounding 
 nations. But the prediction goes far beyond this, even 
 to the foreseeing of ultimate results which were not 
 reached for centuries. Babylon was still a great city 
 in the days of Herodotus, a hundred years after the 
 Return of the Jews ; and at the end of another hundred 
 years the treasures found in it by Alexander the 
 Great were so rich that it is said to have almost sated 
 the Macedonian army. The utter destruction and 
 even the disappearance of such a city as Babylon 
 then was, is not one of those events which happen 
 in the common vicissitudes of war, especially when 
 a great river, and one of the richest soils in the world, 
 concur to make it a natural place of human habita- 
 tion. Yet nothing can be more distinct and definite, 
 nothing even more detailed — than the prediction of 
 Isaiah that the very site of Babylon would become 
 indiscoverable without ' narrowly looking ' at it, and 
 wondering that such heaps and mounds should indeed 
 be the only remains of the great and most wicked 
 city. It was to be made a ' possession for the bittern, 
 and pools of water,' and swept ' with the besom of 
 destruction ^.' It is quite impossible to separate 
 these utterances and the literal fulfilment of them 
 from the strictest conception of predictive prophecy, 
 none the less, but all the more, because of the fact 
 that they are always based upon an insight — avowed 
 and claimed — into those natural causes which are the 
 servants of an everlasting kingdom. Unusual and 
 
 ^ Isa. xiii-xiv.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 285 
 
 enormous wickedness is always alleged as explaining 
 the foreseen results. ' I will punish the world for 
 their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity ; and 
 I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, 
 and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible K' 
 And, undoubtedly, the gross moral corruption of the 
 people of Babylon, and the inheritance of universal 
 hatred which their cruelty entailed upon them, were 
 such as to cause and to explain the utter enervation 
 and decay which did at last literally obliterate from 
 the face of the earth one of the very greatest cities of 
 the ancient world. 
 
 It is all in perfect consistency and harmony with 
 these conceptions of the ultimate causes which rule the 
 future, that the prophecies of Isaiah rise to a far higher 
 level than had ever been attained before respecting 
 the nature of the Great Deliverance which was the 
 indelible, yet the indefinite, expectation of the Jewish 
 people. And the most extraordinary feature about 
 the prophecies of Isaiah on this subject is — not only 
 that they centre on some one Person who was to 
 come, but that they indicate that the power of this 
 Person to convert and subdue the world was to be 
 a moral or spiritual, and not a political or a military 
 power. Much of the imagery, indeed, of an earthly 
 kingdom is still used, as we use it ourselves in 
 common language quite unconsciously. When, for 
 example, we speak of the triumph of some new and 
 great truth over the minds of men we do not even 
 think of the proud triumphal processions which led the 
 
 ' Isa. xiii. ri.
 
 286 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 victorious generals up the steps of the Capitol at Rome. 
 Yet these were what the word triumphs originally- 
 meant. So, in like manner, Isaiah keeps much of the 
 old Hebrew language which clothed with glory and 
 reverence the remembrance of the monarchy of David. 
 And yet in the long series of splendid chapters which 
 begins so suddenly at the fortieth, and are almost 
 exclusively devoted to rapturous visions of the great 
 national hope, there are innumerable passages which 
 are wholly incompatible with the idea of any local 
 or any earthly kingdom. ' The glory of the Lord 
 was to be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together^.' 
 The universality of the comiing deliverance is dwelt 
 upon in the old spirit, indeed, but with a new par- 
 ticularity and emphasis : ' Behold My servant, whom 
 I uphold, Mine elect, in whom My soul delighteth : 
 I have put My spirit upon him ; he shall bring forth 
 judgment to the Gentiles^.' The imagery employed 
 to describe the new power, is not that of mere strength, 
 nor of the sword, nor of any outward dominion. It 
 was to be the power of some slow and gentle influence 
 which no opposition could discourage, and no re- 
 sistance could finally overcome. Moreover the whole 
 pagan world is repeatedly represented as the arena 
 of this mysterious contest, and of its glorious but 
 purely spiritual triumph. The gentleness of the new 
 Deliverer is emphatically described : ' He shall not 
 cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in 
 the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and 
 the smoking flax shall he not quench : he shall not 
 
 ' Isa. xl. 5. * Isa. xlii. i.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 287 
 
 fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment 
 on the earth : and the isles shall wait for his law^' 
 
 In the forty-ninth chapter we have what seems to be 
 a dialogue between Jehovah and the Servant who 
 was to be His agent in bringing all this to pass. The 
 Servant knows that the weapon he was sent to use 
 was to be, not his arm holding a sword, but his mouth 
 uttering words. He sees discouragement and appa- 
 rent failure. In spite of the promise ' Thou art My 
 servant, in whom I will be glorified,' he complains, 
 ' I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength 
 in nought' ; and this complaint seems to be distinctly 
 connected with a foresight that so far as his own 
 nation was concerned, his work, at least for a time, 
 would be a failure. Yet under this forecast the Servant 
 is comforted by an assurance that though ' formed from 
 the womb to bring Jacob again to him,' yet it was 
 'a light thing' to 'raise up the tribes of Jacob; and 
 to restore the preserved of Israel,' compared with 
 that larger work in the conversion of the heathen 
 world, which was to be his reward : ' that thou mayest 
 be My salvation unto the end of the earth -.' The 
 rejection was to be local, the triumph was to be 
 universal. ' To him whom man despiseth, whom the 
 nation abhorreth, kings shall see and arise, princes 
 also shall come to worship.' The incredulity with 
 which such a message was sure to be received by 
 a people who could neither understand the means 
 to be employed, nor the kind of end which was alone 
 to be attained, is depicted in the fifty-third chapter 
 
 ' Isa. xlii. 24. ^ Isa. xlix. 4-6.
 
 288 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 with every image which increases the wonder of the 
 vision both as to means and ends. If we try to read 
 this chapter free from preconceptions, it is impossible 
 to conceive anything more mysterious or at the same 
 time more majestic, when we consider it as a con- 
 ception of the Messiah whom the Hebrew people had 
 been long accustomed to expect. That it is so intended 
 is certain from the perfect continuity of its general 
 ideas with those which had been involved both in the 
 historical and in the oldest prophetic books. There 
 is no abatement in the confidence of a final triumph, 
 nor in the glory which is ascribed to it. But along 
 with this there are new and strange details which 
 connect the coming One with a humble origin — 
 with a want of outward attractiveness in the eyes 
 of men — with the endurance of grief, sorrow, and 
 affliction ; with rejection and despising ; and with 
 a violent death. 
 
 And yet in the midst of this vision which may well 
 have seemed to the seer himself as mysterious as it 
 did to his contemporaries and to later generations 
 of his race, there sounds the old true note of all 
 Hebrew theology, the note, namely, which connects 
 inseparably the Messianic hope with the triumph of 
 the Divine law, through some fresh promulgation, — 
 a more perfect knowledge — and a wider acceptance 
 of it. The triumph was to be attained by these 
 means, and to consist in this result. Of the Servant 
 who, through such dark passages of life, was to ac- 
 complish this great work, the vision says, ' He shall 
 see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied :
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 289 
 
 by his knowledge shall My righteous servant justify 
 many ; for he shall bear their iniquities ^' Nor is the 
 other old note wanting — that, namely, which treats 
 with disparagement the idea of any local worship, of 
 mere carnal sacrifices, and which, in contradistinction 
 to it, dwells upon a life of righteousness. Indeed, 
 in proportion as the prophetic mind saw more close 
 and near the inclusion of the Gentile world to whom 
 a local worship would be impossible, and for whom 
 no place or form of sacrifice was to be prescribed, 
 it became only the more emphatic in proclaiming 
 that old doctrine of a purely spiritual worship as 
 the great characteristic of the coming Deliverance. 
 The old argument against sacrifice is reiterated, — that 
 which rests on the universal sovereignty of God, — on 
 His universal presence; 'The heaven is My throne, 
 and the earth is My footstool : where is the house 
 that ye build unto Me ? and where is the place of 
 My rest^?' 
 
 If all this was really spoken, as is now contended, 
 immediately after the return from captivity, when 
 the Hebrew people were highly excited by the re- 
 building of the Temple, and by all the revived political 
 and national hopes which were inseparable from their 
 traditions, it only shows more signally the lofty 
 superiority of the prophetic eye when^in contrast with 
 the local Temple — it sees the great law which governs 
 all acceptable worship : ' but to this man will I look, 
 even to him that is poor and of a contrite heart and 
 trembleth at My word.' Again and again is this 
 
 * Isa. liii. II. - Isa. Ixvi. i. 
 
 U
 
 290 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 teaching reiterated by the later Isaiah in the very midst 
 of a restored ritual and of the self-delusions which it 
 might well engender. There is no more sharp piercing 
 into these delusions, no more withering rebuke of 
 them, in any part of the Hebrew Scriptures, than that 
 presented in the few verses of the fifty-eighth chapter 
 of Isaiah, which denounces those which were connected 
 with ostentatious fasts. These formal solemnities are 
 vividly and even mockingly described. And the reason 
 is given. They were no real mortification, but only 
 pretences of it. The subtle temptations which tend 
 to undermine the reality of worship had so invaded 
 the Jewish practice, that the pretended days of humi- 
 liation were really days of self-gratification : — ' Behold, 
 in the days of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact 
 all your labours ; ' — ' Behold, ye fast for strife and 
 debate,' and ' to make your voice to be heard on 
 high.' Then comes the contrast, 'Is it such a fast 
 that I have chosen ? a day for a man to afflict his 
 soul ? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and 
 to spread sackcloth and ashes under him ? Is not 
 this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands 
 of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to 
 let the oppressed go free, and to loose every yoke^ ?' 
 There is no difference here between the second Isaiah 
 and the oldest prophets ; but the teaching stands in 
 more close connexion with a vision far more im- 
 mediate and distinct of the nature of that great 
 change which was to spread the knowledge of such 
 Divine truths over the whole world. 
 
 ' Isa. Iviii. 3-6.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 29I 
 
 In the same connexion we cannot fail to note one 
 other remarkable development of all that, in germ 
 only, had been contained in the earlier Hebrew 
 writings. The personaHty of Jehovah, indeed, had 
 been always a fundamental conception. But His 
 corresponding relations with the souls of individual 
 men — the personality of man in its relation to the 
 personality of God — had been a less marked feature 
 in the teaching of the older historians and prophets. 
 The patriarchs, the lawgivers, the soldiers, and the 
 kings, who are the chosen heads of the chosen people, 
 are always, as it were, representative, rather than 
 mere individual, men. They were the agents employed 
 in a great work in, and upon, a great national instru- 
 mentality. They were the makers, the bearers, the 
 guides, and defenders of the ark. But they were 
 not in themselves a temple or a place wherein the 
 Most High could dwell. Moses, indeed, was a man 
 to whom it was conceived Jehovah personally spoke, 
 and Abraham was called His friend. But both had 
 high political functions assigned to them in founding 
 and leading the race which was ' the people of His 
 pasture, and the sheep of His hand.' 
 
 The possibility of such high and close personal inter- 
 course with the God of Israel, had been indeed long 
 familiar, at least as regarded the leaders of the adopted 
 people. But now, as the more spiritual conceptions 
 which had always underlain the very earliest Hebrew 
 worship, were coming into closer view with the ap- 
 proaching call to the Gentile world, these conceptions 
 undergo a corresponding enlargement and find more 
 
 U 2
 
 292 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 explicit and definite expression. There is nothing 
 anywhere else in the Hebrew writings which is quite 
 like that wonderful burst of universal invitation to all 
 individual souls which marks the opening of the fifty- 
 fifth chapter of Isaiah — ' Ho, every one that thirsteth, 
 come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money ; 
 come ye, buy, and eat ; yea, come, buy wine and 
 milk without money and without price.' To every 
 individual soul the promise is held out of enjoying a 
 converse which had before been the privilege of a few : 
 ' Incline your ear, and come unto Me : hear, and your 
 soul shall live ; and I will make an everlasting cove- 
 nant with you, even the sure mercies of David \' The 
 whole imagery of the special blessings which had been 
 so long associated exclusively with a small nation and 
 a limited geographical area, is here pressed into the 
 service of depicting the nature and results of a new 
 revelation which was to be made accessible to every 
 soul of man. Nor is it possible to mistake the lead- 
 ing idea of the means by which this new accessibility 
 is to be attained. The whole stream of Isaiah's 
 prophecy rests on the vision of a new Personality 
 who could be, and was to be, seen on earth, and who 
 could therefore be personally known and personally 
 loved as Jehovah never could have been known and 
 loved before. 
 
 Quite as obvious and still more wonderful is the 
 fact that the sentiment of compassion, which is often 
 so deep-seated an element in the noblest forms of 
 human love, is seen by the prophet as one of the most 
 
 ^ Isa. Iv. 3.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 293 
 
 powerful attractions which were to operate on the 
 world in favour of the new Deliverer. Triumph, 
 indeed, there is, and triumph, too, clothed in the old 
 imagery of national ambition. And yet the passages 
 are numerous and explicit vv^hich represent it as 
 a purely spiritual triumph which was to be as the 
 shining upon all men of one great self-revealing light. 
 But a triumph through suffering, and a triumph, in 
 part at least, by means of suffering, was a new con- 
 ception altogether. It is true that the idea of Jehovah 
 as a Father of His children, and as suffering grief on 
 account of their rebellion, is an element in the old 
 theology of the Hebrews. Isaiah clearly does not 
 conceive himself to be saying anything new when he 
 utters the pathetic words, ' In all their afflictions He 
 was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved 
 them.' But that any feeling of compassion could ever 
 be felt by man towards any Being representing the God- 
 head, or that any such feeling could ever be appealed 
 to as even an element in drawing men to the spiritual 
 apprehension and worship of the Divine law, would 
 seem to have been impossible in the earlier days of 
 Messianic expectation. The prophet himself seems 
 to have felt what may be called its natural incredi- 
 bility, and to have foreseen the rejection of it, when, 
 in giving utterance to his vision, he stops for a moment 
 and bursts out in the exclamation, ' Who hath believed 
 our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord 
 revealed ? ' And yet there can be no doubt whatever 
 that the language in which he proceeds to describe 
 his vision was intended in his mind to describe the
 
 294 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 lifcj sufferings, and death, of that Great One of whose 
 coming and of whose work there had been so many- 
 mysterious intimations throughout the whole history 
 and writings of the Hebrews. He is seen still in 
 shadow, and no more. It is as if the seer saw great 
 leading outlines only, and there is the inevitable 
 obscurity in details which is natural in the atmosphere 
 of prophecy. 
 
 If we try to imagine what a Jew of that time could 
 have made out in reading what Isaiah wrote in that 
 mysterious fifty-third chapter, we can well understand 
 the question which was actually put to the Christian 
 apostle, Philip, some 500 years later by the man of 
 Ethiopia who was coming up in a chariot on the road 
 from Egypt to worship at Jerusalem and was read- 
 ing on his way this chapter of Isaiah, ' I pray thee, 
 of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of 
 some other man ^ ? ' Of whom was it that so strange 
 a prediction could be uttered ? ' He was led as a lamb 
 to the slaughter ; and like a lamb dumb before his 
 shearer, so opened he not his mouth. In his humilia- 
 tion his judgment was taken away; and who shall 
 declare his generation ? for his life is taken from the 
 earth.' And if such a prediction might well puzzle 
 a Gentile, even more might it puzzle a Jew who was 
 accustomed to think of a Messiah in connexion with 
 some great restoration of national power and glory. 
 And yet, however obscure in details this chapter 
 undoubtedly is, there are several characteristics which 
 it is impossible to mistake. In the first place it is 
 
 ' Acts viii. 34.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 295 
 
 important to observe that it is closely connected with 
 the preceding passages, which are in perfect harmony 
 with all previous Messianic intimations : ' Awake, 
 awake, put on thy strength, O Zion : put on thy 
 beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city ; from 
 henceforth there shall no more come into thee the 
 uncircumcised and the unclean.' There is the old 
 note of triumph here. No Jew could have any diffi- 
 culty in recognizing it as in perfect harmony with all 
 the old national traditions. Then, although perhaps 
 more spiritual than before, the like may be said of 
 the poetic image, ' How beautiful upon the mountains 
 are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that 
 publisheth peace ; . . . that publisheth salvation ; 
 that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth ! . . . Break 
 forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of 
 Jerusalem : for the Lord hath comforted His people, 
 He hath redeemed Jerusalem.' This is again the 
 old note of triumph as before. It identifies, beyond 
 all doubt, the object of the prophet's vision with the 
 old hope of Israel which in various forms had been 
 so often expressed before. Nor is there any change 
 in the reference here made to the personal element 
 which had always been associated with that hope : 
 ' Behold, My servant shall deal prudently : he shall 
 be exalted and extolled, and be very high.' 
 
 But from this passage the prophet passes to visions 
 of that Personality which are altogether new. They 
 address themselves especially to the sentiment of 
 compassion, which is not only one of the strongest 
 emotions of our nature when it is effectually aroused,
 
 296 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 but may be also one of the most powerful and per- 
 manent in its effects when it is inseparably connected 
 with motives, and with relations to fact, which are also 
 permanent. But as directed towards One who in any 
 way was to represent the power and mercy of the 
 God of Israel, the idea of any appeal to compassion 
 had never before been associated with the Hebrew 
 foreshadowings of their Deliverer. And yet the most 
 striking feature in this vision of Isaiah, is not only 
 the pathetic repetition of an appeal of this nature in 
 various forms of most graphic imagery, but the pre- 
 sentation of some extraordinary suffering as the very 
 means by which the great triumph was to be se- 
 emed. The one great feature in that triumph which 
 had always been prominent in Messianic predictions, 
 namely, the conquest of the Gentile world, is referred 
 to by Isaiah in words which seem expressly to connect 
 it with the effect of this mysterious ministry of pain : 
 ' So shall he sprinkle many nations.' 
 
 The burst of incredulity with which the prophet 
 foresees that this message will be received by those 
 to whom it was to be most immediately addressed, is 
 one of the most striking parts of his vision, and it 
 is by no means inconceivable that he may himself 
 have been conscious of the temptation to it. But, if 
 so, he is overpowered by the definiteness and reality 
 of the impressions which are revealed to him. So 
 that, instead of conciliating that incredulity by passing 
 lightly over this new and mysterious aspect of the 
 means to be employed, he goes on to dwell upon it 
 and to express it with a particularity which was as
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 297 
 
 unlike the older forms of prophecy as it was new in 
 the conceptions they had hitherto conveyed. There 
 is no abatement whatever in the former assurance of 
 ultimate triumph. But that triumph is emphatically 
 coupled with the idea of a victory through suffering 
 and death. In the last three verses of this wonderful 
 vision, these two notes are inseparably interwoven. 
 He of whom the prophet spoke was 'to see his seed,' 
 he was to ' prolong his days/ and ' the pleasure of the 
 Lord was to prosper in his hand.' But all this was 
 to be out of ' the travail of his soul,' the ' pouring out 
 of his soul unto death,' and the being ' numbered with 
 the transgressors.' 
 
 There is indeed no explanation here given, no theory 
 here propounded, or even indicated as to the nature 
 of the connexion between the suffering and its results, 
 except in so far as the words ' when thou shalt make 
 his soul an offering for sin ' contain an obvious 
 allusion to the old laws of Hebrew sacrifice. But the 
 high spiritual interpretation which the prophets, as 
 we have seen, had always put upon the essence of 
 those sacrifices, stamps upon this allusion a corre- 
 sponding import. The words ' by his knowledge 
 shall My righteous servant justify many,' point to 
 that profound doctrine concerning the nature of all 
 true worship of which, as we have seen, the Hebrew 
 Scriptures are full — the doctrine, namely, that as 
 Jehovah is absolute Truth, so perfect knowledge would 
 be perfect worship. It would be a complete seeing 
 of universal and eternal facts — a complete hearing of 
 the Divine word — and a complete fulfilment of the
 
 298 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 Divine law. If there is anything new in Isaiah's 
 vision of the outward circumstances attending the 
 realization of the old national hope, there is none 
 whatever in this deepest teaching of the old Hebrew 
 theology. Nowhere is the idea more powerfully 
 expressed which, as it connects goodness with know- 
 ledge, does also connect sin with increasing and 
 hopeless ignorance : ' we wait for light, but behold 
 obscurity ; for brightness, but we walk in darkness ^.' 
 And this idea is continually connected with the 
 remedy which was to come: 'And He (the Lordj 
 saw there was no man, and wondered that there was 
 no intercessor . . . And the Redeemer shall come to 
 Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in 
 Jacob.' Then follows that sublime burst of adoring 
 welcome which is in perfect harmony with the old 
 national idea, and with that grand peculiarity of the 
 Hebrew theology which identified the future glory of 
 Israel with the widest and greatest blessings to the 
 whole human race: 'Arise, shine; for thy light is 
 come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. 
 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and 
 gross darkness the people : but the Lord shall arise 
 upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee. 
 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings 
 to the brightness of thy rising^.' 
 
 We shall lose nothing, on the contrary we shall 
 gain immensely, by reading all these prophecies with 
 the strongest effort to forget, or put aside, all inter- 
 pretations which to us have become traditional, and 
 
 ' Isa. lix. ^ Isa. Ix. 1-3.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 299 
 
 if we try our very utmost to imagine how they must 
 have appeared to Jews of the age in which they were 
 written. Nor does it matter anything, in this effort, 
 whether we take the earliest or the very latest pos- 
 sible date for their composition, whether before, or 
 during, or after the Exile. For it must be remem- 
 bered that, although Isaiah is more definite than 
 others, and his touches of delineation are more graphic 
 than those of others, the same conceptions exactly 
 are reproduced by those who have been called the 
 Minor Prophets, some of whom wrote expressly in 
 the character of men who had themselves been 
 captives in Babylon, who had seen the Return, and 
 who were witnesses of the rebuilding of the Temple. 
 In some respects, certain of their utterances are quite 
 as remarkable as those of Isaiah. In particular it is 
 to be noted that at a moment of great national 
 excitement, when the Israelites must have been under 
 the strongest temptation to dwell on the purely 
 secular aspects of the old promises, we find, on the 
 contrary, the highest spiritual interpretations and the 
 least possible tendency to look for mere local bless- 
 ings, or mere tribal triumphs. Micah hails the days 
 when ' the mountain of the Lord's house shall be 
 established on the top of the mountains, and it shall 
 be exalted above the hills ; and the people shall flow 
 unto it. And many nations shall come ... for the 
 law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord 
 from Jerusalem.' Habakkuk hears an express order 
 to write the vision of a coming time which, even if it 
 tarried, was to be waited for ' because it will surely
 
 300 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 come to pass.' And the burden of the vision was to 
 rebuke pride and to inaugurate a reign when ' the 
 just shall live by faith ^ ' — with this glorious con- 
 summation held out — ' for the earth shall be filled 
 with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the 
 waters cover the sea.' Haggai is roused to en- 
 thusiasm by the rebuilding of the Temple, and cheers 
 the builders by a vision of its future glories. But the 
 vision seems, as it vver.e, to overpower him, and instead 
 of prophesying any renewal of an ancient but a 
 vanished kingdom, he sees some great moral revolu- 
 tion in the condition of mankind which was to make 
 the second Temple more glorious indeed than the 
 first, but more glorious because it was to belong not 
 to the Jews only but to the whole world : 'And I will 
 shake all nations, and the desire of nations shall come : 
 and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of 
 Hosts V 
 
 Zechariah is much more obscure ; but the element 
 of personality in the hope of Israel is strongly marked 
 in the image of a branch, and in the language used 
 in explanation of it — ' My servant the Branch ; ' 'the 
 man whose name is the Branch,' who was to be 
 the builder of the Temple, the bearer of its glory — 
 the ruler upon a throne, combining the characters of 
 a Priest and of a King ■'. There is much in this book 
 that must have seemed enigmatical at the time, and 
 is hardly less so now. But there is always the same 
 undertone, and one remarkable passage is to be noted 
 which seems to be connected with a vision of the 
 
 ' Hab. ii. ^ Hag. ii. 7. ^ Zech. iii. 8; vi. 12, 13.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 3OI 
 
 final destruction of Jerusalem, and of a time when 
 the meaning of the great events connected with the 
 second Temple could not, and would not, be under- 
 stood, although they would assuredly make themselves 
 known at last : ' And it shall come to pass in that 
 day, that the light shall not be clear, nor dark. But 
 it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, 
 not day, nor night : but it shall come to pass, that at 
 evening time it shall be light. And it shall be in that 
 day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem ; 
 half of them towards the former sea, and half of 
 them towards the hinder sea \' Malachi is most 
 distinct of all : ' Behold, I will send my messenger, 
 and he shall prepare the way before me ; and the 
 Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly "come to his 
 temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom 
 ye delight in : behold, he shall come, saith the Lord 
 of Hosts ^.' 
 
 Such being the language of the prophets who ad- 
 mittedly wrote after the Exile, and after the Return, 
 it is a matter of complete indifference so far as our 
 present purpose is concerned, whether the second part 
 of the Book of Isaiah be of the same date with the 
 first part or not. That purpose has been to identify 
 the root ideas of Hebrew theology through all stages 
 of their development ; and the latest of these stages 
 is quite as important and as telling as the earliest. 
 There is, indeed, a wonderful homogeneousness through- 
 out, a persistency of fundamental conceptions which 
 reduces to complete insignificance the mere questions 
 
 1 Zech. xiv. 6-8. ■' Mai. Hi. i.
 
 302 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 of date and of personal authorship over which the 
 ' higher criticism ' ranges with its strange mixture of 
 laborious care, and of mere fanciful ingenuity. The 
 results of our investigation are absolutely independent 
 of all these questions of mere date within the range of 
 Jewish history. But, on the other hand, these results 
 do absolutely condemn some of the canons of criticism 
 which have been laid down for the determination of 
 those subordinate questions of date and authorship. 
 The preconception that prophecy is impossible in the 
 purely predictive sense of foreseeing and foretelling 
 political and secular events, is a preconception which 
 is as inconsistent with philosophy as with facts. As 
 a matter of fact, it is certainly untrue that each prophet 
 saw only, or saw even mainly, the circumstances of 
 his own day, and that their visions were entirely 
 dominated by the passing phenomena of their own 
 time. All of them lived much in the past. All of 
 them spoke continually of it. All of them saw the 
 present in its light ; and all of them read the future 
 in an organic continuity of connexion with both. 
 There is no more signal example of this than the 
 prophets of the post-exilic time. So far from being 
 engrossed with the outward events of that time, excit- 
 ing as they must have been to every Jew, they were 
 absorbed, on the contrary, with visions of a future 
 which must have been largely unintelligible to their 
 contemporaries, and which, in details at least, were 
 probably almost as unintelligible to themselves. If 
 the writer of the latter half of the Book of Isaiah 
 really wrote at that time, as very possibly he may
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF I\IAN 303 
 
 have done, then is he only the most conspicuous proof 
 of the deep-seated error which vitiates the assumptions 
 adverse to predictive prophecy. In the Books of 
 Ezra and Nehemiah we have a most touching picture 
 of the intense excitement of the returned exiles in the 
 reconstitution of their State, and especially in the re- 
 building of their temple. And one of the most striking 
 features in that picture is the passionate reversion of 
 the Jews to the old practices of that Levitical ritual 
 which, in its narrowest sense, had been called ' The 
 Law.' We hear, in tones of exultation, of the great 
 scale on which the rites of bloody animal sacrifice were 
 revived. The site of Jehovah's worship must have 
 been converted into veritable shambles. A hundred 
 bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and 
 twelve he-goats to represent the twelve tribes, all these 
 are the tale of slaughtered beasts with which ' the 
 Children of the Captivity ' kept the dedication of that 
 House of God with joy ^. Moreover, the old exclusive- 
 ness of the Jews, and the desire of a sharp separation 
 from all other nations, returned upon the returning 
 exiles with a passion which seems to have felt no 
 scruple about a cruel repudiation of the wives and 
 mothers and children with whom they had lived in 
 a long exile -. 
 
 There is only one of the prophetic books — that of 
 Haggai — which breathes, at all, the excitement of the 
 Return, and he is the prophet who sees that the glory 
 of the Second Temple is to be the coming of One who 
 is not a Jewish Messiah alone, but of One who is 
 
 ^ Ezra vi. 16. - Ezra x. 3.
 
 304 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 specially seen and described as the ' desire of all 
 nations ^' If it be indeed true that the second 
 Isaiah prophesied after the Return, or even before the 
 Return, but with near prospect of it among the exiles 
 of Babylon who trusted in the character and policy of 
 Cyrus, there could not be a more striking proof of 
 the extent to which the great prophetic writers of the 
 Hebrew race, soared above the atmosphere of their 
 own immediate surroundings, and how little their 
 visions were ' conditioned ' by mere contemporary 
 feelings and events. For then it would follow that 
 at that time either of exulting joy, or of sanguine 
 expectation — due to the prospect of a national and 
 strictly local restoration^ and of full liberty to worship 
 their God according to the revived ritual of a local 
 worship — we have a whole series of the most deeply 
 and purely spiritual utterances to be found in any of 
 the Hebrew books, whether of prophecy or of song. 
 Much of the old imagery is, indeed, retained, but it is 
 always transfused with the light of a new and universal 
 interpretation. This great seer, if he wrote in Babylon, 
 did indeed have visions of a speedy return, but it was 
 to be a return to laws of universal authority over all 
 the children of men : ' My salvation is near to come, 
 and My righteousness to be revealed ^.' No ' son of 
 the stranger ' who might lay hold on that righteousness 
 and might thus join himself to the Lord, was any 
 longer to feel that, because he was not born a Jew^ he 
 was ' utterly separated ' from the Lord's people ^. 
 Every soul of man who by obedience and faith kept 
 
 ^ Hag. ii. 7. '^ Isa. Ivi. i. ' Isa. Ivi. 3.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 305 
 
 the everlasting laws, was seen as a soul ' taking hold 
 of that covenant,' which had been so long exclusively 
 associated with the seed of Abraham. The Temple 
 at Jerusalem was, indeed, spoken of as built up again, 
 but it was expressly described as a place that would 
 be called ' a place of prayer for all people.' The walls 
 of Jerusalem were also described as built up again, 
 but the same glorious conception of their purpose and 
 function, is typified in the beautiful image of walls on 
 which the God of all the earth was to set watchmen 
 who should never hold their peace day nor night, 
 since those who make mention of the Lord were never 
 to be silent until God had established Jerusalem as 
 a ' praise in the earth ^.' 
 
 In chapter after chapter of the second Isaiah these 
 conceptions are pursued through every form of language 
 and of imagery, always vivid, often splendid, not 
 seldom most tender and pathetic — conceptions which 
 might help, as it were, to tread under foot all lower 
 thoughts associated with mere national pride, or with 
 any kind of limitation whether of place, or of blood, 
 or of time, upon the blessings which were foreseen as 
 coming through the advent of one Divine Person. If, 
 writing before the Return, he could foresee, as he easily 
 might do. the intense national excitement that would 
 find vent in the holocausts of beasts which Haggai 
 did actually live to witness, or if, writing after the 
 Return, he looked back upon them as at least a 
 memorable scene in history, it is really wonderful 
 to observe how this second Isaiah was absolutely 
 
 ^ Isa. Ixii. 
 X
 
 306 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 unmoved by it, and how loftily he maintained the 
 ancient prophetic tones on the only true meaning of 
 sacrifice. Not in any passage of the older prophets 
 is there anywhere such language of contempt, and 
 even of bitterness, poured out upon the whole idea of 
 literal temples, and of altars dripping with the blood 
 of beasts, as in this great writer of whom modern 
 criticism boasts that it has brought him down to dates 
 when the Jews, if not saturated with the narrowest 
 conceptions, were at least under the strongest tempta- 
 tion to be so. It is all the more magnificent if it was 
 really under such conditions that the second Isaiah 
 wrote the very latest chapter assigned to him, or even 
 if some nameless and unknown successors, inheriting 
 the same old prophetic spirit, were the authors of it. 
 For in that chapter the very idea of any local temple 
 is attacked with scorn : ' Thus saith the Lord, The 
 heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool : 
 where is the house that ye build unto Me ? and where 
 is the place of My rest ? For all those things hath 
 Mine hand made.' Then follows the indication of the 
 only true temple as being the individual soul in com- 
 munion with a personal God, and with His everlasting 
 law : ' But to this man will I look, even to him that 
 is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My 
 word.' In contrast with this true temple, and with 
 the devotion to God by worshippers of that which is 
 really their own, the mere bloody sacrifices of the 
 Second Temple are spoken of with disgust. The 
 killing of an ox, the sacrifice of a lamb, the offering of 
 an oblation, the burning of incense, are all severally
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 307 
 
 mentioned, and are all branded under odious simili- 
 tudes, as representing nothing of the realities of a true 
 and acceptable worship ^, 
 
 Ezekiel is the prophet who, writing in the midst of 
 the Exile, and as a captive beside the river Chebar, 
 is most engrossed by the prospect and by the vision 
 of a national restoration — of a literal and geographical 
 return. For all other nations, and especially for those 
 who rejoiced over the fall of the Jewish kingdom, 
 he sees only days of retributive vengeance— of the 
 inevitable ruin of their power, and of the desolation 
 of their lands. There is no vision in Ezekiel of the 
 place which the New Jerusalem was to take in some 
 universal illumination of the world ; and in this fact, 
 indeed, we may well see the limitations of view which 
 were connected with his place and time. The Jews 
 living as captives in the low, hot, Mesopotamian 
 plains, and with a passionate longing for their ancient 
 home, must have needed above all things some hope 
 of seeing its breezy hills again, and of resting once 
 more upon them. And so it was the special function 
 of this great prophet to minister this hope to his 
 brethren in exile, and to dwell both on the causes of 
 their fall and on the immediate conditions of their 
 return. Yet there is no prophet whose writings are 
 more faithful to the fundamental ideas of the old 
 Hebrew theology. His denunciations of idolatry, and 
 his minute descriptions and pictures of the many 
 ways in which the Jews had fallen into the very 
 lowest of its depths, are all directed to impress upon 
 
 '■ Isa. Ixvi. 3. 
 X 2
 
 3o8 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH, 
 
 the mind the grossness and the heinousness of it as 
 the master sin of the ancient world. In all its forms 
 — even in those which were in themselves the least 
 gross, as for example in the worship of the sun — 
 idolatry was a departure from the one only living 
 and true God. It tended invariably to more and 
 more corrupting embodiments — falling down at last 
 among all the surrounding nations, to the personifi- 
 cation and worship of man's own fiercest passions 
 and foulest imaginations. Ezekiel's prophecies of 
 a national return were all expressly conditional upon 
 a spiritual return to the exclusive worship of Jehovah. 
 Nor is there any prophet who is so emphatic, and 
 so plain, in his definitions of that spirit, and of 
 that conduct, which alone could be pleasing in his 
 sight. These consisted simply in a life of righteous- 
 ness. The whole of the eighteenth chapter is an 
 elaborate answer to difficulties and objections to 
 a belief in the Divine government which arise out of 
 the inequalities and apparent injustices in the fates 
 of men. He connects the universal ownership of God 
 over all human souls with a vindication of the prin- 
 ciple on which his individual disposal of them is 
 conducted: 'Behold, all souls are Mine . . . the soul 
 that sinneth, it shall die. But if a man be just, and do 
 that which is lawful and right,' if he ' hath walked in 
 My statutes, and hath kept My judgments, to deal 
 truly ; he is just, he shall surely live ^' 
 
 The idea that human souls have no right to reason, 
 and no power of reasoning, on such subjects at all, is 
 
 * Ezek. xviii. 4-9.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 309 
 
 an idea which does not seem even to occur to Ezekiel. 
 This is not an uncommon doctrine now, and has been 
 imph'ed or directly taught by not a few who value 
 religion sincerely. They think that the weapons of 
 scepticism are safe weapons to turn against itself. But 
 agnosticism of this kind was, and it must have always 
 been, inconceivable to those whose theology had, 
 above all things, taught them that Jehovah's kingdom 
 was to be a righteous kingdom, and a dominion 
 founded on everlasting and intelligible laws. And 
 so the great prophet of the Exile allows the expres- 
 sion of a natural, but an ignorant, human expostulation 
 on the subject, and represents the Almighty as con- 
 descending to answer and to explain : ' Yet ye say. 
 The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear now, O house 
 of Israel ; Is not My way equal ? are not your ways 
 unequal ? . . . therefore I will judge you ^.' This em- 
 phatic tribute to the value of each rational soul in 
 its relation to a personal God, is all the more strik- 
 ing in a prophet who was so much engrossed by the 
 prospect of a tribal restoration, and of the renewal of 
 a highly organized priestly worship which was pecu- 
 liar to one place and to one nation. Although Ezekiel 
 does not seem to have seen what Isaiah saw — the 
 inclusion of all nations as the highest glory of Israel's 
 Return — he did see the fundamental theological facts 
 on which that far higher vision was revealed to others. 
 Neither does he seem to have seen as prominently at 
 least as they saw, the personal element in the advent 
 of a Messiah. He does indeed see and predict the 
 
 * Ezek. xviii. 25.
 
 3IO THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [cH. 
 
 renewed kingdom of Israel as to be reconstituted 
 under some one Servant of God to whom he assigns 
 the typical name of David. But his spiritual place 
 and functions in the world are all apparently subor- 
 dinated to the vision of a restored Hebrew kingdom. 
 
 Jeremiah has a wider range of vision, though in 
 exile he was Ezekiel's contemporary and his friend. 
 But he had also lived and prophesied before the 
 Captivity, and had foretold it. There is indeed no 
 difference whatever between the theological concep- 
 tions of the two prophets, nor in the general burden 
 of their song. But Jeremiah is the more spiritual of 
 the two — the most far-reaching in his intimations of 
 the future. In no Hebrew writing is there any image 
 employed more beautiful or more profound than that 
 which Jeremiah uses when he compares the true God 
 to the only ' fountain of living waters/ and all depar- 
 tures from Him as nothing but a laborious hewing 
 out of ' broken cisterns, that can hold no water ^.' 
 Water welling out of the depth of the earth is an 
 excellent type of Divine truth uprising from the very 
 nature and heart of things. And this is a root idea 
 in the theology of the Hebrew prophets. The identity 
 of that Truth with the life-giving energies, and ele- 
 ments, and laws of Nature — the absolute contrast 
 which in every sphere of thought it presents to 
 all the mere imaginations of men — the quality which 
 was inherent in it of escaping, and, as it were, 
 draining away from every artificial receptacle hewn 
 out for it by man's labour and device — this is the 
 
 ' Jer. ii. 13.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 3II 
 
 constant current of their teaching. The inevitable 
 connexion of suffering and of misfortune with sin 
 considered as a departure from Divine laws, is 
 a correlative and inseparable doctrine. Jeremiah ex- 
 presses it very clearly — ' I will bring evil upon this 
 people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they 
 have not hearkened unto My words, nor to My law, 
 but have rejected it \' Nor is he less emphatic in 
 rebuking the smallest reliance on the ritual sacrifices 
 which were so deeply interwoven with all the national 
 ideas of Hebrew worship. He calls upon his brethren 
 to go back to a simpler time, before these sacrifices 
 had been instituted at all, but when the Divine hand 
 had been conspicuous in turning the events of history 
 in their favour, and when gratitude and obedience to 
 a living God, was all that was demanded of them : 
 ' For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded 
 them in the day that I brought them out of the land 
 of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices : 
 but this thing commanded I them, saying. Obey 
 My voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be My 
 people : and walk ye in all the ways that I have 
 commanded you, that it may be well with you ^.' 
 
 It is in perfect consistency with this high spiritual 
 theology, but in wonderful contrast, surely, with 
 the mere natural feelings of a Jew who wrote in the 
 immediate anticipation of the heaviest calamities to 
 be inflicted by heathen nations, that Jeremiah glories 
 and comforts himself in some approaching call to the 
 Gentile world, and in some wide acceptance of it : 
 ^ Jer. vi. 19. ^ Jer. vii. 22, 23.
 
 qT2 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 'O Lord, my strength, and my fortress, and my 
 refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come 
 unto Thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, 
 Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and 
 things wherein there is no profit^.' Perhaps even 
 more remarkable is the language of Jeremiah in dwell- 
 ing on the individuality of all true religion, as having 
 its seat in the personality of individual men, and not 
 less as having to struggle there with the greatest 
 impediments to its power : ' Blessed is the man that 
 trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. 
 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters I' 
 On the other hand, this prophet lays down, as no 
 other Hebrew writer had before done, the great fact 
 and law of the tendencies to corruption which are 
 of universal prevalence in every soul of man : ' The 
 heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately 
 wicked : who can know it ? I the Lord search the 
 heart, I try the reins, even to give every man accord- 
 ing to his ways, and according to the fruit of his 
 doings ^.' 
 
 The vision of Jeremiah, however, as to the personal 
 or Messianic element in the glory of Israel, is far more 
 limited and local than the vision of the second Isaiah. 
 The images under which he represents the great 
 restoration which he foresaw, are all physical and 
 local images — such as of a land in which property 
 would be secure — so that fields would again be bought 
 and sold for money, and flocks would again ' pass under 
 the hands of him that telleth them.' These are vivid 
 
 '■ Jer. xvi. 19. '■' Jer. xvii. 7, 8. ' Jer. xvii. 9, 10.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 313 
 
 and beautiful images of a pastoral and an agricultural 
 people restored to a sense of security for property, that 
 is to say, to a life of confidence and of peace. And 
 it is in close connexion with this purely national 
 and local idea of the Divine promises, that he sees 
 the vision of a Person by whom it was to be 
 realized : ' In those days, and at that time, will I 
 cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto 
 David ; and he shall execute judgment and right- 
 eousness in the land.' And again, ' For thus saith 
 the Lord ; David shall never want a man to sit upon 
 the throne of the house of Israel ; neither shall the 
 priests the Levites want a man before Me to offer 
 burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to 
 do sacrifice continually ^.' How far this language 
 was consciously metaphorical in the mind of the 
 prophet, is a question which cannot be answered 
 without knowing more than we do of the nature of 
 the prophetic impulse — of the occasions on which it 
 came — and of the forms it took in the individual 
 minds which were subject to it. But this may be 
 safely said, that to the Jews of his own day the 
 language of Jeremiah must have seemed to promise 
 a strictly national restoration, a local worship as 
 before, and a kingdom like to that of David or of 
 Solomon. This, at all events, would have been a 
 natural interpretation to them, preoccupied as their 
 minds must have been by the old traditional con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 And yet we cannot fail to see in this prophet the 
 
 ' Jer. xxxiii. 15, 17, 18.
 
 314 THEOLOGY OK THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 same extraordinary character which belongs to all the 
 others, as well as to the Psalms, a character, as it 
 were, of superabundance and of overflow, so that the 
 implied meanings and intimations conveyed, stretch 
 to an illimitable distance beyond the containing walls 
 of the language and of the imagery. These walls seem 
 to be, as it were, constantly breaking down under the 
 strain, and stretch, which were too heavy for them to 
 bear, and through the rifts and openings in them we 
 see issuing forth visions and promises which can mean 
 nothing less than a new heavens and a new earth. 
 And these are always connected, however dimly, with 
 the idea of a Person through whom, and in whom, 
 these promises were to be fulfilled. It is in the ful- 
 ness, and in the definiteness, of the language conveying 
 this idea that the Isaiah of the Captivity stands pre- 
 eminent. But it is present more or less in all the 
 prophets^ and when we come to the few prophets who 
 wrote undoubtedly after the Return, in the midst of 
 all the disappointment which must have arisen from 
 the actual facts of that event, and the total absence of 
 any visible prospect of a great kingdom being ever 
 restored, all the brilliance and majesty of the Mes- 
 sianic vision of a coming Person and a coming 
 spiritual dominion, breaks out again : ' Behold, I will 
 send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way be- 
 fore me : and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly 
 come to his temple, even the messenger of the cove- 
 nant, whom ye delight in. But who may abide the 
 day of his coming? and who shall stand when he 
 appeareth ? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 315 
 
 fullers' soap, and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier 
 of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and 
 purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer 
 unto the Lord an offering in righteousness ^.' 
 
 Nothing could be more dark and enigmatical than 
 this language to the contemporaries of the prophet, 
 so far as regarded any possibility of foreseeing any 
 actual events through which it could be fulfilled. 
 Nothing, on the other hand, could be more luminous 
 than the outline as indicating not an earthly, but a 
 spiritual kingdom, and the outpouring into old forms 
 of a new spirit and a new understanding of all that 
 constituted really acceptable worship. The purify- 
 ing of the sons of Levi in order that they may offer 
 the true sacrifice of righteousness, is the condition of 
 the promises conveyed ; and the bringing about of this 
 consummation, is clearly connected with the instru- 
 mentality of a Person. The description of him as the 
 'Messenger of the Covenant' in which the Hebrew 
 people were accustomed to delight, connects this 
 coming Person with the oldest traditions, and the 
 dearest hopes of the seed of Abraham. Yet here too 
 the prophetic vision does not fail to take in that wider 
 horizon which, in the atmosphere of prophecy, had 
 never been separated from the narrow skies of that 
 narrow land which lay between the Jordan and the sea : 
 ' And all nations shall call you blessed : for ye shall 
 be a delightsome land, saith the Lord of Hosts ^.' 
 Perhaps in no passage of all the Hebrew books does 
 the overflow of meaning beyond the mere letter, 
 
 ' Mai. iii. 1-3. ^ Mai. iii. 12.
 
 3l6 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 appear more conspicuously than in the six verses 
 which have been divided off as constituting the last 
 chapter of the prophet Malachi. The ultimate and 
 universal triumph of a spiritual worship, and the 
 application both of threatenings and of promises to 
 all the wicked and to all the proud, could not be 
 more powerfully conceived or expressed than in the 
 beautiful image, ' But unto you that fear My name 
 shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in 
 his wings.' The mere imagery nevertheless continues 
 to be Jewish to the last. The law of Moses, as 
 delivered on Horeb, is referred to as the great standard 
 and exemplar, and the Person who was to come is 
 typically called Elijah. Yet through all this imagery 
 the splendour of a new vision shines, and the coming 
 of some incomparably greater One than had ever 
 appeared before ^. 
 
 The Book of Daniel has been the subject of keen 
 dispute in respect to its true date, because of the bear- 
 ing which it has on the question of purely predictive 
 prophecy concerning the course of such secular events 
 as the succession of the Persian, the Greek, and the 
 Roman Empires. Those who start with a fixed pre- 
 conception that no prediction of this kind is possible, 
 have recourse, naturally enough, to the further assump- 
 tion that where such predictions do appear to have 
 been fulfilled, they were in reality no predictions at 
 all, but were written after the events, and have been 
 merely attributed to an old prophetic authorship. 
 This has been the course taken with reference to 
 
 ^ Mai. iv.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 317 
 
 certain parts of the Book of Daniel. But this ques- 
 tion of date has no bearing on the subject we are 
 now considering, which is the teaching and the concep- 
 tions of Hebrew theology from its first appearance 
 in the world to its last and latest expressions in the 
 sacred writings of the Jews. As regards this question, 
 it matters nothing whether the Book of Daniel as 
 we now have it. or parts of it only, may have been 
 written at the date when it purports to have 
 been written, or even as late as the close of the 
 Hebrew canon in the second century before our era. 
 In either case it is equally representative of Jewish 
 religious thought, and of the latest forms taken by 
 its theology. And in this book, where it deals with 
 the Messianic hope of Israel, we find exactly the same 
 phenomena as before, with only one circumstance 
 which is peculiar, and that is an apparently pre- 
 dicted time, or date, for the appearance of the coming 
 One. Yet this element of seeming chronological 
 precision — so unusual in Hebrew prophecy — is veiled 
 under allegorical forms of language, which render it 
 of difficult interpretation even now, and which must 
 have made it wholly unintelligible to the Jews at any 
 possible date to which the prophecy may be assigned. 
 The 'seventy weeks' do not seem to be intended for 
 weeks of seven literal days, whilst the other indications 
 given of preceding, or of contemporary, events are all 
 shrouded in that atmosphere of mystery which is 
 characteristic of all the prophetic books. But not 
 less do there shine out in a conspicuous light certain 
 great leading conceptions which cannot be mistaken.
 
 3l3 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 Like Isaiah, Daniel sees a Messiah who is to suffer 
 before he triumphs. That triumph was to be the 
 bringing in of an everlasting righteousness, not the 
 restoration of an earthly kingdom. He was to be 
 a Person called ' the Messiah, the Prince.' He was 
 to be 'cut off, but not for himself; whilst the re- 
 mainder of the vision points to some terrible destruc- 
 tion and overthrow, which was to accompany the 
 final close of the whole Hebrew polity and local 
 worship. The sacrifice and the oblation were to 
 cease, and the abomination of desolation was to 
 overspread Jerusalem until the consummation ^. 
 
 The prayer of Daniel which precedes the vision 
 is one of the most magnificent passages in all the 
 Hebrew sacred books. It is a typical embodiment of 
 their theology, and of the extraordinary phenomena 
 which are characteristic of its relation to the history and 
 religion of the Israelitish people. No other people 
 has ever preserved, as sacred, any writings of such 
 a nature — writings which are one long continuous and 
 almost unbroken series of bitter reproaches, of tender 
 remonstrance, of lofty rebukes, and of the most fearful 
 denunciations — all directed against themselves. It is 
 an absolutely unique fact in the history of Man. 
 Such a treasuring of self-accusations seems almost 
 unnatural, that is to say, it is in violation of many 
 tendencies in humanity which generally prevail, and 
 which could only be overcome, and be accounted for, 
 by some higher agency having unusual power over the 
 minds and hearts of men, and which never elsewhere 
 
 ' Dan. ix. 24-27.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 3I9 
 
 have been brought into such concentrated and power- 
 ful action. Nor is there any possibility of mistaking 
 what that agency was, when we read such outpourings 
 of the Hebrew soul as this prayer of Daniel in the 
 first year of the reign of the Persian king, Darius. 
 It was not merely a vague belief in some one Divine 
 Being, but an immanent and abiding sense of the 
 presence of a Personal and Living God, who acts on 
 laws and principles which are intelligible to man, and 
 who had especially so acted in all the relations of 
 a long and wonderful history with one chosen race. 
 The misfortunes which had come upon that race, were 
 due to departure from those laws which v/ere essentially 
 laws of righteousness. Repentance, and a turning 
 again to obedience, was the only hope of deliverance. 
 But what is specially remarkable in connexion with 
 our subject here, is the conception of this Personal God 
 having taken human means and instrumentalities to 
 communicate the knowledge of His laws, a conception 
 woven into the very texture of the whole prayer : ' We 
 have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have 
 done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing 
 from Thy precepts and from Thy judgments : neither 
 have we hearkened unto Thy servants the prophets, 
 which spake in Thy name to our kings, our princes, 
 and our fathers, and to all the people of the land K' 
 And yet in this conception of a Personal God there 
 is no lowering of the Divine Majesty down to the 
 measure of a man. Daniels invocation is a splendid 
 illustration of the combination of those two apparently 
 
 ^ Dan. ix. 5, 6.
 
 320 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 incompatible ideas, the intelligibility of the Godhead 
 on the one hand, and yet its ineffable majesty and in- 
 scrutability on the other : ' O Lord, the great and 
 dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to 
 them that love Him, and to them that keep His com- 
 mandments.' And here, again, the characteristic idea 
 of a universal call to righteousness, and of a universal 
 covenant with every individual soul of man as founded 
 on it, breaks in upon a prayer that is nevertheless 
 altogether framed upon the old familiar Jewish 
 language which identifies Jerusalem as God's city 
 and as His holy mountain. And it was in answer to 
 this prayer, which, in the form and language of its 
 actual petitions, is purely Jewish and bounded by the 
 horizon of local hopes and expectations, that a vision 
 follows full of mysterious intimations pointing to some 
 totally different consummation. 
 
 The indications of an actual date for the fulfilment 
 of this vision are by far the least important part of 
 the prophecies of Daniel. Those indications may, or 
 may not, with certainty be identified with the date 
 of later historical events. This has been the subject of 
 a long-standing controversy. But the earlier date may 
 be either vindicated or denied, with entire indifference 
 to the point dwelt on here, namely, the wide divergence 
 between the prophet's own petitions and the whole 
 line of thought taken by the vision which he sees in 
 response to them. The comparative narrowness of 
 the one, the mysterious and obscure, but the unmis- 
 takable grandeur and universal scope of the other — 
 this is a contrast which it is impossible to mistake.
 
 VlJ ON THE NATURE OF MAN 32I 
 
 If we Start with the preconception, as so many do, 
 that prophets can only have seen what they were 
 beforehand prepared to see — that their vision was 
 always naturally and necessarily limited to the hori- 
 zon of their own individual or national consciousness 
 and experience, we must be confounded indeed by 
 the facts before us. Daniel, or the later Hebrew- 
 writer represented by this name, seems in prayer to 
 think, and to speak, of nothing but Jerusalem and 
 of the national judgments that a Divine retribution 
 had brought upon the Hebrew nation. The prayer, 
 indeed, is profoundly spiritual, and puts the highest 
 interpretation on the facts of past history, as well as 
 on the facts of the prophet's own time. The sin 
 which was confessed was a persistent departure from 
 the Divine law ; and that law was identified — not with 
 any ritual worship but — with ' the truth.' And that 
 truth again is referred to as intelligible to man : ' We 
 made not our prayer before the Lord our God that 
 we might turn from our iniquities, and understand 
 Thy truth.' Moreover, the doctrine of sacrifice in any 
 approach to that coarser interpretation which the 
 older prophets had so long denounced, is shut out by 
 an appeal of the most absolute humility: 'For we 
 do not present our supplications before Thee for our 
 righteousness, but for Thy great mercies.' Yet in 
 the prophet's mind the whole of these supplications 
 are bound up with an actual revival of the glories of 
 the literal Jerusalem : ' Open Thine eyes and behold 
 our desolations, and the city which is called by Thy 
 name.' 
 
 Y
 
 322 THEOLOGY OF THE HEBREWS [CH. 
 
 These are the prophet's personal and national 
 preconceptions. This is the horizon by which his 
 personal and patriotic hopes were bounded. Yet 
 how little do they correspond with the prophetic 
 intimations which he receives, and which he cannot 
 but report. The vision granted to him was not only 
 of the ' bringing in of an everlasting righteousness V 
 but also of a ' sealing up of the vision and of the pro- 
 phecy' — of some mysterious ending of pre-existing 
 dispensation, and of the opening of a new one under 
 a personal Messiah who is called ' the Prince ^.' But 
 this Messiah, instead of restoring the literal throne of 
 David, was to be 'cut off, but not for himself ^' Then 
 follow predictions which point to the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, and not to its restoration. Moreover, its 
 once exclusive, and only holy, worship, was to come to 
 an end through the agency of that very Prince who 
 had always been before connected with its greatest 
 glory: ' He shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation 
 to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations 
 he shall make it desolate, even until the consumma- 
 tion*.' It really matters nothing what the precise date 
 of this prophecy may have been, or what the name of 
 the man to whom such a vision was given. It is 
 at least a typical product of the highest religious 
 consciousness of the Hebrew Church. It has, in the 
 highest degree, all those astonishing and unique cha- 
 racteristics which we have traced throughout, and in 
 particular that fulness and mystery of meaning which 
 
 ^ Dan. ix. 24. ^ Dan. ix. 25. 
 
 ' Dan. ix. a6. * Dan. ix. 27.
 
 Vl] ON THE NATURE OF MAN 323 
 
 overflows the images, and seems to strain the contain- 
 ing walls of language. All notions, however deeply 
 rooted, of mere national pride as founded on special 
 Divine favour, are not only broken down, but they 
 are confronted with predictions of complete national 
 ruin, as one of the conditions of a more spiritual, and 
 a much more glorious, kingdom. 
 
 Y 2
 
 Chapter VII. 
 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 
 
 CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH. THE NATURE OF SACRIFICE : 
 OF FAITH : OF INSPIRATION : OF REGENERATION. 
 
 The perfect continuity which exists between the 
 fundamental conceptions of Hebrew theology and 
 those of Christian doctrine, has never been, and can- 
 not be, denied. The differences which now separate 
 the Synagogue from the Church, wide and deep as 
 these differences are in some points of view, are all 
 contained within a common and a well-defined 
 boundary of beliefs. These beliefs separate both of 
 them, equally and absolutely, from all other systems 
 of religious thought. It is, indeed, a question of 
 paramount importance whether this world has been 
 already visited by such an One as the Hebrew pro- 
 phets foreshadowed in their Messiah, or whether He 
 has not come, and is only yet to be expected. But 
 the mere statement of this alternative, which sepa- 
 rates Judaism from Christianity, is enough to show 
 how near must be the relationship in thought between 
 those who recognize what has already come to pass, 
 and those who only wait for it. And this near 
 relationship must become nearer still when we dwell
 
 CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 325 
 
 on considerations which are full of suggestion. Let 
 any Christian of our time put to himself the question, 
 and really think it out, how far he can be sure that if 
 he had been a Jew living in Palestine at the com- 
 mencement of our Lord's Ministry, he would certainly 
 have recognized the Messiah of his race in the Person 
 and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a question 
 which will give him much to think of. We know as 
 a matter of fact that the great majority of the Jews — 
 including His own brethren — failed to do so — that it 
 was only a comparatively few spiritually minded men 
 and women, who could even conceive as possible the 
 identification which seems so easy and so natural to us. 
 We must remember that the Jews of that age had none 
 of many helps which stand us in good stead now, when 
 doubt or misgivings throw us back on the evidences 
 of Christianity. They saw nothing of that slow, but 
 steady, and wide acceptance which gradually flushed 
 the dark skies of a most troubled world with the 
 rising dawn of a great spiritual light. They did not 
 see His teaching accepted to the uttermost ends of 
 a geography of which they did not know even the 
 existence. They did not see the Isles waiting for 
 His law. Even those who had reached the most 
 spiritual conception of the Messiah's reign, must 
 generally have expected it to be inaugurated by some 
 striking outward manifestation which could be seen 
 and read of all men. Nothing could be more abso- 
 lutely different from that which happened. All that 
 they did see came ' not with observation.' It came 
 in the daily walks, in the daily conversation, and in
 
 326 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a few public addresses, of a Man born of a low estate, 
 and in a town which was one of the least among the 
 thousands of Judah. Even the signs which, they heard. 
 He gave of a superhuman power, were not by any 
 means so significant to them as they would be now 
 to us. Superhuman agencies and powers were to them 
 the most natural of all things. The very idea of what 
 we now thoughtlessly and ignorantly call ' the super- 
 natural ' was an idea unknown and logically unintel- 
 ligible to them. They believed in the existence of 
 a spiritual world underlying all visible things, and they 
 expected it to make itself felt and seen in many ways. 
 They depended therefore, mainly, if not entirely, for 
 the recognition of such a Messiah upon those rare 
 spiritual faculties of the heart and soul, which are, as 
 it were, the retina for catching the finest and purest 
 rays of spiritual truth. It cannot be said with candour 
 on our part, that the predictive utterances even of the 
 greatest prophets, had been clear or unambiguous. On 
 the contrary, they were full of mystery, as of visions 
 dimly seen. Images of a secular and of a spiritual 
 kingdom were inseparably mixed and interwoven in 
 almost all their language. It is quite conceivable, nay, 
 even it is probable, that if the prophets themselves 
 had been confronted with the actual appearing and 
 life of Jesus of Nazareth, they might have failed to see 
 in Him all that they had foreseen and foretold of the 
 Messiah. Between the close of the sacred canon of 
 the principal Hebrew books, under Ezra and Nehemiah, 
 and the Ministry of Christ, there had elapsed the long 
 period of above 400 years, and thus there had been
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 327 
 
 time for a growing intensification of the poorest secular 
 interpretations. It was only a few individual souls, 
 living in high spiritual communion with the personal 
 God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, who 
 could rise above these interpretations, or could be 
 capable of seeing ' Him who is invisible ' in such an 
 unexpected form. 
 
 The difficulties, however, which stood in the way 
 of our Lord being recognized as the Messiah by the 
 Jews, do not form part of our special subject here. 
 That subject is not the Christian evidences as an 
 argument, but the fundamental conceptions of Chris- 
 tian theology as a fact. And in this point of view 
 it is of the first importance to remember that there 
 is one of these conceptions which was obviously 
 common to the Jew and to the Christian, and that 
 was the coming, whether past or future, of some One 
 of whom the prophets spoke, and to whom they 
 attributed the various works and functions fore- 
 shadowed in so many mysterious intimations. That 
 conception is, indeed, fundamental, inasmuch as it 
 lies at the very root of all Hebrew theology — the 
 conception, namely, that nothing can be done except 
 by the use of some definite and appropriate means. 
 Whether the work of the Messiah was supposed to 
 be the ' restoring again the kingdom to Israel,' or the 
 establishment of a dominion of universal righteous- 
 ness over the whole world, it was always spoken of 
 as a work only to be done by the coming of a Person 
 specially made strong for doing it. The whole lan- 
 guage of Hebrew prophecy, and of Hebrew history, is
 
 328 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 full of this conception. Just as we have seen that, in 
 the physical sciences, men are never able to describe 
 fully the commonest facts of Nature without using 
 the words, or the grammatical constructions, which 
 imply the purposiveness of living organs, so in the 
 science of theology, as known to the Jews, they cannot 
 rid themselves of the same underlying necessity of 
 thought. They had an absolute belief, indeed, in the 
 omnipotence of God. But they had also an instinctive 
 belief, quite as absolute, that omnipotence itself was 
 not arbitrary in the exercise of its powers, but worked 
 always through intelligible and moral laws. The selec- 
 tion of themselves, out of all the other families of men, 
 for a special purpose connected with the knowledge 
 and preservation of Divine truth ; the raising up of 
 specially adapted leaders ; the enactments of a peculiar 
 code of rules regulating Divine worship ; the special 
 inspiration of prophets to rebuke, persuade, and 
 teach ; the whole national history, in short, from the 
 call of Abraham, and all the predictions of ultimate 
 blessings to the Gentile world, are permeated with 
 the conception of the Divine reign of law, in the 
 dealings of Jehovah with His universe, and with all 
 the creatures of His hand. The predicted coming of 
 some Person to do infinitely more, in the same direc- 
 tion, than any mere leaders or prophets had ever done 
 before, was therefore in perfect harmony with the 
 same conception that every Divine, as well as every 
 human, purpose is attainable only through the em- 
 ployment of some definite instrumentality. The 
 whole group of ideas which were embodied in the
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 329 
 
 Hebrew expectation of a Messiah, were ideas which 
 were centred in this conception. Who this great 
 coining One was to be, whether human or Divine — 
 what, exactly, was the work he had to do, and by 
 what means it was to be accomplished — all this was 
 shrouded in utterances of a various and splendid 
 imagery. If we read carefully any one of the many 
 passages in both divisions of Isaiah, for example, 
 which are obviously Messianic, we cannot fail to be 
 struck with the universal presence of one character- 
 istic thought, and that is the power of all those 
 well-known laws of our nature which make us most 
 accessible both to intellectual and to moral truth 
 through the instrumentality of our own kind, such as 
 a great teacher, a great character, and a great ex- 
 ample. The very first chapter in the earlier Isaiah 
 which is evidently Messianic, is full of this idea in its 
 description of Him who is there called 'a Branch ' or 
 ' a Stem ' out of the roots of a great Hebrew ancestor. 
 Upon this Descendant of a chosen stock there was to 
 rest ' the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of wisdom and 
 understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the 
 Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.' 
 This Spirit was to make Him 'quick of understanding 
 in the fear of the Lord.' It was to make all His 
 judgments on men and things not superficial but 
 profound, because attained through knowledge of the 
 eternal laws of eternal truth: 'He shall not judge 
 after the sight of His eyes ; neither reprove after the 
 hearing of His ears ^' Absolute justice and equity 
 
 ' Isa. xi. 3.
 
 330 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH, 
 
 were to be, in Him, the guides of perfect knowledge. 
 And all this was to be exhibited in some One whose 
 power was to lie — not in arms or even in any coercive 
 authority whatever, but in oral teaching, in proclaim- 
 ing universal truth, in exhortation, and in reproof: 
 ' He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, 
 and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the 
 wicked ^' 
 
 No imagery could be stronger or clearer than this 
 to describe the nature of the agency that was to 
 appear, and to identify it with one at least of the 
 best known and most powerful influences on the 
 minds and hearts of men, namely, the agency of 
 personal teaching, in sounding forth truths which are 
 far reaching, and full of the self-evidence of an in- 
 ternal light. The later Isaiah adds to this conception 
 that of the attraction of love and gratitude due to 
 suffering voluntarily undergone for the fulfilling of 
 a purpose so beneficent. His language seems to 
 attribute to the inherent and natural efficacy of these 
 means, the world-wide triumph they were destined to 
 achieve. For in immediate connexion with the mys- 
 terious description of that servant whose ' visage was 
 so marred more than any man, and His form more 
 than the sons of men,' the prophet adds, 'so shall He 
 sprinkle many nations ^.' The selection of this word 
 ' sprinkle ' for the expression of what is here implied, 
 is a striking illustration of the innate tendency of the 
 Hebrew prophetic spirit to employ almost always the 
 symbolic language of the Levitical ritual, but yet also 
 
 ' Isa. xi. 4. 2 j5jj_ ]ii_ j^^ j^.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 331 
 
 always to employ it in such a way as to explain it in 
 terms of the spiritual realities which are symbolized. 
 The sprinkling of animal blood over the altar was 
 a conspicuous feature in the worship of the temple \ 
 Ezekiel uses it as applicable to mere cleansing by the 
 use of water ^. Isaiah here uses it for the great reality 
 of the attractive power which was to be exerted over 
 the whole world by the doctrines of One who was to 
 endure exceptional suffering in the proclamation of 
 them. The voluntary endurance of that suffering for 
 so Divine a purpose, is an idea inseparably interwoven 
 with the whole language of the later Isaiah in his 
 vision of the Messianic work. The existence, there- 
 fore, of some necessary relation between the means 
 and the end in view, is an inevitable implication. It 
 has, indeed, always been involved equally in the prac- 
 tice and doctrine of sacrifice in all its forms, whether 
 in the horrible sacrifices of the heathen, such as 
 those to Moloch, or in the more innocent, yet still 
 coarse and carnal, sacrifices of the Jewish temple, or 
 in the high spiritual conceptions of it which were so 
 constantly insisted upon by the Hebrew prophets. 
 It is expressly emphasized in the language of the later 
 Isaiah in his description of what the Messiah was to 
 do. It is seen as the result, not only of effort, of 
 labour, and of sorrow, but of that supreme and pro- 
 verbial agony which is known as travail : * He shall 
 see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied ^.' 
 Even in that lowest sense of all in which the word 
 sacrifice has come to be commonly used in the affairs 
 
 ' Lev. xvi, xvii. ^ EzeL xxxvi. 25. ^ Isa. liii. ir.
 
 332 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of life — the sense of mere purchase — the giving up of 
 something that is valuable to us in order to obtain 
 something else which we are still more anxious to 
 obtain — even in this sense the same implication is 
 involved. 
 
 We must not, however, allow our familiarity with 
 this essential element in the very idea of sacrifice, 
 to blind us to the mystery it involves when applied to 
 the agency of the Godhead in doing anything, or in 
 securing any end. It seems to us as if it implied 
 some limit on omnipotence, some inherent need, such 
 as we ourselves are under, to proceed always in the 
 compassing of any purpose, upon some plan of 
 operation in which natural laws can only be made 
 subordinate by homage being paid to their inalienable 
 and insuperable powers. We have seen that this 
 need is a universal and conspicuous fact in Nature, 
 and it is of infinite interest to observe how the 
 theology of the Hebrews recognized it in all their 
 beliefs concerning the Author of Nature, and how 
 their greatest prophets recognized it, specially, in all 
 their conceptions of what the Messiah was to be, and 
 of what He was to do. Why it could not be done 
 otherwise, and especially at less cost, when neverthe- 
 less it is spoken of as desired and aimed at by 
 Jehovah — this is the question which seems to present 
 to us an insuperable difficulty. Well might the pro- 
 phet interrupt his vision by the exclamation, ' Who 
 hath believed our report^?' There is only one con- 
 ception which even tends towards a solution of this 
 
 ' Isa. liii.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 333 
 
 difficulty, and that is the conception that what we 
 call natural laws, both in the physical and in the 
 moral world, are indeed Divine, owing their origin 
 and all their unchangeable authority to some in- 
 separable relation to the character of the Almighty, 
 as the issue of His will, of His righteousness, and of 
 His truth. 
 
 Difficult as it may be to realize this conception, 
 there is no other so full of an inexhaustible sug- 
 gestiveness. It gives a clue to the intense interest 
 which the human intellect finds in even the minutest 
 detail of the physical sciences, whilst it gives a still 
 more adequate explanation of the solemn and satis- 
 fying joys of a genuine religious faith. It represents 
 the objects of that faith not as things of mere 
 sentimental feeling, but as things of fact, in the ascer- 
 tainment or recognition of which the faculties of our 
 reason have an important part to play. And more 
 than this, it is a conception which is a guide as well 
 as an encouragement to reason, because it supplies 
 us with at least one test of truth in religious creeds, 
 namely, the conformity of their tenets to all other 
 truths which are discoverable in the universe of God. 
 No mere idol of the mind, graven, as it were, by art 
 and man's device — no mere formal dogma not in 
 harmony with the pervading realities of the spiritual 
 world — can long stand this test ; whilst, on the other 
 hand, every article of our creeds which does stand it, 
 however beset it may be with intellectual difficulties 
 due to our knowledge being so limited, will survive 
 all attacks, and become more and more established
 
 334 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 in that reasonable confidence which rises into the 
 assurances of faith. 
 
 It is, therefore, of infinite moment to observe that 
 the theology of the Christian Church, is built upon 
 this conception of the universal reign of law, if not 
 more extensively, yet at least more consciously 
 and avowedly, than the theology of the Hebrews. 
 Judaism, indeed, involved it, but Christianity openly 
 proclaims it, dwells upon it, and embodies it in 
 beliefs which carry it to an extent that constituted 
 the great difficulty of the Jews in accepting it. Their 
 own prophets had, indeed, given to their Messiah 
 such names and titles as are not conceivably applic- 
 able to any mere man. ' Wonderful, Counsellor, The 
 mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of 
 Peace ^ ' — these are appellations which might well 
 indicate any conceivable representation of Jehovah. 
 And in some Jewish writings, which, indeed, were 
 not part of the canon, because they were written after 
 that canon had been closed — to those titles had been 
 added, the Son of Man, the Son of God, and even the 
 Only Begotten Son of God. This last appellation, 
 indeed, was obviously borrowed from the second 
 Psalm -. The degradation of Israel under pagan 
 oppressors, and the temporary triumph of the chosen 
 people in the Maccabean period, gave rise to a copious 
 apocalyptic literature ' in which a conquering Messiah 
 was vividly revived ^.' In them the old prophetic 
 titles received a new development, and the Son of 
 
 1 Isa. ix. 6. 2 Ps. ii. 7. 
 
 ^ Deane's Pseudographia, Introd, p. 31.
 
 Vll] * CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 335 
 
 David was described as ' Christ the Lord ' ; and this 
 last expression seems certainly to have been known 
 before Christian times ^. This, indeed, is clear from 
 the narrative of our Lord's conversation with the 
 woman of Samaria, whose words even imply a more 
 spiritual understanding of the Messianic character 
 than most of the literary references : ' I know that 
 Messias cometh, which is called Christ : when He 
 is come, Lie will tell us all things^.' But still, 
 none of these titles seem to have been connected in 
 the Hebrew mind with that full participation in the 
 Godhead which was claimed by Christians for their 
 Christ. The idea that such a Being could only 
 achieve a deliberate purpose of the Almighty through 
 the sacrifice of Himself, was, not unnaturally, incon- 
 ceivable to the Jews. Yet the apostles of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, all of them Jews, not only accepted this 
 idea, but dwelt upon it with emphasis and in detail, 
 as affording a rational basis for their creed. They 
 claimed a full humanity for Him in whose Messiah- 
 ship they had come to believe, as if that humanity 
 were an indispensable qualification for His work. 
 They not only narrate as facts, but they love to dwell 
 as a comfort, on His human childhood, on His human 
 nurture, on His human subjection to parents, on His 
 human growth in all the graces of character which 
 gave Him increasing wisdom and increasing favour 
 with God and man ■^. They tell us of His early ac- 
 quaintance with the sacred Scriptures of His race, and 
 
 ' Deane's Pseudographia, Introd. p. 17. 
 2 John iv. 25. ^ Luke ii. 46-52.
 
 336 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of that spiritual discernment of their import which 
 enabled Him to meet and astonish the professional 
 theologians who disputed in the temple. They tell us of 
 an interrogation put to Him at a very early age as to 
 the causes of His absence from His family, and of His 
 mysterious reply, ' Wist ye not that I must be about 
 My Father's business^,' which implies a conscious 
 preparation or apprenticeship for His still distant 
 public ministry. And all this human history the evan- 
 gelists record in connexion with an argument which is 
 turned to great account by the Apostles as affording 
 a reasonable explanation of the pre-eminent fitness of 
 their Master for the discharge of His Messianic office. 
 There is one book and only one in the New Testa- 
 ment — the Epistle to the Hebrews — which is specially 
 devoted to demonstrate the perfect continuity of doc- 
 trine between Hebrew and Christian theology, and 
 that book is the one which is more full than any 
 other of the idea that both theologies are one, in 
 recognizing the reign of immutable and eternal laws, 
 and that the doctrines of both are largely susceptible 
 of reasonable explanation by reference to the facts 
 of Nature as known to us by observation and ex- 
 perience. Although this epistle is anonymous, and 
 differences of opinion exist as to who the author was. 
 he is certainly one of the very greatest among the 
 sacred writers, and it is impossible not to be struck 
 with the internal evidence which connects it, directly 
 or indirectly, with the powerful and subtle intellect of 
 St. Paul. But whoever he may have been, his great 
 
 * Luke ii. 49.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 337 
 
 argument is of the highest authority on the relations 
 of Judaism to Christianity, and on the relations of both 
 theologies to natural facts and laws in the spiritual 
 world. He specially devotes himself to the explana- 
 tion to Jews of the Christian belief in respect to the 
 nature and work of the Messiah, and in the identi- 
 fication of that great predicted Person with the life 
 and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In the conduct of 
 this argument he gives explanations of the Mes- 
 sianic functions which are largely founded on an 
 appeal to reason, and to familiar knowledge of natural 
 causes and effects. In particular, he specially recom- 
 mends the idea of a perfectly human Messiahship by 
 its manifest adaptation to the securing of human con- 
 fidence and love. In Jesus, he says, 'We have not an 
 High Priest who cannot be touched with a feeling of 
 our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as 
 we are, yet without sin \' 
 
 Nothing can be more emphatic or explicit than 
 the doctrine of this great writer, that not only the 
 humanity of Christ, but His suffering life on earth, 
 was a needed preparation for His work, and a special 
 ground of hope and confidence in those who look to 
 Him ; ' for it became Him, for whom are all things, 
 and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons 
 unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation 
 perfect through suffering-.' The same argument is 
 pursued through many verses, and is applied to the 
 power of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as 
 events specially adapted to meet the worst evils and 
 
 ^ Heb. iv. 15. 2 Heb. ii. 10. 
 
 Z
 
 338 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 distresses of the world. One of these distresses, 
 particularly mentioned here, is a striking confirmation 
 of a curious passage in the Latin poet Lucretius, which 
 attributes the baneful influence of religious super- 
 stition on the morals and happiness of man, to the 
 universal fear of death coupled with dark imaginings 
 on the conditions of an unknown immortality ^. The 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews confirms this 
 passage to the letter. He speaks of this prevailing 
 fear as a well-known fact, and as an evil for which the 
 human life and death and resurrection of Him who 
 was indeed the promised Christ, was the only, as it was 
 the natural and appointed, remedy. He gives it as a 
 reason for the Incarnation, that it would work out 
 a deliverance from this master evil of false religions ; 
 ' Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of 
 flesh and blood, He himself also took part of the 
 same ; that through death He might destroy him that 
 had the power of death, that is, the devil ; and deliver 
 them who through fear of death had all their lifetime 
 been subject to bondage. For verily He took not on 
 Him the nature of angels ; but He took on Him the 
 seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved Him in all 
 things to be made like unto His brethren, that He 
 might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things 
 pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins 
 
 * See the first ninety-four lines in the third book, which are 
 devoted to this subject, enumerating many of the miseries and crimes 
 and follies of human life, and saying of them : 
 
 ' Haec vulnera vitae 
 Non minimam partem mortis formidine aluntur.' 
 
 Munro's Lucretius, \o\. i. p. 107.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 339 
 
 of the people,' The whole structure of these sentences 
 is charged with the idea of an obvious and special 
 adaptation of unusual means for the attainment of 
 a difficult result. Then comes the climax of the 
 argument which appeals to our intelligible and natural 
 reason for the perfect humanity of the Messiah, ' For 
 in that He himself hath suffered being tempted, He is 
 able to succour them that are tempted \' 
 
 No language could be more emphatic than this in 
 its appeal to human reason, as having the highest 
 functions to discharge in the recognition of religious 
 truth, and especially in that particular truth which 
 was the one great central belief of Christianity, 
 namely, the instrumentality of a personal Messiah 
 qualified to reveal Divine things as they had never 
 been revealed before, and qualified especially to give 
 confidence to men in His character, as well as in His 
 power. In the recorded utterances of Jesus Christ 
 himself there are few which run on this line of 
 thought. But there is one of a most remarkable kind 
 which clearly does so : ' And I, if I be lifted up from 
 the earth, will draw all men unto Me ^.' An appeal 
 to human reason must of necessity be an appeal to 
 natural laws of well-known, or at least of recognizable, 
 authority in the experience of human life. It must 
 assume these to be supreme, and it must assume that 
 conformity with them is characteristic of all truth, 
 and is, in itself, that which can alone constitute to us 
 a reasonable explanation. The whole of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews is full of this idea. It opens with 
 
 ^ Heb. ii. 14-18. ^ John xii. 32. 
 
 Z 2
 
 340 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a reference to the historical fact that Jehovah had in 
 the past at sundry times, and in diverse manners, 
 spoken to their fathers through the prophets, but had 
 now spoken to themselves by His Son, whom the 
 writer describes as 'the brightness of His glory and 
 the express image of His person ^.' 
 
 On this branch of his subject, however, namely, the 
 full Divinity which he claimed for Jesus of Nazareth, it 
 is remarkable that the author of Hebrews does not rest 
 on any appeal to reason, but exclusively on an appeal 
 to prophetic utterances which were of acknowledged 
 authority among the Jews. He does, indeed, appeal 
 to reason in respect to the only possible interpretation 
 which these utterances could bear in their delineations 
 of the rank and character of Him whose advent had 
 been the constant theme of prophecy and of song. 
 He argues that these utterances pointed clearly to 
 One who was to have that kind of close relationship 
 to the Godhead which is best translated to us as 
 Sonship. But beyond this his reasoning does not go. 
 It is a sustained argument on the direct or implied 
 meaning of many passages which he quotes from the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, showing how impossible it is that 
 those passages can have applied to a mere man, 
 and how the whole atmosphere of their mysterious 
 intimations is charged with the conception of some 
 Divine Being who was to come for the accomplish- 
 ment of many purposes not otherwise to be attained, 
 or by any agency of lower rank or power. In this 
 argument the Apostle was addressing himself to Jews, 
 
 ' Heb. i. 3.
 
 VII] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 34I 
 
 who knew that the language thus quoted had always 
 been accepted as referring to the Messiah, and it is an 
 argument which we can all re-enforce for ourselves by 
 comparing and scrutinizing innumerable other passages 
 in the Prophets and in the Psalms. But it is not an 
 argument which could have any power over men to 
 whom the Jewish Scriptures were unknown, or by 
 whom they were not accepted as of any authority in 
 matters of religion. It is not an argument addressed 
 to the universal reason of mankind on the merits of 
 the Christian conception in itself. The Apostle knew 
 too well the limitations on that reason which render it 
 incapable of form.ing any such independent judgment 
 on the nature of the Godhead, as to be able to decide 
 what could, or what could not be possible, in its 
 modes of manifestation. On this side, therefore, of 
 his subject, namely, the possibility of a Divine Messiah, 
 he stands not upon reason, but upon authority, and on 
 that wise and true agnosticism which is conscious 
 that on the possibility of a Divine Incarnation we can 
 have nothing else than authority to stand upon. It 
 is only when he comes to deal with the full humanity 
 of the Christ that he appeals to reason as capable of 
 recognizing means well adapted to meet the wants 
 and weaknesses of our nature. It is in this sense 
 only that we can interpret the language of the 
 Apostle when — in the passages above quoted and in 
 others — he pushes so far the principle of reasonable 
 explanations as almost seemingly to imply that the 
 Creator could not fully understand the creatures He 
 had made, except by sending One who was His Son
 
 342 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 to go through the actual experience of a human life. 
 This interpretation, of course, cannot have been in- 
 tended. What is meant clearly is that our own con- 
 fidence and faith in a Divine sympathy is made easier 
 to us by the human life of a Divine Person. The words, 
 if taken in any other sense, are incompatible with the 
 language of the old Hebrew Scriptures in respect to 
 the character of Jehovah — language used quite irre- 
 spective of any reference to the advent of the coming 
 One. There is no reason to suppose that the Singer of 
 Israel was thinking of a human Messiah when he wrote 
 the 103rd Psalm, which ascribes a character of such 
 exquisite tenderness to the God of Abraham, and of 
 Isaac, and of Jacob, in all His dealings with their 
 children as the chosen representatives of mankind : — 
 ' Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord 
 pitieth them that fear Him ; for He knoweth our 
 frame, He remembereth that we are dust ^.' Again, 
 in the 130th Psalm, we read, ' If thou. Lord, shouldest 
 mark iniquity, O Lord, who shall stand ? But there 
 is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared '^.' 
 Again, in the 139th Psalm, we have the most absolute 
 assertion of the perfect knowledge of the Most High 
 concerning the most intimate secrets of humanity : — 
 ' O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me. 
 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, Thou 
 understandest my thought afar off,' &c. Undoubtedly, 
 therefore, perfect knowledge of, and perfect tender- 
 ness towards men, on the part of Jehovah, was an idea 
 fully grasped by the sacred writers of the Hebrews. 
 
 ' Ps. ciii. 13, 14. ^ Ps. cxxx. 3, 4.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 343 
 
 Nevertheless it remains true that it is most difficult 
 for men to keep up this conception of Jehovah, and 
 to realize it — as compared with the facility with which 
 they can conceive and remember the sympathy of 
 One who has led a human life, and was Himself 
 ' a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief 
 
 All this is most certainly true. It has been the 
 actual experience of millions of men during the last 
 2000 years. It has been one of the strengths of 
 Christianity. It is in complete consonance with 
 well-known laws of our human nature, and in 
 appealing to them as familiar to human experience, 
 the author of the Book of Hebrews does what 
 he obviously meant to do — he gives a reasonable 
 account of the central conception of Christianity, 
 which could be recognized as such, not by Jews only 
 but by all mankind. But in the very reasonableness 
 of that account he plants his foot firmly on the idea 
 that the whole system of Christian belief rests on its 
 conformity to the natural laws of one universal 
 spiritual kingdom. It is in the light of this idea that 
 he insists on the Divinity of Jesus of Nazareth as in 
 no way hindering the application to Him of the 
 spiritual means by which human souls are prepared 
 and disciplined in Divine knowledge, and in the 
 acquisition of a Divine character : — ' Though He were 
 a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which 
 He suffered ; and being made perfect, He became the 
 author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey 
 Him^.' 
 
 1 Heb. V. 8, 9.
 
 344 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY , [CH. 
 
 Then, although it is true, as we have said, that the 
 writer of this appeal to the Hebrew people, rests it 
 on the authority of their own Scriptures so far as 
 all conceptions of the Godhead are concerned, and 
 although he rests it upon reasoning, only so far as 
 those Scriptures could be clearly shown to contem- 
 plate a human character as belonging to the Messiah, 
 yet it is to be observed that he selects out of the 
 Hebrew books those words and passages which do 
 in themselves suggest that we have a clue to the 
 relation between the human and the Divine, which 
 affords, within limits indeed, but still effectively, some 
 rational explanation of the nature of the Godhead. 
 He claims for Jesus of Nazareth, not only that relation- 
 ship to Jehovah which was familiar to the Jews as 
 connected with the Messiah in the title of Sonship, 
 but also that still older relationship which was equally 
 familiar to them as connected with the first progenitor 
 of the whole human race in the narrative of Genesis. 
 One of the most striking parts of that narrative is the 
 declaration that Adam was created in the image of God, 
 and after His likeness. This fundamental ascription to 
 man of a share in the Divine Nature, had never been so 
 grossly interpreted by the Hebrews as to apply it to 
 the bodily frame of man, and the revolt from any such 
 interpretation was the animating sentiment which in- 
 flamed that hatred and horror of idolatry, in any form, 
 which was embodied in the Commandments, and is so 
 continually reiterated by the sacred writers. But they 
 did interpret it as applying to the plan and structure 
 of the mind of man as it came from the hands of his
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 345 
 
 Creator, and before, through the disobedience of a free 
 will, it had been corrupted. When, therefore, the 
 writer of the Book of Hebrews describes Him whom 
 Christians identified with the Messiah, as not only 
 a Son, but as the Son of God who was ' the express 
 image of His Person,' he used an expression which 
 need not have startled any Jew. The most ancient 
 and sacred record of their race had expressly used it 
 as the word best fitted to convey the true relationship 
 which existed between the Creator and the highest 
 creature He had made on earth. Nor need it now 
 startle any thinker among the Gentiles, because it is 
 at this point in the theology of the Hebrews that its 
 fundamental conceptions rest securely on the recog- 
 nition of undoubted facts, which involve no less than 
 the same idea. If our intellects and hearts were 
 not, in some real sense, made in the image and 
 after the likeness of God, we could not possibly 
 delight as we do in the decipherment of God's works, 
 nor be conscious of the order, harmony, and in- 
 telligibility, of the laws by which they are produced 
 and governed. And hence in this appeal to Judaism 
 the Apostle does also, in this high matter, make an 
 appeal to the universal reason of mankind, and to 
 that purposiveness in the system of Nature which we 
 have identified as self-evidently true. The conceiv- 
 ability of a special Incarnation appears in a new light 
 to those to whom the idea has come really home that 
 all men are, in their origin, sons of God and partakers 
 of the Divine Nature. Certain it is that Jesus Christ 
 did not try to make this conception more difficult to
 
 346 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 those whom He addressed when He spoke of Himself. 
 On the contrary, in order to make the conception 
 easier, he appealed to this very fact, namely, the 
 analogy of language used in the Hebrew Scriptures 
 as applicable to human recipients of Divine missions 
 and inspirations : ' If he called them gods, to whom 
 the word of God came, and the Scriptures cannot be 
 broken ; say ye of Him, whom the Father hath 
 sanctified, and sent into the world, He blasphemeth, 
 because I said, I am the Son of God ^/ 
 
 Analogies are not identities, and when analogies 
 are used, as in this case, for the mere purposes of 
 illustration, they may well be distant and imperfect. 
 There is, accordingly, a vast space between that 
 relation to the Godhead which belonged even to the 
 greatest prophets ' to whom the word of God came,' 
 and that other relationship which Jesus Christ always 
 claimed for Himself, and which St. John expressed by 
 describing Him as ' the Word,' who became incarnate, 
 and who, in virtue of this embodiment, was both Son 
 of Man and Son of God. But the illustration was 
 enough to remind the Jews how the language of their 
 own sacred books was full of conceptions concerning 
 the Divine Nature in its relation to man, which ought 
 to facilitate their acceptance of a human and yet 
 a Divine Messiah. St. Paul's doctrine that the bodies 
 of men are to be regarded as ' temples of the Holy 
 Ghost 2,' and that ' in the Creator v/e live and move 
 and have our being ^,' is a doctrine having the same 
 power of rendering more easily conceivable the 
 
 * John X. 35, 36. " 2 Cor vi. 16. ^ Acts xvii. 28.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 347 
 
 same idea ; whilst the intuitive and direct perception 
 of one universal Mind as omnipresent in that system 
 of things to which we ourselves belong, comes in, 
 again and again, with its own special power to remind 
 us continually of the unfathomable mysteries by 
 which we are surrounded, and through which we can 
 see the boundless possibilities of our own nature in 
 its relations with the Divine. 
 
 But this is not the only matter on which the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews throws a clear light 
 on the perfect continuity between Hebrew and 
 Christian theology, and on both these theologies as 
 appealing to some power in human reason to recognize 
 Divine truth. Inseparably connected with the true 
 relations between the Godhead and humanity, lies 
 the great question of the nature of true and accept- 
 able worship. And with this, again, is inseparably 
 connected the world-old practices of sacrifice. The 
 Christian Apostle adopts and enlarges on the funda- 
 mental idea of all the Hebrew prophets, that man 
 has absolutely nothing that he can really give to 
 God except the obedience of a free will, and the 
 affections of a free heart. In addressing the Hebrews 
 he naturally uses the language of their authorized 
 temple-worship, and points out as a fact that in that 
 worship the bloody sacrifices of beasts were so essen- 
 tial an ingredient that it could be said of it with 
 truth that ' almost all things were by the law purged 
 by blood,' and that ' without shedding of blood there 
 was no remission ^' But not less emphatically does 
 
 ' Heb. ix. 22.
 
 348 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 he go on to say^ not as a mere opinion, or as a mere 
 fact, but as if it were a self-evident proposition, ' For 
 it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats 
 should take away sin ^,' And so through a long 
 series of parallels and of contrasts between the mere 
 symbolic sacrifices of the Levitical priesthood and 
 the only kind of sacrifice which can be thought of as 
 acceptable to God, he labours to exalt the work and 
 mission of the Messiah to the level of that highest 
 spiritual reason and consciousness of men which had 
 so often been appealed to by the prophets of Israel. 
 For this purpose he dwells on one of the most obscure 
 historical personages named in the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures, Melchisedec, but one who most clearly was 
 spoken of in the Psalms in connexion with the 
 character of priesthood in the promised Messiah : 
 ' Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Mel- 
 chisedec ^.' Whatever may be the mystery which 
 attaches to the name of this obscure but grand per- 
 sonality in Jewish history, this passage concerning 
 him was a clear prediction of some new order or 
 kind of priesthood, other and higher than that of 
 Aaron. But if there was to be a change in the priest- 
 hood, there was to be ' of necessity a change also of 
 the law.' The new priesthood was one to be con- 
 ferred not ' after the law of a carnal commandment, 
 but after the power of an endless life.' And the old 
 law or commandment which had been administered 
 by the Levites was disannulled ' for the weakness and 
 unprofitableness thereof Then of the new priest - 
 
 1 Heb. X. 4. 2 ps_ ex. 4.
 
 VIl] CHRIST AS THE MESSIAH 349 
 
 hood of the Messiah, at once human and Divine, 
 he gives the reasonable explanation that in virtue of 
 ' His endless life ' He has entered within the veil, and 
 has received an unchangeable priesthood whereby 
 ' He is able also to save them to the uttermost who 
 come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to 
 make intercession for them.' It is in this connexion 
 that he again appeals to the human reason as capable, 
 at least in some measure, of understanding how and 
 why it was that a life of personal holiness in the 
 face of all temptations was a needed qualification for 
 such an office, and for our own confidence in Him to 
 whom it was assigned : ' For such an High Priest 
 became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate 
 from sinners, and made higher than the heavens ^.' 
 
 Thus, again and again, in the conduct of this great 
 argument addressed to Jews, the Apostle uses language 
 which implies that the old prophetic interpretation of 
 the true nature of sacrifice, was an interpretation en- 
 forced by due consideration of the very nature and 
 possibility of things. He insists that the Levitical 
 sacrifices were essentially figurative and temporary, 
 things for the time then present, in which were off'ered 
 both gifts and sacrifices that did not ' make him that 
 did the service perfect, as pertaining to the con- 
 science,' seeing that they * stood only in meats and 
 drinks and diverse washings, and carnal ordinances, 
 imposed on them till the time of reformation -'.' 
 Here we see that, on the one hand, the practical 
 effect of any worship on the spiritual character and 
 ^ Heb. vii. 27. ^ Heb. ix. 9, 10.
 
 350 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conscience of men, is made the test of its conformity 
 with truth, whilst on the other hand the impossibihty 
 of any such effect being produced by formal gifts to 
 the Almighty, and by ordinances which are merely 
 ' carnal ' is assumed to be obvious to the enlightened 
 reason. Then, again, we have the same reasoning 
 enforced by the farther explanation of the effect 
 which the contrasted sacrifice of the Messiah is 
 adapted to produce. That effect was to be nothing 
 outward — not even a mere ' purifying of the flesh.' 
 It was to change the heart and life. It was to cast 
 out the alien conception that the mere doing of out- 
 ward things, which had in them no spiritual life, could 
 have spiritual value. It was to ' purge the conscience 
 from dead works to serve the living God ^.' Nor 
 does the apostle fail to impress upon the Jews what 
 it was, in the Messiah's sacrifice, which was to be thus 
 substituted for the blood of animals. It was not to 
 be the mere substitution of the blood of a man for the 
 blood of beasts. It was not to be a return to the idea of 
 human sacrifices which were only too common among 
 the heathen. On the nature of the Messianic sacrifice 
 he refers them to the language of the fortieth Psalm, 
 in which the carnal sacrifices of the temple are placed 
 in sharp contrast with the spiritual offering of a soul 
 listening to the Divine voice : ' Sacrifice and offering 
 Thou didst not desire ; mine ears hast Thou opened ^.' 
 And this hearing was to be effective, for the contrast 
 is pursued : ' Burnt offering and sin offering hast Thou 
 not required. Then said I, Lo, I come : in the volume 
 
 ■ Heb. ix. 14. -' Ps. xl. 6-10.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF SACRIFICE 351 
 
 of the Book it is written of me, I delight to do Thy 
 will, oh my God : yea, Thy law is within my heart.' 
 Nor was true sacrifice limited to Himself. He waste 
 become the proclaimer of it to the world : ' I have 
 preached righteousness in the great congregation ; I 
 have not hid Thy righteousness within my heart ; I have 
 not concealed Thy loving-kindness and Thy truth from 
 the great congregation.' This is the Psalm, out of 
 their own most sacred Scriptures, to which the Apostle 
 refers the Jews as setting forth the true idea of the 
 Messianic sacrifice; and having put the two ideas in 
 opposition— the idea of a bloody immolation and the 
 idea of doing of the Divine will — he adds empha- 
 tically, ' He taketh away the first that He may 
 establish the second ^' This is the spiritual meaning 
 which he gives to the ' offering of the body of Christ 
 once for all ' — an offering, he adds, which is effective 
 only for those whose character is changed by it : 
 ' for by one offering He hath perfected for ever them 
 that are sanctified 2.' 
 
 It cannot, indeed, be maintained, nor is it even sug- 
 gested here, that these explanations of the Apostle 
 concerning the true nature of the sacrifice rendered 
 by the Messiah, are explanations which solve the 
 deeper speculative difificulties which beset the subject. 
 They do not. They do not abate our wonder, or 
 curiosity, how it is that all the great effects attributed 
 to it on the characters of men, and on the accept- 
 ability of their worship by God, could not have been 
 secured at less cost, or without any cost beyond some 
 
 1 Heb. X. 9. 2 Heb. x. 14.
 
 352 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 omnipotent exercise of the Divine will. But the very 
 nature of this question is in itself a conclusive proof 
 that conformity to some laws deeply seated in the 
 very nature of things, is the underlying difficulty with 
 which we have to deal, and that the absolute neces- 
 sity and authority of eternal laws, is an idea in- 
 separable from the whole system both of Hebrew and 
 Christian theology. It is the exclusion of any purely 
 arbitrary element in the conduct of the Divine 
 government, that is so striking in all these arguments 
 and explanations. Some of them are addressed simply 
 to the Jews as such, to show the conformity of the 
 Christian belief with the uniform language of their 
 own law-givers and prophets. But another part of 
 those arguments and explanations are directed to 
 the moral and spiritual conscience, or reason, of man- 
 kind. The uselessness of mere empty forms in Divine 
 worship, the virtue which lies in the devotion of 
 loving and faithful hearts, the dependence of all 
 goodness, in deeds or works, upon the motive with 
 which they are done, the attractive power of a great 
 personal character, of the example of a holy life, 
 and of self-sacrifice for the sake of others — all these 
 are conceptions reasonable in themselves, and re- 
 cognizable as true by the universal human conscience. 
 Why the gracious purposes of God to man could appa- 
 rently only be attained by the employment of such 
 means as the Incarnation and self-sacrifice of One 
 so much part of the Godhead as to be called His Son, 
 this may indeed be an intellectual, but it is not a 
 moral, difficulty. It contains no element of offence
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF SACRIFICE 353 
 
 against the attributes which we instinctively attach 
 to the Divine nature. It does not represent God as 
 gratified by the mere sight of blood, or by the contem- 
 plation of mere death and suffering. Neither does it 
 represent Him as propitiated by the pretended gift to 
 Him of things which were already all His own. 
 
 It is no part of the object of this work to pronounce, 
 or even to indicate, opinions on any of the points of 
 doctrine which are in dispute between different sections 
 of the Christian Church. It is, on the contrary, my 
 object to avoid them. The aim here is to deal with 
 the conceptions of Christian theology as facts, in 
 order to show their connexion with the idea of natural 
 laws as prevailing in the spiritual, as well as in what 
 is called the material, world. But in the pursuit of 
 this aim it is absolutely necessary to point out that it 
 is quite possible so to express and explain the Christian 
 doctrine of sacrifice, as to involve, and even intensify, 
 all the gross and carnal conceptions concerning it, 
 which were the constant theme of denunciation by the 
 Hebrew prophets. If our rendering of anything to 
 God is in the nature merely of the paying of a debt, 
 then, nothing can be more certain than that in human 
 affairs the discharge of such an obligation is entirely 
 independent of the character of him who owed it, or 
 of the spirit and disposition with which he pays it. 
 This is certainly not the teaching of Christian theo- 
 logy in respect to the sacrifice of Christ. It satisfies 
 no natural law traceable in the spiritual world. On 
 the contrary, nothing can be more repugnant to our 
 moral sense than the notion that we can by any mere 
 
 A a
 
 354 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 outward payment, discharge any obligation lying in 
 the region of gratitude and love. Yet I once heard 
 from a Christian pulpit, more than half a century 
 ago, the nature and effect of the sacrifice of Christ 
 likened to the two sides — the debit and credit sides — 
 of a commercial ledger. The debt of humanity was 
 paid off — we were told — by a payment to account on 
 the credit side, in the blood and death of Christ. 
 This kind of language is hardly ever used now, and 
 probably even then the preacher, if he had been 
 questioned, would have admitted that the elements of 
 spiritual change, demanded in the mind and heart 
 of the Christian debtor, were absolutely left out of 
 account in that image of a pecuniary transaction 
 which he presented to his hearers as explaining the 
 Cross of Calvary in its relation to sinners and to sin. 
 The language of the New Testament writers on this 
 subject must be taken as a whole, and not interpreted 
 from individual passages. For just as the Hebrew 
 prophets, as we have seen, constantly used the imagery 
 of the temple worship even in their loftiest spiritual 
 teaching of the fundamental laws of eternal right- 
 eousness and truth, so did the Christian Apostles 
 in their explanations of Christian doctrine. But 
 this use of the Levitical imagery, was not less con- 
 stantly illuminated by translations into language 
 appealing to the highest moral consciousness of man 
 as capable of appreciating the spiritual truths which 
 lay behind, and beyond, the images and the forms. 
 St. Paul in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill 
 adopts and enforces the old reasonable argument of
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 355 
 
 the Hebrew prophets on the absurdity of supposing 
 that, in sacrifice, man can possibly give to God any- 
 thing external that is not his own to give : ' Neither 
 is He worshipped with men's hands, as though He 
 needed any thing, seeing,' as an admitted and self- 
 evident truth, ' that He giveth to all life, and breath, 
 and all things ^.' Very often, too, the language in which 
 such appeals are conveyed to our human spiritual 
 reason, in condemnation of formal or mechanical 
 understandings of Christian doctrine, and in the in- 
 culcation of substituted realities, is language so full, 
 and so lofty, as to cover applications which, because 
 of the limitations on our knowledge, are evidently 
 inexhaustible by us. Such, for example, is the pro- 
 found antithesis used by the writer of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews in reference to that distant and obscure 
 priesthood of Melchisedec, ' after the similitude ' of 
 which the new priesthood of Christ was to be under- 
 stood, ' not after the law of a carnal commandment, 
 but after the power of an endless life ^.' 
 
 Next in importance in the system of Christian 
 theology to the true doctrine of sacrifice, if indeed 
 it be separable at all, comes the true doctrine of 
 Christian faith. Faith in the language of the New 
 Testament is not mere intellectual conviction. This 
 is, indeed — it should never be forgotten — an included 
 and a necessary element, but not the element which 
 determines its character and constitutes its virtue. 
 There can, of course, be no faith without some 
 intellectual convictions ; but there are a thousand 
 
 ' Acts xvii. 25. - Heb. vii. 16. 
 
 A a 2
 
 356 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 mere intellectual convictions where there is nothing 
 in the nature of faith. There is no moral element, for 
 example, in the conviction we have that things equal 
 to the same thing are equal to one another. We 
 cannot help ourselves in entertaining this conviction. 
 It is to us a mere necessity of thought, the result of 
 those innate or inspired adaptations of our brain 
 power to external facts and laws, which are given to 
 us as necessary parts of the machinery of our intelli- 
 gence. In like manner there are facts in the spiritual 
 world which may be revealed to our reason as in- 
 disputable, and yet our convictions of them may have 
 no moral character whatever. St. James speaks with 
 severity of those who confound these intellectual 
 convictions on any subject with Christian faith. 
 Not even on subjects belonging to religious belief 
 had this kind of conviction any ethical value : ' Thou 
 believest that there is one God ; thou doest well : 
 the devils also believe, and tremble ^.' But in faith 
 there is a moral element according to Christian 
 theology. It declares — as if it were a consequence 
 of the very nature of God — that ' without faith it 
 is impossible to please Him ^.' And in the sequel of 
 this sentence the Apostle gives a rational explanation 
 of the nature of that moral element which is pleasing 
 in His sight. It is the element which concerns, not 
 the mere existence of God, but His character. The 
 true relation between the purely intellectual, and the 
 moral, elements in faith, is set forth in the most strictly 
 reasoning form : ' for he that cometh to God must 
 
 ' Jas. ii. 19. - Heb. xi. 6.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 357 
 
 believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of 
 them that diligently seek Him.' No argument can 
 be more logical than this — more tightly compacted in 
 the texture of a natural and a reasonable sequence. 
 The mere conviction of the existence of God as 
 a livdng God, that is to say as a personal God, may 
 be purely intellectual, and destitute of any moral 
 character; but the farther conviction that He has 
 a moral character, and that in the manifestation of 
 that character He delights to ' reward those who 
 diligently seek Him,' — this is a moral conviction — 
 is in the nature of that kind of belief which constitutes 
 faith — and is alone well pleasing in His sight. 
 
 Faith, as defined in Christian theology, does not 
 stand in any necessary contrast to mere intellectual 
 doubt, any more than it stands in any necessary 
 harmony with mere intellectual conviction. Tenny- 
 son's famous lines are strictly true : — 
 
 ' There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds.' 
 
 But the whole truth of those lines depends on a just 
 interpretation of the word ' honest.' Doubt may be 
 well or ill directed. It may arise, for example, from 
 the rebellion of the moral sense against such teaching 
 in respect to the sacrifice of Christ as likens it to 
 a payment to account on the credit side of a com- 
 mercial ledger. It may arise from the revolt either 
 of the intellect or the conscience against many other 
 doctrines of a similar kind. It may, therefore, be full 
 of that splendid faith which holds to the conviction 
 that as all true religious conceptions are parts of one
 
 358 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 wide system of eternal truth, they must be all in 
 harmony with each other — that some of these may be 
 with certainty felt and known — that some of them, 
 therefore, may be employed to confirm, on the one 
 hand, or to discredit, on the other, dogmas which 
 have come down unquestioned from tradition, or have 
 grown up by insensible accretions from the use of 
 metaphorical language in the controversies of the 
 Church. Christian theology does not teach that faith 
 consists in the easy and thoughtless acceptance of 
 everything that may be presented to us as a religious 
 truth. Even in the golden age of Christianity, when 
 there were living survivors of those who had walked 
 and talked with Christ, or of those who, like Paul of 
 Tarsus, had been converted to His discipleship by 
 overwhelming personal revelations — even then one of 
 them could say, ' There are many false prophets gone 
 out into the world,' and Christians were expressly 
 told to ' try the spirits ' that might speak to them to 
 see ' whether they were of God ^.' This questioning 
 operation of the reason, was no departure from the 
 spirit of faith, but, on the contrary, an active exercise 
 of its characteristic character. It was a faithful, and 
 not a faithless, thing to do. It showed a confidence 
 in the existence, and knowability, of truth as an 
 objective reality in Divine things. 
 
 We cannot fail to recognize the power and the 
 grandeur of the definition which the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews gives of what is meant by faith in the 
 Christian system. It is the ' substance of things 
 
 ' I John iv. I.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 359 
 
 hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ^' It is, 
 therefore, that which, by virtue of the most deep-seated 
 of natural laws, gives reality to all spiritual conceptions 
 whether as regards the future hopes and aspirations of 
 men, or as regards their sense of certainty in purely 
 intellectual knowledge. It is quite as true in the 
 sphere of the physical sciences as it is in the sphere 
 of religion and philosophy, that the things which are 
 seen are temporal, and that it is only the things which 
 are not seen that are eternal. When therefore men 
 act on the ' evidence of things not seen ' they act ' as 
 seeing- Him who is invisible.' And this is faith. In 
 its own nature it is the strongest power on earth in its 
 influence on men. It is the secret of all success in 
 the highest walks of human life. The noble list which 
 is given, in the eleventh chapter of the epistle, of the 
 saints and heroes of the Jewish history in whose lives 
 and deaths the power of faith was best exemplified, 
 is a list including great varieties of action and of 
 circumstance. Yet it is remarkable that this list 
 begins by including as a conception in the nature of 
 faith, one idea or conviction which belongs essentially 
 to the sphere of science or philosophy — the conviction, 
 namely, that the visible creation has been made out 
 of things which are invisible — that the world, as we see 
 it, is a world of phenomena — that these phenomena are 
 the result of causes and agencies which lie beneath 
 and behind all its forms. It is by confidence, as we 
 have seen, in our own direct perceptions that we grasp 
 the conviction that these agencies must consist in the 
 
 1 Heb. xi. I.
 
 360 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 nature of a Personal Mind, or, in other words, in the 
 nature of a Divine Creator. And this conviction is 
 represented as rising into faith, because it has in it that 
 moral element which is inseparable from the idea, 
 however feeble, of a personal recognition on our part 
 of a Divine Personality related to our own : ' Through 
 faith we understand that the worlds were framed by 
 the Word of God, so that things which are seen were 
 not made of things which do appear^.' All the other 
 examples of that faith given by the Apostle have refer- 
 ence to its power over the conduct of men in nerving 
 them for great deeds, or in guiding them in great emer- 
 gencies, or in comforting them with hopes otherwise 
 beyond the bounds of expectation, or in strengthen- 
 ing them to resist great temptations, or in arming 
 them for military conquests, or in breathing into them 
 an invincible courage in witnessing to eternal truth. 
 Patriarchs, and prophets, and kings, and statesmen, 
 and soldiers and women in abundance — are all included 
 in this grand enumeration of those in whom intense 
 moral convictions have been transfigured into faith. 
 There can be no doubt whatever as to the high rank 
 which this power takes among the natural laws that 
 determine human character and conduct. Not, indeed, 
 languid impressions or beliefs, nor things so mechani- 
 cally evident that we cannot choose but know them to 
 be facts — not these, — but all persuasions so strong as 
 to be earnest and abiding, have not only great power 
 over human conduct, but they habitually control it. 
 They incite men to great deeds. They inspire men 
 
 ' Heb. xi 3.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 361 
 
 with great conceptions. Even when there is httle or 
 no moral element present in them, they have their 
 effects none the less. All great men have been men of 
 intense convictions of some kind or another. Nor can 
 we fail to see that the whole grandeur of a great life, 
 together with the value and the permanence of all its 
 deeds, must be related to the truth and dignity of the 
 conceptions by which it is inspired. If men believe, 
 however intensely, in things not true — in idols of their 
 own hands^ or in idols of their own imagination — their 
 works will not stand the test of time, or rather of the 
 eternal laws which work in time. It is in direct 
 proportion to the conformity of our beliefs with these 
 laws, that human conduct of any kind can be righteous 
 or successful. This is not only the teaching both of 
 Hebrew and Christian theology, but it is the root idea 
 of their whole language. They uniformly represent 
 the objects of religious faith and worship as not only 
 realities, but as the only, as well as the supreme, 
 realities of the universe; and they consequently regard 
 truth in the apprehension of them as of corresponding 
 importance, both in the sphere of the intellect and 
 the heart. In a system of things which has but one 
 living cause — one author, one creating and inspiring 
 Spirit — it cannot be a matter of indifference what we 
 believe concerning any part of it, seeing that every 
 error must be liable to run out along a thousand lines 
 of related and vitiated thought. This is the meaning of 
 those constant reiterations in the Psalms which identify 
 the Law of God with the pure abstract conception of 
 the Truth : ' Thy Law is the Truth.' And this is the
 
 362 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 meaning of the great utterances of Christ : ' God is 
 a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship 
 Him in spirit and in truth': whilst the highest hope 
 and promise which He gives to the Church on earth 
 is ' to be guided into all truth 1.' 
 
 It is quite true that among the conceptions of 
 Christian belief, there are some which we are expected 
 to accept on authority alone, and not on any internal 
 light which our mental powers are capable of re- 
 cognizing as belonging to the sphere of natural or 
 necessary truth. But there are two observations 
 to be made as regards those conceptions — one 
 respecting their own nature, and the other respecting 
 the nature of what is called authority in general. 
 As regards the nature of such conceptions in them- 
 selves, they all lie in a region which our own con- 
 sciousness tells us is absolutely inaccessible to any 
 knowledge of our own depending upon reason. Such, 
 for example, are the conceptions of Christian theology 
 on what are called the ' Persons of the Godhead,' and 
 on their mutual relations to each other, and to that 
 unity with which they are always nevertheless re- 
 presented as compatible. The possibility of our 
 entertaining such conceptions does not, and cannot, 
 depend on the insuperable difficulties presented by 
 them to our speculative reason. Similar and equal 
 difficulties beset us in every subject of thought and 
 of investigation, even in the physical world — in none of 
 which do we ever reach,byreason, any knowledge what- 
 ever on the ultimate nature of things. And especially 
 
 ^ John xvi. 13.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 363 
 
 in our own personality do we encounter similar and 
 equally insuperable difficulties affecting even the most 
 familiar of our conceptions — conceptions which indeed 
 we clothe in words, and handle as if we understood 
 them, but which, when cross-examined by our specula- 
 tive intellect, are at once felt to be incomprehensible. 
 The nature of the connexion between our bodies 
 and our minds, and souls, and spirits — or even between 
 the different faculties into which we can divide our 
 one intellectual nature— all this is a region of the 
 darkest night to us. To this category must naturally 
 and pre-eminently belong all conceptions presented 
 to us on the nature of the Godhead. This, con- 
 sequently, is the region of that true and legitimate 
 agnosticism which rests upon a most rational humility, 
 telling us that it is very reasonable that in religion, as 
 even in science, we should be content, as regards many 
 ultimate conceptions, to rest upon something in the 
 nature of authority. 
 
 But here, be it remembered, we return to a 
 domain in which our reasoning faculties have a very 
 high function to discharge. The discrimination be- 
 tween true and false authorities, may be the most 
 important work which our reason is ever called upon 
 to discharge. In the so-called physical sciences, and 
 especially in biology which is highly metaphysical, 
 the authority on which we accept numberless most 
 difficult and obscure conceptions, is simply the autho- 
 rity of ascertained facts which can only bear certain 
 interpretations. And a similar basis exists for 
 authority in religion. We have seen how the facts
 
 364 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of Nature are the authority, by direct perception, for 
 the primary truth of a personal God. The existence 
 of some necessary relations with our own personality, 
 follows as a necessary consequence, whilst the self- 
 revealing truths taught by the Hebrew and Christian 
 theologies, indicate with clearness how close these 
 relations were in the case, above all, of Jesus Christ 
 himself — of the Jewish prophets, and of the Christian 
 apostles. Their obvious knowledge of spiritual things, 
 their profound intimations respecting them, where 
 we can recognize the truth and beauty of their con- 
 ceptions — these are a reasonable guarantee for their 
 authority in other conceptions which are related, but 
 in respect to which we are as ignorant and as helpless 
 as we often are in science. The sacred writers in the 
 New Testament do indeed recognize our human 
 reason as in itself a legitimate authority to the full 
 extent to which our own consciousness would lead us 
 to trust to its possession of adequate data and powers. 
 There is a memorable example of this in St. Paul's 
 speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill. The whole 
 tenor of that speech is an address to the reason of 
 men founded on sentiments and convictions which 
 had been reached by the pagan world concerning the 
 nature of the Godhead in some, at least, of its relations 
 to humanity. One of these convictions was that in 
 some real sense ' we are the offspring of God ' : and 
 St. Paul's argument is that if this be so, then it follows 
 that the elevation of our nature above the level of 
 mere material things, or of any work done in material 
 things by our own hands, ought to save us from
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF FAITH 365 
 
 those irrational conceptions of the Godhead which 
 animated all the idolatries of the Gentile world. It 
 was a Greek poet who had reached the conception 
 that ' we also are His offspring,' and as a consequence 
 of this purely intellectual perception of a natural and 
 necessary fact, the Apostle argues that a moral obliga- 
 tion on us arose in respect to the highest of all subjects 
 of belief : ' We ought not to think that the Godhead is 
 like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and 
 man's device ^.' When we remember that these words 
 werespokenunder the very walls of the renowned temple 
 to Pallas Athene which held the sculptured image of 
 that goddess, and in which the highest Grecian art, in 
 its most glorious days, had lavished all its conceptions 
 of the most perfect human beauty, we can measure in 
 some degree not only the courage of the speaker, but 
 the inspired conviction and confidence with which he 
 appealed to the universal reason of mankind against 
 the false ideas which had become popular on the 
 Divine nature. That appeal lay not to the outward 
 form of man, but to the structure and character of 
 his mind and will. It was not an appeal to what is 
 loosely called anthropomorphism applied to God, but 
 to theopsychism applied to men — to men as indeed 
 in some measure and degree made in God's image, 
 and partaking, however faintly, of the one great 
 reality which that Name represents to us. In the 
 first part of his speech he had impressed on his 
 hearers a conception of man's relationship to God 
 which rendered the whole of this argument more 
 
 '■ Acts xvii. 28, 29.
 
 366 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 easy of a rational acceptance, because it dwelt on 
 the real nearness of the Godhead to us at all times — 
 a nearness so close that we need not go far away 
 to feel after Him and to find Him — seeing that 
 He is an Universal Presence, ' in whom we live 
 and move and have our being.' This points to a re- 
 lationship much higher and closer than that which 
 the Greek poet had asserted for us, namely, that of 
 offspring, although even that relationship ' ought ' to 
 have been enough to redeem men from the worship 
 of graven images. But if our relationship be still 
 more intimate — even that of an included fragment 
 living and moving and having its very life and breath 
 in, and from, the Divine Being — then may the en- 
 lightened human consciousness and reason claim 
 a very high place indeed in the sources of legitimate 
 authority. 
 
 And here we come across the track of another con- 
 ception of Christian theology which runs throughout 
 the whole of it, and that is the existence of what is 
 now called Inspiration. This word, indeed, is rarely 
 used in the sacred books, either Hebrew or Christian. 
 But the idea it expresses is of perpetual recurrence. 
 The mere word is, as it were, too external, too 
 material, too much isolated and separated from the 
 common facts and experiences of human life. It does 
 not accurately or adequately express the kind of 
 influence which the prophets and apostles were con- 
 scious of in themselves, and which they evidently 
 regarded as so perfectly natural that they did not 
 habitually associate it with any special name. They
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF INSPIRATION 367 
 
 thought of what, occasionally, they called inspiration 
 as simply an unusually direct impulse from the living 
 God to some one or more of the million living souls 
 which could only live in Him : ' Holy men of old 
 spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost ^.' That 
 ' moving ' might be more or less definite and dis- 
 tinct, more or less consciously understood by those 
 to whom the impulse came. But in all cases it was 
 but a special exercise of an influence perfectly accord- 
 ing to the natural constitution and course of things. 
 It is indeed impossible so to define that which we 
 mean by inspiration as to separate it, in kind, from all 
 those instinctive perceptions of self-evident truth on 
 which the whole structure and power of our reason de- 
 pend. Nay, more, it is even impossible so to define the 
 wonderful instincts of the lower animals as to separate 
 them wholly from the idea of inspiration. The amount 
 of knowledge and of foresight which is involved in 
 some of these instincts is indeed astonishing. But it 
 is involved implicitly and not explicitly. It is, as 
 it were, put into the creatures as a part of their ma- 
 chinery, as an effect of their structure and organization. 
 It has in it no element of independent or conscious 
 reasoning. It is not really knowledge, but directed 
 impulse. And the directing power is in them indeed, 
 but not of them. It comes as directly from the 
 Creator as the organic or animated machinery through 
 which it works. The comparative narrowness of the 
 sphere within which it operates, and the comparative 
 lowness of the works it performs in them, does not 
 
 ' 2 Pet. i. 21.
 
 368 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 affect the question of its real affinity with the far 
 hisfher manifestations with which we are accustomed 
 to associate the word in man. 
 
 In the great dramatic poem of Job, which in itself is 
 a striking example of much that we mean by inspira- 
 tion, there is a profound indication given of the nature, 
 of the true cause, and of the true source, of inspiration 
 in man. In one striking passage it is compared and 
 contrasted with the conscious gatherings of experience. 
 Elihu, one of the interlocutors who is introduced to us 
 as a young man, a descendant of a branch of the house 
 of Abraham, is shocked by the want of humility in 
 the language of Job and of some of his friends con- 
 cerning the dealings of God with him. He is shy, 
 however, in expressing this feeling in view of his own 
 youth and of their age. But he is impelled by the 
 consciousness of truth coming to him from a higher 
 source than the mere ordinary wisdom that grows 
 with age ; and so he breaks out : ' Days should speak 
 and multitude of years should teach wisdom. But 
 there is a spirit in man : and the inspiration of the 
 Almighty giveth them understanding. Great men 
 are not always wise ; neither do the aged understand 
 judgment ^.' Here we have the root idea that there 
 is a spirit in man upon which the Divine Spirit can, 
 and often does, directly operate by impulse or other 
 modes of communication, not, as we may well believe, 
 essentially different in their nature from those to 
 which all our ordinary perceptions, both of moral and 
 intellectual truth, are really due. This is the idea of 
 
 ^ Job xxxii. 7, 8.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF INSPIRATION 369 
 
 Elihu when he says that it is the Spirit of God that 
 gives to men their understanding, and that it is the 
 same Spirit which may give a higher enHghtenment 
 to youth than is often attained by the experience of 
 age. It is the same idea as that expressed by the 
 Hebrew historian when he narrates the prayer of 
 Solomon for wisdom in the poHtical governing of his 
 people, and the Divine response to that prayer : ' Lo, 
 I have given thee an understanding heart ^.' And 
 again : ' God gave Solomon wisdom and understand- 
 ing exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as 
 the sand that is on the sea-shore ^.' It is the same 
 idea which prompts the question, ' Who teacheth 
 us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh 
 us wiser than the fowls of heaven^?' It is the idea 
 of all the Hebrew prophets when they felt them- 
 selves commissioned to deliver special messages to 
 those around them — messages which, it is clear from 
 the very nature of them, were not fully comprehended 
 by themselves. And yet not less, it is an idea of 
 inspiration which at once places it in close relation 
 with the ordinary facts of life, and enables us to 
 understand how inspiration may exist in various 
 measures and degrees. Man has been provided with 
 instinctive powers and impulses not less than the 
 lower animals, although they are masked in him by 
 the higher faculties of reasoning, and by a larger 
 sphere of will. But even in the highest regions of 
 the intellect and of the scientific imagination, so con- 
 sistent with known facts is the idea of impulses and 
 
 ^ I Kings iii. 12. ^ i Kings iv. 29. ' Job xxxv. 11. 
 
 Bb
 
 370 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 directions coming from above, that the word inspiration 
 has been largely and familiarly appropriated to ex- 
 press all the phenomena of genius as they are known 
 among men. In every region of mental exertion, but 
 especially in the highest regions, where we have to 
 interpret Nature to others or to ourselves, men have 
 always been conscious of illuminating suggestions 
 which come to them they know not whence — sug- 
 gestions which very often have turned out to be the 
 reflected light of some veritable and eternal truth. 
 
 When, therefore, both the Hebrew and Christian 
 theologies assume, and repeatedly assert, the authority 
 of inspired men in the Divine things, they are not 
 calling on us to believe in any fact at variance with 
 natural law as it prevails in the universe of God as 
 seen and known to us. On the contrary, they are 
 in perfect harmony with the whole system of things in 
 which we live, and with the general consciousness of 
 mankind. For, be it remembered that both theologies 
 include, in their appeals to that consciousness, an 
 admission that it is itself so far inspired as to be 
 furnished with an apparatus for testing and recognizing 
 righteousness and truth, as distinguished from un- 
 righteousness and lies. They warn us that there may 
 be inspirations from below, as well as from above, that 
 there are evil spirits, as well as evil men. ' Even now,' 
 says St. Paul, ' there are many false prophets gone out 
 into the world,' and the warning is sounded, ' Try the 
 spirits, whether they be of God.' All this is in per- 
 fect conformity with what we know and experience 
 in life. We are perfectly conscious of impulses, of
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 371 
 
 obscure origin, which are both bad and good, and 
 just as we sometimes see men not only of exceptional 
 elevation of character, but of what we have agreed to 
 call inspired and penetrative genius, so also do we see 
 men abandoned to every vice^ and inspired by an 
 almost devilish ingenuity in evil. The whole lan- 
 guage, therefore, both of the Old and of the New 
 Testaments in this matter of inspiration, is in com- 
 plete harmony with all that we know of as natural 
 laws. And all this makes it easy for us to believe that, 
 in the highest region of human knowledge, there have 
 been men with conspicuously high degrees of in- 
 spiration, whose utterances we may well accept as 
 authoritative in proportion to the truth and purity of 
 their spiritual teaching, so far as we can judge of it. 
 And this we are expressly desired to do. 
 
 Closely connected with the subject of Inspiration 
 in Christian theology, lies the subject of what has 
 been called Regeneration. Here again it is to be 
 observed that, so far as regards the mere word, it is 
 never used in the Old Testament, and but rarely in 
 the New. Yet the doctrine which that word em- 
 bodies is one of the most fundamental in both the 
 Hebrew and Christian theologies. It may even be 
 said with truth that no other single doctrine is so 
 strongly expressed, and, at the same time, so clearly 
 expounded by our Lord himself. And no other is 
 so distinctly announced as depending on a natural 
 and necessary spiritual law. This is one of the rare 
 cases in the New Testament in which we have a doc- 
 trine announced to an honest but a doubting mind — 
 
 B b 2
 
 372 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 in which, further, the difficulty of that mind was most 
 naturally and rationally expressed — and in which the 
 voice of Authority explains itself in a prolonged and 
 continuous discourse. The conversation arose with 
 Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, who came to Christ, 
 avowedly attracted by the miracles which He did, 
 and expressly telling Him that it was on account of 
 these that he, and others, knew that Jesus must be 
 a ' teacher sent from God : for no man could do the 
 miracles that He did, except God be with Him ^.' 
 This was avowedly an appeal, and an appeal only, to 
 external evidence. And this was the origin of the 
 conversation which followed. It was upon this con- 
 fession, and with obvious reference to it^ that Jesus 
 Christ responded by the announcement of a great 
 general law governing all true knowledge of Divine 
 things : ' Except a man be born again, he cannot 
 see the kingdom of God.' A mere intellectual 
 conviction that there was some Divine authority in 
 any teacher, or in his teaching, was not enough ; and 
 so the strongest figure of speech that could be found 
 was used to explain the transforming power of a real 
 faith when it gets full possession of the heart and 
 life. Nicodemus, dwelling on the mere figure as 
 distinguished from the thing figured, asked how a 
 man could enter his mother's womb a second time 
 and be born. Our Lord replies by an elaborate 
 explanation of the two great sources from which such 
 a transforming faith must come — first and foremost, 
 the influence of that Divine Spirit which, like the 
 
 ' John iii. 2.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 373 
 
 very air we breathe, dwells in us and around us, and 
 can ever move from unseen directions the thoughts 
 and hearts of men ; secondly, the very structure and 
 nature of those hearts and minds, which enables them 
 to respond to that influence, and to see spiritual truth 
 when it is presented to them. Founding on this 
 natural adjustment or adaptation, He insists on the 
 moral elements in all belief. He asserts clearly and 
 emphatically His own claims to be the predicted 
 Messiah, and explains the object of His mission, that 
 'the world through Him might be saved.' He asserts 
 that the rejection of this claim would be in itself 
 condemnation, and He expressly explains that this 
 condemnatory character consisted in the rejection of 
 truths which were recognizable by the ordinary 
 faculties of men when rightly and virtuously used. 
 Such a rejection, consequently, was really determined 
 by the power of an alienated moral will : ' And this is 
 the condemnation, that light is come into the world, 
 and men loved darkness rather than light, because 
 their deeds were evil ^.' 
 
 Nothing can be more clear than that this doctrine 
 was not propounded by our Lord as a new one. 
 On the contrary. He expresses astonishment that it 
 should seem so to a Jew like Nicodemus : 'Art thou 
 a master in Israel and knowest not these things - ? ' 
 Both branches of this doctrine, that which relates to 
 the indwelling of God's Spirit in the very nature of 
 man, and that which relates to a responsive structure 
 and receptivity in the human soul — of both these 
 
 1 John V. 10. ■* John v. ig.
 
 374 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 ideas the Hebrew Scriptures are full from beginning 
 to end. They are inseparable, not only frorn the 
 very conception of prophetic inspiration, but from 
 the calls to repentance, and to a change of life, 
 which the prophets were perpetually addressing to 
 the whole of their race and nation. They are in- 
 separable, not less, from the reiterated stress laid 
 on the true nature of sacrifice and of all accept- 
 able worship. They always expressly appealed to 
 the moral conscience and reason of men as quite 
 competent to form a judgment on this and on 
 other related truths. It is not too much to say that 
 the whole structure of Christianity reposes on this 
 doctrine. That it involves a direct appeal to natural 
 and reasonable laws as supreme in the whole sphere 
 of the spiritual world, is an obvious fact. Nor is it 
 less obvious that we can recognize the same laws as 
 of familiar operation in lower things. As regards the 
 moral elements involved in our beliefs, this doctrine 
 is founded on the fact that we have innate or, in other 
 words, inspired perceptions on many things of primary 
 importance, and are responsible for the power of 
 recognizing others as cognate with them. It is 
 in accordance with the well-known and familiar fact 
 that in our own judgments on our fellow-men, in our 
 often acute and true perception of the motives by 
 which they are actuated, and not seldom in our own 
 consciousness of the workings of our own spirits, we 
 all know, and have embodied this truth of Nature in 
 the well-known proverb, that ' the wish is father to 
 the thought.' Christian theology invariably places the
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 375 
 
 master difficulty it has to contend with in a perverted 
 will. But it as invariably represents our nature as 
 
 ' Trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 From God who is our Home ',' 
 
 and as redeemable by a fresh inpouring, and reception, 
 of that Divine Spirit which is never ' far from any 
 one of us.' There are individual passages, indeed, in 
 both the Old and New Testaments which, taken 
 singly, might seem to imply a total and an irre- 
 deemable corruption. Nowhere is this view more 
 severely expressed than in the exclamation of the 
 Hebrew Psalmist, ' Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, 
 and in sin did my mother conceive me -.' But such is 
 not the last word, or the most comprehensive word 
 on this subject, among the utterances which, at sundry 
 times and in diverse manners, have spoken to us in 
 the Hebrew and in the Christian theologies. The 
 change, which our Lord describes as comparable with 
 that of a new birth, when a man turns from a wicked 
 and godless life to a life of righteousness and faith, 
 is always spoken of as a change — even as a physical 
 birth is — in the nature of a development of pre-exist- 
 ing germs. It is not an absolutely new or arbitrary 
 creation. It is not wholly unrelated to the nature 
 and innate powers of the Being who is the subject of 
 it. It is in the highest sense a natural change, taking 
 place according to the eternal laws of an everlasting 
 and righteous kingdom. 
 
 There are many passages in our Lord's recorded 
 sayings which bring home to us, perhaps still more 
 ^ Wordsworth's Ode to hnmortality. ^ Ps. li. 5.
 
 376 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 clearly, the perfect accordance between the Christian 
 doctrine of regeneration and the working of known 
 and intelligible moral laws. One of His disciples 
 pushed the direct question which asked for a fuller 
 explanation : ' Lord, how is it that Thou wilt manifest 
 Thyself unto us, and not unto the world ^ ? ' Nothing 
 can be more intelligible or reasonable — nothing more 
 natural — nothing, so to speak, more human — than the 
 explanation given : ' If a man love Me, he will keep 
 My words : and My Father will love him, and we will 
 come unto him and make our abode with him ^.' 
 It is impossible to conceive any more satisfying 
 answer — any answer more in harmony than this 
 with moral laws which approve themselves to our 
 natural conscience, and to our actual observation and 
 experience in life. For, here we come across one of 
 the well-known tests and proofs of a great natural 
 law, namely, the perpetual recurrence of certain char- 
 acteristic effects. The actual production in men of 
 that kind of change which corresponds exactly to our 
 Lord's promise and prediction, is one of the com- 
 monest and most notorious facts in the history of 
 Christianity. There is nothing, in His account of 
 the nature or occasions of the effects which He called 
 a new birth, that necessarily or even presumably con- 
 nected them with suddenness in point of time, or 
 with conspicuous appearances of any kind. Rather 
 the contrary ; that kind of patient continuance in 
 know^n w-ell-doing, which was to be so richly re- 
 warded, is generally a slow and silent work. But 
 
 * John xiv. 22. = John xiv. 23.
 
 Vn] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 377 
 
 neither did His words exclude that variety of cir- 
 cumstance and of manifestation which is in accord- 
 ance with the varieties of human character, and of the 
 Operations upon it of spiritual agencies. Accordingly, 
 in the history of the Christian Church the circum- 
 stances attending great changes in the beliefs and 
 in the w^hole character and conduct of individual men, 
 have been immensely various. In the case of the first 
 disciples they seem to have been first struck and 
 attracted by the sayings of a gracious and powerful 
 Personality, and to have acquired only slowly and 
 gradually a conviction that the Master whom they 
 were constrained to follow, was indeed One who ' had 
 the words of eternal life.' In the case of St. Paul, 
 indeed, his conversion took place under conditions 
 which were sudden and astounding. The most 
 powerful human intellect, probably, that has ever been 
 employed in the service of Christianity, was changed 
 in a moment from passionate hostility to an equally 
 passionate devotion. St. Augustine has narrated the 
 circumstances under which a new man was made of 
 him — how a profligate life became pure and holy, and 
 another vigorous and original intellect was enlisted 
 among the foremost soldiers of the Cross. But these 
 are nothing more than a few conspicuous instances of 
 a process which, in a great variety of forms, has now, 
 through nearly 1900 years, had the same result on 
 a multitude of human souls whom no man can 
 number. As is truly said by a recent writer, who 
 until very lately was himself a prominent unbeliever 
 of the agnostic school, ' Now, this experience has
 
 378 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 been repeated and testified to by the countless 
 millions of civilized men and women in all nations 
 and all degrees of culture ^' 
 
 And be it observed, this is a new fact in the history 
 of man — new, that is to say, since Christ came. There 
 is, indeed, a remarkable and a very noble passage in 
 the Discourses of Epictetus ^, the Greek slave of a 
 Roman citizen, who taught in the reign of Nero, which, 
 like other utterances of the Stoics, involves just so 
 much of the principle of the Christian doctrine of 
 conversion as to show how completely it is confirmed 
 by the natural reason of man. It is a passage on the 
 freedom and responsibility of the will, and on its 
 power, under discipline, to effect a complete change of 
 character. ' What greater good do you seek than this ? ' 
 asks Epictetus ; and he answers thus : ' From a shame- 
 less man you will become a modest man, from a dis- 
 orderly man you will become an orderly man, from 
 a faithless man you will become a faithful man, from 
 a man of unbridled habits a sober man.' This is a 
 beautiful and imposing adumbration of the Christian 
 doctrine. But, like other gleams and glimpses of great 
 spiritual truth which illuminated the Stoical philosophy, 
 it was severed from all the cognate truths and facts on 
 which its force and power depended. We never hear 
 of such a total change of life and conduct having been 
 ever known in the heathen world. Even in the Hebrew 
 Church we do not read of repentance taking that 
 form of total change in character which is a familiar 
 
 ^ Thoughts on Religion, Romanes (edited by Canon Gore), pp. 162, 
 163. ^ Discourses of Epictetus, chap. ix.
 
 VIl] ox THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 379 
 
 fact in Christian life. And yet we cannot say that it 
 was impossible before, or that the Spirit of God did 
 not dwell with men as He dwells now. There is no 
 spiritual experience of Christianity which does not 
 find its highest expression in some one or other of 
 the Psalms, In Job we have a most striking de- 
 scription of the effect of some unusually direct vision 
 of the Divine nature in producing in man a horror of 
 his own sinfulness: ' I have heard of Thee by the 
 hearing of the ear : but now mine eye seeth Thee. 
 Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and 
 ashes ^.' But no mere passing impression of this kind, 
 however powerful, comes up to the Christian idea, 
 ' That ye put off concerning the former conversation 
 the old man, which is corrupt according to the de- 
 ceitful lusts ; and be renewed in the spirit of your 
 mind ; and that ye put on the new man, which after 
 God is created in righteousness and true holiness^.' 
 And this renewal is not represented as any magical 
 effect procured, once for all, without the use of appro- 
 priate means, but as a process continuous and needing 
 our own co-operation to perfect and keep it up to its 
 work, in the midst, it may be, of difficulties and trials : 
 ' For which cause we faint not ; but though our 
 outward man perish, our inward man is renewed day 
 by day ^.' Moreover, the Christian Apostle, in teach- 
 ing that this renewing is inseparably connected with 
 a pure life, and with the abandonment of every 
 kind of unrighteousness, specially calls it a growth 
 in ' knowledge ' and a return, however incomplete, 
 
 ' Job xlii. 5, 6. - Eph. iv. 22-24. ^ 2 Cor. iv. 16.
 
 380 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 towards that image in which man was originally 
 created : ' Lie not one to another, seeing that ye 
 have put off the old man with his deeds ; and have 
 put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge 
 after the image of Him who created him ^.' This is 
 in perfect harmony with the language and teaching of 
 the oldest Hebrew Scriptures, which always identifies 
 absolute truth as the only object of knowledge, and 
 men's recognizing and appreciating faculties as re- 
 lated to that Divine nature in which all truth is 
 centred. Hebrew theology always taught that true 
 religion is truth in all its forms, so that perfect know- 
 ledge would be perfect righteousness, and perfect 
 worship. But undoubtedly Christian theology dwelt 
 upon, and developed in quite a new degree, the idea 
 of the Divine nature in man, and of the possible 
 renewal of it by a personal indwelling of the Divine 
 Spirit in each individual soul. That complete trans- 
 formation of personal character which has been 
 a common phenomenon in the world since Christ 
 came, is inseparably connected with the acceptance 
 of this idea, as it is inseparably connected with the 
 signal demonstration of its objective truth as a fact 
 in Nature. 
 
 It is precisely in this highest of all the regions of 
 Christian doctrine that we encounter most clearly 
 certain declarations of our Lord himself which 
 point to the reign of unalterable laws and to the 
 necessity of conforming to them. Just as the special 
 facts of Christian experience exhibit many cases of 
 
 ' Col. iii. 9.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 381 
 
 a marked change in the development of spiritual 
 life, so does Christian philosophy establish concep- 
 tions which are in the nature of an explanation. 
 As a fact, the life, the teaching, and the self-sacri- 
 ficing death of Christ, have been the means of inspiring 
 men with a new power of understanding, and of 
 loving, God. It is as if a new channel of communi- 
 cation had been opened between the Mind of the 
 Creator and the minds of individual men. And this 
 is what Jesus Christ himself says of the great pur- 
 pose of His own advent and ministry. Somehow — 
 how and why exactly is beyond us, but somehow — it 
 was necessary that He should do and suffer all that 
 He actually did and suffered, in order that the Divine 
 Spirit should come and abide with men in a sense 
 and in a manner which was new in the world : ' It is 
 expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not 
 away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if 
 I depart, I will send Him unto you ^.' And the pur- 
 pose to be fulfilled by this great Agency is expressly 
 explained to be, not any sudden, arbitrary, or mira- 
 culous revelation, but some slow and gentle guidance 
 through wider and ever wider horizons of that perfect 
 knowledge which is perfect worship : ' When He, 
 the Spirit of truth, is come. He will guide you into 
 all truth ^.' It is quite true that the very existence 
 of such necessities in the nature and constitution of 
 things — necessities lying even on the working of an 
 Almighty will — is and must ever be a wonder and 
 a difficulty to us. But at least we must see it to be 
 
 ' John xvi. 7. 2 John xvi. 13.
 
 382 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 indisputably true that this very difficulty assumes and 
 recognizes the doctrine as a fact to be so, and therefore 
 carries into the very heart's centre of Christian theo- 
 logy, the idea of laws unchangeable and supreme. It 
 is certain that the Apostles of Christ, in using the 
 language that involves this conception, did not use it 
 only incidentally, or occasionally, or metaphorically, 
 or as if they were forgetting for a moment its apparent 
 incongruity with Divine omnipotence. One of the 
 most striking passages in which it is used is a passage 
 that expresses also in the most emphatic terms the 
 supremacy of the Godhead, and represents it as 
 exerting itself according to moral laws for the attain- 
 ment of its Divine purposes : ' For it became Him 
 for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, 
 in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the 
 Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.' 
 If, on the Divine side, this presents an insoluble 
 difficulty to us — if we cannot understand what abso- 
 lute moral necessity is hid under this expression ' it 
 became ' — yet at least, on the human side, we can see 
 how the human life of Christ, and how His sufferings 
 have, as a fact of experience and observation, operated 
 on the human mind in ' renewing a right spirit within 
 it,' and in bringing many sons to that highest kind 
 of glory. It adds that Divine element of compassion 
 to our contemplation of His ministry on earth which 
 is one of the strongest and noblest elements in love. 
 Our Lord himself seems to have contemplated this 
 strictly natural effect as one main element in His pro- 
 phetic vision of a recovered and regenerated world.
 
 VIl] ON THE NATURE OF REGENERATION 383 
 
 For this idea, surely, is conveyed when He said, 
 'And I, if I be hfted up, will draw all men unto Me^' 
 The existence and the power of natural attractions 
 operating in the spiritual world as the causes of 
 spiritual effects, could not be more expressively 
 asserted. 
 
 ' John xii. 32.
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 
 
 THE NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN 
 
 ETHICS. 
 
 We have brought a large part of the Christian 
 system under the domain of Law when we have 
 recognized as necessary or natural such conceptions 
 as those we have now referred to — that the human 
 mind is, in some real measure and degree, an image of 
 the mind which is supreme in Nature ; that a fuller 
 and higher incarnation of it cannot be regarded as 
 difficult of belief; that inspiration, in an infinite variety 
 of degrees, is quite according to the existing constitu- 
 tion and course of things ; that the nature and efficacy 
 of sacrifice admits of some reasonable explanation ; 
 that love, properly so called, must have a personal 
 object ; that this affection is an essential element in 
 belief as distinguished from mere intellectual con- 
 viction ; and that, through the operation of it, the 
 renewal of a lost, or a damaged, intercourse between 
 individual souls and the Divine Spirit, is in perfect 
 harmony with the observed facts of human life. 
 
 It remains, however, to point out that the whole
 
 NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 385 
 
 system of Christian ethics is a part, and an inseparable 
 part, of Christian theology. And in being an in- 
 separable part of that theology, Christian ethics 
 claims, for the whole of it, an absolute conformity with 
 known and intelligible laws. It appeals to the moral 
 consciousness of man as quite capable of seeing and 
 knowing the existence and the demands of moral 
 obligation. It treats this power of vision as a branch 
 of natural and independent knowledge, and even 
 indicates it as a means of testing the genuineness of 
 authority in doctrine, ' Ye shall know them by their 
 fruits ^.' This is a familiar saying which commends 
 itself to universal recognition. Yet probably there are 
 few who are at all conscious of its latent implications 
 It rests upon the fact that the beauty, and taste, and 
 wholesomeness, of vegetable fruits are known, or are 
 knowable, by all men. But this is a branch of know- 
 ledge which is purely instinctive and even physical. 
 We have senses which assure us of it. If, therefore, the 
 verdicts of our knowledge such as this, can be likened 
 to our sense of the highest spiritual claims, it follows 
 that these claims must be related to intelligible laws, 
 and have an indissoluble connexion with products 
 which are, to us, direct objects of cognition. This 
 teaching runs underground, as it were, through the 
 whole field of Christian theology. It breaks out, even 
 upon the surface, in many places, as when St. Paul 
 declares that everything which we can know and love 
 as excellent, whether in knowledge or in virtue, is the 
 natural growth and product of roots which have been 
 
 ' Matt. vii. 16. 
 C C
 
 386 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 divinely planted in us : ' The fruit of the Spirit is in 
 all goodness and righteousness and truth \' It is true 
 that Christian theology puts a supreme value on 
 motive as the determining element in the goodness of 
 all deeds, and of all conduct. But this is in perfect 
 harmony with the moral and intellectual consciousness 
 of men. They never do admire or attribute any 
 virtue to deeds which they can detect as due to some 
 bad or inferior motive. And our judgment on those 
 motives which are inferior, or otherwise, is according 
 to a standard which is instinctive, or in other words, 
 inspired. Christian theology in recognizing this in- 
 dependent basis of morality, disclaims, as it were, any 
 mere arbitrary or external standard unconnected with 
 the universal system of things in which we live. It 
 recognizes the possibility, and the fact, of goodness in 
 a great variety of degrees, as existing, and as familiarly 
 known, outside the circle of its own disciples. It calls 
 on those disciples to practise, and to dwell upon, 
 the implanted and instinctive recognitions of virtue 
 which were abundant even in a very corrupted world. 
 St. Paul, in closing an address to the Philippians, 
 which is full of the most highly spiritual conceptions 
 of Christian belief, puts this doctrine of an independent 
 morality into words of the greatest earnestness as 
 bearing on those testing fruits of that belief which 
 were visible to all : ' Finally, brethren, whatsoever 
 things are true, whatsoever things are honest, what- 
 soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are 
 
 ' Eph. V. 9.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 387 
 
 of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be 
 any praise, think on these things ^.' 
 
 So Httle did our Lord consider the human appre- 
 ciation of goodness in all its forms as an influence 
 which was extinct even in the pagan world, that 
 He dwelt upon it as a power on which He relied 
 as the most natural, because the most universally 
 accessible, witness to all the truths He taught : 
 ' Let your light so shine before men, that they may 
 see your good works, and glorify your Father 
 which is in heaven^.' This is a doctrine which 
 at once condemns, as a great error, all attempts to 
 represent Christian theology as interested in proving 
 that its ethics were wholly new, and that nothing like 
 its moral precepts ever existed in the world before. 
 It shows that, on the contrary, they had their origin 
 in the nature of things — the human heart and soul 
 being not only among those things, but standing first 
 and foremost in their ranks. Nor does this great 
 principle of Christian theology stop short when it has 
 claimed an origin cognate with itself for the primary 
 sense and precepts of moral obligation. The principle 
 extends also to many purely spiritual conceptions 
 which occur, sporadically as it were, in religions other- 
 wise false, or in philosophical speculations which 
 sometimes make a wonderful approach to harmony 
 with the doctrines of the Cross. The whole stream 
 of our Lord's own teaching, and of the teaching of 
 His Apostles, runs in the direction of claiming, and 
 embracing, and amalgamating, all such spiritual drift- 
 
 1 Phil. iv. 8. 2 Matt. v. 16. 
 
 C C 2
 
 388 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 material floating on that river of human Hfe which 
 carries down upon its stream many innate, or far- 
 descended, inheritances of our common nature. What 
 Christian theology had to do for these inheritances, 
 and what it has actually done for them, has been the 
 work which all systematic knowledge does, and that 
 is to co-ordinate them with the higher and central 
 truths on which they depend, or from which they flow, 
 and apart from which they can never long hold 
 together, or exert any permanent influence in the 
 world. Christ not only took them for what they were 
 worth — as if that worth were small — but He glorified 
 them as due to that inspired element in man to which 
 He appealed for the recognition of His own higher 
 revelation. What He, and all His Apostles, urged on 
 their disciples, was to show the world how much 
 more perfectly the natural moral laws which were 
 common to humanity, could be obeyed, when such 
 obedience is seen in the light of obligation to a known 
 God — of love and loyalty to a personal incarnation of 
 His Divine nature. No abstract idea, no philosophical 
 speculation of rare and difficult attainment, could 
 supply the motive power which this one great central 
 influence could alone generate in the souls of men. 
 Hence we have the declaration of St. Paul that ' Love 
 is the fulfilling of the Law\' that a life of love 
 directed to its one supreme object in Him who is in 
 Himself Truth, in all its forms, would, of a natural 
 necessity, be a life of righteousness, in direct pro- 
 portion to its constancy and fervour. 
 
 ' Rom. xiii. 10.
 
 VJIIj NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 389 
 
 Nor is it less remarkable that whilst Christian theo- 
 logy appeals to a natural power for the great motive 
 force in ethics, it does also no less appeal to the natural 
 reason and conscience of men as regards its practical 
 tests of ethical obligation. The golden rule of its 
 moral judgment is a rule expressly made out of the 
 materials supplied by the natural reason and conscience 
 of mankind. It is no mechanical rule — no mere list of 
 necessities laid down by external authority — to be 
 taken upon that authority, and with no other sanc- 
 tion. It is a spiritual rule of the largest kind, resting on 
 a natural exercise both of the intellectual and moral 
 powers of men. These are assumed to be competent 
 judges of its general truth, and competent directors, 
 too, of its particular applications : ' Therefore all 
 things whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
 you, do ye even so to them : for this is the law and 
 the prophets ^' And this most natural and practical 
 rule is expressly founded on an appeal to the natural 
 reason. Just as His Apostle Paul appealed against 
 the irrational character of idolatry to a well-known 
 doctrine of Greek poetry and philosophy — namely, 
 the Fatherhood of God — so did our Lord appeal to 
 that same conception as adequate to sustain the deep 
 foundation of Christian ethics. The natural emotions 
 which lead human parents to give good things to 
 their children were to be accounted the type of the 
 disposition of God towards the creatures He has 
 made, when they come to Him to ask for such things 
 as even their human instincts tell them to be good ^. 
 
 > Matt. vii. 12. ^ Matt. vii. 11.
 
 390 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. [cH, 
 
 And here let it be noted that this idea of ethical 
 obligation in our conduct towards our neighbour, 
 includes, and sanctifies, all that is really true in the 
 Utilitarian theory of morals. It is perfectly true that 
 in forming our estimate of what are, and of what are 
 not, good things, we do, and we must, found that esti- 
 mate on the known results of the possession of them. 
 The abstract idea of obligation, indeed, and the sense 
 of it, is antecedent and independent. But the special 
 direction it takes in the particular things we do for, or 
 give to, our neighbour, is determined by our own per- 
 ception, whether it be low or high, of the good ends 
 which these things will serve in our neighbour's present 
 or future state. Here, as in many other cases, the teach- 
 ings of Christian theology rise above all the wrangling 
 of the schools, and represent Divine Truth as open 
 and accessible to the simplest analysis of natural laws 
 in that spiritual world in which, even now, we live. 
 
 The degree to which Christian ethics rest upon 
 natural laws of our own conscious moral sense, is most 
 evidently seen when we compare those ethics with the 
 attempts which have been made to set up some other 
 standard of obligation in their stead. Some modern 
 speculative philosophers have imagined that they could 
 greatly Improve upon the morality of Christian 
 theology, by divorcing virtue from all expectation of 
 reward, and by lifting our duty to others above any 
 limitations whatever having reference to ourselves. 
 And for this idea they have coined a new word, 
 'Altruism,' which is to replace the old and less 
 perfect conceptions represented by such words as
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 391 
 
 charity, or benevolence, or love. But an invented 
 word is generally little better than a broken thought. 
 This is one of the many cases in which human 
 instincts are much more philosophical than philo- 
 sophy. It is at least an unquestionable fact that 
 in those instincts there is an inseparable connexion 
 between virtue and the hope of its natural rewards, 
 as there also are natural limitations in our regard 
 for others, arising out of our duty to ourselves. These 
 ties, seated in the very nature of things, are recog- 
 nized in the old language both of natural and of 
 Christian theology. Such proverbial sayings as that 
 'virtue is its own reward,' or that 'honesty is the 
 best policy,' are witnesses to the instinctive recog- 
 nition of natural and necessary laws, as linking 
 together, in a perfect unity, the very idea of goodness 
 and of the consequences attendant on it. If the 
 precepts of morality were mere arbitrary commands, 
 having no necessary connexion with the order of 
 Nature, then indeed the rewards promised to obe- 
 dience could be separated, in thought, from other 
 motives which impel or draw us to that obedience. 
 But when these precepts are apprehended as con- 
 formity with a righteous Personal Will which is 
 supreme in Nature, and which governs all things by 
 necessary laws, then it is impossible even to conceive 
 of goodness and obedience as separable from the 
 blessedness which such conformity must of necessity 
 involve. 
 
 This is the uniform conception and language of 
 the Hebrew, as well as of the Christian, theology.
 
 392 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 It is magnificently expressed in the account given in 
 the Book of Genesis of the call of Abraham, where 
 Jehovah Himself is represented as speaking to the 
 Patriarch in a vision, and saying, 'Fear not, Abraham, 
 I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward ^.' 
 And so in the nineteenth Psalm the same idea is 
 enforced in the praises there sung of the judgments 
 of the Lord, as being in themselves absolute righteous- 
 ness and truth : ' Moreover by them is Thy servant 
 warned, and in keeping of them there is great reward -.' 
 In Proverbs we have the inseparable unity between 
 goodness and its reward as definitely expressed : 
 ' The merciful man doeth good to his own soul : . . . 
 to him that soweth righteousness shall be a sure 
 reward ^.' Here we have the idea of the reward of 
 goodness being its natural and necessary results, 
 expressed in the clearest of all images, namely, that 
 of the flowers and fruits that germinate from seeds in 
 the vegetable world. 
 
 When this conception has been grasped, it reveals 
 to us that we are taking not a higher, but a much 
 lower, view of ethical obligation, when we try to 
 separate it from that element which, above all others, 
 identifies it with its ultimate source in the Divinely 
 constituted nature of things. If its rewards were 
 purely arbitrary or even conventional, as money- wages 
 may sometimes be — if they came from an alien source, 
 or even a source wholly outside itself— then indeed it 
 might be rational to think of the consequences of good- 
 ness as a motive inferior in kind to the bare sense of 
 
 ' Gen. XV. i. ^ Ps. xix. ii. =* Prov. xi. 17, 18.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 393 
 
 the duty of obedience to obligation considered in 
 itself. This lower, and purely human, aspect of re- 
 wards, is not unnoticed by the sacred writers, and 
 is always so referred to as to stamp it with the 
 same disparagement as that which is so erroneously 
 applied to the true doctrine of Christian ethics. In 
 Deuteronomy we have a passage in which the good- 
 ness and the power of Jehovah is extolled as those 
 of a God ' which regardeth not persons, nor taketh 
 reward ^' Whilst in several passages of the prophets, 
 as well as in the New Testament, the mere looking for 
 rewards as the only motive of conduct, is spoken of 
 in a similar connexion. But this is, as it were, a mere 
 by-path of Hebrew and of Christian thought, in which 
 it encounters and deals with the case of men who 
 work only for pay — who are 'hirelings' and nothing 
 more — and whose inferior motive is contrasted, even 
 in the care of property, with the love and interest 
 which belongs to simple ownership : ' The hireling 
 fleeth because he is an hireling, and careth not for 
 the sheep,' &c. 
 
 But here, as elsewhere. Christian theology is in- 
 tensely human, recognizing in its ethical system every 
 motive which, in its own place, is really good, and — in 
 its main stream of teaching — always glorifying every 
 form of goodness with consistent and continual refer- 
 ence to its own consequences of reward as natural and 
 appropriate. It is the nature of the reward we look 
 for, not the mere looking for a reward of some kind, 
 that is recognized in Christian ethics as giving a 
 
 ' Deut. X. 17.
 
 394 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 moral or a spiritual quality to conduct. The author 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews thinks it no disparage- 
 ment to our Lord Himself, to connect His life and 
 death of unique self-sacrifice, with the expectation 
 of some ineffable joy that was to follow as the con- 
 sequence of His work ; and all Christians are exhorted 
 to think of, and to be strengthened by, the encourage- 
 ment of His example : ' Looking unto Jesus, the 
 author and finisher of our faith ; who, for the joy 
 that was set before him, endured the cross, despising 
 the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the 
 throne of God^.' And however difficult it may be 
 for us to fathom these words in all that they seem 
 to involve — so as to measure what is here called the 
 joy of Christ — yet the source and nature of it at least 
 is indicated in these other words of our Lord — so 
 human and yet so Divine — 'joy shall be in heaven 
 over one sinner that repenteth ^.' 
 
 Never, in Christian ethics, is goodness in any form 
 even imagined as separate from its reflex action on 
 those in whom it dwells. In the splendour of our 
 Lord's Beatitudes this union is seen to be complete. 
 The blessedness pronounced on each most happy 
 attitude or disposition of the human spirit, is in every 
 case so expressed as to represent its reward as the 
 inseparable consequence of its own inherent excellence. 
 'For' is the connecting word throughout the series, 
 implying the operation of a natural law or, in other 
 words, of a reasonable cause. When, for example, 
 we are told that the humble-minded, or 'the poor 
 
 ' Heb. xii. 2. ^ L^j.g ^^ ^
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 395 
 
 in spirit,' are blessed, ' for ' ' theirs is the kingdom 
 of heaven,' we find ourselves in the presence and 
 under the power of that most fruitful of all ethical 
 conceptions — ' The kingdom of God is within you ^.' 
 And how true this is even in the lower walks of 
 goodness, is a matter of everyday experience and 
 observation. In proportion as any human character 
 approaches the characteristic qualities which St. Paul 
 enumerates in his comprehensive description of 
 Christian charity, we see, as a fact, both that it is 
 happy in itself — that it attracts the love of others — 
 and that it exerts a powerful assimilating influence 
 upon them. Again, the blessedness of those who 
 ' do hunger and thirst after righteousness,' is explained 
 to consist in the natural result of such affections ; 
 ' for they shall be filled.' Thus, it is not only well 
 to get such rewards, but it is right to look for them. 
 They are, as it were, parts of the goodness which 
 makes it good. They are nothing but its reflected 
 light, and that light would not be light if it were 
 not so reflected. It is therefore no disparagement 
 to the system of Christian ethics that it looks 
 continually to the ' great recompense of reward ^.' 
 On the contrary, it is one of the many tests of 
 its universal truth that its sanctions are seated in 
 the very nature of things and the constitution of the 
 universe. 
 
 It may well occur to us, sometimes, to ask how it 
 is that if Christian ethics are so deeply founded on 
 the whole natural constitution and course of things, 
 
 ^ Luke xvii. 21. ^ Heb. x. 35.
 
 396 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 that course, so far as human Hfe and conduct are 
 concerned, has become so widely deflected from the 
 paths of righteousness and peace ? The vices and 
 miseries of the world as we see it, do not look Hke 
 the existence of any natural gift in man, enabHng him 
 to recognize those moral precepts to which he owes 
 obedience, — at the peril of all the heavy judgments 
 we do now see him actually suffering. The solution 
 presented by Christian theology, is the only conceiv- 
 able solution of this difficulty. That solution lies in 
 the very nature and definition of all wTong-doing 
 as the action of a free, but a revolted or rebellious 
 will, conscious in some measure of its obligations — 
 but defying them. Without freedom of the will 
 there could indeed be no vice, but neither could 
 there be any virtue. No moral character belongs to 
 a necessary and mechanical obedience. There is, 
 therefore, an equal intellectual difficulty either way — 
 in understanding wh}^ a free will was given to us 
 capable of sin, or how it could have been withheld 
 from us if it could be capable of goodness. But 
 neither aspect of this difficulty can alter the evidence 
 of facts. It is upon facts and laws, established on 
 concurrent evidence from every direction in all our 
 fields of observation and experience, that we identify 
 the system of Christian ethics, alike in its judgments 
 and in its rewards, with the whole moral, and even 
 physical, government of the world by natural conse- 
 quences as the result of conduct. 
 
 The difficulties which are connected with the 
 prevalent miseries of the world, were assuredly not
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 397 
 
 difficulties which escaped the notice of the authorized 
 teachers of Christian theology. Even one of the old 
 Psalmists had complained how the ' dark places of 
 the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty^.' But 
 no writer has ever stated them so forcibly as St. Paul 
 in his Epistle to the Romans. In the seventh and 
 eighth chapters of that epistle we have a view pre- 
 sented to us of our human nature, which, in some of 
 its aspects at least, would now be called Pessimist. 
 He connects all evil with the very flesh of which we 
 are heirs : ' For I know that in me (that is, in my 
 flesh) dwelleth no good thing : for to will is present 
 with me ; but how to perform that which is good, 
 I find not^.' Nor does he hesitate to connect this 
 consciousness of evil and of infirmity, with facts so 
 universally true as to indicate a natural law ; ' I find 
 then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is pre- 
 sent with me -K' And so full is he of the actual results 
 in life, that he sums up his account of them with this 
 strong figure : ' For we know that the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.' 
 Yet it is in the face of this almost oppressive con- 
 sciousness of the pain and vice of our human state, 
 that he expresses, nevertheless, the most sublime 
 confidence in the righteousness of the Divine govern- 
 ment as seated in the very nature of things. As 
 certainly as he ' knows ' the one, so certainly does 
 he know the other. There is a natural and efficient 
 cause for the groaning and the travailing, and so also is 
 there, for them, a natural and efficient remedy : For 
 
 ^ Ps. Ixxiv. 20. * Rom. vii. 18. ' Rom. Aii. 21.
 
 398 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 ' we know that all things work together for good to 
 them that love God ^.' No words could express more 
 clearly not only the strength of this confidence but 
 the nature of it. All things ' working together ' for 
 the production of some one great general result — this 
 is the very image or typical idea of the operation of 
 a natural law in the highest form in which we can 
 conceive its meaning. 
 
 And this principle runs through and through the 
 whole system of Christian ethics. It habitually 
 appeals to reason as the supreme element in an en- 
 lightened conscience. The Apostles constantly did 
 so against the very strongest of their own natural and 
 customary preconceptions. Perhaps there was no one 
 of these stronger than the inseparable association 
 which, in the Hebrew mind, connected certain kinds 
 of food with the notion of uncleanness or defilement. 
 When, therefore, Christ announced it as a principle 
 and a law that, ' not that which goeth into the mouth 
 defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the 
 mouth, this defileth a man/ He appears to have given 
 great offence. Even His Apostles asked an explana- 
 tion, and His answer was a rebuke — as if even the 
 very question implied a want of understanding : ' Do 
 not ye yet understand that whatsoever entereth in at 
 the mouth, goeth into the belly?. . . but those things 
 which proceed out of the mouth, come forth from the 
 heart ; and they defile the man ^.' Then, it is in the 
 same connexion that we have the subtle and dis- 
 criminating verdict of St. Paul, on the morality of 
 
 ' Rom. viii. 28. " Matt. xv. 17, 18.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 399 
 
 Christians eating food which was offered to idols. 
 He bases his decision entirely upon facts. First, he 
 takes the greatest of all facts, that an idol is, in 
 itself, an absolute nonentity, having power neither to 
 bless nor to curse, seeing that there is none other 
 God but One : and secondly, he takes the conse- 
 quent fact that whatever evil could possibly be 
 connected with an idol, must be entirely in the 
 prevailing atmosphere of opinion amongst other men 
 with whom Christians might happen to consort. In 
 itself, food consecrated to an idol could do a Chris- 
 tian neither good nor harm. But if other men con- 
 sciously attached to the eating of it a spirit of 
 unworthy compliance with idolatrous conceptions, 
 then, the personal liberty of Christians would become 
 a stumbling-block to others. And that would be a sin 
 — a sin against the brethren, which was, of necessity, 
 a sin against Christ. 
 
 The whole of this judgment on the question is 
 essentially an appeal to reason — to a conscience en- 
 lightened by knowledge of fundamental facts, and of 
 the natural consequences which could be rationally 
 traced between outward acts that were in themselves 
 innocent, but might become immoral from the effects 
 they might produce on others. No ethical principle 
 could be more thoroughly natural, or, in other words, 
 more thoroughly rational, than this, and it is an 
 excellent example both of ' that glorious liberty of 
 the children of God,' which Christian theology claimed 
 for those who know the truth, and also of the re- 
 straints on that liberty which are due to a vigilant
 
 400 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 watchfulness of all the calculable, though complicated, 
 results of conduct. Nothing can be more striking 
 than the contrast between the absolute freedom which 
 St. Paul asserts for the Christian, as flowing from his 
 knowledge of fundamental truths, and the determina- 
 tion he expresses that this freedom must be sacrificed, 
 when other facts intervene which import other con- 
 siderations into the court of conscience : ' Wherefore, 
 if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh 
 while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to 
 offend ^' 
 
 But above all things, it is to be noted that in this 
 far-reaching judgment of St. Paul on a burning ethical 
 question of his time, there is a new element included 
 which belongs to Christianity, and to Christianity 
 alone. It is still a perfectly rational element, in the 
 sense of being in thorough harmony with the analogies 
 of Nature. But it is connected with a new fact, and 
 a new conception, which had been supplied to reason, 
 whereon to exercise its ordinary powers with all 
 their appropriate emotions. The whole argument of 
 St. Paul turned on the practical effects produced by 
 a given act upon the brethren. But who were they? 
 The new fact, bearing on this question, was the advent 
 and the death of Christ. In these events a new tie 
 of brotherhood had been established with all mankind. 
 A new force as well as a new direction had been thus 
 given to the sense of obligation. Foreshadowed, but 
 not in its fulness known, this tie of spiritual brother- 
 hood had — at least within the people of one race — 
 
 ^ I Cor. viii. 1-13.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 4OT 
 
 been a familiar conception in the theology of the 
 Hebrews. Its Prophets and its Psalmists had risen 
 to the highest interpretation of it, at various times, and 
 in various utterances. In the exclamation, ' I am a 
 companion of all them that fear Thee ^ '—in the re- 
 peated predictions of a Messiah who was to be accepted 
 by the whole Gentile world — in these and in many 
 other sayings of a like kind, the whole principle of 
 St. Paul's language had been involved. But when the 
 Jew who had been brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, 
 had come to recognize in Christ the ' desire of all 
 nations,' then, this old language of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures represented to him no longer a mere promise, or 
 a mere hope, but an accomplished and an all-powerful 
 fact. That the miseries of the world, which he saw 
 and felt so much, could only be remedied by so great 
 a sacrifice, gave of necessity a new idea of the mere 
 tie of human brotherhood, and of the essential wicked- 
 ness of all acts which could mislead, or misguide, or 
 offend, a brother. Every human being was now seen 
 in the light of a brother ' for whom Christ died.' The 
 duties men owe to comradeship — whether the objects 
 of association be poor and low, or high and noble — 
 are perhaps more naturally, and more universally, 
 recognized than any other. The sense of obligation 
 connected with them is one of the strongest of all 
 natural powers. It is the abounding source of evil, as 
 well as of good, in many forms, not only stimulating 
 to crime, but systematizing it ; and not seldom throw- 
 ing over its most hideous deformities the false glamour 
 
 ' Ps. cxix. 63. 
 Dd
 
 402 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of a virtuous fidelity. This is the great natural force, 
 or power, to which Christian theology appeals, and 
 enlists in its own lofty service. It presents to its 
 disciples the conception of a great brotherhood in 
 arms — warring against all the ills and vices of a 
 troubled world, under the leadership of a Divine Person 
 who has walked and spoken on our earth — who is the 
 captain of our salvation, and who was made perfect 
 through sufferings. To all the enthusiasm which men 
 have been able to cherish for some great abstract 
 cause, St. Paul thus added that personal love and 
 devotion of which only a Person can be the appro- 
 priate object. 
 
 And this is the conception that permeates and in- 
 spires the whole system of Christian ethics. In the 
 light of it, all goodness must be tested and measured 
 by the traceable consequences of conduct upon the 
 highest interests of that universal brotherhood of 
 mankind for which Christ lived and died. This is, at 
 once, a motive and a standard of obligation, involving 
 a great natural law, and not only allowing, but de- 
 manding of us, the rational and careful application 
 of it, under expanding knowledge of all the subordi- 
 nate laws, which we can trace and identify in the 
 constitution and course of Nature. It is a con- 
 ception that does not consist in any mere string of 
 precepts, or list of rules. It consists in a living spirit 
 ever wakeful in the service of a living Master, and 
 consciously aiming at co-operation with Him in the 
 recovery of a Divine dominion. It is powerfully 
 expressed in the description of that new priesthood
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 403 
 
 which was to be ' made, not after the law of a carnal 
 commandment, but after the power of an endless 
 life ^.' It is not therefore to be grudgingly granted 
 as a concession, but to be seen with joy and asserted 
 as a confirmation of the authority of Christian ethics, 
 that they are in the main coincident with the pre- 
 cepts of morality as known by the natural conscience 
 of mankind. Christian theology insists on this as 
 the great test of its own truth, and on the fact that 
 its light is, therefore, self-revealing. St. Paul speaks 
 of himself and of his apostolic brethren as ' commend- 
 ing ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of 
 God^;' and our Lord Himself always speaks of His 
 teaching as carrying its own evidence in itself. 
 
 Nevertheless, we must not carry this doctrine of 
 universal ethical perceptions too far. There are some 
 such perceptions which do undoubtedly occupy this 
 position ; but these are all very rudimentary, and are 
 all connected with the rudest social necessities of 
 human life. Such things for example as treachery, 
 ingratitude, and cruelty, have been almost universally 
 and instinctively felt to be bad or evil influences in 
 conduct. But even these have been often condemned 
 only when practised against men of the same tribe or 
 nation, and not at all condemned — nay, even com- 
 mended — when practised against enemies or rivals, or 
 simply strangers, towards whom no binding obligations 
 of any kind existed. Fidelity to truth, which, in its 
 highest conception, is at the root of everything in the 
 Hebrew and Christian theologies, was a virtue by no 
 
 ' Heb. vii. 15, 16. ^ 2 Cor. iv. 2. 
 
 D d 2
 
 404 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 means widely recognized in the heathen world, and it 
 is one of which many nations had lost all sense what- 
 ever. All that can be said therefore of a universal 
 ethical sense, is that it existed in a rudimentary form 
 everywhere, and, above all, that in its own nature and 
 functions it was capable of appreciating not only every 
 new revelation of the ultimate principles it involves, 
 but also the beauty and excellence of every new 
 exhibition of these, in their applications to conduct. 
 
 When, however, we come to close quarters with the 
 ethics of Christian theology, we cannot fail to see not 
 only how totally new its conceptions then were, but 
 how unexhausted, and inexhaustible, they are now. 
 We have tried in this work to read the Prophets as if 
 we read them for the first time, and with a fresh eye. 
 Let any of us make the same attempt with some of 
 the many passages in the New Testament which give 
 us the characteristic teaching of Christian ethics, and 
 let us endeavour to measure the number, and the pre- 
 vailing power, of the natural laws which are there 
 asserted and involved. Let us take, for example, the 
 three chapters in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans 
 which give a rapid summary of the principles of 
 conduct which were inseparable from the doctrines 
 of Christianity ^. It is impossible not to be struck by 
 their unique character — by their unlikeness to any- 
 thing that had been known before in the religions of 
 the world. It is impossible not to see how sparing they 
 are in mere mechanical direction — how full to overflow- 
 ing they are of spiritual guidance. It is a system of 
 
 * Rom. xii, xiii, xiv.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 405 
 
 rationalism in the highest sense and of the purest kind. 
 That is to say, it is a system, essentially, of conformity 
 to reason, but to reason supplied, for the first time, with 
 a knowledge of the supreme facts in Nature, and ap- 
 plying that knowledge according to its own laws. It 
 begins with the fundamental conception that man has 
 a Divine Creator, to whom he owes all that constitutes 
 his organism as a personal power in Nature — as an 
 originating agency. His whole body with all its life 
 and faculties, are, therefore, to be presented and con- 
 secrated to God as a ' living sacrifice,' which is nothing 
 more than our ' reasonable service.' All the specific 
 virtues commended are predisposing dispositions of 
 the heart, and these are treated as the natural fruit 
 of this one great rational and intelligible law. In the 
 whole list there is nothing formal — no mere observance. 
 There is only one which takes the shape even of an 
 outward act — and that one is an act significant of 
 affection for brethren in the faith, — namely, ' distribut- 
 ing to the necessities of the saints.' All the rest are 
 in the nature of general precepts — not of detailed 
 commandments. They begin with that attitude of 
 personal humihty which is so reasonably demanded of 
 creatures living among, and holding in themselves, in- 
 numerable mysteries and problems which are to them 
 infinitely attractive, and yet absolutely insoluble. 
 They include all the dispositions which can sweeten 
 individual life, and they extend to principles of con- 
 duct without which the stability of political societies 
 would be impossible. If we try to exhaust their 
 applications, we become conscious of their vastness
 
 406 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 and of their penetration. In reading them we seem 
 to feel and know the truth of the saying that, 'the 
 word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than 
 any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing 
 asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and 
 marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents 
 of the heart \' 
 
 This is the region in which the system of Christian 
 ethics sets up its throne. This is the region— the 
 thoughts and intents of the heart — into which it 
 throws the beam of a searching, subtle, and dis- 
 criminating analysis. Not only in this typical passage, 
 but in many others scattered all through the New 
 Testament, it reveals, as it were, the very structure 
 and intimate nature of all goodness, as distinguished 
 from its mere outward manifestations. These are 
 always represented as the natural flowers and fruits of 
 a central stem, as beautiful and as various as those 
 of the vegetable world under its countless condi- 
 tions of adaptation to atmosphere and to soil. ' Faith 
 working by love ' is the root to which all are traced 
 — that is to say, our knowledge of, and our absolute 
 belief in, certain supreme facts concerning our relations 
 to a Divine Person, and the motives which these 
 inspire. This is a correspondence which is always 
 represented as rooted in the very nature of things, so 
 that faith, in the Christian sense, is not mere assent to 
 any purely intellectual conceptions, but a living and 
 moving power in the soul and heart. 
 
 The catalogue of ilkistrative precepts given by 
 
 ^ Heb. iv. 12.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 407 
 
 St. Paul to the converts at Rome, is not, and does not 
 profess to be, exhaustive. Yet if we read it with a 
 desire to follow, in thought, the practical effects on 
 conduct which anything like a full adoption of it 
 would necessarily involve, it must be obvious at once 
 that these consequences would be nothing less than 
 a transformation of the world. It will be time 
 enough to speak, as some men now do, of the value 
 of Christianity being exhausted, and of the need of 
 some new system of beliefs to take up what it has 
 left undone, when anything approaching to a full 
 trial of Christian ethics has been made, even as these 
 are represented in this one short passage, of one 
 epistle, of one of the Apostles. In the abstract, all 
 the principles he lays down command the universal 
 assent of all men. And this assent is due to no 
 other authority than that which attaches to all self- 
 evident truth, whether in the purely intellectual, or in 
 the aesthetic, or in the moral sphere. Just as some 
 exquisite flower, or shell, or plume, is seen to be 
 beautiful because the form, or the colouring, or both, 
 are felt, as such, by adapted organs of sense in us — so 
 do the beauty and excellence of those precepts of 
 Christian theology commend themselves to a sense 
 in man which is an essential part of his high place in 
 the Unity of Nature. The utility of these precepts, 
 as well as their beauty, is a consequence of that 
 unity. It is the necessary consequence of their con- 
 formity to great spiritual laws, and our appreciation 
 of them — even when in practice we cannot reach 
 their elevation — is the result of an original structural
 
 408 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 adaptation which has indeed been marred, but which 
 has never been destroyed. 
 
 There is one master service that the ethics of 
 Christian theology have rendered to mankind, respect- 
 ing which it is not easy to determine how far the 
 innate moral sense of man could ever have done for 
 him what Christianity has done. And yet this service 
 has been rendered on a subject which, in the highest 
 degree, concerns his interests and his life. That 
 subject is the relation of the sexes. Amongst the 
 lower animals it is regulated by instincts which seem 
 never to go wrong. Among men, whether we look 
 to the hideous practices of savage life, or to the still 
 more horrible vices of civilized societies, there really 
 seem to be no restraining or guiding instincts at all. 
 Nor is reason adequate to supply their place. The 
 consequences of vicious conduct are too far out of 
 sight to impress the mere understandings of mankind 
 with any adequate power. And yet there are natural 
 laws upon this subject which vindicate themselves by 
 the most fearful sanctions. There can be no doubt 
 that a very large part of the diseases which afflict and 
 torment human life, have originated, and are per- 
 petuated from generation to generation, by natural 
 causes arising out of vices of a kind that produce 
 their own inevitable disastrous results. The teaching 
 of Christian ethics, on this subject, goes to the root of 
 the matter, and insists on a purity enthroned in the 
 thoughts and intents of the heart. On this subject 
 Christian theology rises high above even the com- 
 parative purity of the Hebrew teaching. And it
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 409 
 
 does SO not by arbitrary commands, but by great 
 general precepts founded on the nature of things. 
 Slowly, but surely, the doctrine of Christian marriage 
 was built up out of these materials, and it is remark- 
 able that our Lord Himself expressly founded His 
 teaching on marriage upon a reference to the creation 
 of man as beginning with a single pair. That 
 monogamy is the system which is most conducive 
 to the increase, to the happiness, and to the virtue, of 
 the human race, is abundantly proved by observation 
 and experience. In this, as in many other things, 
 human reason can recognize and can appreciate truths 
 which it might never have been able to discover for 
 itself. It is a case in which primeval facts must have 
 indicated the natural law, and all departures from 
 that law must have been due to corruption. ' From 
 the beginning it was not so^,' says our Lord, in 
 condemning a system of divorce so loose and easy as 
 practically to destroy marriage. This reference of 
 a fundamental moral law to a fundamental natural 
 fact, is thoroughly characteristic of Christian theology. 
 But there are not wanting other facts to corroborate 
 the natural law which dictates monogamy to man. 
 The approximate equality of the sexes in birth 
 statistics — an equality governed by no ascertained 
 physical cause, yet, in the average, constantly main- 
 tained — is another natural fact of great significance in 
 the same connexion. The express reference made by 
 Christ to what was, and must have been, true • from 
 the beginning,' is in perfect harmony with all He 
 
 ' Matt. xix. 3, 8.
 
 4IO CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH, 
 
 taught. Whatever secrets are yet hid from us as 
 regards the first appearance of man upon the earth, 
 there is no possible scientific hypothesis which does 
 not assume some local point of creation, or of first 
 development, and there, presumably, he must have 
 appeared male and female — and otherwise, potentially, 
 what he is. Facts of this kind are the highest of all 
 authorities. They are the foundation of primeval 
 customs and of traditional beliefs ; and we see as 
 a fact that those races which have been least widely 
 seduced from the acceptance and observance of them, 
 have, as a natural consequence, become the master 
 races of the world. 
 
 Inseparably connected with the general subject of 
 Christian theology, is that special feature of it as 
 a system, which attaches the highest moral value to 
 that particular kind of belief which it calls Faith. 
 That Christian theology does attach such value to 
 the condition of mind to which this name is given, is 
 indeed a conspicuous fact. Yet this feature of its 
 teaching is often resented, as if it were not only un- 
 warranted by any natural law, but conspicuously at 
 variance with the instinctive allegiance which, by 
 nature, we owe to the inherent authority of reason. 
 And yet if we examine carefully the doctrine of 
 Christianity on this subject, we shall find it in perfect 
 accordance with the moral consciousness of man. If 
 by reason we mean only the logical faculty— the 
 faculty which expresses its conclusions by the word 
 ' therefore ' — we shall find that it never is thought of 
 by us as involving any moral element whatever. We
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 4II 
 
 never do, for example, attach the idea either of merit 
 or demerit, to any conclusions which are forced upon 
 us by mathematical demonstration. Neither do we 
 do so, as regards any conclusions forced upon us by 
 the evidence of the physical senses. The moral 
 element comes in only in respect to conceptions 
 which are not purely physical either in their own 
 nature, or in the faculties which apprehend them. 
 There is no moral element in our idea of gravitation, 
 nor in that kind of confidence which we place in the 
 certainty of its work. Yet the law of gravitation, as 
 we all know, was found out by logical processes 
 which are demonstrative. On the other hand, there 
 is a moral element in the confidence we repose in 
 a virtuous character, and in the certainty we feel 
 that it will not knowingly deceive us. A reasonable 
 trustfulness in our fellow-men is universally recognized 
 as a virtue — and a virtue, too, which has a known 
 tendency to justify itself. A habit of ungenerous 
 suspicion towards others is, on the contrary, universally 
 recognized as a vice, with a tendency, also as natural, 
 to rouse its corresponding vices in other men. 
 
 The truth is that the ethical element enters into 
 our convictions only when they concern and involve, 
 directly or indirectly, the character, the conduct, and 
 will, of living and personal agents. Their relations 
 to us, and to the whole system in which we live, 
 are the only region of thought in which moral senti- 
 ments can exist at all. The logical faculty may fill 
 us with the most absolute certitude in respect to 
 innumerable propositions, without there being in any
 
 412 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 one of them, even a grain of that which Christian 
 theology means by faith. The desire of knowledge 
 is indeed in itself a virtue, when it takes the conscious 
 form of a love of truth, and of a firm belief that 
 every bit of truth is part of a whole that includes 
 the region which instinctively we feel and know to 
 be the highest. Even in the purely physical sciences 
 we all feel that those exercises of mind which may 
 seem, at best, to be mere imaginative conceptions, are 
 far higher in themselves, and give us far more the 
 idea of inspiration, than the logical processes — 
 however laborious and difficult — by which they 
 may become verified and established. Newton, 
 when he conceived the idea that the force or law 
 which on earth drew every falling body to the 
 ground, is the same that in the heavens drew the 
 earth's satellite in the same direction, exercised a 
 diviner faculty of the mind than when he tried, at 
 first in vain, but afterwards successfully, to prove 
 the conception to be true by mathematical calcu- 
 lation. 
 
 The history alike of ancient philosophy, and of 
 modern science, is full of the premonitory insights 
 of genius, and they always excite our instinctive 
 admiration. But neither in these, any more than 
 in mathematical calculations, is there any ethical 
 element whatever. And yet a high interest attaches 
 to them as indications of the ultimate sources and 
 of the true nature of ethical perceptions. For just 
 as those perceptions of the intellect are the fruit of 
 natural correspondences and adjustments between all
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 4I3 
 
 our mental faculties and the intimate structure of the 
 whole natural system in which we live, so may we 
 be confident that such adjustments do not stop at 
 the boundary of physics. That on which goodness 
 depends^ and in which it consists, must be at least 
 as much within the intelligibility of Nature, as the 
 laws of matter. Not to depreciate the human reason 
 therefore, but to exalt it, is the inevitable tendency 
 of every proof we have of the truthfulness of our 
 intuitions. They are as invaluable in the moral, as 
 in the purely intellectual, sphere. But Christian 
 theology does no violence to them in its teaching 
 on the subject of faith. On the contrary, it appeals 
 to them as constantly, and as habitually, as the 
 physical sciences appeal to the self-evident axioms 
 and postulates of intellectual truth. It asserts, on 
 their behalf, not only a high but, it may be said, 
 a supreme function, since it assigns to them the 
 power, the right, and the duty, of testing what is, 
 and what is not, legitimate authority. ' Try the spirits 
 whether they are of God ^ ' is the express direction 
 of St. John. And perhaps there is no passage in 
 the New Testament more striking as regards this 
 doctrine than that in which St. Paul — the most 
 vehement, and it may be said, the most dogmatic of 
 all the Apostles — tells the Galatians that the facts 
 which he had told them, and the truths which he 
 had taught them as consequent upon those facts, 
 were truths which were then, and for ever, committed 
 to the keeping and conscience of his hearei's as 
 
 ' I John iv. I.
 
 414 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 rational beings who could recognize the inherent 
 truth of them, and who, in virtue of that recognition, 
 were bound to be so independent of all external 
 authority, that even if he himself, or an angel from 
 heaven, were to present any other doctrine than that 
 which they had thus received, they were to reject 
 his teaching as ' accursed ^.' Considering what stress 
 St. Paul laid on the credentials of his own ministry — 
 how assuredly he knew that it was an external voice, 
 and no merely subjective imagination, that he heard 
 on his way to Damascus — how he dwelt on his own 
 consequent and total change of life — how emphatically 
 he declared that he was constituted an Apostle, not 
 by man nor of the will of man, but by God — it is 
 significant indeed of the sense which Christian 
 theology attaches to the nature of authority, that 
 St. Paul should speak so strongly and so absolutely 
 on the independence of the individual reason in the 
 last resort. And yet not the less, but all the more, 
 on this account did Christian theology maintain the 
 doctrine also of man's responsibility for his beliefs, 
 and of the existence of a supreme ethical element 
 in the conception, and in the entertainment, of them. 
 In this combination Christian theology was in 
 perfect consistency with itself, and with the facts of 
 Nature. For as we have seen that the reign of law, 
 in the only sense in which it is a reign at all, is not 
 only compatible with a free will in man, and with the 
 exercise of it in purpose and design, but is an abso- 
 lute condition of that freedom and of any possible 
 
 ' Gal. I. 8.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 4I5 
 
 confidence in the use of means ; so in the moral 
 sphere, not less clearly, we are brought face to face 
 with the conclusion that man's responsibility for his 
 beliefs, is not only compatible with the authority of 
 his reason, but is inseparably connected with it. All 
 that Christian theology assumes in its teaching on 
 this subject is, that there do exist in the spiritual, 
 as well as in the material, world, a body of absolute 
 and objective truths on which all moral judgments 
 depend, and which we have adapted faculties to 
 recognize, if these faculties are rightly used. It asserts 
 that these truths are self-revealing — that they are 
 luminous with an internal light visible to the moral 
 sense, just as self-evident propositions are luminous 
 to the faculties which are purely intellectual. It 
 ascribes the rejection of this light, largely but not 
 entirely, to an alienated will ; — largely but not en- 
 tirely, it is well to recollect — because it allows for 
 ignorance, and for organs of vision that have been 
 damaged by lack of use, or by perverted teaching. 
 No discrimination can be more subtle than the teach- 
 ing of St. Paul on the moral elements in belief. He 
 says distinctly that those who lived outside any 
 known and acknowledged law, were so far a ' law 
 unto themselves, their thoughts meanwhile accusing 
 or else excusing one another.' The moral sense is 
 not destroyed merely because it is ill informed or 
 ill directed. ' Let every man be fully persuaded in 
 his own mind.' It is in harmony with this teaching 
 that the most solemn prayer ever uttered upon earth 
 pleads for the forgiveness of those who perpetrated
 
 4l6 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 the greatest of all crimes, upon the ground of their 
 ignorance — that they knew not what they did. 
 
 And yet there is no concession in Christian 
 theology to the idea that it does not signify what 
 a man believes, provided only he believes it sincerely. 
 As regards, indeed, the moral responsibility of the 
 individual, it may be in a measure so ; but as regards 
 the interests of humanity as a whole, and in the 
 future, this doctrine cannot be rationally maintained. 
 Truth is truth always, and every one truth is tied 
 to other truths by innumerable links of natural con- 
 sequence leading to results often incalculable and 
 unforeseen. All men who have had occasion to watch, 
 and trace, the causes of human conduct in history, or 
 in the shorter experience of a single life, must have 
 had occasion to notice the powerful influence of some 
 one peculiarity of opinion or belief, even although 
 that peculiarity may have lain in, apparently, the most 
 abstract region of thought. When, therefore, Chris- 
 tian theology insists, as it does, on the supreme 
 importance of truth in our religious conceptions, and 
 on the subtle and far-reaching dangers involved in 
 all forms and degrees of error, it does but assert 
 a great natural law which is continually verified by 
 the universal experience of mankind. But it does 
 not teach us to charge upon the individual reason 
 all the moral consequences of the errors which men 
 may come to hold. Neither does it encourage, or 
 justify, men in forming conclusive judgments against 
 each other on account of erroneous beliefs. It places 
 the seat of responsibility in those thoughts and intents
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 417 
 
 of the heart which are inaccessible to human pene- 
 tration. It thus combines a reasonable ground for 
 the largest charity, with the not less reasonable and 
 absolute conviction of the supreme value, and critical 
 importance, of every fragment of the truth. 
 
 As regards the fundamental conception by which, 
 alone, an ethical element can be brought into belief, 
 namely, the conception of a personal God as the 
 supreme fact in Nature, Christian theology asserts, in 
 the strongest way, the conclusiveness of the evidence 
 on which that conception demands our intellectual 
 assent: — 'For the invisible things of Him from the 
 creation of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made, even His eternal 
 power and Godhead ; so that they are without ex- 
 cuse^.' This is the testimony of St. Paul to the 
 value which he assigns to the work of reason in 
 laying that foundation stone both of natural, and of 
 revealed, theology. But it is the foundation only 
 that it can lay. It is nothing more. 'Eternal power' 
 is not, in itself, an object of love or of adoration ; and 
 accordingly. Christian theology rests its demand for 
 these highest attitudes of mind, entirely on an appeal to 
 other faculties than those which recognize nothing but 
 eternal power. Of the mere intellectual conviction 
 that a Being with such power exists, it says — with 
 perhaps the only touch of scorn that is to be found 
 in the New Testament — ' Thou believest that there is 
 one God ; thou doest well : the devils also believe, 
 and tremble ^.' Not the bare existence, but something 
 
 ^ Rom. i. 20. ^ Jas. ii. 19. 
 
 E e
 
 4l8 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 concerning the character of God, is alone that region 
 in our beliefs into which the ethical element finds 
 admittance. Not in believing the proposition that 
 ' God is,' but in believing the farther proposition that 
 ' He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek 
 Him.' is to be found the quality of faith. And this 
 distinction commends itself to our reason as founded 
 on a law seated in the very nature of things. The 
 highest and noblest exercises of reason are those in 
 which it seeks and finds its own limitations. In its con- 
 stant striving to push farther back its own boundaries, 
 it may sometimes find them — in a few directions — 
 sensibly receding. But it never finds them disappearing. 
 And yet it knows that the region beyond those boun- 
 daries, is not empty space. It knows, on the contrary, 
 that the greatest realities are there — those which most 
 excite its curiosity, as they are those which most baffle 
 its research. The ethical element of humility enters 
 here — no cowardly surrender of inherent powers, but 
 a truthful confession of a felt incompetence, and 
 a virtuous submission to such guidance as may pre- 
 sent itself with recognizable credentials. ' Neither 
 do I exercise myself in . . . things too high for me ^,' 
 is the expression of the Psalmist which claims this 
 humility as an attitude of mind that is at once reason- 
 able and virtuous. ' Lord, Thou hast the words of 
 eternal life,' was the almost involuntary exclamation 
 of one who heard our Lord's discourses, and whose 
 spirit bowed before the self-evidence of their Divine 
 beauty, truthfulness, and authority. 
 
 ' Ps. cxxxi. I.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 4I9 
 
 The New Testament is full of passages which in- 
 dicate the true ethical elements in belief, to be 
 higher, and purer, exercises of reason than the mere 
 acceptance of mechanical demonstration, whether of 
 logic, or of the external senses. There is one passage 
 in particular which is most instructive, because — 
 whilst it places a just and a high value on external 
 evidence — it gives a far higher rank to those faculties, 
 far more deeply seated, which respond to spiritual 
 truth as though organs charged with a diviner func- 
 tion. It is the passage in which St. Peter assures all 
 Christian converts of his intention, and desire, to build 
 up such external evidence of the facts of Christianity 
 as could be afforded by the personal, and recorded, 
 testimony of himself and of his brethren, concerning 
 what they actually heard and saw, of the coming, and of 
 the life, of Christ as the Messiah. But, as if conscious 
 that all personal testimony, as to external events, 
 becomes weakened by death and time, he tells them 
 to dwell on another branch of the Christian evidences 
 which he declares to be stronger still. He refers 
 them to that mysterious body of men, unique in the 
 history of the world, who through many centuries 
 had spoken to the Jews on religious truth, with 
 a power which commended itself to the intellect and 
 the conscience of the race as undoubtedly spiritual 
 and Divine. Comparing it with even the personal 
 testimony of the Apostles, who were ' eye-witnesses 
 of the majesty' of Christ, he tells them that they 
 all had ' a more sure word of prophecy ' and de- 
 scribes it as ' a light shining in a dark place.' Yet 
 
 E e 2
 
 420 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 not even those voices, calling through the ages — at 
 sundry times and in divers manners — to a life of 
 righteousness, and promising the advent of some 
 Great One like unto His brethren, whom the world 
 should hear — not even these voices from the past, 
 St. Peter says, can be the highest evidence of all. 
 That highest evidence would come, he says, to those 
 who could wait, and listen — could wait until the light 
 of internal evidence should shine upon them as no 
 other light can shine, with direct and not merely with 
 reflected rays — that is to say, ' until the day dawned, 
 and the day star arose ' in their own hearts ^ 
 
 The very beauty of this language is almost apt to 
 conceal from us its profound philosophy. We read it 
 as if it were some exquisite bit of poetry, which 
 indeed it is, for the highest poetry is always the 
 highest truth. But the beauty of it can, in this case, 
 be traced, more easily than usual, to its perfect 
 harmony with facts and laws which are none the less 
 natural because they are Divine. What men call the 
 heart, in the instinctive analysis of their own mental 
 powers, is that organ of vision which, in the affections, 
 is conversant with spiritual light. It is there that the 
 dawn of ethical recognition rises. It is there that 
 the ' grammar of our assent ' reaches that kind of con- 
 viction which, beginning in intuitive perceptions and 
 in personal experience, is established as personal love. 
 Nothing can be more certain than that our Lord 
 relied mainly on its own internal evidence for the 
 acceptance of His teaching. And the nature of that 
 
 ^ 2 Pet. i. 15-21.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 42I 
 
 internal evidence He expressly declared to be that 
 His words were not His own, but came direct from 
 the Author of Nature, who is the fountain of all 
 truth : ' The words I have spoken unto you are not 
 Mine, but the Father's which hath sent Me' ; and 
 again to those who reject it, ' The word that I have 
 spoken shall condemn you in the last day.' St. John 
 dwells emphatically on this aspect of Christian theo- 
 logy : ' This is the condemnation, that light is come 
 into the world, and men loved darkness rather than 
 light because their deeds were evil \' Christ spoke of 
 the demand for ocular demonstration as a demand open 
 to some reproach : ' Unless ye see signs and wonders 
 ye will not believe.' And there is yet another of His 
 sayings which, perhaps more than any, brings home to 
 us in the most touching form the high ethical element 
 that may be involved in a belief in truth as seen in 
 its own light : ' Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, 
 thou hast believed : blessed are they that have not 
 seen, and yet have believed ^.' 
 
 There is probably no mind capable of understanding 
 the meaning of this benediction, that does not also 
 feel its beauty and its truth. It exalts — it does not 
 disparage — reason to assign to it, as its noblest func- 
 tion, the recognition of internal evidence. With evi- 
 dence of this kind it always does, and always must 
 begin. But there can be no ethical element in belief 
 unless there be also an ethical element in that which is 
 believed. It is not that proof is wanting in those con- 
 ceptions which are the special objects of faith. It is 
 
 ' John iii. 19. - John xx. 29.
 
 422 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 only that the kind of proof is changed. Another eye is 
 opened which sees another kind of light ; and those 
 who, in other matters, are most rigid in their demands 
 for external evidence, may, in that light, reach the 
 highest certitudes of conviction. It was so, for ex- 
 ample, with one of the most distinguished men of our 
 time — one of those who has most widely influenced 
 Christian belief — Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby. His 
 passion was History, and his most intense desire was 
 to realize and understand the great characters of the 
 past. His delight was in the work of those who sub- 
 mitted the records of history to the most searching 
 analysis, and reconstructed its materials according to 
 the resulting evidence. Yet he was the Christian 
 teacher who, perhaps above all others in recent years, 
 dwelt on our knowledge of the Personality of Christ 
 as the very soul of Christian theology, and who, 
 on a death-bed of great agony, quoted with intense 
 happiness the blessing pronounced on those who 
 held to Christ with a nobler faith than that which 
 rested on the fingers and the eyes of Thomas. 
 
 It may not be easy to define in words, but it is very 
 easy to understand in heart, the disposition and the 
 attitude of mind, to which our Lord assigned thisspecial 
 meed of approbation and of love. At the time when 
 He spoke. His words can only have applied to an infini- 
 tesimally small number of those who have since come 
 under the sweep of its benediction. It can only have 
 applied to those Jews who — though His own contem- 
 poraries and countrymen — had not seen Him at all, 
 but had nevertheless been convinced by what they
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 423 
 
 heard of His Personality and of His teaching, that He 
 must be He that should come. This conviction 
 could only have been reached by them through 
 characteristics of mind and life full of the highest 
 ethical character. In the first place, such believers 
 must have been free from that narrow national and 
 religious pride which was fostered among the Jews 
 by a misinterpretation of the nature and objects of 
 the Divine favour which had been shown to the seed 
 of Abraham through so many generations. They 
 must have risen above the conceptions, and the temper, 
 of the Pharisees. They must have had a sense of 
 the high spiritual interpretation to be put upon the 
 glorious promises of the Prophets. They must have 
 been prepared, beforehand, by the happy preconcep- 
 tions of a holy life, to recognize in the new teaching that 
 which corresponded to the long-predicted kingdom of 
 righteousness and of truth. They must have been 
 living, in short, in a consciousness of the reality and 
 nearness of the spiritual world, and in an atmosphere 
 of expectation founded on trust and confidence in 
 promises which they believed to be Divine. 
 
 This was the highest ethical condition attainable in 
 the Hebrew Church. Accordingly, we find these 
 characteristics of individual character specified in the 
 description, given by St. Luke, of two Israelites of 
 that time who may be called the first heralds of 
 the Christian Church — Zacharias, father of John the 
 Baptist, who was a Priest, and Simeon, who is simply 
 described as ' a man living in Jerusalem \' Of both of 
 
 ' Luke i and ii.
 
 424 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 them it is specially recorded that they were men of 
 holy lives. Of Zacharias and his wife, who was of the 
 family of Aaron, we are told that they were ' both 
 righteous before God, walking in all the command- 
 ments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.' Of 
 Simeon, we are told that he was 'just and devout,' 
 and that he was one of those who lived in a state 
 of constant expectation, ' waiting for the consolation of 
 Israel.' No description could better bring home to us 
 the high moral elements in the belief of those who 
 were the first to recognize Christ as the Messiah. 
 To both of these two men, indeed, were given 
 those special messages from a Divine Voice, which 
 were common in the history of Hebrew prophecy. 
 But, perhaps, never were they given under circum- 
 stances which demanded for their acceptance a faith 
 more firmly rooted in an enlightened interpretation of 
 their own national history, and of those natural laws 
 of the spiritual world which that history had embodied. 
 Both to Zacharias and to Simeon the immediate 
 subject of prediction was — so far as the senses were 
 concerned — nothing but a little child. The idea of 
 Divine purposes attained through the instrumentality 
 of gifted men, had indeed been inseparable from the 
 whole history of the Jews. Their great progenitor 
 Abraham, Moses their lawgiver, Joshua their military 
 leader, David their typical king, and all their pro- 
 phets, had been examples, familiar to them, of the 
 human personalities whom Jehovah had employed. 
 But it needed some special enlightenment, both of 
 mind and heart, to conceive the application of this
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 425 
 
 principle in such a form as the choice of two infant 
 children for the fulfilment of a greater purpose than 
 had ever been attained before. One of them was to 
 be no less than the Messiah— of whom Isaiah had 
 said, ' to us a Child is bom, to us a Son is given.' The 
 other was to be the herald and forerunner of this great 
 Heir of prophecy, 'to prepare His way before Him.' 
 
 The ethical or meritorious element in the belief of 
 Simeon — that which raised it high in the scale of 
 faith — lay entirely in its connexion with those Divine 
 promises which, through many centuries, went back to 
 the days of Abraham. It is not probable that our 
 Lord, when He referred to the evidence of the senses 
 as an inferior element in faith, intended to include the 
 faith of those who had indeed seen Him — but only in 
 childhood. There was nothing visible, in that child- 
 hood, which could represent the touch and sight which 
 Thomas had demanded. The belief of Simeon, there- 
 fore, was a pure and typical example of the highest 
 form of faith. It is true indeed that there was nothing 
 in itself incredible, or out of the ordinary course of 
 Nature, in the agency indicated in the revelation made 
 to him. We know that in the ordinary course of 
 things there is nothing that can be laden with possi- 
 bilities so immense, and so unknown, as the cradle of 
 a child. Not only in the sacred history of the Jews, 
 but in the secular history of mankind, it has happened, 
 often, that great and lasting changes in the condition 
 of the world have hung on the escape of a single 
 babe from the many dangers of infancy and of child- 
 hood. If Simeon had believed merely that the Child
 
 426 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 before him would one day grow up to be a great 
 Leader, who would in his time ' restore again the 
 kingdom to Israel '—if he had merely believed that 
 the Child would do, for the Jewish nation, something 
 like what had been done for the Persians by Cyrus, 
 or for the Greeks by Alexander, or temporally for 
 the Jews by the first of the Maccabees — his belief 
 would still have been an act of faith, because it would 
 equally have rested on trust in Divine promises how- 
 ever narrowly interpreted. But Simeon's belief in the 
 Babe he saw brought into the temple, was a far higher 
 act of faith, because it rose to the full height of that 
 spiritual interpretation of prophetic promises, which 
 identified the ' consolation of Israel ' with a general 
 redemption for the world. 
 
 There is no more beautiful passage in the New 
 Testament than the few words of Simeon in which he 
 expressed the reason of his delight, when — at the end 
 of a life of waiting — he saw the Child that was to be 
 the consolation of Israel. They are words which seem 
 to condense, as it were, into the shortest compass all 
 the purest moral elements which enter into the 
 Christian idea of meritorious belief: — Thanksgiving 
 to a Personal God for the salvation which had been 
 long promised ; a confident trust that could not be 
 staggered by the visible appearance of that salvation 
 in the form of an unconscious child ; recognition of 
 the fact that, in that Child, the purpose of the 
 Almighty was being ' prepared before the face of all 
 people ' ; and the triumphant assurance that it was 
 to be not local or national, but 'a light to lighten
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 427 
 
 the Gentiles, and the glory of His people Israel \' 
 There is often much that is selfish in what is called 
 patriotism — much that is anything but virtuous in our 
 self-identification with a sect, or with a nation, or 
 even with a race. But no inferior element, of this 
 kind, can have entered into Simeon's interpretation of 
 the promises upon which he had lived a life of holy 
 expectation. It may be said, indeed, that his faith 
 was more free from any mere personal element than 
 even the faith of Abraham, for this great father of the 
 faithful had the stimulus of splendid personal promises 
 set before him. A glorious posterity is an attractive 
 prospect to all men, and most of all to men of the 
 highest nature. If it was ' against hope ' that he 
 nevertheless ' believed in hope/ it was ' that he might 
 become the father of many nations".' The belief 
 which, we are told, ' was imputed unto him for 
 righteousness,' was simply a full persuasion that the 
 promise was really Divine, and that what God had 
 promised, ' He was able also to perform.' And this, 
 too, was Simeon's persuasion, but with no induce- 
 ment to belief from any personal share in the Hope 
 of Israel, other than that which was to belong to the 
 whole human race. Simeon had, indeed, one help 
 which those did not possess on whose faith our Lord 
 pronounced His special benediction. Simeon had 
 heard some external voice which he accepted as 
 Divine. That voice had indicated the Babe before 
 him as the Salvation of the Prophets. There is no 
 reason to suppose that any such help was given, 
 
 ' Luke ii. 29 32. ''^ Rom. iv. 18.
 
 428 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 generally, to others who came to believe in Jesus of 
 Nazareth after His public ministry began, but who 
 had never actually seen or heard Him. Their faith 
 must have rested entirely on internal evidence — on 
 their recognition of the fact that He ■ had the words 
 of eternal life.' That is to say, their faith must have 
 grown up in minds and hearts exceptionally open to 
 the light of truth. They must have been morally 
 prepared to see it, and to accept it — not indeed against 
 hope, in the sense in which Abraham had been tempted 
 to doubt the possibility of his having the promised 
 child, but still — against many apparent improbabilities 
 and difficulties in the recognition of our Lord as what 
 He claimed to be. 
 
 There has been, perhaps, no age of the Christian 
 Church in which there have not been some special 
 difficulties in the way of that highest kind of belief, 
 which alone is worthy of the name of faith. But 
 probably no period in its progress can have been so 
 trying as the time when our Lord was yet on earth. 
 We are told — and it is a striking fact — that His own 
 family were not among the number of His early con- 
 verts — 'for neither did His brethren believe in Him.' 
 Probably this belief may have been more difficult for 
 them than it is for us. We must remember that 
 His contemporaries had neither the light of prophecy 
 nor the light of history, as later generations have had 
 both these lights to guide them. W^hat, exactly, the 
 prophecies meant, was hard to be understood. The 
 fulfilments which history was even then laying up in 
 rich and abundant store, it was still more difficult or
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 429 
 
 even impossible for them to see, or even to imagine. 
 Much that must have been to them purely matters of 
 faith, are now to us comparatively matters of actual 
 sight. We see, as a fact, that which Simeon could 
 only trustfully believe — that the Child he saw only as 
 a child presented in the Temple, was to be the 
 mightiest of the sons of men in His effects upon the 
 condition of the world, and upon the mind and souls 
 of the human race. This is an historical and a living 
 fact to us. But it was not such to them. Those who 
 came to believe in Him during His ministry, and the 
 forty days after His Resurrection, must have been 
 guided in their belief by the purest spiritual insight, 
 that is to say, by the habitual and conscientious cul- 
 ture of faculties which are the highest in our nature. 
 It may well have been comparatively easy before 
 His coming, to fill up the grand and attractive, but 
 dim, outlines of prophecy, by enthusiastic imaginations. 
 And so it may be comparatively easy, now, to dwell 
 on the thousand different lines of fact and argument 
 which go to make up the unexhausted total of the 
 Christian evidences. Some of these evidences appeal 
 to one class of mind, some to another. But a few 
 only of such aids to faith were available to those 
 who, in Christ's own day, believed in Jesus of Nazareth 
 and in His Resurrection. Neither the passion of 
 nationality, nor the passion of sectarianism, nor in- 
 tellectual pride in dogmatic conceptions inherited 
 from our fathers, not one of these — so powerful in their 
 operation on the modern religious world — could have 
 influenced those on whose faith our Lord bestowed
 
 430 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 His special benediction. They can have had nothing 
 to guide them except the high faculties whose function 
 it is to recognize righteousness and truth. The beauty 
 of holiness, and this beauty alone, can have been their 
 attraction. The Sermon on the Mount must have 
 been the teaching before which their spirit bowed. 
 And those elements in their own character which 
 opened their eyes to its beauty, must have imaged, 
 in a measure, the character of Him by whom its 
 beatitudes were pronounced. They must have be- 
 longed to those pure in heart who were to see God. 
 
 Let us remember that this is the natural law of 
 affinity on which all our perceptions of beauty, 
 whether in the moral or the material world, must 
 of necessity depend. In the organic sphere, the lines 
 of greatest beauty, are always lines of structure. 
 That is to say, the history of things, and the reason 
 of them, are also the beauty of them. And this is so 
 because our sense and admiration of that which con- 
 stitutes beauty, is the product of our own related and 
 adapted mechanisms of perception. The high, and 
 even supreme, virtue which Christian theology assigns 
 to faith, is founded on this law, and finds in this law 
 its adequate and reasonable explanation. Christian 
 theology does give a supreme place to faith, but by 
 faith it means, above all things, a reasonable faith. 
 It is a fundamental error to think of any antithesis 
 between faith and reason. Even if the word reason 
 be so narrov/ed as to mean only the logical faculty 
 which follows such steps of proof as are concerned in 
 geometry,even in this meaning,there is no antagonism.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 43! 
 
 The true distinction — so often misconceived — does 
 not lie in any difference between two reasoning 
 faculties of two different kinds, but only in wide 
 distinctions between the things, or conceptions, to 
 which our one great faculty of reason, is variously 
 applied. When applied to purely physical facts and 
 conceptions, as it is in all forms of mathematical 
 demonstration, it deals exclusively with matter, with 
 time, with space, all divisible into measurable units, 
 and the numerical relations of quantity among these 
 units, are the sole subjects of its cognizance. Nothing 
 can be more different from these than the relations 
 with which reason is called to deal in all ethical, and 
 in all spiritual, or even in all purely intellectual, 
 conceptions. Not one of these is ever divisible into 
 measurable units. And yet in these, equally, the 
 logical faculty, which is the essential element in all 
 reasoning, is the same. We cannot say that it is 
 reason, or the logical faculty, which asks the two 
 questions What, and How, but it is not reason which 
 asks the third question Why. On the contrary, it is 
 the question Why, and that question above all others, 
 which stands to reason in the most intimate and 
 inseparable relation. It is true that in physics the 
 knowledge we can attain has a sharply cut definite- 
 ness, certainty, and precision, which, in its own way, 
 delights us. When, for example, the result of calcula- 
 tion upon measurable units enables us to foresee the 
 time, within the fraction of a second, when one of 
 the planets begins to come between the earth and the 
 sun, or when by a similar process of reasoning, on
 
 432 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 purely physical data, men are enabled to infer the 
 existence of another planet which had never yet 
 been seen by human eyes, we are filled with a sense 
 of wonder and of satisfaction. But in direct pro- 
 portion to these characteristics of precision and 
 certainty in our physical knowledge, stands out the 
 narrowness, and the mechanical nature, of it. Even 
 in its own narrow sphere, we are often painfully 
 conscious of its limitations ; and it is our reason 
 which tells us of them. 
 
 But it is not even the limitation of our physical 
 knowledge which is the most characteristic fact about 
 it — it is the utter irrelevancy of that knowledge as 
 regards the highest quests of reason that is most 
 impressive. And here again it is our reason — our 
 logical faculty in the strictest sense — which tells us 
 of that irrelevancy. The metaphors of language do 
 indeed indicate a sense of some far off and dim 
 analogies between the conditions of physical, and of 
 moral, reasoning. Thus the strength of a beam, or 
 of a wall, to resist strain, is a purely physical pro- 
 blem soluble by mathematical calculation in terms 
 of measurable units ; whereas the strength of a human 
 character to resist the strain of temptation, is a pro- 
 blem in which calculation of this kind is of no avail. 
 But it is the business and function of our reason to 
 deal with the one kind of problem as well as with 
 the other. The elements which it has to handle are 
 different, but the sequences and processes of thought, 
 in both cases, equally, belong to logic. The word 
 ' therefore,' or its equivalent, as expressing the tie
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 433 
 
 between premises and conclusions, is of frequent 
 occurrence in the theology of the Hebrews, as ap- 
 plicable to spiritual things. ' Thy word is very pure: 
 therefore Thy servant loveth it ^' is the reasoning of 
 the Psalmist. The devotion of all the powers of life 
 to the service of God is represented by St. Paul as 
 'our reasonable service-.' The appeals to reason, 
 both in tne Old Testament and in the New, are as 
 continual as the demands on faith. They are in- 
 variably regarded as complementary, and never as 
 antagonistic. 
 
 The merit which Christian theology ascribes to 
 faith is founded on the fact that true faith is the 
 highest exercise of reason. It can only be reached 
 as the result of the fullest working of all our rational 
 powers. This is true even when the logical faculty 
 seems, as it were, to lay down its arms in favour of 
 authority. For this it may most rationally do when 
 it feels its own incompetence, or its own incomplete- 
 ness, or the insufficiency of the data with which it is 
 supplied. Accordingly one of the most meritorious 
 elements in faith is a rational humility, that is to 
 say, a humility founded on the evidence of conscious- 
 ness, which is perpetually telling us of the limitations 
 upon our own intellects, both in respect to power, and 
 in respect to opportunity. Christian theology never 
 asks us to be disloyal to our own reason, or, in a 
 cowardly spirit, to abandon its endeavours. What it 
 does ask of us is to accept the testimony of conscious- 
 ness as to its weaknesses as well as to its strengths. 
 
 ' Ps. cxix. 140. ^ Rom. xii. i. 
 
 F f
 
 434 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 We are called upon to do this continually in the 
 affairs of life and in the domain of the physical 
 sciences. Probably there is no man who in some 
 one or more of these branches of knowledge, does not 
 feel himself to be as helpless as a child. To all men 
 who are not themselves mathematicians, the triumphs 
 of the human reason, for example, in astronomy and 
 in the higher physics, may seem nearly inconceivable. 
 Therefore even within the scale and stature of our 
 common humanity, there is nothing so reasonable 
 as humility. When the average mind compares 
 itself, for example, with such another mind as that 
 of Sir Isaac Newton, it must, at least in some measure, 
 feel what limitation and weakness mean. They do 
 not mean an incapacity for knowledge. But what 
 they do mean is the incompetence of certain par- 
 ticular methods of attaining it, and the necessity of 
 resorting to a method which is different. We must 
 accept continually the instrumentality of minds, other 
 — higher and richer — than our own. In other words, 
 we must make use of authority, as we all habitually 
 do in nine-tenths of all the beliefs on which our daily 
 life depends. 
 
 But this is a beginning only in the great lesson 
 of humility — a lesson in which we have a great deal 
 more to learn. The sense of our dependence upon 
 minds other than our own, in respect to the whole 
 cycle of knowledge embraced within the physical 
 sciences, is a sense which reaches its highest develop- 
 ment when we consider the narrow limitations within 
 which these sciences are themselves confined. De-
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 435 
 
 pendent as we are upon other minds even in respect 
 to them, the sense of a still deeper dependence comes 
 over us with overwhelming force when we discover 
 that, on all the higher and more ultimate questions 
 on the nature, origin, and goal of things, our greatest 
 authorities in physics are, so far as their discoveries 
 are concerned, as helpless and as ignorant as our- 
 selves. There is not one physical discovery yet made 
 which casts the least light upon these questions. 
 Belonging as they do to another sphere of thought, 
 they stand untouched behind, and beyond, all the 
 ascertainable laws of visible phenomena. The solu- 
 tion of them remains always as far off as ever — that 
 is to say, so long as we employ only the same instru- 
 ments of research. It is this which widens the area, 
 and deepens the character, of our reasonable humility, 
 transferring it from ourselves, individually, as com- 
 pared with the giants of our race, to the whole human 
 family and to the universal intellect of man, as com- 
 pared with that prevailing mind in Nature which it 
 is our intense, and instinctive, desire to understand. 
 The humility which is praised in Christian theology, is 
 not a humility of feebleness, or of abdication, disparag- 
 ing to the relation in which we stand to the highest 
 subjects of our spiritual desires. It is a humility which 
 is consistent with the doctrine of the Hebrew Psalmist, 
 that man has been made only ' a little lower than 
 the angels ' — that, in his nature, he has been ' crowned 
 with glory and honour ' — and that, by special gifts 
 and faculties for the acquisition of physical knowledge, 
 he has been 'set over the works of the Creator's hands.' 
 
 F f 2
 
 436 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 Never has this power and prerogative of man been 
 more conspicuous than in our own time. Never has 
 the growing knowledge of physical facts, and laws, 
 yielded such rich returns, in our larger dominion over 
 them. Never has the precision, and certainty, which 
 belongs to our knowledge of them, reflected more 
 clearly that character of invariability of all material 
 laws which alone can make them the trustworthy, 
 the supple, and the subtle, instruments of mind and 
 will. This subordination of invariable laws, is the law 
 of laws — the Lex Legtivi — the constitutional principle, 
 as it were, to which, in a universal kingdom, all its 
 special and separate statutes are subordinate. This 
 is the universal principle which we see governing all 
 things, and especially the use made of those rigid 
 exactitudes of relation which prevail between the 
 measurable units of force, or energy, of time, and of 
 space. It is in the perception of this universal truth 
 that the physical sciences do help us to feel that we 
 are indeed ' crowned with glory and honour.' There 
 is no man of science worthy of the name, who does 
 not value scientific truth entirely irrespective of the 
 effects it may have in ' setting us over the works ' of 
 creation, so far as mere economic applications are 
 concerned. These effects are all very well, as inci- 
 dental consequents. But there is no branch of 
 physical science which does not yield conceptions 
 extending far beyond the region of material utility, 
 and there are others, not a few, from which no such 
 benefits have yet come at all, or are ever likely to 
 accrue. Yet it is in these conceptions, most of all,
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 437 
 
 that we do feel to be crowned with glory and honour, 
 when we desire and rejoice in the knowledge of them 
 for its own sake. It may even be said that it is in 
 the highest sense of all that we feel ourselves to be 
 set over ' the works ' of the material creation, when, in 
 terms of our own intellectual and moral nature, we 
 can trace the relationship in which they stand to the 
 universal Mind. This is the natural law governing 
 the rank that belongs to our knowledge according to 
 the rank of the things it knows. This is the natural 
 law on which the doctrine of Hebrew and Christian 
 theology takes its stand, when it declares, in the words 
 of Jeremiah, ' But let him that glorieth glory in this, 
 that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am 
 the Lord \' 
 
 We have seen how, in descriptive science, the appre- 
 hension of this Mind is so instinctive, and universal, 
 that words and forms of speech implying it, and 
 expressing it, cannot be avoided even by those who 
 resist it most. It is the real cause and explanation 
 of the feelings of awe, or of admiration, or of reve- 
 rence, with which both natural phenomena in them- 
 selves, and the triumphs of those who discover the 
 laws of them, are regarded. If there be such a Mind, 
 it must be the highest knowledge to be conversant 
 with its character. There is no glory or honour in 
 knowledge, except in proportion to the grandeur, the 
 majesty, and the significance, of the thing known. 
 Neither is there any ethical value in it, except in like 
 proportion to the bearing of it upon heart and 
 
 ' Jer. ix. 23, 24.
 
 438 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conduct. Even the knowledge of individual truths 
 which, in themselves, are of high importance,, may- 
 have a deteriorating rather than an improving effect 
 upon the character of him who knows them, unless 
 that knowledge has an ethical superstructure built 
 upon it. It is in this sense that Christian theology- 
 declares 'that knowledge puffeth up'; and this 
 doctrine it applies, as we have seen, even to such an 
 important item of knowledge as the nothingness of 
 idols, even at a time when its own struggle against 
 idolatry was yet an undecided contest in the world. 
 St. Paul ^ lays down the principle that knowledge 
 of the nonentity of idols, was a knowledge barren 
 and misapplied if it led Christians, through pride, 
 to forget another truth, viz. that the beliefs of other 
 men, however false, were facts to be reckoned with 
 in the conduct of life, and that love or ' charity ' 
 towards them, demanded a due consideration of the 
 effects of that conduct upon their ignorance and 
 superstition. The whole passage is indeed a striking 
 testimony to the true nature of the ethical element 
 in the Christian idea both of knowledge and of faith. 
 It puts the mere intellectual conviction of any truth, 
 however important in itself, altogether on a lower 
 level than convictions awake to moral concomitants, 
 and moral consequences, and alive, not less, to the 
 ignorance which all true knowledge brings home to 
 us, out of its infinite suggestions. 
 
 The knowledge of our own ignorance is the highest 
 kind of knowledge, for this kind of knowledge does 
 
 ^ I Cor. viii. i-q.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 439 
 
 not puff up. On the contrary, it generates humility. 
 The greatest minds in the history of science have 
 been minds of singular, and of a strictly natural 
 humility. It was their knowledge that made them 
 conscious, above all things, of the narrow boundaries 
 within which physical science is confined. They have 
 felt continually the truth of St. Paul's words, ' If any 
 man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth 
 nothing yet as he ought to know ^' The context of 
 this powerful sentence explains the sense in which 
 it is to be understood. It does not mean merely 
 that all our intellectual knowledge is incomplete. 
 Still less does it mean that our knowledge, so far 
 as it goes, is in itself fallacious. It does not mean, 
 merely, that our knowledge, for example, of the law 
 of gravitation, leaves us in utter ignorance of the 
 physical causes to which its energies are due, and 
 that our knowledge of the still more mysterious 
 agency of light, leaves us in an ignorance, if possible, 
 still more profound on its ultimate physical causes. 
 It does not mean merely that the man who is proud 
 of the little that he knows, in utter forgetfulness or 
 ignorance of the deeper things of which he knows 
 nothing, is a man who ' knows nothing as he ought 
 to know.' All this, no doubt, is true, and is covered 
 and included in the far-reaching sweep of the sentence. 
 But, beyond all this, there is another, and a deeper, 
 meaning in it, which goes to the root of the ethical 
 element as that element is understood both in Hebrew 
 and in Christian theology, when the highest sense of 
 
 ^ I Cor. viii. 2.
 
 440 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 it is intended. St. Paul was not thinking or speaking 
 of any physical knowledge when he declared that 
 any man who prided himself in the mere intellectual 
 conviction of any truth whatever — without having any 
 sense of its relation to, or bearing upon, other truths 
 connected with life and conduct — was a man who had 
 no true knowledge at all. St. Paul was thinking and 
 speaking of the conviction that 'an idol is nothing 
 in the world, and that there is none other God but 
 one.' He was therefore expressly speaking of the 
 most fundamental of all truths in theology, the very 
 central idea alike of Christian and of Hebrew worship 
 and belief Yet it is of this proposition that he 
 represents the mere holding of it as an intellectual 
 proposition, and in a proud and self-satisfied spirit, 
 as unworthy of the very name of knowledge as under- 
 stood in the Christian system. 
 
 Nor does he fail to specify the element that is 
 wanting. True knowledge, in the language of theology, 
 must engage the emotions of the heart, as well as the 
 faculties of the understanding. There are indeed 
 many things in the knowledge of which, the affections 
 can have no part. The physical forces, and their 
 elementary laws, are all among the number. But that 
 higher knowledge which concerns the relations of 
 mind with mind, is inseparably connected with the 
 heart. In particular St. Paul impresses on his brethren 
 in the Christian faith, that the knowledge of God 
 could mean nothing but the love of God. He puts 
 this kind of knowledge in sharp contrast with that 
 other kind which would leave men ' knowing nothing
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 44I 
 
 as they ought to know ' : ' But if any man love God 
 the same is known of him.' An explanation follows 
 how, and why, it is, that this supreme ethical element 
 is a natural and necessary part of the Christian con- 
 ception of the Godhead. That conception is not that 
 of some bare abstract monotheism, but of a living and 
 personal Being standing to men in the nearest of all 
 relationships of life : — ' But to us there is but one God, 
 the Father ^' To this conception, essentially and in its 
 nature ethical, he adds the highest intellectual concep- 
 tion which is attainable in philosophy, namely, that of 
 the immanence of the Divine Spirit in all that we call 
 Nature : — ' Of whom are all things, and we in Him.' 
 
 It is impossible to read this argument of St. Paul 
 on the place assigned to knowledge in Christian 
 theology, and on the ethical elements which belong 
 to it, without seeing that he regards the whole system 
 of Christian teaching as a rational system, and one 
 capable of a reasonable explanation. That is to say, 
 he regards it as resting on well-known facts, and laws, 
 of man's intellectual and m.oral nature, which cannot 
 fail to be recognized as self-evidently true, when men 
 are reminded of them. It is a fact that we know our 
 knowledge to be limited, and it is a farther fact that 
 the consciousness of this limitation ought to generate, 
 and in the highest characters does generate, a natural 
 humility. It is a fact and a law of consciousness 
 that we never do, or can, attach the idea of merit 
 to mere intellectual apprehensions such as those 
 which belong to the physical sciences. It is not less 
 
 ' I Cor. viii. 6.
 
 442 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 a fact of that consciousness, that the sentiment of love 
 and of ethical obligation, can only be attached to 
 knowledge of a Personal Being — to our relations with 
 a Character, and not to our relations with a bare 
 abstract spiritual Existence. It is a fact that the 
 omnipresence of a Mind of which our own is in some 
 real sense the image, is, as we have seen, an indelible 
 impression on us in our interpretations of all natural 
 phenomena, as these are seen both in us and around 
 us. It is a fact that the idea of sonship in our 
 relationship to that Mind, had been borne in even 
 upon heathen poets and philosophers, so that the 
 Fatherhood of God was a Christian and a Hebrew 
 doctrine in perfect harmony with rational conceptions. 
 In particular it was in perfect harmony with that 
 confidence in the intelligibility of Nature which is 
 the basis not only of all knowledge but of all desire 
 to know, or to look on anything with other eyes than 
 those of the beasts. The very word intelligibility has 
 no meaning except the possibility of reducing the facts 
 and laws of Nature into terms of human thought and 
 of human emotion, and nothing can be more striking 
 than the complete and uniform assumption of St. Paul 
 that all the great conceptions of Christian theology 
 are not only, in this sense, intelligible, but are in 
 a special and structural harmony with the highest 
 faculties of our nature. 
 
 It is the custom of all the sacred writers, and of 
 St. Paul especially, to connect every doctrine or 
 spiritual truth, and even every exhortation on the 
 conduct of life, with some general principle or law
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 443 
 
 lying deep in the very nature of things, on which the 
 truth of the doctrine, or the virtue of the exhortation, 
 is represented as depending. Moreover, it is the rule 
 that every principle or law so quoted and defined for 
 this purpose, is invariably appealed to as in accord- 
 ance with the testimony of the human conscience in 
 proportion to its enlightenment or its powers of 
 spiritual perception. Of the teachers of no other 
 religion, can this be said. It is a characteristic which 
 separates Christian theology from all other theologies 
 in the world. It has not only constituted the strength 
 of that theology in the past — accounting for all the 
 triumphs it has already won — but it assures us also 
 of the inexhaustibility of its triumphs in the future. 
 Nature, in its physical aspects, is universally re- 
 cognized as boundless in its field of knowledge, and 
 still more in its mental or spiritual aspects. The 
 same infinite horizons must be recognized as stretch- 
 ing out everywhere around us, and within us. Ac- 
 cordingly, it is the habit of the apostolic writers to 
 see, and to dwell upon, the many profound analogies 
 which connect the phenomena of Nature, including 
 the instincts, the habits, and even the customs of 
 men, with the spiritual laws of an everlasting king- 
 dom. It is thus that in writing to a community, 
 which was accustomed to the great athletic contests 
 of the Isthmian games at Corinth, St. Paul refers to 
 the long, and careful, and self-denying discipline 
 practised by athletes in order to fit themselves for 
 the great prizes of success. He points it out as an 
 example of a great general law prevailing in the
 
 444 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 spiritual, as absolutely as in the ph3^sical, world — 
 the law, namely, of the adaptation of special means to 
 the attainment of special ends. But this again im- 
 plies the farther teaching that a life of faith, in the 
 Christian sense, is a life of difficulty, and of contest 
 — a doctrine, be it observed, in perfect harmony with 
 the definition of true knowledge as something very 
 different from mere intellectual convictions, which 
 might be good for nothing but for puffing up. 
 
 It is in farther pursuit of this line of thought that 
 St. Paul enters upon that incomparable description of 
 Love or Charity as understood in Christian theology, 
 which is one of the splendours of the New Testa- 
 ment, even if we were to regard it merely as a literary 
 passage of great power and beauty in ethical philo- 
 sophy^. It is a description which stands in close 
 connexion with the whole subject of this work, 
 because it is a striking exemplification of the coin- 
 cidence between the root ideas of Christian theology 
 and the universal perceptions of our human nature. 
 If we examine closely, and, one by one, the character- 
 istic fruits and products of charity as understood in 
 that theology, and as here given in abstract by St. Paul, 
 we cannot fail to see how perfect and how attractive 
 such a character would be, in the estimation even of 
 what is called the world. Those fruits and products 
 are not indeed an exhaustive list or catalogue of 
 human virtues, nor does the passage purport to give 
 any such catalogue of ethical obligations. What it 
 does is to indicate and describe a certain general 
 
 * I Cor. xiii.
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 445 
 
 disposition of heart and soul from which there always 
 does, and there must naturally, proceed a great 
 number and variety of beneficent effects on the 
 whole range of thought, and life, and conduct. Ne- 
 gatively, it is described as extinguishing a multitude 
 of sins which do most embitter the world — im- 
 patience, irritability, jealousy, pride, and suspicion ; 
 whilst, affirmatively, it is represented as determining 
 the mind to be generous in its interpretation of others, 
 hopeful, and trustful, of all good elements in them, 
 and, in all things, rejoicing in the truth. 
 
 In this grand delineation we rise above the atmo- 
 sphere, not only of observances, but of all mere pre- 
 cepts and commands, into the higher and purer air of 
 one great effective cause in the spiritual world — one 
 which can be truthfully described as above many 
 others, chiefly because it includes them, and resolves 
 them into itself. For this is the obvious explanation 
 of the lower rank which St. Paul assigns both to faith 
 and hope, in comparison with the all-embracing in- 
 fluence which he ascribes to charity. It is not possible 
 to divide the faculties or operations of the human 
 mind, under separate names. Each and all of them 
 need the co-operation of others. St. Paul describes 
 charity as ' hoping all things ' ; and therefore when he 
 says that charity is greater than hope, he must mean 
 that it is greater because the greater must include the 
 less. And so with faith — charity is greater, because, 
 as he describes it, charity is especially spoken of as 
 exercising that kind of discriminating belief in all 
 recognizable good, which is in itself of the nature of
 
 446 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 faith. And so, again, of knowledge — charity must be 
 greater than knowledge, because some knowledge 
 must be involved in every exercise of charity or of 
 love, and the attribute of ' rejoicing in the truth ' 
 specially ascribed to charity, is an attribute essentially 
 belonging to knowledge, and to the faculties which are 
 concerned in its pursuit. But the superiority which 
 the Apostle ascribes to charity, he, above all, explains 
 and defends upon the ground of its everlastingness. 
 It can never be superseded. It will be for ever what 
 it is now. It is not a mere item of knowledge, nor 
 a mere act of faith. It is a disposition — a condition 
 of soul — a quality of all those elements in our mental 
 constitution out of which are the issues of life. 
 
 It is in explaining this distinction that, as usual, the 
 Apostle takes occasion to indicate a great natural or 
 inherent law, which governs every attainment of know- 
 ledge that is possible to us, and stamps upon it a com- 
 paratively provisional character. That law is that ' we 
 know in part ' only. This is no philosophy of nescience. 
 It is not agnosticism pushed to that ' madness of 
 extremes.' But it is the truth out of which that false 
 agnosticism has been an erroneous suggestion. The 
 uniform teaching of Christian theology, is that our 
 knowledge, so far as it goes, is true knowledge, although 
 always only partial and incomplete. This is a fact of 
 our consciousness, and in the history of the physical 
 sciences, detailed illustrations of it have been frequent. 
 The three laws of Kepler concerning our planetary 
 system, were true knowledge. But they have been 
 merged and lost, as it were, in the higher knowledge of
 
 VIIl] NATURE AND FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS 447 
 
 the facts which rewarded the genius of Sir Isaac Newton. 
 The Newtonian law of gravitation, is itself, now, in the 
 same stage of partial knowledge which was before 
 occupied by the discovery of his great predecessor. 
 And if ever the Law of Gravitation should come to be 
 physically explained, that explanation will again, in 
 its turn, be only another link in a chain which passes 
 out of sight. Christian theology, therefore, in apply- 
 ing the same law of limitation to our spiritual know- 
 ledge, is founding itself strictly, as it always does, on 
 the analogies of Nature as these are known to, or are 
 recognizable by, us. It does not disparage our facul- 
 ties. It only puts them under a reasonable discipline, 
 and it specially encourages them in that hope and 
 desire of knowledge, which is the noblest and most 
 significant of our natural endowments. Nothing can 
 be grander than St. Paul's interpretation of the mean- 
 ing, and the end of our desire to know, in its true rela- 
 tion to that limitation of powers which he asserts as a 
 universal fact. That interpretation is simply this — a 
 future as yet unfulfilled — and an absolute assurance 
 that it will be fulfilled somehow, and somewhere : 
 ' For now we see through a glass darkly ; but then 
 face to face : now I know in part ; but then shall I 
 know even as I am known.' This is indeed a standard 
 of knowledge, than which nothing higher can be con- 
 ceived. Yet this is the standard of hope and of faith 
 which is lifted in the sight of all men by the apostolic 
 writer who, more than any other, except St. John, has 
 so expounded Christian theology as to place it on the 
 firmest basis of natural and necessary laws.
 
 Chapter IX. 
 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 Inseparably connected, in Christian theology, with 
 the virtue and the power of Faith, stands out, in corre- 
 sponding prominence, the idea of the duty, and of the 
 efficacy, of Prayer. There are two very different 
 aspects of the recognizable relation in which this 
 doctrine stands to the reign of natural and universal 
 laws. In one of these aspects, that relation is simple 
 and obvious — in the other, that relation constitutes 
 one of the greatest difficulties of modern thought. 
 It will be well to look at these separately, for they 
 are not only widely different, but they are even oppo- 
 site and antagonistic. 
 
 The first, and most obvious, relation of prayer 
 to natural laws, is simply one of fact — the fact, 
 namely, that, in some form or another, the impulse 
 and the desire to pray, are as universal among men 
 as the existence of the religious instinct. It is the 
 inevitable product of that sense of weakness and 
 dependence on mental or spiritual agencies other 
 than our own, which is intuitive and universal in the 
 human race. Sacrifice, in all its forms, is essentially 
 an act of prayer. How many forms that act has taken,
 
 PRAYER 449 
 
 through the ages, and among different tribes and 
 nations, it would be impossible to enumerate. Some of 
 them have been, and as in Africa still are, horrible 
 and cruel almost beyond conception. Others have 
 been in themselves so comparatively harmless that, 
 as we have seen, St, Paul declared that Christians 
 might innocently partake of meat offered to idols, 
 unless the act could be so misunderstood as to have 
 bad effects on other men. Sacrifice was an estab- 
 lished part of the worship of Jehovah in the Jewish 
 ritual. The fierce denunciations of idolatry, in all its 
 forms, which never ceased to be poured out by the 
 Hebrew prophets, never had, in them, the least in- 
 gredient of disparagement towards the idea or the 
 practice of prayer, or of any notion of the inaccessi- 
 bility of the Divine Nature to this method of approach. 
 What drew forth the denunciations of the prophets was 
 — not that the heathen nations prayed or sacrificed, 
 but that they prayed and sacrificed to false gods — to 
 the works of their own hands, or to the fictions of their 
 imaginations. St. Paul puts this view strongly when he 
 says that ' the heathen sacrificed to devils and not to 
 God,' and when we think of the unnatural horrors of 
 cruelty which were, and still are, common in connexion 
 with the rites of sacrifice among the heathen, the idea 
 of the influence of wicked spirits, rises more terribly 
 upon us than in connexion with any of" the other 
 phenomena of human corruption. But neither the 
 prophets, nor the Apostles, ever thought for a moment 
 of discouraging that natural and universal instinct of 
 men which leads them to pray. On the contrary, the 
 
 ^ g
 
 450 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 doctrine of the Godhead being accessible to human 
 supplication, ran through and through the whole 
 theology of the Hebrews. It was, indeed, inseparable 
 from their very conception of the Personality of 
 Jehovah, of His relations with the personality of men, 
 and of His character in His dealings with the govern- 
 ment of the world. The Old Testament, from begin- 
 ning to end, is full of examples and instances of prayer, 
 that is to say of direct supplication, sometimes alone, 
 sometimes in combination with praise and thanks- 
 giving. The patriarchs, the kings, the prophets, and 
 the singers of Israel, were all moved to pray. The 
 historical books narrate it as a fact ; the prophetical 
 books contain it as an essential element in the hopes 
 and promises of the future ; the Psalms are in them- 
 selves largely prayers, and nothing else. 
 
 Nor is it possible to separate or define the objects 
 of prayer which all these examples include. We 
 cannot distinguish between temporal, and spiritual, 
 benefits, because in the laws of Nature these are 
 inseparably interwoven, and the great lines of Hebrew 
 theology follow faithfully the lines of fact in that one 
 and universal dominion in which Jehovah reigned. 
 The body, and the soul, and the mind, of men, are in 
 far too close a union to make such discriminations 
 possible. And all these, again, are so married to con- 
 ditions in the external world that neither can they 
 be classified apart. Success in war, for example, was 
 essential to the highest spiritual aspirations of the 
 Jewish people. Direction and success in virtuous 
 love, might well be an essential condition in building
 
 IX] PRAYER 451 
 
 Up the family of Abraham, and the beautiful story of 
 the choice of Rebekah as the wife of Isaac, is a perfect 
 example of the Hebrew idea of the providential lead- 
 ings of the Most High in the blessings of individual 
 life ^ The Hebrew prayed for everything that he 
 desired in life — for everything, that is to say, that 
 he felt to be in itself innocent, according to the 
 moral law as known to him. The Almighty was 
 universally regarded as working invariably by the use 
 of means. But He was regarded, also, as having His 
 hand always on the most direct springs of ultimate 
 causation. Above all, He was regarded as having, in 
 supreme measure, that power of free will which, as 
 possessed even in a limited degree, is the highest gift 
 of man. This freedom is, with us, an ultimate fact of 
 consciousness. Upon it the very existence of moral 
 responsibility depends. The Hebrews never doubted 
 that in this — the greatest of our endowments — we are 
 made after the image, and in the likeness, of Him who 
 is our Creator. They never thought of Him whom 
 they knew as the God of Abraham and of Isaac and 
 of Jacob, as the heathen world thought of Olympian 
 gods, as subordinate to the fates. The doctrine of 
 Necessitarianism, in all its forms, was unknown to 
 them. Their own moral nature did not suggest it — 
 neither did the moral government of the world, in so 
 far as it was to them conceivable. Free wills open to 
 the influence of motives, and one Supreme Will open 
 to exercise a righteous judgment upon such motives, 
 and upon all the contingencies of voluntary conduct 
 
 ' Gen. xxiv. 
 G g 3
 
 452 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 — these were to them the great facts, and the great law, 
 of the spiritual world. 
 
 It is true that immutability was an attribute assigned 
 to God. But the sense in which it was understood, 
 involved the most absolute assertion of freedom in 
 the administration of righteousness and truth. Justice 
 and judgment were described as the ' habitation of 
 His throne,' and these attributes must involve, in the 
 very nature of things, a free access to all the elements 
 of perfect knowledge, and a free will in assigning 
 a due value to the conduct of voluntary and respon- 
 sible agents. It is a conception essentially natural 
 in this sense — that it assumes the exercise of the 
 highest human faculties, in the discharge of their 
 highest functions, to be the best representation we 
 can form of the Divine Being in the administration of 
 His own Divine Laws. And the explanation is plain. 
 It was Gods character, not His acts, which Hebrew 
 theology regarded as immutable, and assuredly any 
 other idea of that immutability would be irrational. 
 An immutable character must be capable of change 
 in its attitude, and in its conduct, towards the evil 
 and the good. It cannot be the same to rebellion 
 and to obedience ; to wickedness and to repentance ; 
 to malignity and to love. It must therefore, above 
 all things, be accessible to supplication, and to those 
 'turnings of heart' among the disobedient to the 
 wisdom of the just ^, to which the prophets were 
 perpetually calling, and inviting, all whom they 
 addressed. The natural response to these invita- 
 
 ' Luke i. 17.
 
 IX] PRAYER 453 
 
 tions was always prayer — prayer in the form of con- 
 fession, of repentance^ of promise, and of supplication ; 
 and so much did Hebrew theology dwell on the 
 accessibility of God to prayer, that the Psalmist 
 addresses the God of Israel as the Hearer of Prayer, 
 as one of the most glorious of the names by which He 
 can be known, and as indicating that attribute of 
 His nature which is most attractive, and will ulti- 
 mately have an all-prevailing power : ' O Thou that 
 hearest prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come ^.' 
 
 It is needless to say that Christian theology not 
 only adopted to the full, but deepened and extended, 
 the teaching of the Hebrews on the duty, and efficacy, 
 of prayer. The constant practice of it by our Lord 
 himself; and the continual exhortation of His Apostles, 
 can leave no doubt as to the fundamental importance 
 which they attached to this form of direct communion 
 with the Godhead. It is certain, too, that they did 
 not conceive as possible any such definition of the 
 objects of prayer as could enable us to draw a sharp 
 and definite line between legitimate and illegitimate 
 petitions — such, for example, as a division between 
 spiritual and temporal blessings. And this is the 
 more remarkable as prayer is the only spiritual act 
 and duty, on which our Lord, in response to a direct 
 appeal, did give an actual form or model for imita- 
 tion. 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught 
 his disciples "',' this was the request which produced 
 what has ever since been known as the Lord's Prayer. 
 The wide comprehensiveness of its character has been 
 
 ' Ps. Ixv. 2. ' Luke xi. i.
 
 454 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 universally recognized in the Church, although it has 
 never been considered as condemning, or even as 
 superseding, more detailed petitions in harmony with 
 its spirit. What that spirit is, as casting light on the 
 very nature of prayer, and on the spiritual facts and 
 laws on which it depends, is revealed in its opening 
 words. These words express, and explain, that one 
 great fact which renders prayer intelligible as a duty, 
 and possible as a power. ' Our Father which art in 
 heaven ' are words which at once establish the idea of 
 Christian theology as to man's relationship with the 
 Creator. It is the relation of sonship on the one side, 
 and of parentage on the other. 
 
 If it be possible, at all, for human reason to reach 
 any conception, or to frame even any guess, on that 
 which it does most earnestly desire to know, namely, 
 its own origin or source, this is the most natural 
 and rational conception it can entertain. It was 
 actually the conception reached by Greek philosophy, 
 and we know the powerful use which St. Paul made 
 of it in his speech at Athens. Nor need we doubt 
 its substantial truth because it contains some elements 
 of metaphor. If we are to doubt the truth of any of 
 our conceptions on this ground alone, there will not 
 be much left for us either to know, or to believe. 
 Without perception of the subtle analogies of Nature, 
 there is little, indeed, that we could understand, and 
 almost nothing that we could express. The whole 
 structure of human thought, and of human speech, is 
 built up out of the materials they supply. Bounded 
 as our faculties undoubtedly are, the boundary is
 
 IX] PRAYER 455 
 
 always indefinite, and seems as if it were pierced by 
 many openings. None of these are so wide, or so 
 accessible, as the openings afforded by analogy. The 
 mind sees and feels instinctively those resemblances 
 between things inside the visible horizon, which carry 
 their powerful suggestions very far beyond it. There 
 is nothing so penetrating as a real, and true, analogy. 
 The unity of Nature — that is to say, of the whole 
 system of things visible and invisible — is our sure 
 guarantee for this. And, therefore, no presumption 
 lies against any conception merely because the expres- 
 sion of it, has to be eked out by recourse to elements 
 of metaphor or analogy. The conception may overpass 
 those elements — that is to say, they may be inadequate 
 to cover all that the conception involves, or all that the 
 mind struggles and labours to express. And very 
 easily may this be the case with the metaphorical 
 element in that conception of our origin and source 
 to which our Lord gave His sanction in proclaiming 
 the sonship of man and the Fatherhood of God. It 
 is a true conception, but we may well surmise that 
 it is even less than the full truth — an approximation 
 to it only — if in its fulness we could conceive it. 
 Not only the dim glimpses of our spirit — but even 
 the lines of rational speculation, and the language of 
 Christian philosophy, point to a connexion of which 
 mere human afifiliation can give but an imperfect idea. 
 The boundless Christian hope of knowing ' even as we 
 are known,' implies a nearness on the part of the 
 Divine Being, such as does not exist in earthly 
 parentage.
 
 456 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 But all these considerations do but tend to impress 
 us with the idea that whatever element there may be 
 of metaphor in the Fatherhood of God, is an element 
 which does not exaggerate, but falls short of the truth 
 as bearing on what may be called the philosophy of 
 prayer — that is to say on the relation which it bears 
 to such facts and laws as we can discern in the 
 spiritual world. If the relationship in which man 
 stands to God, must be even nearer and closer than that 
 of sonship — some relation of absolute derivation and 
 dependence for which we have no name — it affords 
 a rational explanation of one of the most universal 
 phenomena of human life. It becomes intelligible 
 why it is in the nature of man to pray, and why it is 
 in the nature of God to hear. There is a remarkable 
 passage in one of the writings of St. John which 
 seems to cover at once all the human perplexities, 
 and all the Divine hopes, connected with the relation- 
 ship of man to God. On the one hand the Apostle 
 feels all the wonder that is natural in thinking of 
 a creature such as man now is, being spoken of as the 
 offspring of God : ' Behold, what manner of love 
 the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be 
 called the sons of God ^.' On the other hand, he feels 
 and recognizes a still higher aspiration of which even 
 this near relationship is but an imperfect image : 
 ' and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.' Then 
 follows the conclusion reached by that triumphant 
 faith, which is founded on the natural law of assimi- 
 lation effected through the agency of a closer spiritual 
 
 * I John iii. i.
 
 ix] PRAYER 457 
 
 communion, and of a more perfect vision: 'But we 
 know that when He shall appear we shall be like 
 Him/ with the reason given, ' for we shall see Him as 
 He is.' 
 
 If, again, we pass from the opening address of the 
 Lord's Prayer, to the condensed and concentrated 
 petitions that follow, we shall see that the whole 
 vast region of possible hope and of expectation is 
 included in them. The very first petition is ' Thy 
 Kingdom come.' If, only, we remember what the 
 meaning of God's Kingdom was in the language of 
 the Old Testament, and what were the additions 
 made to that meaning in the discourses of Christ 
 himself, we may be able to form some idea of 
 the all-comprehensiveness of this one petition. In the 
 theology of the Hebrews, the Kingdom of God meant 
 nothing less than a reign of universal righteousness, 
 and of absolute truth. Under the full dominion of 
 that Kingdom, the earth was to be covered with the 
 knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. All 
 through the Prophets and the Psalms, the resources of 
 human speech seem to be exhausted in expressing 
 this idea in every variety of aspect. But to these 
 conceptions Christ Himself added another, which 
 contributes largely to the intelligibility of the truth 
 by establishing an inseparable connexion between 
 God's Kingdom and each individual human soul, 
 ' The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' This was 
 the new idea, or at least the new explanation given, 
 of the nature of the Kingdom. It lifted the old 
 conceptions, at once and for ever, above the mere
 
 458 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 conditions of place and time. It seated the image of 
 God's Kingdom in the whole nature — that is to say, in 
 the whole affections and the whole intellect, of man. 
 
 It is not necessary to assume that this is the only 
 sense in which the same words can be ever used. 
 But if it be not only one sense, but, as our Lord 
 implies, one of the most important of all the senses, in 
 which the Kingdom of Heaven is to be understood, 
 then, consequences of corresponding importance fol- 
 low. If the domain of God's Kingdom is specially 
 in the mind and heart of man, then, the laws of 
 that everlasting and universal Kingdom must have 
 the closest relations with the very structure of his 
 whole moral and intellectual faculties. His instincts, 
 however perverted in actual use, and however 
 misguided in particular directions, must have had 
 their own source in the nature of things, and in 
 the system of these things they must have their 
 own legitimate functions to discharge. They must 
 be convertible to uses which are good, and capable of 
 being turned into directions which are right. This, 
 at all events, is the doctrine of Christian theology. 
 It is verified as such on the authority of Christ. It 
 is obviously a doctrine founded upon the conception 
 of a natural and necessary law binding together, in an 
 inseparable unity, the Supreme Mind and the mind of 
 man in its natural and original constitution. The 
 very idea of a Kingdom, is an idea taken from human 
 life and government ; and, although the analogy is im- 
 perfect, its incompleteness obviously consists in this, 
 that the subjects of a human ruler are not in such
 
 IX] PRAYER 459 
 
 near relations with him as to be called his offspring. 
 Nor, even if human subjects were the children of their 
 rulers, does this similitude come up to the deep reali- 
 ties of a relation which makes men the creatures of 
 a Being, who is above all things their Creator, and, 
 only as such, their King. 
 
 The intelligibility, therefore, of divine laws, to the 
 mind and heart of man, and the cause of that intelli- 
 gibility, is the assumption which is more and more 
 brought out by every analysis of the language of Chris- 
 tian theology. This, at least, is one aspect of it, whilst 
 another, and not less important aspect, is the Divine 
 origin which that theology attaches to all the funda- 
 mental conceptions of humanity as derivations from 
 the rock whence man was hewn, and of the hole of the 
 pit whence he has been digged ^. In this lies the deep 
 significance of all the language of Christ, and of His 
 Apostles, which assumes and involves the idea that the 
 natural laws of the Eternal Kingdom under which we 
 live, are in accordance with the instincts and impulses 
 of the human mind, in so far as these are original and 
 uncorrupted. This is indeed the one constant pre- 
 supposition underlying the whole system of Christian 
 beliefs, but it is nowhere so urgently and expressly 
 taught as on the subject of the duty, and of the 
 efficacy, of prayer. These conceptions are enforced 
 not only in the many examples of prayer recorded 
 both in the Old and in the New Testament — not only 
 in the composition of those prayers, and in the benefits 
 sought — not only in the reiterated injunctions to 
 
 ' Isa. li. I.
 
 460 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 pray, which are the continual themes of apostolic 
 teaching, but in the special endeavour made by our 
 Lord himself to bring home to the popular under- 
 standing, the principle, or the law, on which prayer 
 depends. That principle is that the Free Will of man 
 is, in its own small measure and degree, a real image 
 of the Free Will of God, so that He is accessible to 
 supplication, even as men are accessible to the appeals 
 of their fellow-men. 
 
 For the purpose of impressing this principle on His 
 disciples, our Lord does not hesitate to appeal to 
 human feelings and experience even when the analo- 
 gies referred to are approximate, and partial only. It 
 is thus that in the parable known as that of the 
 ' Friend at Midnight ^,' the success sometimes achieved 
 by importunity is used as a lesson on the duty of 
 perseverance ; whilst the urgency of the appeals for 
 bread addressed to a human father, is used in the 
 same connexion — to encourage confidence in the re- 
 sponse, which may be expected from the Fatherhood 
 of God, when our petition is for that communion 
 with the Divine Spirit, which is the natural, and 
 appropriate, sustenance of the spiritual life. The very 
 fact of any argument being used at all on such a sub- 
 ject, is in itself a proof that, in Christian theology, 
 prayer is considered as a practice susceptible of a 
 reasonable explanation ; whilst the nature of the argu- 
 ment, in itself, is equally a proof that the corruptions 
 of our human nature, however great they may be, are 
 not such as to destroy the fundamental analogies 
 
 ^ Luke xi. 5.
 
 IX] PRAYER 461 
 
 between the movements of its good affections, and of 
 its really enlightened will, with those of the Universal 
 Mind. The argument used by Christ in the conver- 
 sation on prayer recorded by St. Luke is an argument 
 a fortiori. It does take cognizance of the unlikeness 
 between the Divine, and the human, mind, which sin 
 and evil have established. But it does not use either 
 the corruption of man's nature, or the limitation of its 
 powers, as precluding all possibility of reasoning from 
 human to Divine things. On the contrary, it uses 
 what remains of goodness, and of compassion, in 
 human character, as the nearest type of the same 
 characters exalted to an infinite degree in the charac- 
 ter of the Father : ' If ye then, being evil, know how 
 to give good gifts unto your children : how much more 
 will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to 
 them that ask Him.'' ' 
 
 The relation, therefore, in which the Christian idea 
 of prayer, stands to the idea of a universal reign of 
 Law, is a relation not only of perfect harmony, but 
 of an inseparable unity. It assumes the existence of 
 that supremacy of Mind and Will of which we are con- 
 scious as the ultimate agency in ourselves, and which, 
 as we have seen, are the universal objects of recog- 
 nition in what we call external Nature. It assumes 
 that this supreme Mind and Will, act on motives 
 which are intelligible to us in proportion as we know 
 them, and that they act, always, by the adaptation 
 of means to ends — these ends, also, being intelli- 
 gible to us in proportion to our knowledge of them. 
 
 1 Matt. vii. II.
 
 462 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 It assumes that the Almighty is not the servant of 
 what we know as natural laws, but the Author and the 
 Master of them. It assumes not only that He is, or 
 exists, but that His existence is not like the existence 
 of a physical force, but means the ubiquitous presence 
 and power of a Spirit with a character and qualities 
 related to our own. It assumes that one of these 
 qualities of character, is to be the rewarder of them 
 that diligently seek Him. It assumes that the uni- 
 versal practice of prayer, and of sacrifice, among men, 
 is but the natural expression of an instinct which in 
 itself is true and good, however more or less perverted 
 in its application through the ignorance and corrup- 
 tion of mankind. It asserts that in the life and death 
 of Christ, the Divine and human nature were united, 
 in a sense, and in a measure in which they had never 
 been united before, and that ' a new and living ' way 
 of access has been opened up, through His means, 
 between men and the Father of Spirits. It explains 
 that natural and universal sense of dependence upon 
 unseen agencies, which has been considered as the 
 essence of the religious sense in man, by asserting it 
 as a fact that ' every good gift and every perfect gift 
 is from above, and cometh down from the Father of 
 lights \' It treats the unchangeableness of the Divine 
 character, not as a discouragement, but as an en- 
 couragement, to supplication. It regards, not as a 
 ground of alarm, but, on the contrary, as a ground 
 of confidence, the fact that with the Father of lights 
 ' there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.' 
 
 * Jas. i. 17.
 
 IX] PRAYER 463 
 
 In the whole of this teaching Christian theology is 
 in complete harmony with facts and laws which are 
 thoroughly intelligible to the human understanding. 
 An unchangeable character must, in virtue of its own 
 nature, change its attitude and conduct towards 
 changed, and changing, men. The good and perfect 
 gifts of the Creator can be withdrawn, or, on the 
 contrary, they can be multiplied and enriched, accord- 
 ing as rebellion or obedience calls, each, for its 
 appropriate response. The freedom of the Divine 
 Will is asserted absolutely. To the pure initiative 
 of that Will, the Apostle ascribes that knowledge of 
 the history and of the power of Christ, which he 
 identifies with the ' Word of Truth \' If gifts of such 
 supreme value had been, as it were, spontaneously 
 given to men, the Jewish converts of the Dispersion 
 were encouraged and commanded to seek, through 
 prayer, for a still more perfect knowledge : ' If any 
 of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth 
 to all men liberally, and upbraideth not ; and it shall 
 be given him ^.' And yet even to this promise 
 a condition is annexed, thus maintaining the contin- 
 gent character of all voluntary action as an essential 
 characteristic of the Divine, as it is of the human. Will. 
 The condition, on the part of the worshipper, is that 
 he shall have that full belief, or persuasion, in the 
 power and goodness of God, which, in Christian 
 theology, is called faith, and without which it is 
 obvious that prayer would be only a mockery of Him. 
 
 We must now turn, however, to that other aspect 
 
 . ' Jas. i. 18. 2 Jas. i. 5-7.
 
 464 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 of the relation between the doctrine of prayer and the 
 conception of natural laws, to which reference was 
 made as not only different but antagonistic. This 
 is very necessary, because we shall not have sounded 
 the depths of the Christian philosophy of prayer, even 
 to the limited extent of line which our faculties can 
 supply, unless we try to estimate those depths by 
 another method, and from another point of view. 
 New and special difficulties have arisen in our time, 
 and in many minds, which were unknown to the 
 ancient world. These are suggested by conceptions 
 arising out of the immense development of the 
 physical sciences, and particularly out of the mis- 
 understandings of the word law, as understood in 
 their domain. I have dealt with these misunder- 
 standings in the first work of the present series, 
 The Reign of Law, and the conclusion arrived at 
 in that analysis, seemed clear and certain — that the 
 rigid uniformity of strictly physical laws — taken singly 
 and not in their combinations — is not only no impedi- 
 ment in the way of Free Will in purpose and in action, 
 but is an absolutely essential condition of that free- 
 dom, as supplying the only means by which purposes 
 can be effected. But however clear the results of that 
 analysis may be, and however familiar they are in our 
 own daily life, the old temptations of the human mind 
 to believe in fatalism, or in the doctrines of Necessity 
 in some form or other, are always breaking out afresh. 
 In reality, they are essentially, and equally, antagonistic 
 to any belief in the efficacy, even in ourselves, of 
 valuntary effort of any kind whatever. They would
 
 IX] PRAYER 465 
 
 make it as useless to make known our requests to 
 our fellow-men, as to make our requests known 
 to God. If everything that is done, or happens, is 
 pre-determined, then, the actions of men are as much 
 parts of a necessary sequence, as the movements of 
 a steam engine. It is ignorance only that can induce 
 us to ask anything of them. But as this conclusion is 
 contrary to the universal instincts, and the equally uni- 
 versal experience, of mankind, the doctrine is not so 
 pushed as to include the human will, but is kept for 
 speculative application to the Will of God alone. This, 
 it is conceived, is helpless, or, if capable at all of what 
 is known to us as voluntary and contingent action, 
 is capable of it only in some sense which does not 
 render it possible for Him to vary by a hair's-breadth 
 from some predetermined course. This modern form 
 of fatalism, is probably more destructive to belief in 
 prayer, than the older forms of the same creed, which 
 it has superseded, and which it hardly recognizes as — 
 what they are — the same. In the older forms, it never 
 did succeed in wholly suppressing prayer. The 
 instincts, and the traditions, of men, have been too 
 strong for that. But in our modern society it is to 
 be feared that the fatalism born of misconceptions on 
 the very meaning of natural laws, has actually been 
 strong enough, in only too many minds, to suppress 
 altogether any recourse to prayer ^. The natural 
 
 ^ See the confession made by the late Dr. Geo. J. Romanes in his 
 Thoughts on Religion on the effects produced on himself personally 
 during his Agnostic phase : " Even the simplest act of will in regard 
 to religion — that of prayer — has not been performed by me for at 
 
 H h
 
 466 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 emotions and impulses which prompt to that resource, 
 are treated as the mere results of ignorance, and 
 although even the speculative reason cannot do any 
 of its work except by the aid of instinctive percep- 
 tions, it is always aspiring to kick down the ladders 
 of its own ascent, and to repudiate intuitions with 
 which its speculative theories cannot be reconciled. 
 
 To many, however, who intellectually are possessed 
 by the new theory, the consequences of it are too 
 painful, and too unnatural, to be endured. The head 
 and the heart are set at hopeless variance. The result 
 is a compromise — the aim of which is to satisfy the 
 instinct which cannot be suppressed, without contra- 
 dicting too absolutely the intellectual conception which 
 sits like a nightmare on the mind, and puzzles or 
 benumbs the heart. This condition of mind is prob- 
 ably far more common than the consciousness of it, 
 and still more common than any expression of it. Yet 
 if such a mind did express itself freely, its language 
 would be nearly such as I have once heard actually 
 held, with perfect simplicity and frankness, by a sin- 
 gularly cultured and active mind : — ' I cannot believe 
 that prayer can ever affect the course of any events. 
 That course is determined by inexorable laws. Still, 
 when I am in trouble, either through actual or im- 
 pending sorrow, I always do pray — simply because 
 I cannot help it. But nevertheless my conviction is 
 that it can never be of any use.' Then, others again, 
 dissatisfied as they may well be with this avowed but 
 
 least a quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impos- 
 sible to pray, I cannot will the attempt ' (p. 133).
 
 IX] PRAYER 467 
 
 intolerable contradiction between their feelings and 
 their intellectual hypotheses, have constructed, or tried 
 to construct, a theory of reconciliation. That theory 
 rests on an attempt to draw a fixed line of distinc- 
 tion between spiritual and physical effects. Nothing 
 physical — no external or material event or cause — can 
 possibly be changed. But spiritual effects may be 
 produced. Thus praying may have a good effect 
 upon ourselves. In this way it may be of use, but in 
 no other. 
 
 This appears to be a common refuge, now. But 
 what is the relation in which it stands to that 
 larger and more general conception of the universal 
 reign of Law, which it is supposed to save, and to 
 respect ? It is in the most profound and violent 
 contradiction to any intelligent understanding of that 
 conception. It assumes that the ultimate agencies 
 which work in the physical world, are not spiritual, 
 and that there are no laws in the spiritual world 
 having any analogy with those which prevail in the 
 world of matter. But this assumption is contradicted 
 by everything we know of the system in which we 
 live, including the knowledge we have of our own 
 conscious relations with it all. Then, again, the idea 
 that any spiritual good can come to us from pretend- 
 ing to ourselves that we believe in supplications 
 which we think must, of necessity, be useless — is an 
 idea in violation of spiritual laws which are self- 
 evidently true. It is like expecting to gather grapes 
 from thorns, or figs from thistles. That prayer to 
 God should be nothing but preaching to ourselves, 
 
 H h 2
 
 468 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 is a supposition irrational enough. But to believe 
 that even this preaching can be good, when it is 
 consciously framed on assumptions which we our- 
 selves believe to be erroneous, is an idea not only 
 so irrational, but so immoral, that it cannot possibly 
 be entertained or acted upon by any honest or earnest 
 mind, when its true character has been grasped. If, 
 therefore, prayer is to be retained at all, it cannot be 
 on this theory, because, if for no other reason, it does 
 — and does in an extreme degree — the very thing 
 which it is invented to avoid. It is thoroughly in- 
 consistent with the very idea of immutable laws 
 existing in the spiritual world, and is in contempt of 
 some of these laws which we know best in our own 
 dealings both with ourselves and others. 
 
 Further, it is to be observed that the doctrine of 
 Christian theology on the subject of prayer, does 
 not, as a matter of fact, give any support to the 
 theory that legitimate and illegitimate petitions in 
 prayer, can be sorted, and discriminated, by drawing 
 some clear-cut line of division between temporal and 
 spiritual benefits. It is true, indeed, that in the Lord's 
 Prayer, there is only one petition which, directly and 
 immediately, asks for the possession of material 
 things: 'Give us each day our daily bread.' But 
 even if this petition were to be so literally understood 
 as to refer to nothing more than the barest modicum 
 of food needed for the support of life, still we must 
 remember that it involves the co-operation of a whole 
 cycle of operations and of causes which are as purely 
 physical as all such combinations must always be.
 
 IX] PRAYER 469 
 
 And when we reflect that at least the petition must 
 be regarded as not confined to the individual who 
 prays, but to the whole brethren of mankind, we may 
 form some estimate of the immense extent and com- 
 plication of the purely physical agencies which this 
 one request asks the Almighty to employ, for filling 
 the mouths of men with food, and their hearts with 
 gladness. Not only the return, in due course, of 
 fruitful seasons, but — at least in this modern world — 
 the growth and development of all those conditions of 
 society on which the demand for labour depends, are 
 all included in the scope of this one petition. 
 
 But there is more than this to be said of the con- 
 demnation, involved in the Lord's Prayer, of the idea 
 that the ' Father of lights ' ought never to be asked 
 for temporal things, because He never can, or never 
 does, interfere with some other agencies more power- 
 ful than Himself, the existence of which we choose to 
 imagine, and which we call natural laws. The other 
 blessings, besides daily food, which the Lords Prayer 
 does also make the subject of petition, are all equally 
 comprehensive of, and dependent on, innumerable 
 physical conditions. That God's Will should be done 
 on earth, even as it is done in other regions of Intel- 
 ligence, where no rebellious wills have been set up 
 against His own, is a petition which cannot, in the 
 nature of things, be granted without changes involv- 
 ing a vast co-operation of both physical and spiritual 
 conditions in bringing them about. It is clear, there- 
 fore, that whatever may be the intellectual difficulties 
 which afi'ect our full comprehension of the relations
 
 470 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 between the Divine Will, and the possibility of it 
 being at all affected, or determined, by contingencies 
 of any kind, or especially by the supplications of 
 His creatures, are difficulties from which there is no 
 escape by imagining an absolute distinction between 
 spiritual and material benefits. We know enough 
 from our own consciousness, and from our own ex- 
 perience, to be sure that no such distinction exists 
 in Nature. We know that, within our own compara- 
 tively narrow sphere of voluntary action, and, above 
 all, in our own organism considered as a mechanical 
 structure, there is some close connexion between 
 the two spheres — a connexion so intimate that they 
 seem to be inseparable ; and we have seen how the 
 universal subordination of matter to mind, and to 
 the characteristic phenomena of combinations with a 
 view to Purpose, are so instinctively impressed even 
 on minds strongly prejudiced against such perceptions, 
 that they dominate the whole language of descriptive 
 science. 
 
 If, therefore, we desire to find some principle of 
 separation between legitimate and illegitimate peti- 
 tions in prayer, we must turn from definitions, which 
 are mechanical and artificial, to principles of distinc- 
 tion which are rational, and in conformity with all 
 that we know of natural laws governing the spiritual 
 world. And this is, in a great measure, possible, if we 
 follow the indications of Christian theology. It is 
 true that we have no systematic treatment of the 
 subject in the sacred writings. That is not their 
 method of dealing with any question. But we have
 
 IX] PRAYER 471 
 
 numerous actual examples of prayer, on every variety 
 of occasion, from the days of Abraham to those of 
 Christ and of His Apostles ; and we have also a great 
 number and variety of observations upon prayer, and 
 of precepts in regard to it, which throw much light 
 upon the subject. The whole of this evidence is con- 
 sistent with the general idea that the government of 
 the Creator, over the creation to which we belong, is 
 a rational government, ruled according to laws intelli- 
 gible — not to this or that separate faculty alone, 
 but— to the whole of our intelligence, and therefore in 
 harmony with the whole intuitions both of the heads 
 and hearts of men. 
 
 Sometimes, in the New Testament, as in all Eastern 
 writings and discourses, special aspects of the truth 
 are enforced in the language of hyperbole, for the 
 purposes of emphasis, or of compelling attention. 
 Our Western habits of thought, and our more prosaic 
 forms of expression, do not always lend themselves 
 to a right understanding of such passages as these. 
 Very probably no one of our Lord's hearers, when He 
 told them that faith could remove mountains, would 
 even for a moment understand Him to mean literally 
 that if any one of them believed that his own prayer 
 could remove Mount Lebanon from its foundations, 
 and could cast it into the Mediterranean, these effects 
 could actually be produced. And so there are various 
 passages in the Apostolic writings which lay some 
 special stress, now on one, now on another, of the 
 conditions of devout prayer, according as they 
 seemed appropriate to the immediate occasion, and
 
 472 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 to the particular Church which was addressed ; 
 and all of these passages may need a thoughtful and 
 reasonable interpretation. Our Lord himself warns 
 men against ' vain repetitions ' as partaking of the 
 heathen notion that they will be heard ' for their 
 much speaking,' or of that other heathen notion, 
 that the Father does not know what we have need 
 of before we ask Him. These are condemnations of 
 formal, or mechanical, or superstitious and ignorant, 
 elements in prayer. His Apostles enlarge on the 
 spiritual conditions which can alone make prayer 
 a spiritual power. St. John seems to lay great 
 stress on personal holiness of life in those who pray, 
 and, having, perhaps, in his mind rather the ideal, 
 than the actual, character of any Christian com- 
 munity, he says, ' Whatsoever we ask, we receive 
 of Him, because we keep His commandments, and 
 do those things that are pleasing in His sight ^.' 
 St. James dwells on its power in the healing of the 
 sick, and says, ' The effectual fervent prayer of a 
 righteous man availeth much^.' In St. Paul's mind 
 the functions he assigns to prayer, are as vast and 
 various as the applications of every great spiritual 
 truth must always be in such a mind as his. In 
 writing to the Church at Ephesus, where he describes 
 himself as having ' fought with beasts,' he dwells 
 naturally on the impediments and dangers which 
 there opposed the progress of Christianity in the 
 world, on the 'principalities and powers,' on 'the 
 spiritual wickedness in high places,' against which 
 
 ^ I John iii. 22. * j^g_ y_ jQ_
 
 IX] PRAYER 473 
 
 he and his brethren had to keep up a continual, and 
 a most arduous, contest. From this point of view 
 he enjoins the use of constant and earnest prayers 
 of intercession for all saints, and especially for him- 
 self, that he might have the gifts of strong and 
 courageous utterance in making known the ' mystery 
 of the Gospel ^.' St. Peter, in addressing the 
 'stranger' converts scattered through Asia Minor, 
 speaks of them as a ' spiritual house, and a holy 
 priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable 
 to God by Jesus Christ '^.' In none of all these 
 references to prayerful worship by the different 
 Apostles, is it possible to separate between temporal 
 and spiritual benefits. In the triumphs of the 
 Christian Church on earth, these were inseparably 
 blended, the one class of agencies being the means 
 and instruments by which the other was obtained. 
 In not one of these various utterances on the subject 
 does the idea seem to have been even present to 
 the mind of the sacred writers, to draw up any 
 abstract definition of the objects of prayer. They 
 evidently regarded it as applicable, not only to the 
 whole sphere of human activity, but to all the acti- 
 vities of the Divine Nature, and character, in the 
 government of the world. Only in one solitary 
 passage of the writings of the beloved disciple, do 
 we find even the indication of any general principle 
 applicable to all religious supplication. But in that 
 passage we do indeed find a principle as intelligible, 
 as it is full of immense significance. It is the 
 
 - Eph. vi. 18-20. ^ I Pet. ii. 5.
 
 474 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 passage in the First Epistle of St. John, where he 
 defines the nature of the confidence that we ought 
 to have in God : ' And this is the confidence that 
 we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according 
 to His Will, He heareth us ^.' 
 
 It is impossible to conceive any announcement 
 upon the most difficult of all subjects, which takes 
 more obviously than this, the form and character of 
 a great natural law in the spiritual world. Nor is 
 it possible to conceive of one which appeals more 
 directly to the reason and conscience of mankind. 
 No man could ever dare to ask of God anything 
 which he knows to be in itself wrong, and therefore 
 displeasing to the Divine Will. And if that Will is 
 understood as a Will of perfect truth, and perfect 
 justice, as well as perfect love, then, the law laid down 
 by St. John would rule out of the range of our 
 prayers any petition which, so far as our knowledge 
 goes, could possibly be inconsistent with a dominion 
 of perfect righteousness. This is obviously an ethical 
 boundary, or condition, applicable to all prayer. But 
 the law laid down by St. John extends beyond this 
 boundary, and establishes another much farther off — 
 1 lore elastic— and in its very nature less accessible 
 to our vision, or to our organs of understanding. If 
 the Divine government be, as it most clearly is, 
 a government only comprehended in part, and that a 
 very small part, there may be many petitions in 
 themselves innocent so far as their moral character 
 is concerned, but which are, nevertheless, not accord- 
 
 ' I John V. 14.
 
 IX] PRAYER 475 
 
 ing to the Will of God, for reasons which we cannot 
 know. What we ask may be, in itself, unreasonable, 
 as interfering with the stability of laws on which 
 many immensely greater consequences depend. Other 
 petitions, again, may be impossible, in the only sense 
 in which that word is applicable to the Divine Being 
 — as when it is said that ' it is impossible for God 
 to lie.' And this kind of impossibility may, and 
 indeed must, have a very wide application. Farther, 
 it may be quite possible for us in many cases to see 
 that results that are distressing to us, are unavoidable, 
 whilst, equally, other results that would rejoice us, are 
 unattainable, according to all that we know of those 
 laws of Nature which are laws of God. In all such 
 cases we should instinctively feel it to be unnatural, 
 and unreasonable, to pray for benefits which we have 
 good grounds to know do not fall within the defini- 
 tion of St. John, as being ' according to His Will.' 
 
 The reasonable inference would seem to be, that in 
 all our petitions we should make this great reserva- 
 tion indicated by St. John, as one that may be needed 
 in a thousand cases where we do not absolutely know 
 that it actually applies. Accordingly, it is the teach- 
 ing of Christian theology that prayer should always 
 be, in this sense, contingent. We know this upon 
 the highest of all authority — the actually recorded 
 examples of prayer in our Lord's life and death. 
 The model prayer which He dictated to His disciples 
 has been always known as in a special sense the 
 Lord's Prayer. But some of His own special prayers 
 have been handed down to us in apparently literal
 
 476 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 reports. As such they are invested with a supreme 
 interest, and a supreme authority. We see, in them, 
 how absolutely our Lord conceived the Divine Will 
 to be the one ultimate and determining power in the 
 course of things : ' Nevertheless, not My will, but 
 Thine be done ^.' And yet even in those prayers, we 
 have the same supreme testimony given to the place 
 and function of voluntary action as involved in the 
 Divine Will and sanctioned by it : ' Father, save Me 
 from this hour : but for this cause came I unto this 
 hour -.' 
 
 It is true that in these words we are brought face 
 to face with conceptions which involve the greatest 
 mysteries of the Divine Being. But they are, not less, 
 the greatest mysteries of our own. All sorts of sug- 
 gestions may occur to us in our intellectual struggles 
 to reconcile ideas which seem to be contradictory. 
 We may think, for example, that prayer is reduced 
 to a nonentity when it is represented as availing only 
 in procuring occurrences which have been already 
 otherwise determined. But this idea is negatived by 
 our own consciousness — fortified by all experience 
 and observation — that our own wills have a real 
 effect on the course of things. Under these con- 
 ditions the solution presented by Christian theology 
 is the only solution which has a rational character, 
 that is to say, a solution consistent with natural facts 
 and laws, as known to us. It is consistent, on the 
 one hand, with the universal impression made upon 
 us by the system in which we live, that there is 
 
 * Matt. xxvi. 39. 2 John xii. 27.
 
 IX] PRAYER 477 
 
 a large area of causation in which, and over which, 
 we have no power whatever. It is consistent, on the 
 other hand, with the conception that there is, so to 
 speak, another large area of contingency, in which we 
 possess a delegated power of more or less effective 
 action, and that in the whole of that area, our own 
 wills, and our own characters, can, and do, enter as 
 an element into the finally determining, or ultimate, 
 Will of our Father which is in Heaven. 
 
 Nor need we allow ourselves to be troubled by 
 another suggestion of the speculative faculties, which 
 has occurred to many, namely this — that what we may 
 call, and think to be, ah area of real contingency open 
 to supplication, is, in reality, an area of necessity or 
 of predetermination quite as much as any other, only 
 concealed from us by our own ignorance of neces- 
 sities which are hidden. The accusation against 
 prayer, or the misgiving in respect to it, is, that in our 
 imaginations as to contingency, and the freedom of 
 voluntary action, we always have to retreat into some 
 dark regions of the unknown, where alone we can 
 even profess to find it, since in every other region, in 
 proportion to our knowledge, we feel and know the 
 iron rule of predetermination and necessity. This 
 has been often said : but it has been said in complete 
 contradiction of the most certain knowledge that we 
 possess. There is nothing we know so securely as 
 our own consciousness of the freedom of our will, 
 for upon this consciousness our whole plans of life 
 depend, as well as the very possibility of passing 
 moral judgments on our own conduct, or on that of
 
 478 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 Others. That region, therefore, is not dark, but, on 
 the contrary, more full of light than any other, from 
 which we derive our conception of the constitution 
 and course of Nature. Moreover, the area of this 
 source of knowledge, is not only very large and wide, 
 but it is the region in which the highest, and most 
 governing, agencies of the universe are seen and felt 
 to work. It is the very region in which these agencies 
 are seen to be using the subordinate implements of 
 necessity, and the obedient rigidities of force, as the 
 ministers, and tools, of purpose. 
 
 But although Christian theology enters upon no 
 abstract theory on the philosophy of prayer, and not 
 only admits, but enforces, the truth, that we are, and 
 must be, largely ignorant of what may, or may not, 
 be according to the Divine Will, its injunctions and 
 its examples on the subject of prayer, leave no room 
 for any uncertainty whatever as to at least one great 
 spiritual law applicable to this question, which is 
 eminently intelligible to our understandings, and not 
 less satisfying to our heart. It is this : that the Will 
 of God is a holy and perfect Will, always identified 
 with what we know as truth, justice, righteousness, 
 and love. Everything, therefore, that, according to 
 the measure of our lights, we may think and feel 
 conducive to the triumph of these qualities in the 
 external or in the spiritual world — every combination 
 and concurrence of causes and events which can tend, 
 however feebly or remotely, to the coming of that 
 Kingdom in which they rule supreme — must be ap- 
 propriate objects of prayer. This is the definition of
 
 IX] PRAYER 479 
 
 an area as large as the whole world of thought, and 
 as practical as the whole world of action. Nor need 
 we feel any paralyzing doubt lest what is human is 
 necessarily false — lest the imperfections and limita- 
 tions under which our estimates of goodness must 
 necessarily lie, involve, of very necessity, elements 
 which, in themselves, must be false and wrong. Our 
 Lord's prayers are eminently human. They not only 
 assume contingency in the action of the Divine Will, 
 but they assume that we can understand some, at 
 least, of the conditions which may enter into its 
 determinations of perfect justice, and of perfect com- 
 passion. The last prayer which Christ uttered upon 
 earth, except that in which He resigned His Spirit, 
 is a prayer which assigns a special reason for one 
 petition, as being a reason which would be operative 
 on the Divine Mind, because it was according to His 
 Will. And that reason is one which commends itself 
 to the moral conscience of mankind : ' Father, forgive 
 them ; for they know not what they do.' No conceiv- 
 able petition can enforce more clearly the teaching of 
 Christian theology, that what appears to us — despite 
 all our limitations, and even despite all our concep- 
 tions — to be just and righteous, is at least presumably 
 cognate to considerations which do also enter in the 
 determinations of the Divine Will, and is conform- 
 able with its eternal laws. 
 
 Then there is another aspect of the doctrine of 
 prayer in Christian theology, which establishes, still 
 farther, its rank and place in that sense and perception 
 of cause and effect, which is the fundamental condi-
 
 480 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 tion of all our knowledge, whether in religion, or 
 in that which is called science. That aspect is this : 
 that the legitimate field of prayer is identified with 
 the whole of our own sphere of action, and of thought. 
 If the kingdom of God, even in a subordinate sense, 
 lies within the minds and hearts of men, then, the 
 coming of that kingdom must be advanced by every- 
 thing that can enlighten those minds, and elevate 
 those hearts, in the knowledge and in the love, of truth. 
 And this doctrine must have an universal application 
 to all knowledge, which is really such — that is to 
 say, to all knowledge which deserves the name — the 
 knowledge of things in their true relations to each 
 other, to ourselves, and to the Supreme Being. For, 
 if in another sense, as Hebrew and Christian theo- 
 logies have continuously taught, the kingdom of God 
 be the kingdom of truth — absolute, universal, and all- 
 prevailing truth — then, is every effort we make, whether 
 in the intellectual or in the moral sphere, consecrated 
 as an effort which must be, so far as it goes, according 
 to the Divine Will. This is a conception which 
 explains and justifies the joy, and the instinct, of all 
 mental exertion which is conscientious and sincere. 
 It convinces us, moreover, that such exertion is open 
 to all, even to those of meanest natural endowments, 
 so far as mere intellectual gifts are concerned. The 
 very sight of goodness, is, in proportion to its goodness, 
 a power in the world. This is a fact verified by all 
 experience, and establishing a law in absolute accord- 
 ance with the teaching of Christian theology, that 
 the kingdom of heaven is seated in the enlightened and
 
 IX] PRAYER 481 
 
 obedient hearts of intelligent and moral beings. In 
 the whole province, therefore, of our voluntary activities, 
 which is a province of immense and unknown extent, 
 wherever those activities are directed with wisdom, 
 and animated by Christian love, we may be sure of 
 prayer as an agency, to which great promises have 
 been given. 
 
 The speculative theories of Necessity may tell us 
 that in this we can be only instruments ; but not 
 even these theories can deny that our instrumentality 
 is voluntary and conscious, and that, within a certain 
 sphere, it can, and does, produce great effects. Neither 
 can they throw any doubt on our conviction, which is 
 instinctive, that the Almighty must have other instru- 
 ments than ourselves wherewith to work His Will. 
 This is undoubtedly the teaching of Christian theology ; 
 and it is not only free from the least antagonism to 
 every rational conception that we can form of the 
 Reign of Law in Nature, but it is in strict con- 
 formity with that conception when it is subjected 
 to a strict analysis. Whatever real difficulties there 
 may be in the comprehension of the ultimate truths 
 of Nature, due to the limitation of our faculties, it is 
 certain that there are many unreal difficulties, which 
 we entirely make for ourselves by the careless use of 
 indefinite and ambiguous words. The word ' motive ' 
 is one of those. It seems, somehow, to be thought 
 and conceded, that it is impossible to reconcile the 
 idea of a free will with another idea, equally certified 
 by the facts of consciousness — namely this, that in 
 action our wills are decided, or, as it is called, deter- 
 
 I i
 
 482 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 mined, by what we know as motives. And this 
 difficulty would be real if the word ' motive ' could 
 only be applied to a mechanical force as a cause of 
 material motion. But the truth is, not only that the 
 word * motive ' can be applied to a totally different 
 kind of agency, but that it is specially so applied in 
 our habitual conceptions, and in our common use of 
 speech. The motives which influence our wills are 
 not physical forces, nor are they anything in the least 
 degree like them. On the contrary, what we call 
 a motive power in mechanics, is separated by the 
 whole width of conceivable existence, from those 
 thoughts and intents of the heart, which tell upon our 
 wills, and ' move ' them to voluntary action. There 
 is no likeness between the inducements of the spirit 
 and the tractions of an engine, or the expansive forces 
 of a vapour, or the energies of falling water. These, 
 and such as these, are the motive powers in Nature, 
 and the masses of matter which they are competent 
 to ' move ' have no option in the movements they are 
 compelled to take. 
 
 It is nothing but a most careless blunder if we allow 
 ourselves to be deceived by the distant, dim, and 
 partial, analogies at which the speech-making instinct 
 in man has clutched in order to bridge over the 
 chasms of thought which yawn between the pheno- 
 mena of matter and of mind. What we — for want of 
 a better image — call the motives which act upon our 
 wills, and between which they must decide, have, in 
 themselves, the quality of good and evil as judged by 
 knowledge and by conscience. A motive power in
 
 IX] PRAYER 483 
 
 mechanics can never be either good or bad. But the 
 motive powers in mind, are the very seat and centre 
 of all that we know of goodness, and of vice, in our- 
 selves, and in other men. This is an ultimate fact 
 beyond which we cannot get. But it is a fact so 
 universally and so instinctively recognized, that, in 
 our judgment on others, and on ourselves, we never 
 do, practically, allow ourselves to be deceived by those 
 confusions of the speculative intellect by which, in the 
 highest regions of religion and philosophy, we try 
 to escape from inconvenient beliefs. Nothing can 
 be more irrational than the idea that mind cannot be 
 considered free unless it be inaccessible to such 
 motives as love, or justice, or veneration, on the one 
 hand, and to their opposites, on the other. If it were 
 not accessible to such motives, it would not be mind 
 at all, either as known, or as even conceivable, by us. 
 Assuredly, the supremacy of natural laws in the 
 government of the universe, is a conception, which 
 is not only consistent with this truth, but which abso- 
 lutely demands the recognition of spiritual motives as 
 an essential characteristic of mind, and as the highest 
 agency in the universe. In nothing does the philo- 
 sophy of Christian theology vindicate more clearly 
 for itself its supreme comprehensiveness and authority, 
 than in that teaching which affirms of certain motives 
 that their ' service is perfect freedom.' 
 
 There seems to be one passage, and only one, in 
 the whole of the sacred writings, including the books 
 both of the Old and New Testaments, in which 
 the word ' law ' is used precisely, or as nearly as 
 
 I i 2
 
 484 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [cH. 
 
 possible, in that sense in which it is now most 
 generally used, in the philosophy of the physical 
 sciences. In that sense the word 'law' denotes in 
 any thing, or in any combination of things, an in- 
 herent and necessary tendency to produce, as their 
 cause, certain definite and characteristic effects. The 
 only passage in which ' law ' is used in this sense 
 by any authoritative writer on Christian theology, 
 seems to be the passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the 
 Romans, in which he deals with certain peculiarities 
 of the human character and will, and especially with 
 the antecedent conditions under which its freedom 
 and responsibility are called to act ^. The Apostle 
 examines by introspection, as it were, his own spiri- 
 tual structure, just as a naturalist might examine, on 
 external evidence, the tastes, appetites, and habits, of 
 some other animal. He declares that he sees and 
 feels as a fact, in the phenomena of his own personal 
 experience, what may be called a dual nature — 
 one of them he speaks of as seated in his bodily 
 members, the other of them as seated in his mind or 
 spirit. He is sensible of their frequent, if not of their 
 continual, antagonism. The promptings of the mere 
 physical nature, with its corresponding appetites, con- 
 stitute one set of motives which he feels and sees to 
 be comparatively low, whilst the aspirations of the 
 other nature, rise towards all that is Divine. So strong 
 is this higher nature in him that he is able to say, 
 ' I delight in the law of God after the inward man.' 
 But yet he feels, none the less, the power exercised 
 
 * Rom. vii. 14-25.
 
 IX] PRAYER 485 
 
 by the lower motives, coming from the lower nature, 
 to impede or pervert his better will — a power so great 
 that he confesses, ' The good that I would, I do not, 
 but the evil that I would not, that I do.' He declares 
 that the facts, of which he is thus conscious, can only 
 be described as 'a law in his members warring against 
 the law of his mind,' and bringing him into captivity 
 to sin. 
 
 This is an accurate, and a philosophical, account of 
 the facts which establish what is called, in Christian 
 theology, the corruption of human nature. That 
 nature is not represented as irredeemable. It is 
 represented, on the contrary, as not only capable of 
 delighting in that which is the highest conceivable 
 object of love and of adoration, namely, the law of 
 God, but as holding these elements of character in the 
 deepest-seated recesses of its structure, even in what 
 St. Paul calls ' the inward man.' Only, it is over- 
 laid, and so largely overweighted, by tendencies of an 
 opposite character, that the balance falls on the wrong 
 side. Nothing- can be more certain than that this 
 is a rational account of the facts which everywhere 
 encounter us in human life. It is an explanation, in 
 terms of natural law, of all the conscious wickedness of 
 mankind — that is to say, of all failures to act up to 
 such standard of morality as may have been estab- 
 lished among them by knowledge or tradition. Low 
 as that standard may be in particular times and 
 places, the conduct of men tends to be lower still, 
 ' their thoughts meanwhile accusing or else excusing 
 one another.' It is a fact, too, that the higher the
 
 486 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY [CH. 
 
 standard is — all the more conscious do men become 
 of their own failures to attain it. 
 
 It is impressive, indeed, to find this consciousness so 
 highly developed in the writer of the Epistle to the 
 Romans. There is probably no human character 
 known to us in the history of the world, which it is so 
 difficult to think of as yielding to the lower, and 
 resisting the higher, elements of its own nature, or 
 acting in violation of its own deeper convictions, as 
 the character of St. Paul. With a powerful intellect 
 and a fervent spirit, by education and training a 
 Hebrew of the Hebrews, and jealous for ' the Law ' as 
 the glory of his nation, his vehemence in opposing and 
 in persecuting the new sect of the Nazarenes, has all the 
 appearance of conduct dictated by a most natural, 
 however misguided, sense of duty. And equally does 
 his course, subsequent to his new convictions, seem to 
 be the course of one whose actions ran always, and 
 ran with resistless energy, along the lines laid down 
 by the highest voices of his ' inward man.' Yet this 
 is the writer who lays bare his own conscious experi- 
 ence of life as giving him, above all things, a sense of 
 difficulty in fighting the good fight of faith, because 
 of natural facts and laws affecting all human minds, 
 in their present condition, which tend to deflect the 
 action of their wills in wrong directions. We do not 
 know what his special temptations were. They may 
 have been connected with that very zeal with which 
 he himself tells us that he persecuted the Christian 
 Church, and which became a glorious virtue when it 
 was directed to better purposes. There is nothing
 
 IX] PRAYER 487 
 
 more probable than that some one, or more, of the 
 internal evidences of the truth of Christianity — per- 
 haps even some of the external evidences — had dawned 
 upon his mind before — perhaps long before, he had 
 allowed himself to think seriously of them, or to give 
 more than a passing heed to the smothered misgivings 
 of his heart. This would fully explain the meaning, 
 and the special significance to him, of the mysterious 
 words which he heard on the way to Damascus, and 
 which do undoubtedly seem to refer to a long and a 
 hard struggle against suggestions of his inner man : 
 ' It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.' 
 
 If this be so, it would account most naturally for 
 another feature in the teaching of St. Paul, and that 
 is the constant stress he laid on the virtue of humility. 
 This is not a virtue which seems to have been specially 
 natural to the personal character of Saul of Tarsus — 
 as tenderness was personally natural to the character 
 of St. John. But it may well have been impressed 
 upon him by his painful experience of that natural 
 law which he describes with such subtilty of analysis 
 in his letter to the Romans. It gave him a far-reach- 
 ing lesson in the depths of that theology which he 
 was commissioned to teach, and which he has taught 
 with a power of penetration, and a variety of applica- 
 tions, which stand pre-eminent among all the Apostolic 
 writings. Not only his recollection of past temptations, 
 but his sense of their continual presence — his power of 
 tracing them to a general law deeply seated in certain 
 corrupt affections of the human heart — all this had a 
 natural connexion with his new conviction of the only
 
 488 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY L^H. 
 
 remedy — and that was the spiritual aid of that Divine 
 Person in whom he had come to believe as the Mes- 
 siah, so long promised to his race, and in whom not 
 that race alone, but all the families of the earth, were 
 to be blessed. Nothing can be more clear than that 
 his mind was filled with the idea, that, as the evil in 
 the human heart had an intelligible origin, so also, an 
 intelligible remedy had been provided for it. His 
 sense of the deep-seatedness of the evil, is, indeed, so 
 intense as to be nearly overwhelming. He evidently 
 regards it as innate in the present condition of hu- 
 manity, and under this sense he is moved to one of 
 the most passionate utterances that ever came even 
 from his fervent nature : ' Oh wretched man that I am ! 
 who shall deliver rne from the body of this death?' 
 and, in reply to this question, he looks to the natural 
 resource of that kind of external aid and help which 
 all men, in some form or other, do instinctively seek 
 for, under such mental conditions. And that help can 
 be no other than the help of another mind, greater, 
 and better, than their own. It is, therefore, strictly 
 according to the analogies of natural law in all mental 
 trouble, that he answers his own question, as to any 
 possible deliverance, by the thankful recognition of 
 Him in whom he had come to believe as the Messiah, 
 ' I thank my Lord Jesus Christ.' 
 
 The human spirit always could hold, and often had 
 more or less actually held, communion with the Spirit 
 of the Father. But a new channel for that communion 
 had now been opened up in the life and death of 
 Christ. Humility was one main condition of it,
 
 IX] PRAYER 489 
 
 hardly separable from faith. St. Paul urged men 
 to be ' instant in prayer.' and he did not pretend 
 to draw any dividing line of definition between legiti- 
 mate, and illegitimate, petitions. Leaving that to the 
 conscience of men, in so far as moral elements can 
 determinate it, he encouraged them ' in all things 
 to make their requests known unto God.' He asso- 
 ciated himself with the humblest of those whom he 
 addressed in saying that ' we know not what we should 
 pray for as we ought' But he added, with absolute 
 conviction, that the God with whom we have to do, 
 is not only accessible to supplication, but desires it on 
 the part of those who love, and seek, Him. The 
 blessed attribute of sympathy is ascribed to Him in 
 that perfection of power which, in all things, is His 
 alone. For this quality in the Divine character, he 
 finds expression in the strongest image which lan- 
 guage could command ; seeing that he speaks of the 
 ' Spirit helping our infirmities with groanings that 
 cannot be uttered.' Nothing could be more natural, 
 in the highest sense, than the whole of this teaching 
 — that is to say, nothing could be more accordant 
 with the laws which we can ourselves recognize as 
 established in the spiritual world, and by which we 
 do ourselves— when at our best — try to regulate our 
 conduct towards our own kind.
 
 Chapter X. 
 CHRISTIAN BELIEF 
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The harmonies of Christian teaching with all that 
 we know, or can recognize, as the eternal laws of 
 Nature are innumerable. The theme is inexhaustible. 
 Far too little has been thought or said of the Christian 
 Faith considered simply as a system of philosophy. 
 No greater mistake can be committed than to suppose 
 that any treatment of it in this sense, must involve 
 some compromise of its other, and higher, claims. It 
 is true that the word philosophy has been ' soiled with 
 all ignoble use ' ; and that even where this would be 
 too severe a sentence on that use, it has still been 
 often appropriated to the most fanciful and flimsy 
 structures of the abstracting faculty, or of the specu- 
 lative imagination. But we must never forget that 
 the original meaning of the word denotes no less than 
 the love and desire of knowledge in that largest sense 
 which is identified with the pursuit of Wisdom. It 
 represents the constant struggle and desire of men to 
 bring their own thoughts and conceptions more and 
 more into conscious correspondence with the system 
 of the universe in which they live. There can be no
 
 CHRISTIAN BELIEF 491 
 
 higher aim than this. It affords room for the exercise 
 of all the most powerful faculties we possess. It is 
 an aim which not only must include theology, but 
 must regard it as the central and ultimate object of 
 attainment. If there be a universe at all, the great 
 endeavour of philosophy must be to conceive how its 
 unity can be made intelligible, and on the other hand 
 to understand how it is that, in some aspects, it so 
 often appears as if it were divided. 
 
 This is the great question of all questions with 
 which, as a fact, Hebrew and Christian theology does 
 specially and continually deal. This is the question 
 for the solution of which it does present a well- 
 compacted system of thought, larger, wider, more 
 definite, and more consistent, than any other which 
 the world has known. We have only to compare it 
 with the sacred books of the East, and with the more 
 systematic philosophies of the West. There is no 
 need to disparage any of these. As products of the 
 religious consciousness or of the intellect of man. they 
 are witnesses of the highest value to the right inter- 
 pretation of a world in which that consciousness and 
 that intellect are, after all, the highest created things. 
 It is a fact, and an invaluable fact, that in the sacred 
 books of many nations there are to be found thoughts 
 and reflections which are both profound and true. 
 Over these it is not uncommon to see scholars bowing 
 down in raptures of admiration. The more of them 
 we can collect the better ; and the more we admire 
 them the better, provided only that we take due note 
 of all the characteristic facts and circumstances
 
 492 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 affecting their position and occurrence. One of those 
 facts is invariable — that such thoughts and reflections 
 are but scattered and isolated utterances standing in 
 no organic connexion with any wide or firm structure 
 of wisdom and knowledge. The other fact is — that 
 these thoughts or reflections are invariably but pale 
 and imperfect counterparts of the same truths which 
 are grasped more firmly, and are expressed more 
 powerfully, as parts of an all-embracing system of 
 beliefs, in the theology of Christ. 
 
 This may be said with emphasis of those marvellous 
 schools of philosophy which have won for the Greek 
 race an imperishable name. Everything that was of 
 solid value in their guesses, intuitions, and reasonings 
 — and there was much — has been, as it were, absorbed 
 and lost in the vaster volume of harmonious con- 
 ceptions concerning the nature of the Divine govern- 
 ment, which flows through the history and teachings 
 of Christianity. Those teachings rejected nothing 
 that was true, come from what source it might. 
 They rejoiced in the light of Nature, and in the light 
 of mind as a part of Nature, wherever even one ray of 
 that light could be detected shining on any of the 
 difficult paths of thought. It is well to remember 
 that Aristotle, who flourished three centuries and 
 a half before the birth of Christ, remained, for 
 1,500 years after that event, so much the cherished 
 authority of the Church on many questions of ab- 
 stract thought, that he was called by the greatest of 
 Christian poets, ' The Master of those who Know.' 
 Nor ought it to be forgotten that some of the thoughts,
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 493 
 
 and some of the language, which were evolved from 
 the teaching of Plato, are thoughts and language which 
 were caught up, and glorified, in the magnificent pro- 
 logue to the Gospel of St. John. 
 
 It may confidently be said that there is not a single 
 conception that is distinctive of any of the leading 
 schools either of Greek or of modern philosophy, and 
 that has. at the same time, some real place, however 
 subordinate, in the substructures of universal truth, 
 which does not also find its own appropriate position 
 in the penetrating and capacious system of Christian 
 thought. The philosophy which made much of Innate 
 Ideas may well be satisfied with the faith which 
 teaches that the fundamental postulates of reasoning 
 are among our Creator's good and perfect gifts, and 
 that we possess nothing — in this category, any more 
 than in any other — which we did not receive. The 
 philosophy of Experience, which dwells exclusively 
 on the reaction between outward things and the con- 
 ceptual faculties to which these outward things are 
 organically related, will find a congenial home in that 
 cherished doctrine of Christian theology which dwells 
 on the power of habit — on the discipline of training 
 — on the verifications which follow on obedience — on 
 such an announcement of natural law as that ' light is 
 sown for the righteous and gladness for the upright in 
 heart.' One of the most striking sayings of Epictetus, 
 the Roman Stoic, has been reported in these words : 
 ' for of this be well assured, there is nothing- so tract- 
 able as the human soul ^.' It is in connexion with this 
 
 ' Epictetus, Book x.
 
 494 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 thought that the same philosopher gives a description, 
 at least of the possibility, of that complete change of 
 life and character which is associated with the Christian 
 doctrine of Conversion, and of which, in practical life, 
 we seldom or never hear except in connexion with 
 the experience of Christ's disciples. The philosophy, 
 again, which identified the Beautiful with the Good and 
 with the True, is amply provided for in that teaching 
 which dwells continually on the beauty of holiness ^5 
 and holds out as the highest prospect of spiritual en- 
 joyment the seeing the King in His beauty^. The 
 philosophy which sees in the Useful the essence of 
 the Good, is but a broken fragment of that infinitely 
 larger thought which regards as inseparably united 
 the very idea of utility and the results of a perfect 
 obedience to the laws of righteousness and of truth. 
 Even the lowest of the great Greek philosophies — 
 that of Epicurus — which made enjoyment the one 
 great end and aim of life, does not find itself thrown 
 completely out of that all-embracing Christian con- 
 ception which declares that the chief end of man is 
 to 'glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.' Given 
 a right estimate of that in which happiness consists, 
 Christian philosophy has nothing to say against the 
 conception that the possession of it must be the great 
 object and desire of all sentient beings. But every- 
 thing depends on that estimate being right. It is in 
 the uplifting of it to the highest levels of spiritual 
 conception, so as to render it adequate and true, that 
 the Hebrew and Christian teaching stands — not only 
 
 ^ I Chron. xvi. 29. ^ Isa. xxxiii. 17.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 495 
 
 pre-eminent but — alone. And so, again, when the 
 Stoics proclaimed that something which they called 
 Nature was the rule of life, and that a perfect con- 
 formity with its dictates would be the perfection of 
 humanity, there was nothing to condemn their idea 
 in that vaster and yet more definite conception which 
 identified Nature with the will of one supreme Law- 
 giver whose character is perfect love, and righteousness, 
 and truth. Much that the Greek and Latin thinkers 
 said on this aspect of Nature was practically and 
 profoundly true. But it was generally, if not uni- 
 versally, associated with such gross and materialistic 
 ideas of that which constituted ' Nature ' that, practi- 
 cally, its whole value was dissipated and lost. 
 
 The attitude of the great Hebrew and Christian 
 teachers towards the ancient philosophies of Greece is 
 one of the most striking circumstances attending the 
 history of religion. It is an attitude of absolute 
 reserve. Considering that for nearly 900 years, from 
 Thales to Marcus Aurelius, many of the greatest 
 intellects that have ever dignified the human race, 
 were struggling to attain some definite conceptions 
 on the constitution and course of Nature — considering 
 that these struggles did issue in many speculative 
 conclusions of singular grandeur and penetration, 
 which attracted much attention in the world — con- 
 sidering, farther, that this term of centuries is co- 
 incident with those in which the Hebrew historians, 
 and prophets, and singers, were handling the same 
 problems — it is notable indeed that the sacred writers 
 cared neither to hail approximations to their own
 
 496 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 teaching, where these were noticeable in heathen 
 philosophies, nor to contest or expose in them 
 failings and divergencies, where these were glaring 
 and fundamental. The geographical isolation of the 
 Jews, and their still more complete intellectual soli- 
 tude during a great part of the time, may account for 
 much. The complete failure of the classical philo- 
 sophies to become a power in the world even among 
 their own native communities, accounts still farther, 
 no doubt, for the treatment of them as a neglectable 
 quantity. But after the age of Alexander the Great 
 had brought the intellect of Greece into a wide contact 
 with the world, and had given to its ideas the range 
 and authority of a great conquering race, it is im- 
 possible to be satisfied with the same explanation. 
 The silence with which the great writers of Christian 
 theology treated the philosophies of Greece and Rome, 
 cannot have been due either to the ignorance of isola- 
 tion, or to any mere feelings of contempt. Our Lord 
 himself never even mentions them. St. Paul was 
 a native of Tarsus — a city known to have contained 
 the most flourishing Greek University in the East — 
 and although himself educated, certainly in part, and 
 perhaps wholly, under the great Jewish teacher, 
 Gamaliel, he must have known, and there are clear 
 indications that he did know, what was then called 
 philosophy. He knew it, too, to be — practically and 
 in the main — an influence antagonistic to the Gospel 
 of Christ. He warns those to whom he writes ' not 
 to be led away by philosophy and vain deceit ^' He 
 
 ' Col. ii. 8.
 
 x] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 497 
 
 speaks of the world ' by wisdom knowing not God ^,' 
 and he holds up in substitution for that kind of 
 wisdom, the knowledge of Him whom he called 
 ' Christ the Power of God, and the Wisdom of God ^.' 
 Still, there is no wrangling with the schools ; and it 
 is evident from his speech at Athens that he was 
 ready and eager to seize upon all the ' broken lights ' 
 of truth which struggled through the confusions of 
 Gentile speculative contemplation. When he was 
 encountered personally by the Epicureans and the 
 Stoics — when he was contemptuously called by them 
 a ' babbler ' — and when his doctrine was denounced 
 as ' foolishness,' he did indeed dispute daily in the 
 synagogues and in the market-places with both Jews 
 and Greeks ^. But in his writings, as well as in 
 those of the other Apostles^ we find no pains what- 
 ever taken to meet philosophy on its own ground of 
 abstract argument. It was treated, indeed, some- 
 times as a help by way of illustration, sometimes 
 as an obstruction, but never as a serious rival in 
 the fields of thought. It had afforded exercise to the 
 strong dialectical instincts in man, and it had en- 
 gaged successive generations of thinkers — as Greeks 
 especially loved to be engaged — in opposing camps of 
 intellectual contention. But it had few deep roots 
 even in the intellect ; and it had none whatever in 
 the affections. It gave to men little that they could 
 live by, and nothing for which they would care to die. 
 Substitution, therefore, not confutation, was the plan 
 of the Apostles. They spoke from a higher elevation 
 
 ' I Cor. i. 21. ^ I Cor. i. 24. ^ Acts xvii. 17. 
 
 Kk
 
 498 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 and commanding a wider view. They proclaimed new 
 facts, and with these new facts a whole world of new 
 philosophical ideas were inseparably connected. 
 
 There was however, probably, another reason why 
 the Apostles of Christian theology avoided any direct 
 polemic with Gentile philosophy. A good deal of 
 that philosophy was employed in a direction with 
 which they did not desire to interfere. It was 
 directed to what is now generally understood by the 
 word Science — that is to say, the explanation of 
 physical phenomena in their causal relations to each 
 other. With a prescience which was certainly wise, 
 and which we may well be allowed to consider as 
 Divine, they looked with a sublime reserve on the 
 whole possible area of speculative thought in 
 the direction of secondary causes. They themselves 
 continually referred to such causes whenever it was 
 instructive so to do. They seem to have had an 
 instinctive and inspired confidence that, in this direc- 
 tion, nothing could be found out that was really new — 
 nothing really strange — nothing really antagonistic — 
 nothing that could be more than fresh illustrations 
 of facts and laws which had been long known and 
 had been amply provided for, by anticipation, in the 
 fundamental explanations of a true theology. And 
 well has their faithful confidence in this respect been 
 justified by events. Those anticipations of modern 
 physical discovery which had been actually reached, at 
 least with a wonderful approximation, by some of the 
 earlier Greek philosophers, are a signal, and indeed 
 a splendid, witness to the natural correlations which
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 499 
 
 bind together the structure of the human mind, and 
 the structure of the material and intellectual system 
 in which its own energies are born, and out of which 
 they come. If some of the old Pythagoreans who 
 held that Number was at the root of Nature, and that 
 the power of numerical relations was that in which 
 her great secret lay, could now see what has been 
 achieved by mathematics in the mechanics of the 
 universe — still more, perhaps, if they could see the 
 diagrammatic numerical forms in which the wonderful 
 facts and laws of chemical combination are now 
 habitually explained — forms the very essence of 
 which is the expression of numerical relations — they 
 might well be proud of the penetrating powers of 
 their master's intellect. In like manner the philo- 
 sophers who conceived the idea of the clash of atoms 
 as the ultimate fact in the constitution of matter, 
 might well be proud of having seen, with such a close 
 approximation to the truth, the modern idea of the 
 dynamic theory of gases. But Christian theology 
 was still more wise in its silent faith that these, and 
 all such like, discoveries in the physical constitution 
 of the universe, would be found to be covered and 
 overarched by the still grander conception that all 
 these forces are but the tools and implements of the 
 creative mind — casting only an ever clearer and 
 clearer light on the profound question how it is that 
 the rigid uniformities of sequence among these forces, 
 are the necessary and natural conditions under which, 
 alone, they can be made pliable to use, and can thus 
 subserve their final ends. 
 
 K k 2
 
 goo CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 Not indifference, but a spirit of the largest patience, 
 may well possess the souls of those who watch the 
 progress of physical discovery with the indelible per- 
 suasion of the Psalmist, ' For all are Thy servants ^.' In 
 like manner when the subject of investigation did not 
 belong to the world of matter but to the world of 
 mind — when Aristotle analyzed the grammar of our 
 intellectual assent, and detected the laws of reasoning 
 in the unconscious structure of the Syllogism — a work 
 was done which powerfully reinforced the doctrine 
 that the mind of man is an adjusted and an adapted 
 mechanism for catching and reflecting the light of 
 reason and of truth. But this is one of the founda- 
 tion stones of Hebrew and of Christian theology. 
 For this is the doctrine on which alone can securely 
 rest the idea of responsibility for opinions, and 
 the still grander idea of a soul capable, by its very 
 construction, of standing in close relations with the 
 Creative Spirit. And no philosopher has ever given 
 a more significant illustration of the consequences 
 flowing from this adaptation of mental structure to 
 the ultimate realities of the universe, than Aristotle 
 himself. Modern science often speaks with a sort of 
 indulgent compassion of the position occupied by 
 naturalists in those past ages which were destitute 
 of the many mechanical appliances whereby the naked 
 senses have been enlarged in range, such as the 
 microscope and the telescope. But they forget that 
 another apparatus of infinitely more subtle power was 
 in the born possession of such a mind as that of 
 
 ' Ps. cxix. 91.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 50I 
 
 Aristotle — perhaps more fully than it is in the posses- 
 sion of any of our own contemporaries. Aristotle^s 
 detection of natural laws governing the logical process 
 in the human intellect, is a discovery which, in principle, 
 extends far beyond the syllogism. The sense and 
 the perception of those dim analogies — the instant 
 recognition of those identities of work — which connect 
 our own mental operations with the processes which 
 prevail in Nature — this is a sense and a perception 
 founded, like the other, on the natural working or 
 function of a structural apparatus, and the sensitive- 
 ness of that apparatus varies with what we call the 
 inspiration, or the genius, of the man. 
 
 Christian theology had indeed no need to be jealous 
 of philosophy in the hands of Aristotle. His treat- 
 ment of biological problems was not too primitive or 
 too old-fashioned to secure, even in our own day^ the 
 enthusiastic admiration of Cuvier — whose idea of an 
 'explanation' as applied to organic structures, was, as 
 we have seen, precisely that which was the principle 
 of explanation that commended itself to the father of 
 Science who flourished more than 2,000 years ago. 
 In the view of Aristotle the essence of every organic 
 structure was in its function— that is to say, in its 
 purpose in the economy of the creature's life. And 
 this purpose was its final, as distinguished from its 
 proximate, cause. The essence of an eye lay in the 
 function of seeing, or in other words, in the faculty of 
 sight. Since his time it is indeed true that the 
 microscope has revealed in that organ a complexity 
 of structure for the attainment of this end, which,
 
 502 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 more than in any other organic structure, brings its 
 mechanism within the category of measurable units 
 in space and time. And the cause of this com- 
 plexity of structure is the necessity, for the purposes 
 of vision, of such a mechanical adaptation of living 
 tissues as will fit into the composition, and into 
 the velocities, of light. That composition, and those 
 velocities, are so nearly inconceivable to us in the 
 numbers they involve, that they range from four 
 hundred, to eight or nine hundred millions of 
 millions of vibrations in a second of time. These 
 are the numbers which have to be discriminated by 
 an organ, if it be made to distinguish the colours 
 which range from violet to red. The almost infinite 
 fineness of mechanical adjustments which is involved 
 in a structure with such functions, was of course un- 
 known to Aristotle, as it is still but very incompletely 
 known to us. But if he had known all that we now 
 know, and a great deal more, he would have been as 
 far off as ever from any physical explanation of the 
 phenomena of sensation, of organic growth, and of 
 the vital forces under which such tissues are built 
 up in the egg or in the womb. The philosophical 
 generalization of Aristotle would have remained, as it 
 still remains, the only satisfying conception. But this 
 is none other than the old and familiar conception of 
 Hebrew and of Christian theology. It is expressed 
 with all the power and beauty of the sacred writers 
 in the Old Testament in the text from the Hebrew 
 w^riter of Ecclesiastes which was chosen by Locke 
 as the motto of his famous Treatise on the Human
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 503 
 
 Understanding, ' As thou knowest not what is the way 
 of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb 
 of her that is with child : even so thou knowest not 
 the works of God who maketh all ^.' 
 
 In full possession of this philosophy which has thus 
 satisfied the most powerful intellects both of the 
 ancient and of the modern world, the Christian 
 Apostles had no cause to dread the progress of dis- 
 covery, or even of speculation, on the constitution of 
 the Universe. They were confident that it could only 
 fill in, and fill up, here and there, some bits of the 
 all-embracing outline of their own vast conception. In 
 their survey of Nature they saw, as it were, the forests 
 and the mountains, and they were not anxious about the 
 work of those who explored the botany and the rocks. 
 But, besides the spirit of prescient direction under 
 which the Apostles evidently wrote, there was another 
 reason why they should maintain a lofty reserve on the 
 thinkings of philosophy. The school most prevalent 
 in their time — that of the Stoics — had gathered up 
 into itself a strange eclectic combination of ideas from 
 many different quarters, and not a few of these ideas 
 seemed almost as much anticipations of Christian 
 thought, as some physical conceptions struck out by 
 the older thinkers, were curious approximations to 
 the discovered facts of modern physical investigation. 
 We must remember that the writings of Lucretius, 
 of Cicero, of Epictetus, and of Seneca, must have 
 been all familiar in the apostolic age. The two last 
 were strictly contemporaries of St. Paul. Even the 
 
 * Eccles. xi. 5.
 
 504 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 great Epicurean poet had, as we have seen, some 
 splendid intuitions, but the Stoics had many more. 
 In their writings and sayings we may see the high- 
 water level which the ancient philosophies ever 
 reached in what may be called the purely intellectual 
 perception of spiritual truths. It is well known that 
 the discourses of Seneca are full of such strange 
 approximations to the ideas and even to the expres- 
 sions of St. Paul, that it has been supposed that they 
 were personal friends, and that the Roman Stoic took 
 his philosophical inspiration from the great Apostle 
 of the Gentiles. This is a subject of the highest 
 interest in more than one point of view ; and perhaps 
 no contribution to the history of Christian theology 
 has appeared in our times, more full of instruction 
 than the essay in which Bishop Lightfoot has sub- 
 jected the facts of this case to a close and pro- 
 found analysis ^. The result of that analysis is most 
 striking and suggestive. Bishop Lightfoot marshals 
 all the instances of parallelism or coincidence between 
 the thoughts or language of Seneca and those of the 
 Apostle, and, after eliminating much that may be 
 accidental, and much that is superficial and deceptive, 
 there still remain such a number and variety of cases 
 that they demand some general explanation. There 
 would seem to be in the writings of this Roman 
 philosopher some strange echoes even of the Sermon 
 on the Mount ; and this is quite possible, for we 
 must remember that, although it is certain that the 
 Gospels cannot have been published or known before 
 
 * The Epistles of St. Paul. Philippians, Disputation II.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 505 
 
 the death of Seneca, which happened in A.D. 6j, it 
 is not less certain that the sayings of our Lord must 
 have been widely circulated long before they were 
 gathered up and recorded either by St. John, or by 
 the Synoptists, In all cases of similarity, and appa- 
 rent derivation, between writings of the same age, 
 it is often erroneously assumed that there are only 
 two possible explanations — either that one author 
 unconsciously appropriated from the other, or that 
 each similarly appropriated from some third writer 
 who was accessible to both. But there is another 
 explanation which is too often forgotten — which is 
 this — that the third and common source was — not 
 any man or any writer — but simply certain facts 
 and truths of Nature which were detectable as such 
 by the common intellectual and moral faculties of 
 mankind. Plagiarism or derivation of any kind 
 can never be, even presumably, the explanation of 
 such coincidences or parallelisms where the subject 
 matter to which they refer, consists in facts recog- 
 nizable or detectable by the inherent powers of the 
 human mind, when these powers are exercised under 
 training which is exceptionally high. In the purely 
 physical sciences this cause of community of results 
 would be at once recognized as needing no further 
 explanation. Nobody, for example, would think it 
 strange that chemists, working far away from each 
 other, should report the same facts in the same 
 language, as the result of their analysis of any bit 
 of matter. And even in those branches of know- 
 ledge which are not purely physical, as for example
 
 5o6 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 in the laws of Political Economy, the most perfect 
 parallelism between the conceptions and the language 
 of any two writers, could never be safely taken as 
 an indication of plagiarism on the part of either, 
 but only as an important corroboration of truths in- 
 dependently perceived, and independently described, 
 by both. And this is undoubtedly the light in which 
 we must regard most of the coincidences of thought 
 and language which are conspicuous between the 
 writings of Seneca and of St. Paul. Such harmonies 
 are not confined to these two authors. They are 
 to be traced more or less markedly between many of 
 the older utterances of Greek philosophy and those of 
 Hebrew or of Christian theology, — both of them dating 
 from times when communication was impossible. 
 
 It would have been strange indeed if, during so 
 many centuries, the most subtle intellects that have 
 ever been developed in the human race, had been 
 poring over what they could see, or conceive, of the 
 relations between themselves and the universe, without 
 their seeing and identifying at least some of the main 
 facts of these relations. What they saw, and what 
 they did not see — the clearness or the obscurity of the 
 vision — are all phenomena of the highest interest 
 and importance. The school of the later Roman 
 Stoics had every possible advantage. They had 
 behind them all that had been done by the older 
 schools, and they are supposed to have inherited 
 from their founders elements of thought and feeling 
 which were not Greek but Semitic — that is to say, 
 they had some obscure connexion with the race in
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 507 
 
 one branch of which the rehgious knowledge of the 
 Hebrews had been developed. They were free to 
 pick and choose among all the past— to reject what 
 did not commend itself to their judgment as true, 
 and to adopt whatever might be suggested to that 
 earnestness of ethical sentiment which was one of 
 the newest and most striking elements in the 
 character of the school. All this they did. They 
 were essentially eclectic, nor were they by any 
 means unsuccessful in the conceptions which they 
 assimilated from a great variety of sources, and from 
 that most fertile of all sources — their own moral and 
 intellectual nature in its thoughtful observation and ex- 
 perience of the mysteries of life. They did not care 
 for physics. They did not care for formal logic. 
 Their philosophy was essentially a philosophy of in- 
 tuitions, and in this field they did some noble work. 
 On many of the subjects of contemplative speculation 
 which every philosophy must encounter, if it even 
 attempts to deal with the constitution of the universe, 
 the Stoics did undoubtedly hold language which has 
 at least a strange echo of the language of Christian 
 teaching. 
 
 Of these subjects Bishop Lightfoot specifies no less 
 than some seven or eight, each one of which goes 
 deep down into what may be called the philosophy 
 of Christian doctrine, and of all religion. On the 
 goodness of some Thing, or of some Existence 
 which at least they called God : on the filial relation 
 of man to that Existence, on the fatherly chastise- 
 ment of man by God, or in other words, on the
 
 5o8 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 spiritual uses of affliction : on the indwelling of 
 a Divine spirit in man : on the universal dominion 
 of sin : on the office of the conscience : on self- 
 examination and confession : on social duties towards 
 other men : on all of these — the Stoics held lofty 
 sentiments, conveyed in phrases which are curiously 
 near to, and sometimes are identical with, the phrase- 
 ology of the Gospel. Some detailed coincidences 
 with the thought and imagery of the Sermon on the 
 Mount — all taken from the writings of Seneca — are 
 striking from the same point of view, whilst some 
 extend to other recorded sayings of our Lord. With 
 the Epistles of St. Paul many more coincidences 
 are to be found. But the question whether it is 
 possible or impossible that any of these may have 
 been derived from personal knowledge of the Apostle, 
 or personal acquaintance with his language in speech 
 or writing, is a question which has no other interest 
 than that of a purely literary or historical curiosity. 
 Seneca was undoubtedly the minister of Nero during 
 the two years of St. Paul's first captivity in Rome, 
 when the Apostle dwelt, as St. Luke tells us, in his 
 own hired house, and preached continually, ' no man 
 forbidding him ^.' Yet Bishop Lightfoot has shown 
 that the probability of personal intercourse is not 
 very great ; and it is of more interest to observe that 
 the coincidences are not confined to Seneca, but 
 extend to the whole of the Stoic school, and to 
 many of the conceptions which had long constituted 
 its peculiarities in the history of philosophy. The 
 
 ' Acts xxviii. 30, 31.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 509 
 
 harmonies of Christianity with much that had been 
 taught by Cicero, are perhaps even more substantial 
 and remarkable, and Cicero had been dead for a 
 little more than a hundred years before the residence 
 of St. Paul in Rome. It seems to be generally 
 agreed that what is called an 'Oriental element' 
 is distinctly recognizable in the Stoic school, and it is 
 legitimate to surmise that this may have come from 
 the great fountain of religious thought which had 
 been open for centuries in the Judaean hills. 
 
 How far a knowledge of the unique worship and 
 literature of the Jews had spread at all among the 
 surrounding nations, is one of the darkest problems 
 of history. A fact which is mentioned in the Acts 
 of the Apostles would seem to be significant — that 
 an officer in the household of Candace, Queen of 
 the Ethiopians, had come up to worship in the Jewish 
 Temple, and that as he was returning from Jeru- 
 salem to Gaza he was found by St. Peter to be busy 
 reading the Book of the prophet Isaiah ^ It is not 
 easy to conjecture how far such conditions of foreign 
 intercourse may have extended, and it is difficult to 
 conceive how they could have existed at all in 
 such a case as this — mentioned incidentally and 
 without surprise — if they had not been common, or 
 at least by no means unusual. If any of the Hebrew 
 prophets were known in the royal household of 
 Ethiopia, some at least of the Psalms may well 
 have been known also, and if so, then in them there 
 was opened a perfect well-spring of the most highly 
 
 ' Acts viii. 27.
 
 5IO CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 spiritual conceptions on the philosophy of religion. 
 Moreover, if no more than even the merest frag- 
 ments of the Hebrew Scriptures had penetrated so 
 far as the upper regions of the Nile, it is difficult to 
 conceive that they had never reached those far 
 nearer colonies of Greece which were scattered over 
 the shores of Asia, and were fertile in speculative 
 thought. It is not difficult therefore to imagine 
 whence came those so-called Oriental elements in the 
 philosophy of the Stoics which have been generally 
 recognized. The difficulty lies rather in the other 
 direction — in understanding how comparatively weak 
 those elements were, — how broken and disconnected, 
 — how powerless to attract or influence the heart and 
 the lives of men. 
 
 It is here that we come upon three great facts 
 which make us independent of all theories and all 
 conjectures. The first of these facts is this — that the 
 coincidences between Greek philosophy and some at 
 least of the doctrines of Christianity, are an indis- 
 putable proof that those doctrines do concern the 
 same problems which philosophy had of necessity to 
 encounter and to deal with, if it was to give any 
 account of the constitution of the Universe. It 
 must therefore be relevant to compare them. The 
 second fact is — that in the solution of those pro- 
 blems Greek philosophy was a rival of Christianity 
 when it appeared in the world, and, to a very large 
 extent, an enemy. Its hostility was doubtless largely 
 due to ignorance, and to the credence given by almost 
 all educated Greeks and Romans to the vulgarest
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 5II 
 
 falsehoods concerning the practices and behefs of 
 the infant Church. But, from whatever cause, philo- 
 sophy was, on the whole, a rival and an enemy 
 to the Christian solution of the great problems of 
 humanity. The third indisputable fact is — that in 
 this great contest philosophy failed, and Christian 
 theology succeeded — in winning the assent both of 
 the human intellect, and of the human heart. 
 
 The success, too, of Christianity was of a peculiar 
 kind. It was won as it were without the sound of 
 battle. It was not the violent or sudden rush of an 
 opposing army, but a steady overflow, and a final 
 substitution. It had all the characters which mark 
 the operation of natural causes — that is to say, of 
 causes which, being natural, are irresistible and Divine. 
 Philosophy never had been securely seated in any 
 general possession of the ground. Bishop Lightfoot 
 compares its writers to a corps of professors without 
 any classes. It may also be compared to an army 
 all composed of officers, with no rank and file. It 
 never did enlist the people. It took no hold of 
 the general mind, and, at the time when Christ came, 
 it had lost the little vitality it ever possessed, even 
 among a select few. The Roman Stoics were in- 
 deed in some aspects noble and pathetic — but they 
 were languid, impassive, unpractical, and after all, 
 hesitating and doubtful. The Christian Apostles 
 do not seem to have disputed with them at all, 
 but to have passed them by with a glance of 
 compassionate indulgence, and simply to have pro- 
 claimed another philosophy instead. And this
 
 512 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 new philosophy at once began to take hold, and 
 to be accepted — in a manner and in a sense in 
 which no Greek philosophy had ever been accepted. 
 From the first moment, it was what may be called 
 dynamic. It was not received, where it took root at 
 all, with a languid or hesitating acquiescence, but 
 with a passionate fervour of conviction which in- 
 stantly became a power in the world. It is specially 
 recorded of it, and we know it to have been the fact, 
 that on its first promulgation the common people 
 heard it gladly. But from the moment of its pro- 
 clamation in the Gentile world it spread among 
 all classes of society. It captured minds of every 
 calibre. There was no intellect then existing upon 
 earth before which any teaching could fear to plead, 
 that had already conquered the intellect of St. Paul. 
 In the course of a few years it had spread through all 
 the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and had 
 established itself not only in the Capital, but in the 
 Imperial Halls upon the Palatine, Only some twenty- 
 seven years after the Crucifixion St. Paul could write 
 to the converts in Rome that their faith was spoken 
 of throughout the whole world ^. Nothing seemed to 
 stop it. Even the measures taken to arrest its pro- 
 gress only contributed the more to bring out its 
 invincible attractions. St. Paul tells us that his 
 journey as a prisoner to Rome, and his residence 
 there in bonds, had tended powerfully to the further- 
 ance of the Gospel which he preached, and when in 
 writing from Rome to other cities of the Empire he 
 
 ' Rom. i. 8.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 513 
 
 sent messages of salutation from the converts he had 
 made there, he was able to specify 'chiefly they of 
 Caesar's household ^' 
 
 And all this march from victory to victory con- 
 tinued to be made in spite of bloody and repeated 
 persecutions, until, at last, the new philosophy came to 
 be seated securely not only in the Imperial household, 
 but on the Imperial throne. Then, as we all know, 
 the old philosophies roused themselves to make a last 
 stand for life. Protected by a pagan and an apostate 
 Emperor, and fortified by an alliance between some 
 elements borrowed from Hebrew thought, and by 
 other elements taken from the noblest of the older 
 Greek schools, the Platonists, they tried hard to 
 galvanize into activity, again, the old ideas and prac- 
 tices of heathen worship. But all in vain. The new 
 solution which had been presented of the enigmas of 
 life — the new explanation given of the constitution of 
 the Universe — had so completely commended them- 
 selves to the intellects and to the hearts of men, that 
 the old conceptions of the Greek philosophies, one 
 and all, were either rejected as false and irrational, 
 or where partly true, and high, and good, were com- 
 pletely superseded as mere bits and fragments of the 
 larger truths which Christianity had made the common 
 inheritance of mankind. 
 
 All these are incontestable facts in the history of 
 human thought which stand absolutely alone. And 
 if philosophy is of any use at all, it must have some 
 account to give us of the causes of this great crisis, 
 
 ' Phil. iv. 22. 
 Li
 
 514 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 and of this great change, in its own Hfe. It bears 
 upon the face of it all the marks of an effect pro- 
 duced by great natural laws, that is to say, by 
 causes deeply seated in the conceiving mind of man, 
 and in its relations with all the conceivable realities 
 of its own nature, and of the world around it. There 
 must have been something to account for it, on the 
 one hand, in the systems of thought which so 
 withered and died, and, on the other hand, in the 
 new system of thought which so rapidly overwhelmed 
 and superseded them. And this something must be 
 discoverable. Accordingly a recent historian of philo- 
 sophy, who certainly does not approach his subject 
 from a Christian point of view— the late Mr. G. H. 
 Lewes — has summed up the facts in language which 
 identifies the cause of failure in Greek thought 
 with the futility of its attempts to be a philosophy at 
 all. The Sophists and the Sceptics had proved this. 
 Its own dialectics had undermined it, and landed it 
 in universal doubt : ' All the wisdom of the antique 
 world was powerless against the Sceptics. Speculative 
 belief was powerless against the Sceptics. Specu- 
 lative belief was reduced to the most uncertain 
 probability. Faith in philosophic truth was extinct. 
 Faith in human endeavour, that way, was gone. 
 Philosophy was rejected as impossible. . . . The last 
 cry of despair seemed to have been wrung from the 
 baffled thinkers, as they declared their predecessors 
 to have been hopelessly wrong, and declared also that 
 their error was without a remedy. It was indeed 
 a saddening contemplation. The hopes and aspira-
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 515 
 
 tions of SO many incomparable minds thus irrevocably 
 doomed, the struggles of so many men, from Thales 
 to the elaborate systematization of the forms of 
 thought which occupied an Aristotle — the struggles 
 of all these men had ended in scepticism. Little was 
 to be gleaned from the harvest of their endeavours 
 but arguments against the possibility of that Philo- 
 sophy they were so anxious to form. Centuries of 
 thought had not advanced the mind one step nearer 
 to a solution of the problems with which, child-like, 
 it began. It began with a child-like question. It 
 ended with an aged doubt. Not only did it doubt 
 the solutions of the great problem which others had 
 attempted ; it even doubted the possibility of any 
 solution. It was not the doubt which begins, but the 
 doubt which ends inquiry ^.' 
 
 This is indeed a striking picture of the facts, and it 
 is a picture drawn to the very life. But it does not 
 account for them. It enters into no analysis of the 
 causes of a failure so disastrous and so complete. 
 And yet it does indicate, very clearly, where those 
 causes must be sought. It was in the building up 
 of any real philosophy that the Greek schools of 
 thought had broken down. It is not philosophy 
 at all — merely to gather, here and there and every- 
 where, some scattered thoughts which have in them 
 some elements of truth. If this can be called know- 
 ledge in any sense, it is knowledge in the most 
 rudimentary condition. It is the knowledge of the 
 savage, or of the child, who knows a few isolated 
 
 ' Lewes' History of Philosophy, vol. i. pp. 373, 374. 
 L 1 3
 
 5l6 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 facts, or has a few intuitive perceptions, but is wholly 
 unable to think of them in their true connexion. It 
 is the business of philosophy to select, purify, and co- 
 ordinate these isolated truths with each other, and 
 with new truths yet more general and comprehensive, 
 with which they are co-existent, and to which they 
 point and lead the way. Any system of speculative 
 thought which fails to do this, fails to be a philo- 
 sophy at all. Still more must the failure be com- 
 plete, and the breakdown inevitable, when such 
 speculative systems attempt to combine together a 
 few conceptions which are in a measure true, with 
 other conceptions which are immeasurably false. 
 
 Now this, and nothing less than this, was the ineradic- 
 able fault of all the so-called philosophical schools 
 of Greece. In particular, this is the case with that 
 philosophy of the Stoics which may dazzle us some- 
 times with its superficial glitter of ideas and of words 
 more or less akin to that real and true philosophy 
 before which Stoicism faded like a dream. In order 
 to see how vague, incoherent, and, so to speak, inor- 
 ganic is the whole structure of Stoic thought, we have 
 only to examine carefully the writings of those great 
 Stoics who belonged to practically the same age — of 
 Cicero, for example, on the ' Nature of the Gods,' 
 of Epictetus in his Discourses, of Seneca in his 
 Essays, and at a later time of Marcus Aurelius in 
 his Thoughts. Stoicism was nothing if it was not 
 a system of Ethics. Yet it had no doctrine on the 
 nature and sources of obligation, or even on any 
 intelligible standard of morality in conduct. It simply
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 517 
 
 took refuge in such ambiguities of language as ' life 
 according to Nature/ and in other like forms of 
 speech which ring the changes on the same indefinite 
 conception. In this language it failed to take any 
 account of those most obvious facts of human life 
 which indicate a wide departure in the case of men 
 from those conformities with the present, and adapta- 
 tions for the future, which do really give some definite 
 meaning to the idea of Nature as the rule of life 
 among the lower animals. It is a satire indeed on 
 ' life according to Nature ' that Seneca himself, to 
 serve his brutal master Nero, wrote a treatise in 
 defence of matricide. And thus again, as it tried 
 to erect a system of Ethics without the cement of 
 obligation, so also did it play with the language 
 of Theology whilst not upholding the existence of 
 a God. But as if these vacuities in its system were 
 not enough, it was full of one great intellectual 
 vice — that, namely, of a gross materialism. The 
 supreme God of the Stoic had no existence distinct 
 from external Nature. He was identified with fate, 
 with necessity, with Nature as a living whole. A 
 corporeal existence was assigned even to moral ab- 
 stractions, such as courage, cheerfulness, and wisdom. 
 And when in that philosophy spiritual conceptions 
 are dimly seen, and when they borrow some forms of 
 expression from sources which we can only guess, they 
 are divorced from the only signification which makes 
 them valuable. Seneca speaks of a Sacred Spirit, 
 and of our being Members of God. But all this is 
 nothing but changes rung on the one fundamental
 
 5l8 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 conception of our place in external Nature, and 
 of the Universe as one great animal pervaded by- 
 one soul or principle of life. Into man, as fractions 
 of this whole, or as limbs of this body, is transposed 
 a portion of the Universal spirit. All of this was not 
 only useless as the foundations of religion, but it was 
 bad philosophy. It was irrational and incoherent 
 thought. Beautiful in form, touching in sentiment, 
 as many of the fragments were, they were incapable 
 of being compacted together into any connected or 
 solid intellectual structure. No more in ethical than 
 in religious conceptions, was it competent to lay down 
 upon them any safe or strong foundations. ' It ends,' 
 says Mr. Lewes, ' in apathy and egoism. Apathy, 
 indeed, was considered by the Stoics as the highest 
 condition of Humanity, whereas in truth it is the 
 lowest ^.' 
 
 There is no need to wonder why Christianity rapidly 
 superseded such pretended philosophies as these. It 
 did exactly what they had attempted, and had failed, 
 to do. It really was a philosophy, and they were none. 
 It gave an account of the constitution of the Universe 
 and of man's relation to it, which, without professing 
 to be exhaustive, or to satisfy curiosity, was, so far as 
 it was intended to go, sufficient, coherent, and intel- 
 ligible. Its religious teaching was a real system of 
 thought addressing itself vigorously, definitely, and 
 coherently, to all the fundamental problems which had 
 baffled speculation. Conscious of its own indwell- 
 ing strength and power, even in this which is the 
 
 ^ History of Philosophy, vol. i. p. 360.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 519 
 
 lowest aspect of its character, it could thus well afford 
 to maintain towards the old schools of paganism its 
 own lofty attitude of compassionate reserve. Only 
 a few words of not disrespectful reference — only a few 
 notes of warning — escape its lips : ' The world by 
 wisdom knew not God ^.' Whom therefore ye igno- 
 rantly worship as an unknown God, ' Him declare we 
 unto you ^.' Christianity did not stop for a moment 
 to wrangle or dispute, nor did it say one word to 
 disparage or discourage the application of reason 
 to the systematic search for any kind of truth. It 
 glanced indeed at the ' oppositions of science,' ' but,' it 
 instantly added, 'falsely so called ^' Committing itself 
 to no propositions that could be disproved in the 
 progress of physical discovery, it poured forth utter- 
 ance after utterance on the facts and laws which are 
 the basis of all spiritual conceptions — the underlying 
 realities of Nature. For these utterances it challenged 
 — and awaited — the ceaseless corroborations of accu- 
 rate observation and experience both in the external 
 and internal world. And among these corroborations 
 it reckoned and claimed every idea of natural good- 
 ness which had adorned literature or life among the 
 heathen nations, and every grain of truth that had 
 rewarded the excursions of their speculative thought. 
 It not only adopted, but positively relied on, every- 
 thing amongst them which was 'excellent and of 
 good report.' It was confident that in its own march 
 through time, all these elements would fall into line 
 behind it, and would be found to be nothing but 
 
 ' I Cor. i. 21. ^ Acts xvii. 23. ^ i Tim. vi. 20.
 
 520 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 subordinate and fractional parts of its own Divine 
 philosophy. 
 
 This is the secret of one feature in the sacred 
 writings, both of the Old and the New Testament, 
 which distinguishes them from all other writings. 
 That feature is their majesty — their imperial tone. 
 It disappears absolutely with the Apostles. None of 
 the so-called Apostolic Fathers possess it even in the 
 least degree. Good and edifying in various degrees 
 they may be, but they are often childish and fanciful. 
 Not even when we come to the great names of Origen 
 and Augustine does this majesty reappear. It has 
 a purely Divine source. It was at once noticed in the 
 discourses of Christ by the contemporaries who heard 
 Him, that ' He taught them as one having authority, 
 and not as the Scribes.' There is in His words, and 
 in the farther development of them by His Apostles 
 and evangelists, no sound of disputation — no breath of 
 mere polemics. The solitary grandeur of the general 
 effect is unmistakable, and although familiarity and 
 carelessness are apt to obscure that effect with us, we 
 may be sure that it was — or rather that it indicated — 
 the most deep-seated cause of the resistless progress 
 of Christianity in the world, as well of its tenacious 
 vitality in our own day. 
 
 When we try to analyze wherein that atmosphere 
 of authority and of majesty consists, we shall find 
 that it is largely traceable to its handling of the 
 conception of Law as — when properly understood — 
 the highest expression of the Supreme Agency in 
 Nature. What that agency is, and what are our
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 52I 
 
 own relations to it, are the ultimate questions of all 
 speculative inquiry, and it is on those questions that 
 Christianity has established a system of thought 
 which, whilst it reaches into the highest regions of 
 human aspiration, has always its feet firmly planted 
 on the common and solid ground of ascertainable fact 
 and of corresponding law. It is this feature in its 
 teaching to which the present volume has been de- 
 voted. But many volumes would not exhaust the 
 subject, and no man who has entered at all upon 
 this analysis can fail to have seen innumerable avenues 
 of suggestion opening out on every side of him, but 
 into which he has had no time to enter. Before closing 
 these pages, however, it may be well to illustrate the 
 general conception they are intended to establish, by 
 fixing our attention on certain historical facts con- 
 nected with the memorable epoch which we have 
 been last considering. 
 
 It is not easy to sound the depths of uneasiness — of 
 dissatisfaction — and even of distress, upon religious 
 questions, which affected the minds of all thinking 
 men at the time of our Lord's birth, and for many 
 years after His crucifixion. Notwithstanding the com- 
 plete failure of the Greek schools to satisfy the 
 demands of either philosophy or religion, men would 
 continue to argue and to speculate as before, and the 
 revival of Stoicism in Rome, as well as the appearance 
 of the great poem of Lucretius, representing the 
 Epicurean school, were striking proofs of an undying 
 interest in the questions they discussed. It has been 
 said that the destruction of the public liberties of the
 
 522 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 Roman people, and their subjection under a military 
 despotism, turned, and almost compelled, educated 
 men into the paths of speculation. But this is a very- 
 inadequate explanation of the facts. Lucretius does 
 not seem to have belonged to the class of politicians, 
 and Cicero, who did belong to them, was immersed 
 in political action to nearly the end of his days. 
 Seneca was not only a politician, but his career was 
 most successful for a like proportion of his life, having 
 been first the tutor, and then the all-powerful minister, 
 of Nero for many years. Epictetus was a slave, and 
 lost nothing by political changes. It cannot have 
 been an enforced banishment from public life that 
 drove any of these men into the lines of thought in 
 which they worked so laboriously. It can have been 
 nothing but the universal and pressing interest of 
 the subject on which they wrote. There must have 
 been, moreover, a large reading public to whom their 
 writings or their discourses were addressed. And 
 yet it is certain that all this widespread interest in, 
 and desire for, spiritual knowledge, found nothing to 
 reward, far less to satisfy it, in the greatest writers 
 of the past, or of that time. It was impossible to 
 be carried away by the enthusiasm of Lucretius in 
 favour of the doctrine that the law of Death was 
 the only law affecting the human soul that was indeed 
 immortal and eternal. It was equally impossible to 
 resist the rational and deserved attacks made both 
 by Lucretius the Epicurean, and by Cicero the 
 Stoic, on the whole system of popular worship, and 
 on the popular conceptions as to the nature of the
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 523 
 
 gods. Yet, again, it was impossible to be satisfied 
 with the fact that neither of these writers — represent- 
 ing as they did the only two philosophies which 
 were really alive at that time— offered any sub- 
 stitute whatever as objects of belief, or of adora- 
 tion, or still less, as objects of love. To all earnest 
 minds with strong religious instincts, the situation 
 must have been intolerable. It must have been 
 literally the position of men 'having no hope, and 
 without God in the world.' Personal immortality 
 was denounced by one school as the most pestilent 
 of all ideas, whilst by the other school it was passed 
 by as of little or no account. Morality was founded 
 on no theory or principle of obligation ; and piety 
 was recommended without any definite conception of 
 the existence or of the character of the gods. There 
 was absolutely nothing to satisfy the intellect, and 
 less than nothing to engage the heart. 
 
 Let us now try to imagine the effect, in this con- 
 dition of things, of the arrival in Rome of such a 
 document as the Letter of St. Paul, which was sent 
 to the Christian converts there some time during the 
 first five years of the reign of Nero ^. Doubtless it 
 was copied and widely circulated among those whose 
 intellects had been puzzled by the gross materialism 
 of Lucretius, or by the occasionally noble, but in- 
 consequent, reasonings of Cicero and Seneca. In 
 order to realize the effect of such a new teaching, let 
 any man sit down to that Epistle and read it through 
 
 ' Bishop Lightfoot gives the date as a. d. 58. Nero had ascended 
 the Imperial throne in a. d, 54 Biblical Essays, p. 222).
 
 524 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 — carefully and consecutively — bearing in his memory 
 what the mental condition of all thinkers must have 
 been at that time. He will then perhaps see and feel 
 that, both morally and intellectually, it must have 
 been to them nothing less than a new emotion. The 
 majesty of tone is unmistakable. It is the tone of 
 a writer handling certainties and not opinions. It 
 dealt with facts, not with speculations. Without a 
 whisper of mere debate, it is nevertheless full of 
 argument. There is no trace of any plan of formal 
 propositions, and yet it is thoroughly systematic. It 
 begins with theology, and it ends with ethics. That 
 is to say, it sets forth, first and foremost, the character 
 and attributes of the Being to whom perfect obedi- 
 ence would be, of necessity, a perfect righteousness. 
 It then goes on to indicate the dispositions, the 
 motives, and the conduct, in which such righteousness 
 must consist. Its theology begins and ends with 
 Christ as a Personal Incarnation of the Godhead. It 
 refers to that incarnation as promised by the prophets. 
 In the very first sentence it assumes and announces 
 this truth as resting on both internal and external 
 evidence — on the spirit of holiness in His life and 
 teaching, and on the fact of His resurrection from 
 the dead. In both of these ways — on both of these 
 kinds of evidence — He had been declared ' to be the 
 Son of God with power ^.' The Letter appeals freely to 
 the light of Nature, but it treats that light as a part 
 of the light of God. It ascribes to a wilful departure 
 from that natural light, the hideous vices which 
 
 * Rom. i. 1-3.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 525 
 
 prevailed in the heathen world, and which had re- 
 duced man to a level far lower than that of any of the 
 beasts ^. It unfolds the dealings of God with men in 
 the history of the Jews, and it explains the connexion 
 between this preparatory selection of one people, and 
 the light which was to shine upon all nations. Instead 
 of singing the praises of death— of ' immortal death' 
 as the best gift that man could hope for — it held up 
 the example and the teaching of One who was both 
 Human and Divine, and who proclaimed as His 
 mission, ' I am come that they might have life, and 
 that they might have it more abundantly^.' Then 
 this new philosophy, whilst dwelling much on the 
 corruption of man as an actual and a patent fact, 
 dwelt not less emphatically on his Divine origin — on 
 the immense capacities of his nature— and on the 
 consequent possibility of an immeasurable elevation. 
 In speaking of a Man as ' the Son of God with power,' 
 it specially meant, and dwelt upon, His power to 
 make His human brethren partakers in that dignity as 
 ' heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ ^' It spoke 
 of the possibility of the nearest conceivable relations 
 with the Deity becoming the direct subject of human 
 consciousness— the Divine Spirit 'bearing witness 
 with our spirit ' to their reality and truth K Nor could 
 an educated Roman of that time fail to be struck 
 with the fact that the great attribute of benevolence 
 which — as his illustrious countryman Cicero had lately 
 argued — must be conceived to be an attribute of the 
 
 ^ Rom. i. 20 23. ^ John x. 10. 
 
 ^ Rom. viii. 14-17. * Rom viii. 16.
 
 526 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 Godhead ^, was emphatically proclaimed to be so, as 
 a fact, in this Letter of St. Paul. It is in this declara- 
 tion that every reader of it must have seen and felt the 
 highest aims of the old philosophy rising at last into 
 actual attainment in the knowledge of a new religion. 
 A conception and belief which was obviously one of 
 supreme importance in philosophy, was no longer 
 pleaded for as a conception resting only on the cold 
 inferences of abstract argument, but a conception 
 announced as the result of absolute knowledge, and 
 embraced by all the deepest convictions of the soul. 
 To the writer of this Letter it was a matter of per- 
 sonal knowledge and experience — something of which 
 he was as sure as of his own existence. 
 
 Many passages in the Letter which specially related 
 to Jewish history and belief, may indeed have been 
 with difficulty followed by a Roman, and some of 
 them may still be obscure to us. But the general 
 drift and result of Paul's argument was as clear as 
 day. It was that all the declarations and promises of 
 favour which had ever been addressed to Jews, had 
 now become the common inheritance of all nations 
 on certain natural and reasonable conditions of obedi- 
 ence and of faith. Such words as ' I have loved thee 
 with an everlasting love^,' and a thousand other 
 utterances of the same kind addressed to Israel by 
 the prophets, were now proclaimed as words applic- 
 able to the whole human race. Those pretensions to 
 exclusive Divine favour which must have seemed so 
 offensive and irrational to nations far greater in power 
 
 * De Naturd Deot-utn, xliii. ^ Jer. xxxi. 3.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 527 
 
 and in culture than the Jews, were, in this Letter, seen 
 to be absolutely abandoned. The love proclaimed as 
 the highest attribute of the Father was proclaimed 
 to be a universal love ; and although this was, for 
 a time, so inconceivable to Jews that it was but slowly 
 accepted by the Apostles themselves — was actually 
 the cause of serious divisions among them — and was 
 reckoned even by Paul himself as a part of ' the great 
 mystery of godliness ^ ' — it must have been an im- 
 mense attraction to every man who was imbued with 
 the true spirit of philosophy. All the schools could 
 appreciate the authoritative declaration that ' there is 
 no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the 
 same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon 
 Him 2.' The intense conviction on the reality of 
 this Divine love which animated the writer of the 
 Letter to Rome, could not fail to be not only striking 
 but contagious. In a world so unhappy as the 
 Roman world then was — so distracted by hopeless 
 doubts, and so dominated by the spectacle of supreme 
 power in the hands of men supremely wicked, cruel, 
 and licentious — it must have been an unspeakable com- 
 fort and revelation to read the triumphant certainties 
 of Paul : — ' Who shall separate us from the love of 
 Christ ? . . . I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, 
 nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
 present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
 nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us 
 from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord ^' ' I am persuaded ' — this is what the world 
 
 * I Tim. iii. 16. ^ Rom x. 12. ' Rom. viii. 35 39.
 
 528 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 had SO long wanted, and had failed in getting — some 
 thing to be sure of — something to rest upon with the 
 full assurance of an absolute conviction. Philosophy- 
 had not attained it. Not in ' that way,' as Mr. Lewes 
 says, could it possibly be attained. But now the Jews 
 and Romans who read the Letter of St. Paul, read 
 the words of a man who was in full possession of it, 
 and could expound with extraordinary power the 
 facts and laws on which his certainties were founded. 
 This was, literally, the ' Desire of all Nations,' and 
 the Letter declared how that Desire had, indeed, 
 come. 
 
 Then, following strictly as a complement to this 
 theology, came, in the same Letter, the splendid 
 pages on the ethics of the new religion which, in our 
 divisions of it, begin with the twelfth chapter. As if 
 to mark their rational and necessary connexion with 
 those facts concerning the Divine Nature which had 
 been before set forth, these pages began with the 
 word ' therefore ' — indicative of logical results — and 
 proceed to give a summary of those principles of 
 conduct which flow from one self-evident moral law : 
 ' I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of 
 God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, 
 holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable 
 service ^' Upon this firm foundation of a principle 
 commending itself at once to the conscience and to 
 the intellect, the Letter proceeded to enumerate a 
 series of precepts in respect to that ' reasonable service' 
 — precepts so pure, so penetrating, so spiritual, and 
 
 ^ Rom. xii. i.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 529 
 
 yet SO practical as a guide in all the difficulties and 
 trials of life, that no Roman of that time could read 
 them without being filled with a sense, at once, of their 
 completeness, and of their beneficence. If, only, the 
 society in which he lived could be brought under 
 their power, he must have felt that the world would 
 be changed indeed. They all rested on a spiritual 
 law which was laid down as a universal truth, that 
 ' to be carnally minded is death ; but to be spiritually 
 minded is life and peace ^.' Here, beyond all question, 
 was a new system of thought, having all the power 
 of an organic structure, giving a rational explanation of 
 the facts of Nature, and laying a solid foundation for 
 hopeful exertion in the service of an eternal kingdom 
 of righteousness and truth. It accounted for all that 
 was best in previous speculative thought. It put, 
 as it were, a keystone into all the broken arches of 
 philosophy. It revealed them as exactly what they 
 were — genuine, but fragmentary, products of true 
 knowledge, only needing some higher knowledge to 
 complete them. 
 
 The rapid spread of Christianity was not only 
 natural but inevitable under such conditions. And 
 then came, following his Letter, the first personal 
 visit of St. Paul to Rome, about two years later, 
 in the year A. D. 60. He came indeed as a prisoner 
 in the capacity of an appellant to the courts of 
 Caesar. But neither the popular religion, nor the 
 popular philosophy, had then taken any serious alarm 
 on the subject of the new sect, and Paul was allowed 
 
 ^ Rom. viii. 6. 
 
 M m
 
 530 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 to lodge in his own hired house, and to teach and to 
 preach during ' two whole years, no man forbidding 
 him.' We have many specimens of Paul's epistolary 
 style, and we have a few of his speeches. But except 
 some passing anecdotes in the Acts, we have no report 
 of his argumentative and persuasive conversations. It 
 is impossible to doubt, however, that in them many 
 Romans must have heard, for the first time, many of 
 those sayings of Christ himself which came to be 
 recorded afterwards in the Gospels, especially by 
 St. John. It has often been observed, and it is indeed 
 a conspicuous fact, that in his writings St. Paul does 
 not dwell on any of the incidents of his Master's 
 earthly life and ministry. The omission is undoubtedly 
 due to the fact that he was not himself an eye-witness 
 of those incidents, and that he knew how others, 
 better qualified, were busy in recording all that was 
 essential. But in his conversations during his mis- 
 sionary journeyS; it is not probable that he can have 
 abstained from telling those who came to hear him, 
 many of the details which he had himself just come 
 from hearing, at Jerusalem, from the mouth of St. John, 
 St. Peter, and from ' James, the Lord's brother.' One 
 saying of our Lord — how 'it is more blessed to give 
 than to receive^' — not recorded elsewhere, has actually 
 been preserved by St. Paul, who had probably heard 
 it in this way. But many other such anecdotes must 
 have added a powerful element to the vivid impres- 
 sion of historical reality, and of personal conviction, 
 which we all derive from the writings of this great 
 
 ^ Acts XX 35.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 53J 
 
 Apostle, and which must have been still more impres- 
 sive to those who listened to his spoken addresses. We 
 may be sure how he dwelt on the certainty of Christ's 
 resurrection, because in his writings he specially re- 
 counts the number of his Master's appearances, and 
 the number of persons who were witnesses of them — 
 in which number he includes himself, as ' one born out 
 of due time ^.' The vision, and the Voice on the way 
 to Damascus, had been the overpowering evidence 
 which had changed his own life. Here was a man of 
 high education — of brilliant powers — of a masculine 
 understanding — and to whom the new religion and the 
 new philosophy had at first appeared so false and so 
 incredible, that he had ranged himself amongst the 
 keenest of its persecutors, — here he was, subdued by 
 its power, animated by the most intense and self- 
 sacrificing love towards its Founder, and declaring to 
 all men, 'I know in whom I have believed^.' All 
 these circumstances must have confirmed the feeling 
 and the conviction which his Letter had produced, 
 that the Christian faith was a revelation of facts, and 
 of related truths, by which men could live, and for 
 which they might well be willing to die. The majesty 
 of its utterances was due to the grandeur, beauty, 
 and self-evidence, both of its intellectual, and of its 
 ethical, conceptions. Let us look for a moment, in 
 conclusion, at some of these, considered mainly in the 
 light of solutions offered for the great problems of 
 life and thought which were the standing problems 
 of philosophy. 
 
 ' I Cor. XV. 58 2 2 Tim. i. 12. 
 
 M m 2
 
 532 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 On the nature of the Godhead the authoritative 
 announcement of Christian philosophy is as simple 
 as the subject admits of, and the consequential law 
 attached to it has all the character of a self-evident 
 and a necessary truth. ' God is a Spirit ; and they 
 that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in 
 truth ^.' The implications involved in this doctrine 
 are inexhaustible in extent. It implies a Personal 
 God, with personal relations to man : not an idol of 
 abstracting thought such as the ' Absolute,' or the 
 ' Infinite,' or the ' Unconditioned,' but, on the con- 
 trary, a Being with a character and attributes intel- 
 ligible to us. On the nature of those attributes it 
 proclaims, especially, the primary characteristics of 
 Righteousness and Love. God is Love — this is the 
 emphatic summary of St. John. On the relation 
 between the world of phenomena and the causal 
 realities which, instinctively, we feel must lie behind 
 them, the authoritative announcement is — as a uni- 
 versal truth — that ^ the things which are seen are tem- 
 poral, but the things which are not seen are eternal ^.' 
 All our experience and observation of Nature are 
 a continual corroboration of this law. Nothing that 
 is visible is permanent ; and therefore the spiritual 
 'seeing of Him who is invisible^' must be the only 
 hope of seeing that which can endure. On the relation 
 between man and God, the authoritative announce- 
 ments in Christian theology are innumerable, all con- 
 curring in a connexion of derivation or Sonship, on 
 the one hand, and of Fatherhood, on the other. On 
 
 ^ John iv. 24. ^ 2 Cor. iv. 18. ^ Heb. xi. 27.
 
 _X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 533 
 
 the corruption and miseries of man, the assertion of 
 fact is, that it arose from, and consists in, the rebellion 
 of a will which was free, and on the freedom of which 
 the possibility of virtue depends, as well as the possi- 
 bility of sin. On the available means of recovery, 
 it relies on a reunion of the human and Divine in 
 One, who, in a special sense, united the two natures, 
 and the belief in, and acceptance of whom, would 
 satisfy conditions which, however partially explained, 
 are at least always represented as conditions depend- 
 ing on spiritual laws of insuperable authority. On 
 the desperate and inborn antagonism which has come 
 to be established between the revolted children of 
 men and the Supreme Will, it declares as a fact and 
 as in the nature of a law, that ' the carnal mind is 
 enmity against God, and is not subject to the law of 
 God, neither indeed can be ^.' On the difficulty, in 
 speculative thought, how a being in such a corrupted 
 condition, can even begin to return to the paths leading 
 to the highest ends of its own existence, we have the 
 countervailing declarations, repeated in many forms, 
 that man was made in the Creator's image, and after 
 His likeness — that the Divine Spirit has never ceased 
 to strive with men — that He has never left Himself 
 without a witness in natural perceptions of moral 
 obligation, and in some spiritual intuitions, which are 
 at least enough to start from, in higher and higher 
 recognitions of the truth. It asserts, moreover, as a 
 fact and as a law, that such higher recognitions come 
 naturally when men walk steadily, and consciously, in 
 
 * Rom. viii. 7.
 
 534 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 such light as they possess. This law of increasing 
 corroboration, and of wider enlightenment, coming 
 from a spirit of obedience, and from a walk in the 
 path of known duty, is expressly laid down as a law 
 in the New Testament, as it had been heralded with 
 characteristic power and beauty in the Psalms : ' To 
 him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show 
 the kingdom of God ^ ; ' and again, ' Light is sown for 
 the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart ^.' 
 Throughout both the Old and the New Testament 
 this habit of referring all the beliefs, as well as all 
 the precepts and principles of life and conduct, to 
 known and intelligible laws, both in the physical and 
 in the spiritual world, is a habit which comes out 
 more and more distinctly the more we analyze the 
 sources of their majesty and power. Our Lord's 
 parables are full of this idea, and many of them are 
 wholly based upon it. The commonest phenomena of 
 external Nature, and the most ordinary transactions 
 of human life, are the sources of illustration continu- 
 ally taken. Above all, the stress laid by the sacred 
 writings on historical events, and the light in which 
 they regard them as the result of causes under the 
 supreme guidance of intention and of a righteous 
 will, is full of the same system of thought. Even 
 the Resurrection of Christ, one of the most central 
 facts in Christian theology, although narrated as a 
 fact, and expressed as such by the recapitulation 
 of many ' infallible proofs ^,' is also represented as 
 a result of causes which could have had no other 
 
 ' Ps. 1. 23. ^ Ps. xlvii. II. 3 Acts i. 3.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 535 
 
 issue. Christ is said to have vanquished death be- 
 cause ' it was not possible that He should be holden 
 of it ^.' Although we cannot know all that was meant, 
 or that is involved in this impossibility, it is at least 
 instructive to note the assertion of it, and to think 
 that our modern notion of the indestructibility of 
 matter, may not be unconnected with the higher idea 
 of the indestructibility of mind as the most necessary, 
 and the most individual, of all existences. We know, 
 at least, that the Resurrection of Christ was the special 
 event which is described as being inseparably con- 
 nected with the resurrection of His disciples — as 
 having, for them, ' brought life and immortality to 
 light ^,' and as having constituted our Lord ' the first- 
 fruits of them that slept ^.' 
 
 Nor is it less important to note that not only the 
 past history and the actual teaching of Christianity, 
 were thus continually referred to the working of eternal 
 laws, but especially, also, the whole of its prospects 
 and destiny in the future. For just as Christ pre- 
 dicted that if He were ' lifted up from the earth *,' 
 His death would have such an attractive power that, 
 at last, He would draw all men unto Him, so did His 
 Apostle rest his confidence in his Master's final 
 triumph, on that inherent and Divine power by which 
 'He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself^.' 
 On the other hand, St. Paul did not underrate the 
 difficulties, both external or internal, against which 
 Christianity had to struggle. He declared that it was 
 
 ' Acts ii. 24. ^ 2 Tim. i. 10. ^ 1 Cor. xv. 20. 
 
 * John xii. 32. '' Phil. iii. 21.
 
 536 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 a struggle not against mere ' flesh and blood, but 
 against principalities, against powers, against the 
 rulers of the darkness of the world, against spiritual 
 wickedness in high places ^.' But he placed his con- 
 fidence of ultimate victory on the countervailing power 
 which lay in the very nature of the truths contained 
 in the theology, and in the philosophy, of Christ. 
 These he called ' the weapons of our warfare,' and 
 for them he made the glorious claim that they were 
 no mere mechanical or fleshly weapons, but weapons 
 of a spiritual kind, and that by virtue of spiritual laws 
 they would be 'mighty through God to the pulling 
 down of strong holds ; casting down imaginations, 
 and every high thing that exalteth itself against the 
 knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every 
 thought to the obedience of Christ ^.' 
 
 There is no possibility of mistaking the spirit, and 
 the significance, of this solemn and triumphant cer- 
 titude. It is no reliance on any mere arbitrary or 
 unreasoning authority. It is a reliance based on the 
 natural facts, and on the natural laws, of an ever- 
 lasting kingdom. It is an assurance that these facts 
 and laws will, at last, make good their own dominion 
 over the receptive, and subordinate, minds and hearts 
 of men. It did not represent this consummation as 
 immediate, or even as very near : ' But now we see 
 not yet all things put under Him ".' And yet the 
 power on which the assurance rests, has been proved, 
 and is as visibly at work as ever. It has already been 
 justified by the disappearance of all the philosophies 
 
 ' Eph. vi. 12. - a Cor. x. 4, 5. '■' Heb. ii. 8.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 537 
 
 which contested the victory with Christian theology 
 at the time when these words were spoken. It has 
 been justified by the establishment of that theology 
 over a large and ever-increasing portion of the globe. 
 It has been justified, perhaps even more, by its power 
 over the many individual souls who in all past ages 
 have exhibited to the world something at least ap- 
 proaching to the complete dominion which it predicts. 
 For in them, especially, the quality of its products 
 has been seen. From them we can all estimate what 
 the result would be if these comparatively few ex- 
 amples could be made to embrace mankind. 
 
 Nor is it less striking to observe that the theology 
 and the philosophy of Christ have absolutely no rival 
 now in the fields of thought. If Christian theology be 
 not true, there is assuredly nothing to take its place, 
 either in philosophy or in religion. There is no other 
 name given under heaven whereby we may be saved 
 from the blankness of universal scepticism. In this 
 respect there is a sharp — almost a violent — contrast 
 between the physical sciences, in which human pro- 
 gress has been immense, and what is called philo- 
 sophy, in which it may almost be said with truth 
 that there has been no progress at all. For more 
 than 250 years, counting from Descartes to the pre- 
 sent time, a series of great modern thinkers have 
 again and again attacked the same eternal problems, 
 with an interest which never — and with a success 
 which always — fails. Not one of them has succeeded 
 in raising any system of thought which is satisfying, 
 consistent, or even, as a whole, intelligible. Three
 
 538 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 words — three true though cruel words — sum up the 
 general result of all of them — ' Hitherto in vain.' 
 These are the words — this is the verdict — not of any 
 outside critic or historian, but of one of the very- 
 greatest of those thinkers himself. And he recorded 
 it when considerably more than half of these 250 
 years had already expired. They are the last words 
 of the great and laborious work of Emanuel Kant, 
 published in 1782. Of course he did not mean to 
 apply those words to his own philosophy. But 
 assuredly we may now do so. He did apply them to 
 all his predecessors. And when we remember the 
 names of these, we can judge what a sweep is made 
 by the words ' hitherto in vain.' Putting aside Lord 
 Bacon as belonging to another category, we find that 
 they would include the philosophies of Descartes, of 
 Leibnitz, of Spinoza, of Locke, of Berkeley, of Butler, 
 and of Hume. The same verdict must now be passed 
 upon Kant himself, and upon all the lesser men who 
 have succeeded him. Kant, like all the rest, had 
 a wonderful confidence in his own course of dialectic. 
 He called it, indeed, modestly, a ' footpath.' But he 
 invited all men to walk on it with him until it should 
 become a 'high road,' and he expressed his confidence 
 that if this were done, then, even before the close of 
 the century — that was, before eighteen years — men 
 would be able to achieve what had been so long 
 sought in vain — a satisfying solution of the problems 
 which had baffled all before him. This expectation 
 has vanished like a dream. Kant has been called, 
 not a master-builder, but 'a shatterer' — a philo-
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 539 
 
 sopher who pulled down, but did little indeed to 
 reconstruct. 
 
 And yet it would be ungrateful to deny that the 
 metaphysicians have been of use. Like the ancient 
 classical philosophers, each one of them has seen 
 some bit or fragment of truth which he has done 
 something to clear up, but which he has generally, also, 
 ridden to the death. Each one of them has assailed 
 the system of a precursor, and generally with at least 
 some success. On the whole, the metaphysical attacks 
 on the strongholds of Scepticism, have been far more 
 successful than the like attacks on the foundations 
 of Belief Hume seemed to have a shortlived triumph. 
 But he did not himself believe in his own results, and 
 the fallacies of his system were speedily exposed. 
 Thus the best thing the metaphysicians have done, 
 has been to refute each other.. Most of them have 
 done good service in exposing some egregious fallacy, 
 or omission, of their predecessors. And we must 
 always recollect that this may be a service of the 
 highest kind, because the detection and exposure of 
 an error, may be, and generally is, the discovery or 
 the vindication of a truth. There are many indica- 
 tions that Kant saw, and at moments deeply felt, 
 the unsatisfactory nature of his own logomachies. In 
 particular there is a noble passage towards the end 
 of his Critique in which he testifies to convictions 
 higher than those for which his own philosophy made 
 any adequate provision : ' Reason,' he says, ' constantly 
 strengthened by the powerful arguments that come 
 to hand by themselves, though no doubt they are
 
 540 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [cH. 
 
 empirical only, cannot be discouraged by any doubts 
 of subtle and abstract speculation. Roused from 
 every inquisitive indecision, as from a dream, by one 
 glance at the wonders of Nature and the majesty 
 of the Cosmos, reason soars from height to height till 
 it reaches the highest, from the conditioned to con- 
 ditions, till it reaches the supreme and unconditioned 
 Author of all ^.' ' Inquisitive indecision ' is an ex- 
 cellent phrase descriptive of the quality of his own 
 dialectical results. A dream is a true image of many 
 intellectual exercitations which seem real for a 
 moment. But this passage amounts, in fact, to a great 
 confession of the incompetence of metaphysics, and 
 of so-called philosophy, to do the work which it has 
 so often tried to do. It not only has done nothing to 
 satisfy the affections, or the spiritual desires of men, 
 but it has done nothing to satisfy the intellect. It 
 leaves the philosophy of Hebrew and of Christian 
 theologies, unchallenged and alone. That philosophy 
 alone can say, and it has said to men, as the result of 
 its teaching and beliefs, 'Wherefore — lift up the hands 
 that hang down, and the feeble knees ^.' 
 
 The still more recent, and the yet struggling philo- 
 sophies which purport to be founded on the physical 
 sciences, are obviously powerless for any constructive 
 purpose. It is, indeed, only doing them justice to 
 admit that they do not pretend to be in any other 
 condition. They are generally content with the title 
 of Agnostic. Their position is even worse than this, 
 
 ' Critique of Pure Reason (translation by Professor Max Muller), 
 vol. ii. pp. 535, 536. 2 Heb. xii. 12.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 54I 
 
 for, as it has been well observed by a distinguished 
 living critic^, if the Latin equivalent for this word, 
 Agnostic, were substituted for the Greek, it would 
 better describe the real position of the negative school 
 of thought. ' Ignoramus ' is the correct word to apply 
 to every system of reasoning which — as we have 
 before seen — wilfully and systematically repudiates, 
 or suppresses, the self-evident conceptions that rise, 
 unbidden, through the continual and irrepressible 
 evidences of human speech. The expedients resorted 
 to in defence of this suppression, cannot be philo- 
 sophically defended. In like manner, the dividing of 
 the Universe into two sharply contrasted regions — 
 one of them inside of Nature and the other some- 
 where above, but outside of it — is an operation of 
 the intellect which is thoroughly unreal and fallacious. 
 Then again, that no knowledge can be trustworthy 
 unless it is complete, is a doctrine rotten to the core. 
 If it were true, then all knowledge would be im- 
 possible, and no reasoning would be valid, because 
 there is absolutely nothing in the world of which our 
 knowledge is complete. All the other — even the most 
 plausible — catchwords of the Philosophy of Nescience, 
 are honeycombed with similar fallacies. That the 
 Finite cannot understand the Infinite, is one of these. 
 In a sense, undoubtedly, man is finite, but in a fuller 
 sense, he not only understands the Infinite, but is 
 utterly unable to understand the opposite. The In- 
 finitudes of Space and Time are conceptions which 
 
 1 Religious Problems of the Nineteenth Century, by Aubrey de Vere, 
 p. 44.
 
 542 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 belong to our very selves. The moments which we 
 call Time are — so far as the bare idea of duration 
 is concerned — nothing but samples of Eternity, and 
 we cannot even think of them in any other light. 
 All the great abstract ideas which are the warp and 
 woof of our ethical and intellectual perceptions, are, 
 without exception, in our apprehension of them, free 
 from the limitations which belong to Place and Time. 
 And so, again, the almost universal tendency in 
 modern philosophies to attribute to matter the func- 
 tions and activities of mind, is a reversion to the 
 worst characteristics of the worst of the old pagan 
 schools. The oscillations which their language be- 
 trays between a reliance on mere Fortuity, and a 
 despairing resort to Mechanical Necessity, are a sure 
 indication of conceptions which are essentially un- 
 natural, and as such are not less essentially irrational. 
 And so, again, philosophies which pretend to be 
 based on theories of Evolution, but which give no 
 account of the previous Involution which must have 
 gone before, are philosophies which stand self-con- 
 demned, as of necessity founded on less than half a 
 truth. Nothing can ever be developed that has not 
 first been enveloped — in a germ. From all these subtle 
 but pervading sources of fallacy the philosophy of 
 Christian theology is free. It everywhere rests on 
 Nature as a word for one all-pervading kingdom, in 
 which the reign of righteousness and truth will pre- 
 vail at last, and in which that triumph is, even now, 
 being visibly prepared. It uniformly condemns every 
 artificial separation of the Here and the Hereafter.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 543 
 
 And in this doctrine even the physical sciences are 
 coming as supporting witnesses into court. Perhaps 
 the most striking discovery of modern times, is that 
 every physical element existing in the remotest re- 
 gions of the visible universe, is to be found here also 
 — in our own little corner of it. If ever there was 
 a parable, this is surely one. What is true of the 
 material, may well be true, also, of the spiritual, 
 world. What is true here, and now, may well be 
 true elsewhere and for ever. It impresses on us, as 
 nothing else can do, the unity of the system under 
 which we live. It seems most suggestive of the 
 idea that everything here may well survive — ex- 
 cepting, only, those violations of eternal law which 
 are the essence of what we know as Sin. It is an 
 idea in perfect harmony with the theology of Christ, 
 — with the doctrine that the Kingdom of Heaven is 
 within us, — that here, and not elsewhere, all our facul- 
 ties have their appointed work to do, in one service — 
 which will be found to have been an all-embracing 
 service, at the last. 
 
 But perhaps the greatest testimony of all to the 
 supreme rank of Christian Belief as a system of philo- 
 sophy, is in its evidently unexhausted reserve of 
 power. The great things it has accomplished in the 
 reform and elevation of human life and character, are 
 little indeed compared with the results which it would 
 obviously accomplish, if it were really understood, and 
 if its dominion were thoroughly established. Chris- 
 tianity is infinitely greater than all Christians, and 
 than all the Churches. Corruptions entered almost
 
 544 CHRISTIAN BELIEF [CH. 
 
 at the beginning. Persecuting doctrines and prac- 
 tices have defamed its history, and the most hideous 
 cruelties have been esteemed duties enacted by its 
 commands. Yet every abuse of this kind is now seen 
 to have been condemned by some one or more of its 
 fundamental principles. And so it will be with every 
 other abuse which may come to be detected in the 
 course of time. ' O fools and slow of heart to believe 
 all that the prophets have spoken ^ ' — these are 
 the words recorded by the Apostles as addressed 
 to two of the disciples by their risen Master. They 
 are words which may well have to be repeated often 
 to other disciples, from age to age, until that unex- 
 hausted teaching of His has come, slowly and gradually, 
 to be better comprehended. Of no other teaching — 
 of no other philosophy — can this be said. It, and it 
 alone, among the many which have passed across 
 the stage of human history, seems large enough to be 
 capable of containing all the yet unknown treasures 
 of wisdom and knowledge. Its whole spirit is the 
 spirit of devotion to truth — to truth in conception — to 
 truth in reasoning — to truth in conduct. It hates 
 every form and shadow of untruth. It classes with 
 the most hideous sins ' whatsoever loveth and maketh 
 a lie ^.' It loves knowledge, and it loves the love 
 of it. It sets before its disciples, as the greatest of 
 all their rewards, the hope of ' knowing even as they 
 are known ■^' It takes special note of the unsatis- 
 fied, and apparently unsatisfiable, desires of men, 
 as a significant fact in their mental constitution. 
 
 ' Luke xxiv. 25. ^ Rev. xxii. 15. i Cor. xiii. 12.
 
 X] IN ITS RELATION TO PHILOSOPHY 545 
 
 Lucretius calls it ' the thankless nature of the mind,' 
 and adds the beautifully plaintive line : 
 
 ' Nee tamen explemur vital fructibus umquam.' 
 
 With irresistible reason Christian philosophy correlates 
 that fact with the inexhaustibility of the Creator's 
 works, and regards this unappeasable hunger of the 
 human soul as the natural result of the correspond- 
 ingly immense capabilities of a creature made in His 
 image, and always, in proportion to the awakening of 
 its faculties, finding intense delight in the appreciation 
 and understanding of His mind and works. The 
 practical use it makes of this correlation, and the 
 practical inference it draws, is the thoroughly intelli- 
 gible and rational assurance that * eye hath not seen, 
 nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart 
 of man to conceive, what God hath prepared for 
 them that love Him.' 
 
 N n
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abraham, call of, 209, 217, 218, 
 
 392 ; his faith, 210. 
 Abstract conceptions, 140, 143, 
 
 195, 196. 
 — predictability, 265, 266. 
 Abstraction v. Subtraction, 59. 
 Acts of the Apostles, quoted, 346, 
 
 365, 365, 508, 509, 519, 530, 
 
 534- 
 Agassiz, 165. 
 
 Agnosticism, true, 194, 195, 245, 
 363 ; ignoramus v. agnostic, 540. 
 
 Akbar, 210. 
 
 Alexander the Great, 284, 496. 
 
 Altruism, 390. 
 
 Amos, on animal sacrifices, 225 ; 
 his foresight, 244, 278. 
 
 Analogy, distinct from homology, 
 90. 
 
 Analysis, principle of true, 54. 
 
 Animals, lower, their instinct quasi- 
 inspired, 367. 
 
 Animism, 155. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, 249, 250, 253, 
 365. 
 
 Anthropopsychic, 249. 
 
 Antipodes, the, 123, 240, 241. 
 
 Apostles, teaching of the, 387 et 
 seq., 398 ; on prayer, 471-473 ; 
 their avoidance of philosophy, 
 
 497, 498, 503, 5"-5i3- 
 Apparatus, meaning of, 20, 114; 
 
 its purpose, 127. 
 Argument from design, 147, 149. 
 Aristotle, an authority of the 
 
 Church, 492 ; his detection of 
 
 natural laws, 500-502. 
 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 422. 
 Articulata, 84. 
 Assimilation, meaning of, 60, 69. 
 
 Assyria, monarchies of, 369, 271. 
 Athens, St. Paul at, 364, 497. 
 Authorized Version, simplicity and 
 majesty of the, 275. 
 
 Babylon, its fall predicted, 268, 
 270, 284, 285. 
 
 Beatitudes, the, 394, 395. 
 
 Because, meaning of, 8t. 
 
 Berkeley, 246. 
 
 Bio-crystallization, 107. 
 
 Biology, 8, 34, 113; Spencer's 
 Principles of, Ti2<)-i^2)'i Huxley 
 on study of, 143, 144; psycho- 
 logy a part of, 248. 
 
 Brotherhood of man, universal, 
 
 253, 254- 
 Butler, Bishop, on Nature, 3. 
 
 Causation, conceptions of, 37, 38, 
 43, 242 ; limits of, 240, 242. 
 
 Chaldeans, the, 277. 
 
 Challenger Expedition, Report of, 
 on Sponges, 106-112. 
 
 Chance, meaning of, 94. 
 
 Charity, St. Paul's description of, 
 444-446. 
 
 Chemistry, a law of, 16 ; its limita- 
 tions, 201. 
 
 Christ, as the Messiah, 324-349 ; 
 His sacrifice, 350 et seq., 381- 
 383 ; 'the tie of spiritual brother- 
 hood,' 400-402 ; the Personality 
 of, 422; the 'Lord's Prayer,' 
 
 453, 454. 457- 468, 469 ; His 
 conversation with St. Luke on 
 prayer, 461 ; His last prayer, 
 479; His Resurrection, 534, 
 535- 
 
 N n 2
 
 548 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Christian Doctrine and Hebrew 
 Theology, .^24, 336. 
 
 — Ethics, vide Ethics. 
 
 — Faith, vide Faith. 
 
 — Theology, vide Theolog}', Chris- 
 tian. 
 
 Christianity, in harmony with 
 Nature and Greek philosophy, 
 
 510, 511; resistless progress of, 
 
 511, 520 ; its reserve of power, 
 
 542. 
 Chronicles, Book of the, 494. 
 Cicero, his definition of Nature, 
 
 I ; his writings known to the 
 
 Apostles, 503 ; his teaching in 
 
 harmony with Christianity, 509 ; 
 
 on 'Nature of the Gods,' 516, 
 
 522, 525, 526. 
 Colossians, St. Paul's Epistle to 
 
 the, on truth, 380, 496. 
 Conceptions, of causation, 37, 3S, 
 
 43, 242; of space, 122, 123, 
 
 241 ; of time, 123, 241, .1541 ; 
 
 abstract, 140, 143, 195, 196; of 
 
 religion, 199 et seq. ; of prophecy, 
 
 242, 302 ; of Christian belief, 
 
 362. 
 Consciousness of Ignorance, its 
 
 use, 194; the Jews and their, 
 
 236-238. 245, 
 Corinthians, St. Paul's Epistle to 
 
 the, quoted, 346, 400, 438, 519, 
 
 535. 536, 543- 
 
 Cosmogony, New Testament view 
 of, 206. 
 
 Creation, the, 259 ; blanks in 
 story of, 260. 
 
 Crystals, 78, 79. 
 
 Cuvier, Le Repie Aniniale, 57- 
 98 passim ; his definition oT life 
 as a whirlwind, 58 et seq. ; on 
 form and structure, 71 > spon- 
 taneity, "J},; function, 74; plan, 
 79 ; his four divisions of animal 
 structure, 83, 84 ; and Aristotle, 
 501. 
 
 Cyrus, King, 281, 283, 
 
 Damascus, 270. 
 
 Daniel, The Book of, 316-322 ; 
 
 prayer of, 318, 321 ; invocation 
 
 of, 319, 320. 
 Darwin, Charles, 7, 71, 173, 254. 
 
 David, and the Messianic Ex- 
 pectation, 279. 
 
 Deane's Pseudographia, 334, 335. 
 
 Definitions, their results in In- 
 tuitional Theology, 1-45. 
 
 Deluge, the, and Geology, 215- 
 217. 
 
 Descartes, 246. 
 
 Design, in Nature, 147, 148; argu- 
 ment from, 147, 149. 
 
 Deuteronomy, 3^3. 
 
 Development, distinct from manu- 
 facture in Nature, 1 2 ; of germs, 
 34, 71, 72 ; Lucretius on creation 
 by, 161 ; recent theories of, 173. 
 
 Divine Incarnation, the, 341, 345, 
 
 352- 
 
 — Law, the, 228-235, 264, 270. 
 
 — Will, the, 221, 463, 469 et seq. 
 
 ' Downwardness and Upwardness,' 
 122, 123, 240, 241. 
 
 Echinus (sea-urchin\ 103. 
 
 Eggs, external hatching of, 41. 
 
 Egypt, 270. 
 
 Egyptian tomb, box found in an, 
 120. 
 
 Electricity, 202. 
 
 Embryology, 124; its principle, 
 125. 
 
 Energy {ivepyeia), meaning of, 48. 
 
 Ephesians, St. Paul's Epistle to, 
 on regeneration, 379 ; morality, 
 386 ; prayer, 473 ; difficulties of 
 Christianity, 535. 
 
 Epictetus, on doctrine of con- 
 version, 378, 493, 494; his 
 writings known to the Apostles, 
 503 ; his Discourses, 516, 522. 
 
 Epicurean Philosophy, i^i et seq., 
 494 ; passion for Nature in, 246. 
 
 Ethics, Christian, nature and foun- 
 dation of, 384-447; and Chris- 
 tian theology inseparable, 385 ; 
 a natural power, 387 ; v. Al- 
 truism, 390 ; intensely human, 
 393 ; appeal to reason, 398 ; 
 morality of, 403 ; New Testa- 
 ment teaching of, 404 et seq. ; 
 the throne of, 406 ; on relation 
 of the sexes, 408. 
 
 Evolution, new theories of, 173, 
 
 257-
 
 INDEX 
 
 549 
 
 Experience and Reason, 30. 
 
 Ezekiel, his denunciations of idol- 
 atry, 307-309 ; on God's uni- 
 versal ownership, 308, 309. 
 
 Ezra, on animal sacrifices, 303. 
 
 Faith, in Christian Theology, the 
 nature of, 355-366, 406, 410 et 
 seq. ; examples of, in Epistle to 
 Hebrews, 359, 360 ; Christian, 
 and its relation to philosophy, 
 490-543 ; distinction between 
 reason and, 431 et seq. ; its 
 rational humility, 433 ; its re- 
 serve of power, 542. 
 
 Fall, the, 259 ; described allegori- 
 cally, 260. 
 
 Fatalism, 266, 465. 
 
 Feathers, function of birds', 76. 
 
 Fish, flying, 91. 
 
 Form, meaning of, 64. 
 
 Fortuity, meaning of, 170; v. 
 purposiveness, 173 ! Professor 
 Osborne on, 175, 176. 
 
 Function, subserviency of structure 
 to, 8 ; meaning of, 74, 77 ; of 
 birds' feathers, 76 ; Spencer on, 
 142. 
 
 Galatians, St. Paul's Epistle to, 
 on truths of Christianity, 413, 
 414. 
 
 Genesis (Book of) , call of Abraham, 
 209, 392 ; the Flood, 214 ; 
 passage of Red Sea, and Jordan, 
 ib. ; Cain's sacrifice, 221; the 
 Creation of man, 253 ; its alle- 
 gories, 260; its figurative lan- 
 guage, 276. 
 
 Geology, and the Deluge, 215- 
 217. 
 
 Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., Com- 
 pendium of the Psalter, 272. 
 
 God, Jewish conception of, 204 
 et seq.; works through natural 
 laws, 207; Divine Will of, 221, 
 463, 469 et seq.; Divine Law 
 of, 232-235, 264, 270; man's 
 relation to, 252, 291, 454, 456, 
 532 ; the Fatherhood of, 389, 
 442 ; His immutability, 452, 
 462 ; Kingdom of, 457-459, 
 480 ; confidence in, 474. 
 
 Godhead, character of the, 204- 
 251, 343; sacrifice an Agent of 
 the, 331, 332 ; ' Persons of the,' 
 362 ; accessible to prayer, 450. 
 
 Goethe, on Vertebrata, 85. 
 
 Gravitation, law of, 123, 240, 
 241,411,447. 
 
 Growth, meaning of, 60. 
 
 Habakkuk, on the Chaldean 
 triumphs, 277; his doubts, 27S; 
 the burden of his vision, 299, 
 300. 
 
 Haeckel, Professor, on Sponges 
 (' bio-crystallization '), 107. 
 
 Haggai, on rebuilding of Temple, 
 300; on the 'Return,' 303-305. 
 
 Hand, meaning of, 250. 
 
 Heart, definition of, 420. 
 
 Heathens, prayer among, 449. 
 
 Hebrew Prophets, the, on animal 
 sacrifice, 222-228, 282 ; their 
 appeal to human reason, 223; 
 their conception of free will, 
 224, 258, 263 ; their interpreta- 
 tion of the Law, 228 ; their con- 
 ception of the Divine Nature, 
 236-238; their humility and 
 faith, 237, 238, 242 ; their belief 
 in the Unseen, 243; their spiritual 
 insight, 244 ; their conception of 
 Adam, 262; theirpowerof inter- 
 pretation, 265-267; on Babylon 
 and Nineveh, 268, 270, 284; on 
 Damascus and Egypt, 270; on 
 communion of God with man, 
 271 ; on the Messiah, 272 et 
 seq., 286 et seq., 314, 317, 
 318. 334> 342, 401; universal 
 blessings predicted by, 279 ; 
 spiritual triumph of the Jews 
 foretold by, 280, 281 ; on cor- 
 ruption of man's nature, 312; 
 their self-accusations, 318. 
 
 Hebrews, the chosen people, 211- 
 213; on physical forces, 214; 
 on natural laws, 221 ; on animal 
 sacrifice, 222-228, 282 ; their 
 appeal to human reason, 223 ; 
 their conception of free will, 
 224, 258, 263, 451 ; foundation 
 of their religion, 227, 228; their 
 conception of the Messiah, 272,
 
 550 
 
 INDEX 
 
 273, 326-329; their power under 
 Solomon, 279; spiritual trinmph 
 of, 2S0, 281 ; the supernatural 
 unknown to, 326 ; their belief 
 in God's omnipotence, 328, 332; 
 prophecy an authority among, 
 340 ; geographical isolation of, 
 496. 
 Hebrews, St. Paul's Epistle to the, 
 quoted, 336-341, 343-345, 347- 
 
 351, 355-360, 394> 395.406, 539. 
 — Theology of the, z^zfl?^ Theology, 
 
 Hebrew. 
 Histology, 76. 
 Homogeneity of life, 46. 
 'Homogeneity to Heterogeneity,' 
 
 7. 44- 
 Homology, meaning of, 87 ; v. 
 
 analogy, 90. 
 
 Hosea, on true sacrifice, 225, 276. 
 
 Humanity, nature and unity of, 
 252, 253, 261. 
 
 Hume, Joseph, 246. 
 
 Humility, ' the longing for more 
 knowledge,' 250.439; the ethical 
 element of, 418, 433 ; of faith, 
 433 ; the lesson of, 434, 435. 
 
 Hunter, John, on causation, 36, 
 
 71- 
 Huxley, Professor, on Nature, 3 ; on 
 
 organization, 37 ; his Elements 
 of Comparative Attatomy, 37, 
 1 13 ^^ seq. ; his use of teleological 
 language, 113-117, 127 ; on de- 
 velopment of Vertebrata : the 
 embryo chick, 127-129; on 
 results of biological studies, 143, 
 144; his self-analysis, 144; his 
 definition of physiology, 144. 
 Hyperbole, use of, in New Testa- 
 ment, 471. 
 
 Identity of all living bodies, 24. 
 Ignoramus v. Agnostic, 540. 
 Ignorance, consciousness of, its 
 
 use, 192 ; Jews and their, 236- 
 
 238, 245. 
 Incarnation, the Divine, 341, 345, 
 
 352- 
 Inorganic world, the, 2 ; home of 
 mathematical demonstration, 31 ; 
 Spencer on, 133, 137 ; the adap- 
 tations in, 175. 
 
 Insects, metamorphosis of, 42. 
 
 Inspiration, in Christian Theology, 
 366-371 ; its true source in man, 
 368. 
 
 Isaiah, his vision of universal 
 blessings, 230, 283, 287, 304; 
 God's law the sum of all truth, 
 230-232; 'a God that hidest 
 thyself,' 237; on knowledge and 
 law, 242 ; on spiritual insight, 
 244, 245 ; his conception of the 
 human species, 253, 459; on 
 Nineveh and Babylon, 268-270, 
 284, 285 ; on communion of 
 God with man, 271, 272, 292 ; 
 on animal sacrifice, 282, 306, 
 331 ; his Messianic predictions, 
 283, 2S5-289, 294, 295, 298, 
 
 314' 329. 331. 332, 334 ; 0° the 
 conquest of the Gentiles, 296, 
 297; the New Jerusalem, 305, 
 306 ; on the chief end of man, 
 494. 
 
 James. General Epistle of, quoted, 
 356, 418, 462, 463, 472. 
 
 Jeremiah, on animal sacrifice, 226 ; 
 on Nineveh and Babylon, 268, 
 269 ; God ' the fountain of living 
 waters,' 310 ; on suffering and 
 sin, 311; on man's corruption, 
 312; his Messianic predictions, 
 312-314. 
 
 Jewish, Jews, Vide Hebrew, He- 
 brews. 
 
 Job, Book of, the expectation of 
 immortality in, 274, 275; its 
 inspiration, 368 ; on repentance, 
 
 379- 
 John, General Epistle of, quoted, 
 
 358, 413? 456, 472. 474- 
 
 Kant, Emanuel, Critique of Pure 
 
 Reason, 246, 538, 539. 
 Kepler, the three laws of, 446. 
 Kingdom of God, the, 457-459, 
 
 480. 
 Kings, Book of, 369. 
 
 Lamarck, J. B. P. de, 25, 173. 
 Language, of mind, 5, 18; of 
 design, 6; growth of, 18, 50;
 
 INDEX 
 
 551 
 
 recognitions in the structure of, 
 in Intuitive Theology, 46-112; 
 origin and history of modern, 
 50 ; use and abuse of, 134 ; full 
 of abstract conceptions, 140 ; 
 effect of physiology on, 145 ; 
 full of allegory, 259. 
 
 Law, universal reign of, 207, 220, 
 235. 247' 334; natural, 221, 
 333. 343> 352, 374; Jewish 
 interpretation of the, 228 ; 
 Divine, 228-235, 238, 264, 270; 
 invariability of material, 436 ; 
 relation of prayer to, 448, 461, 
 467. 
 
 Laws, Natural, the expression of 
 a Divine Will, 221 ; divinity of, 
 333 ; Christian belief in, 334, 
 343- 374; St. Paul on, 398 ; and 
 relation of sexes, 408 ; God, 
 ' the Author and Master ' of, 
 462 ; relation of prayer to, 464 ; 
 Aristotle on, 500-502. 
 
 Lenormant, 215. 
 
 Levitical ritual, and Hebrew Theo- 
 logy, 221-223, 282, 330. 
 
 Lewes, G. H. {History of Philo- 
 sophy), on failure of Greek philo- 
 sophy, 514, 515, 518. 
 
 Life, homogeneity of, 46 ; the 
 common word, 55, 56; attempts 
 to analyze, 56; Cuvier's definition 
 of, 58 ^/ seq. ; Spencer's definition 
 
 of, 132, 134- 
 
 Lightfoot, Bishop, Biblical Essays, 
 .S04, 507, 508," 511, 523. 
 
 Limitations in Intuitive Theolog)', 
 147-203. 
 
 Lizard, flying, 90. 
 
 Locke, On the Htmian Under- 
 standing, 182, 246, 502. 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., 165. 
 
 Lord's Prayer, the, 453, 454, 457, 
 468, 469. 
 
 Lucretius, quotations from, 154- 
 ifi% passim, 338, 543; his con- 
 ceptions of mythology, 151, 153- 
 157, 163-168, 522; on mind in 
 Nature, 152, 155, 157, 166, 167 ; 
 his invocation to Venus, 153, 
 156; on human sacrifices, 156 ; 
 on primordia, 160; on creation 
 by development, 161 ; on natural 
 
 selection, 161 ; on Chemical 
 Affinity, 162 ; on reason and 
 soul, 162, 163 ; on the fear of 
 death, 168, 338 ; his passion for 
 Nature, 246 ; his writings known 
 to the Apostles, 503 ; ' the 
 thankless nature of the mind,' 
 543- 
 
 Malachi, ' the Messenger of the 
 Covenant' foretold by, 301, 315, 
 316. 
 
 Mammalia, Professor Osborne's 
 History of the, I'ji et seq. 
 
 Man, Hebrew Theology on nature 
 of, 252-323. 
 
 Manufacture, distinct from de- 
 velopment in Nature, 12. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 210, 516. 
 
 Mathematical demonstration, 
 sphere of, 31. 
 
 Melchisedec, 348. 
 
 Mesopotamia, monarchies of, 271. 
 
 Messiah, the, expectation of, 272, 
 273; predicted by Isaiah, 274- 
 342 passim ; Christ as, 324- 
 347 ; nature of his sacrifice, 350 
 et seq., 401. 
 
 Messianic, functions, 337 ; passages 
 and predictions in Old Testa- 
 ment, 274^/ seq., 286-2S9, 292- 
 298. 314, 317, 318, 329, 331, 
 332, 334. 342, 401- 
 
 Micah, 299. 
 
 Mill, J. S., on Nature, 3. 
 
 Mind, automatic action of, 5 ; 
 language of, 5 ; in Nature, 1 1, 
 18, 22, 26, 46, 150, 170, 179, 
 180, 185, 347, 501 ; and phe- 
 nomena of Nature, 50; Lucretius 
 on, 152, 155, 157-159, 543 ; 
 Locke on, 182, 183 ; motive 
 powers of, 483. 
 
 MoUusca, 84. 
 
 Monogamy, 409. 
 
 Monotheism, 204, 210. 
 
 Morality in Nature, 391. 
 
 Motive, meaning of, 481-483. 
 
 Miiller, Professor Max, 165. 
 
 Mythology, origin of, 150; Lucre- 
 tius on, 151, 153-157, 163-168, 
 522.
 
 552 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Nasmyth, James, 14, 15. 
 Natural Laws, vide Laws, Natural. 
 
 — Selection, 8, 17 ; Lucretius' idea 
 of, 161. 
 
 — and Supernatural, no distinction 
 between, i, 26, 192. 
 
 Nature, classical definitions of, i, 
 495 ; Cicero on, i ; the sum of 
 all existences, 3, 158 ; Butler, 
 Mill, and Huxley on, 3 ; no 
 boundary to, 4, 443 ; mind and 
 matter in, 5 ; tendency of human 
 mind to personify, 8; Reason 
 ('Logos') in, 9; design in, 10, 
 21, 147, 14S ; mind a fact and 
 power in, 11, 18, 22, 26, 46, 
 150, 170, 179, 180, 185, 347, 
 501 ; development and manu- 
 facture distinct in, 12 ; invisible 
 forces in, 16 ; the ' apparatus- 
 world,' 20 ; man part of, 24 ; 
 unity of, 28, 47, 181, 407; 
 words significant facts in, 53 ; 
 correspondences in, 78 ; teleo- 
 logical conception of, 144 ; Lu- 
 cretius on mind in, 158, 159, 
 161, 167, 246; confusion limited 
 by, 161 ; purposiveness in, i77~ 
 179, 1S4-188; machinery of, 
 177 ; intelligibility of, 247, 442; 
 identity of Divine Truth and 
 "Will with, 310, 495; precepts 
 of morality in, 391 ; ' motive' in, 
 482, 483 ; ancient philosophers 
 on, 495 ; Stoics on, 495, 517; 
 ' things seen and unseen' in, 532. 
 
 Necessitarianism, 265, 451, 481. 
 
 Nehemiah, on animal sacrifices, 
 
 303- 
 
 New Testament, Christian Ethics 
 taught by, 404 et seq. ; hyper- 
 bole in, 471 ; authority and 
 majesty of, 520. 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 412, 447. 
 
 Nicodemus, the Jew, 372. 
 
 Nineveh, its fall predicted, 268. 
 
 Nominalism, 246. 
 
 Oken, on Vertebrata, 85. 
 
 Old Testament, language of, 206, 
 211, 212, 217-238 ; on universal 
 brotherhood, 255, 262 ; on free- 
 
 dom of will, 258, 263 ; on the 
 Creation and Fall, 259 ; savages 
 unknown to writers .of, 262 ; 
 Messianic passages and pre- 
 dictions in, vide Messianic ; the 
 new priesthood, 34S ; on nature 
 of God's sacrifice, 350 ; on in- 
 spiration, 368, 369 ; full of ex- 
 amples of prayer, 450, 471 ; its 
 authority and majesty, 520. 
 
 Organ, meaning of, 19. 
 
 Organic world, the, 2 ; Spencer 
 and Darwin on, 7, 133, 137; 
 dominant facts in, 8 ; develop- 
 ment of genus in, 71 ; physical 
 forces in, 100 ; mental purpose 
 in, 142; growing adaptations 
 of, 174. 
 
 Organization, Hunter and Huxley 
 on, 36 ; life the cause of, 39 ; 
 meaning of, 68. 
 
 Oriental Element (Stoics), 509, 
 510. 
 
 Osborne, Professor, History of the 
 Mammalia, 171 et seq.; on for- 
 tuity, 175. 176. 
 
 Owen, Professor {Homologies of 
 the Vertebrate Skeleton^., on ana- 
 logy and homology, 90, 91 ; on 
 conformity of type, 90, 98 ; on 
 leg-bones of cow and crocodile, 
 92 ; on skulls, 93 ; ' a vegetative 
 repetition,' loi ; on starfish, 102. 
 
 Pantheism, 204. 
 
 Phenomena, misuse of the word, 
 
 239- 
 
 Philippians, St. Paul's Epistle to, 
 on Christian Ethics, 386 ; on 
 Christ's final triumph, 535. 
 
 Philosophy, in Intuitive Theology, 
 1 13-146 ; V. Religion, 245, 246 ; 
 Christian Faith and its relation 
 to, 490-543 ; Greek, its con- 
 ception of prayer, 454 ; meaning 
 of, 490 ; of Innate Ideas : of 
 Experience, 493 ; of the Beauti- 
 ful : the Useful, 494 ; its per- 
 ception of spiritual truths, 504 ; 
 Greek, and Christianity, 510; 
 Lewes on failure of Greek, 514,
 
 INDEX 
 
 553 
 
 Physical research, 32 ; small results 
 of, 33 ; its progress and pro- 
 blems, 247, 248. 
 
 Physical Science, true analysis of, 
 54; its value, 190; abstract 
 conceptions in, 195; its limita- 
 tions, 201, 239 ; community of 
 results in, 505. 
 
 Physiology, Spencer on, 142 ; 
 Huxley on, 144 ; its effect on 
 language, 145. 
 
 Plan, meaning of, 77, 115 ; essen- 
 tial idea conveyed by, So. 
 
 Plato, teaching of, 246, 493. 
 
 Prayer, its duty and efficacy, 448, 
 453 ; in Christian Theology, 
 448-489 ; its relation to natural 
 laws, 448 ; among heathens, 449 ; 
 in Hebrew Theology, 450 ; no 
 distinction between temporal and 
 spiritual effects of, 450, 451, 
 453.467-470,473 ; 'The Lord's,' 
 453. 454, 457, 4^8, 469; and 
 Greek Philosophy, 454 ; the 
 philosophy of, 456 ; persever- 
 ance in, 460 ; and universal 
 reign of law, 461, 467; and 
 natural laws, 464 ; fatalism de- 
 structive to, 465 ; the new theory 
 of, 464-468 ; Apostolic writers 
 on, 471-473; 'confidence in 
 God,' 474 ; the accusation 
 against, 477, 488 ; legitimate 
 field of, 480. 
 
 Predictability, abstract, 265, 266. 
 
 Prepared, meaning of, 71. 
 
 Prestwich, Jos., 215. 
 
 Primordium, meaning of, 160. 
 
 Prophets and Prophecy, vide He- 
 brew Prophets. 
 
 Proverbs of Solomon, on nature 
 of sacrifice, 227 ; on rewards of 
 goodness, 392. 
 
 Psalms of David ("the language of 
 the whole Christian Church, 2 29\ 
 quoted, 212, 223, 227, 232-238, 
 242, 250, 251, 253, 263, 265, 
 268, 272, 342, 348, 375, 392, 
 
 397.401,418,433, 453, 500, 534- 
 Psychology, a part of biology, 248, 
 
 249. 
 Purposiveness, v. fortuity, 173 ; in 
 
 Nature, 177-179, 184-189. 
 
 Pythagoreans, the, 499. 
 
 Radiata, 84 ; the starfish, 102. 
 
 Realism, 246. 
 
 Reason ('Logos'), in Nature, 9; 
 experience and, 30 ; Lucretius 
 on, 162, 163 ; conscious, 243 ; 
 in Christian Theology and Ethics, 
 3S9, 4x8, 419 ; St. Paul on, 417 ; 
 distinction between faith and, 
 43 1 et seq. 
 
 Regeneration, nature of, in Chris- 
 tian Theology, 371-383- 
 
 Reign of Law, vide Law. 
 
 Religion, its basis, 23, 180, 181, 
 186 ; the guess-work of the 
 human mind, 199 et seq. ; Jew- 
 ish conception of, 227, 228 ; 
 individuality of true, 312. 
 
 Romanes, Dr. G. J., Thoughts on 
 Religion, 378 ; on prayer, 465. 
 
 Romans, St. Paul's Epistle to, 
 quoted, 397, 398, 404,417,427, 
 433, 524. 525, 527-529- 
 
 Sacrifice, Jewish view of animal, 
 222-228, 282, 311, 330, 331, 
 347; Amos on, 225; Jeremiah 
 on, 226; Isaiah on, 282, 306, 
 331 ; Nehemiah on, 303 ; Ezra 
 on, 303 ; nature of, in Christian 
 Theology, 347-355 1 Christ's, 
 350 f/ 5^^., 381-383 ; in Hebrew 
 Theology, 401 ; an act of prayer, 
 
 449- 
 St. Augustine, on his conversion, 
 
 377- 
 St. James, on prayer, 472. 
 St. John, on relationship of man 
 
 to God, 456; on prayer, 472, 
 
 474. 475- 
 St. John's Gospel quoted, 335, 
 346, 362, 372, 373, 376, 381- 
 
 383, 421, 476, 525, 535- 
 St. Luke's Gospel quoted, 335, 
 
 336, 395, 427, 452, 453. 460, 
 542. 
 St. Matthew's Gospel quoted, 385, 
 
 387. 398, 476- 
 St. Paul, at Athens, 364, 497 ; his 
 conversion, 377 ; on Fruit of the 
 Spirit, 386 ; on morality, 386 ; 
 his sense of evil in man, 397,
 
 554 
 
 INDEX 
 
 488 ; on Nature, 398, 532 ; on 
 food offered to idols, y)^, 400 ; 
 on principles of Christian con- 
 duct, 404 ei seq. ; on individual 
 reason, 414, 417; and the 
 Christian converts, 419, 523 ct 
 seq.; on knowledge, 438, 441, 
 447 ; on athletes, 443 ; on 
 charity, 444-446 ; on prayer, 
 449, 472, 473; on law, 484; 
 his habit of introspection, 484- 
 486 ; his character, 486, 487 ; 
 on humility, 487-489 ; on philo- 
 sophy, 496, 497 ; and Seneca, 
 504, 506 ; at Rome, 529, 530. 
 
 St. Peter, an Inspiration, 367, 419, 
 420 ; on prayer, 473. 
 
 Samuel, on sacrifice, 225, 226 ; on 
 communion with God, 265. 
 
 Schulze, Professor, on Sponges, 
 108-112. 
 
 Science, meaning of, 32, 498; 
 virtue of words in 52 ; in Intui- 
 tive Theology, 1 1 3-1 46; fortuity 
 repugnant to, 170; its limita- 
 tions, 197, 201, 248; its pro- 
 blems, 248. 
 
 Seneca, and St. Paul, 504, 506, 
 508; his Essays, 516, 517, 522. 
 
 Simeon, the faith of, 423-429. 
 
 Solomon, Proverbs of, 227, 392; 
 prayer of, 369. 
 
 Space, conceptions of, 122, 123, 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, his invention of 
 phrases, 6 ; his formula ' Homo- 
 geneity to Heterogeneity,' 7, 
 44 ; his Principles of Biology, 
 129-143; reduces phenomena 
 to ' matter, mind, and force,' 
 129 et seq. ; his attempts to 
 avoid teleology, 131-142; his 
 definition of life, 132; on or- 
 ganic and inorganic world, 133, 
 137; on 'adaptations' and 
 'changes,' 133; his wooden 
 formula, 134, 135 ; his root- 
 idea, 1 36 ; on the heart's action, 
 139; on physiology, 142. 
 
 Sponges, 103-112 ; animal life of, 
 104 ; Hexitenellidae, 105. 
 
 Spontaneity, Cuvier on, 73. 
 
 Starfish, 102. 
 
 Stoics and their philosophy, 210, 
 246, 495» 503-510, 516, 517. 
 
 Structure, subservient to function, 
 8 ; meaning of, 64. 
 
 Subtraction v. Abstraction, 59. 
 
 Supernatural and Natural, no dis- 
 tinction between, i, 26, 192. 
 
 Superstition, 200, 25S. 
 
 Teleology, language of, 67 ; ne- 
 cessity for, 113; avoided by 
 Spencer, 1^1 ei seq. ; its purest 
 form, 137, 142. 
 
 Tennyson, 178, 357. 
 
 Theism, 204. 
 
 Theology, preconceptions of, 119; 
 effect of self-evident truths on, 
 191, 198; the true, 203; light 
 cast on physical problems by, 
 
 254- 
 
 — Intuitional, its definitions and 
 their results, 1-45. 
 
 — Intuitive, its recognitions in 
 the structure of language. 46- 
 112; its recognitions in descrip- 
 tive science and philosophy, 47- 
 146; its limitations, 147-203. 
 
 — Christian, 324-489 ; Christ as 
 the Messiah, 324-347 ; nature of 
 sacrifice, 347-355; of faith, 355- 
 366, 410 f/ seq. ; of inspiration, 
 366-371 ; of regeneration, 371- 
 383 ; nature and foundation of 
 Christian Ethics in, 384-447 ; 
 Prayer, 448-489 ; and Ethics 
 inseparable, 385 ; origin and 
 value of motive in, '386-388 ; 
 reason and conscience in, 389, 
 443 ; its view of rewards of 
 virtue, 391-394 ; vice the action 
 of a rebellious will, 396 ; a 
 great brotherhood, 402 ; its view 
 of man's responsibility, 414- 
 416 ; and the importance of 
 truth, 416 ; of humility, 435 ; 
 place of true knowledge in, 440, 
 441 ; its conception of man's 
 relationship to God, 454, 456, 
 532 ; of corruption of man's 
 nature, 485 ; its silence about 
 Greek and Roman philosophies, 
 496 ; its conception of Christ's
 
 INDEX 
 
 555 
 
 Resurrection, 534, 535 ; victory 
 
 of. 536, 537- 
 Theology, Hebrew, 204-323; on 
 character of the Godhead, 204- 
 251 ; strictly scientific, 207 ; and 
 call of Abraham, 209 ; on symbol- 
 ism ofLevitical ritual, 221-223 ; 
 its appeal to reason, 223 ; its 
 conception of Divine Law, 228- 
 235, 23S ; full of humility, 242; 
 its view of truth and goodness, 
 
 242 ; its belief in the Unseen, 
 
 243 ; on spiritual insight, 244 ; 
 solves intellectual antagonism, 
 246; on nature of man, 252- 
 323; onrelationsof manto God, 
 252, 291 ; on nature and unity 
 of humanity, 253, 261 ; on man's 
 corruption, 256, 312 ; its power 
 of interpreting phenomena, 265 ; 
 confident in its spiritual triumph, 
 280, 281 ; identifies Divine truth 
 with Nature, 310 ; and Christian 
 doctrine, 324, 336 ; on eternal 
 laws, 352 ; inspiration in, 370 ; 
 regeneration in, 371 ; its view 
 of rewards of virtue, 391-394 ; 
 prayer in, 450 ; God's character 
 immutable in, 452 ; its idea of 
 the kingdom of God, 457, 480 ; 
 its silence about Greek and 
 Roman philosophies, 496. 
 
 Theopsychism, 253, 365. 
 Tides, 239. 
 
 Tierra del Fuego, savages of, 254. 
 Time, a necessity of human thought, 
 
 117; not an agency of change, 
 
 120, 121 ; careless identification 
 
 of, 121; conceptions of, 123, 
 
 241, 541. 
 Timothy, St. Paul's Epistle to, on 
 
 Christianity and Science, 519; 
 
 on the mystery of godliness, 527 ; 
 
 on Christ's Resurrection, 535. 
 Titanotheres, the, 171. 
 Transmutation, power of, 69. 
 Truths, meaning of self-evident, 
 
 189 ; their bearing on, 191, 19S ; 
 
 their correlations, 203 ; in Chris- 
 tian Theology, 416. 
 Turkeys of Australia, Brush, 42. 
 
 Unity of Nature, 28, 47, 181, 407. 
 ' Upwardness and Downwardness,' 
 meaning of, 122, 123, 240, 241. 
 Utilitarianism, 390. 
 
 Venus, Lucretius' invocation to, 
 153-155 ; the animating spirit, 
 156. 
 
 Vere, Sir Aubrey de, 540. 
 
 Vertebrata, 83 ; wealth of resources 
 in, 84 ; structure of, 89 ; ver- 
 tebral column in, 96 ; potential 
 and actual use of, 98. 
 
 Vice, the action of a rebellious 
 will, 396. 
 
 Virtue, the rewards of, 391-394. 
 
 Water, a type of Divine truth, 310. 
 
 Watt, James, 15. 
 
 Will, the Divine, 221, 463, 469 et 
 seq. ; Free, 224, 258, 263. 
 
 Words, like impressions on sensi- 
 tized paper, 18, 49 ; use and 
 misuse of, 47 ; ' the evidence of 
 things not seen,' 51 ; virtue in- 
 herent in, 52, 53 ; analysis of, 
 54 ; definitions of — organ, 1 9 ; ap- 
 paratus, 20, 1 14 ; science, 32, 498; 
 energy (ev(pfeia\ 48 ; groivih, 
 60 ; assimilation, 60, 69 ; form 
 and structure, 64 ; organization, 
 68 ; prepared, 71 ; function, 74, 
 77 ; plan, 11, 115 ; because, 'S,\ ; 
 homology, 87 ; chance, 94 ; pri- 
 mo7-dium, 160; fortuity, 170; 
 hand, 250; philosophy. 490. 
 
 Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality, 
 375- 
 
 Young, Dr. Thomas, 202. 
 
 Zacharias, 423, 424. 
 Zechariah, an enigmatical prophet, 
 300, 301. 
 
 THE END.
 
 OXFORD : HORACE HART 
 PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL'S WORKS. 
 
 ♦ '•'♦ 
 
 THE UNSEEN FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY: An 
 
 Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic 
 Science due to Neglected Elements. 8vo, i8s. 
 
 ' Every page is marked by some novelty of treatment of old theories, and 
 
 is the outcome of fresh individual observation To many it \vill 
 
 seem that the most valuable elements in the Unseen Foundations are the skill, 
 insight, and force with which moral laws, not to be voted down or sus- 
 pended by popular acclamation, are detected underlying the infinite variety of 
 economical facts.' — Times. 
 
 ' From first to last it is replete not only with accurate observation, careful 
 thought, and just reasoning, but with smart sayings, caustic criticisms, and 
 congruous citations. Moreover it is pervaded by the charm of real originality. 
 It is not only a valuable contribution to political science, it is also a fascinat- 
 ing chapter in the biography of one of the most illustrious members of the 
 most illustrious assembly in the world.' — .S"^. James's Gazette. 
 
 THE REIGN OF LAW. Nineteenth Edition. Crown 8vo, 5^. 
 
 ' A masterly book. Strong, sound, mature, able thought from its first page 
 to its last.' — Spectator. 
 
 ' The Duke of Argyll has made a real contribution towards the solution of 
 a great problem, and has produced a book which would do credit to the 
 calmest and most disengaged philosopher.' — Guardian. 
 
 THE UNITY OF NATURE. Third Edition. 8vo, 12^. 
 
 IRISH NATIONALISM; An Appeal to History. Crown 
 
 8vo, })S. 6d. 
 
 THE BURDENS OF BELIEF, and other Poems. Crown 
 8vo, 6s. 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
 
 STANDARD WORKS FOR THE LIBRARY. 
 
 *•••¥ 
 
 TKE BA1I.WAYS OP ENGI.ANII. By \V. M. AcwORTH. With fifty-six 
 Illustrations. 8vo, 14J. 
 
 AUSTIN'S GENERAI. JURISPRUDENCE ; or, the Philosophy of Posi- 
 tive Law. Edited by Robert Campbell. 2 vols., 8vo, 32s. 
 
 BRUGSCH'S HISTORY OP EGYPT UNDER THE PHARAOHS. 
 
 New and thoroughly Revised Edition. Edited by M. Brodrick. Maps. 8vo, 18s. 
 
 OLD ENGIiISH PI.ATE. By WILFRED Cripps, C.B. With 122 Illustra- 
 tions and 2,500 Facsimile Plate Marks. Medium Svo, 2ij. 
 
 THE VIKING AGE. The Early HistorJ^ Manners, and Customs of the 
 Ancestors of the English-speaking Nations. By PAUL B. Du Chaillu. With 1,300 
 Illustrations. 2 vols., Svo, 32J. 
 
 EIiPHINSTONE'S HISTORY OP INDIA— The Hindoo and IXahom- 
 
 medan Periods. Edited by Professor Covvell. Map. Svo, i8j. 
 
 THE EVIIi EYE. An Account of this Ancient Superstition. By F. T. 
 Elworthy. With Illustrations. Svo, 21s. 
 
 PERGUSSON'S HISTORY of ARCHITECTURE in aU COUNTRIES 
 
 FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES. 1,700 Illustrations. 5 vols., medium Svo. Vols. L 
 and II. Ancient and Medieval, 2 vols., 63*.; III. Indian and Eastern, 3ii'. 61/. ; 
 IV. Modern, 2 vols., 31J. 6d. 
 
 SIR BARTI.E PRERE'S I.IPE AND CORRESPONDENCE. By JOHN 
 
 MARTINEAU. 2 vols., Svo, 32s. 
 
 NEW CHAPTERS IN GREEK HISTORY. Historical Results of Recent 
 Excavations in GREECE and ASL\ MINOR. By Professor Percy Gardner. With 
 Illustrations. Svo, 15J. 
 
 GIBBON'S HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND PALL OF THE 
 
 ROMAN EMPIRE. Maps. 8 vols., Svo, 6oj. 
 
 GROTE'S HISTORY OP GREECE. From the Earliest Times to the Death 
 of Alexander the Great. Portrait, Maps, and Plans. 10 vols., post Svo, gs. each. 
 
 THE RISE OF THE BRITISH DOMINION IN INDIA. From the 
 Early Days of the East India Company. By Sir ALFRED Lyall, K.C.B. With 
 Coloured Maps. I2j. net. 
 
 A HISTORY OF GREEK SCULPTURE FROM THE EARLIEST 
 
 TIMES. By Dr. A. S. MuRR.^Y. With 130 Illustrations. 2 vols., medium Svo, 36s. 
 
 HANDBOOK OF GREEK ARCH2:OLOGY. By Dr. A. S. Murray. 
 
 Many Illustrations. Crown Svo, i8.y. 
 FIVE GREAT MONARCHIES OF CHALD2:A, ASSYRIA, MEDIA, 
 
 BABYLONIA, and PERSIA. By Canon Rawlinson. With Maps and Illustra- 
 tions. 3 vols., Svo, 42s. 
 
 HERODOTUS : a New English Version. Edited, with Notes and Essays, by 
 Canon Rawlinson, Sir H. Rawlinson, and Sir J. G. Wilkinson. Maps and Wood- 
 cuts. 4 vols., Svo, 48J. 
 
 THE WORKS OP DAVID RICARDO. With a Notice of his Life and 
 Writings. By J. R. McCULLOCH. Svo, 16s. 
 
 TOCQUEVILLE'S STATE OF SOCIETY IN PRANCE BEFORE 
 
 THE REVOLUTION, 17S9, and on the Causes which led to that Event. Svo, 12.S. 
 
 RESEARCHES IN THE EARLY HISTORY OP MANKIND, AND 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF CIVILIZATION. ByE. B.Tylor. Third Edition. Svo, 12 j. 
 
 PRIMITIVE CULTURE : the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, 
 Religion, Art and Custom. By E. B. Tylor. Third Edition. 2 vols., Svo, 21s. 
 
 MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OP THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. By 
 
 Sir J.G.Wilkinson. Edited by Samuel Birch, LL.D. Illustrations. 3 vols., Svo, 84J. 
 
 BISHOP WORDSWORTH'S GREECE : Pictorial, Descriptive, and His- 
 torical. With an Introduction on the Characteristics of Greek Art, by Geo. Scharf. 
 400 Illustrations. Royal Svo, 31J. 6d. 
 
 A GLOSSARY OF ANGLO-INDIAN COLLOQUIAL WORDS AND 
 
 PHRASES. By Colonel Yule and A. C. Burnell. Medium Svo, 36s. 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 JAftf 9- 33g^ 
 
 LD-UR 
 
 i:d 
 
 DEC ^^ ^ 
 
 7-4 
 
 A'O 
 
 Form L-9 
 
 10 m -3. '39(7752) 
 
 ^ to 
 
 m^ 
 
 (Mmmjxuk 
 
 ^ ...• ^ 
 
 i^itfJKT.KSl
 
 _1QQ_ Argyll-:!— 
 A69p The philosopliy^ 
 beliefs" 
 
 7a 000 382 359 8 
 
 BR 
 
 100 
 
 A69p
 
 w