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A NEW ANALOGY 
 
A FEW ANALOGY 
 
 BETWEEN REVEALED RELIGION AND THE 
 COURSE AND CONSTITUTION OF NATURE 
 
 BY CELLAEIUS 
 
 3C.cmii.0n : 
 MACMILLAX AND CO. 
 
 1881. 
 [All rights reserved.'] 
 
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 UNIVERSITY 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 THE author of the Analogy, in his preface to that im- 
 mortal work, states his reasons for writing it in the 
 following terms : " It is come, I know not how, to be 
 taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is 
 not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now 
 at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly 
 they treat it, as if in the present age this were an agreed 
 point among all people of discernment." Now it is not 
 to be denied that a state of mind, similar to that which 
 he noticed and described, has been to an incredibly 
 great extent growing up amongst ourselves in respect 
 of Eevelation, which "people of discernment" do not 
 indeed pronounce fictitious, still less " set up as a prin- 
 cipal subject of mirth and ridicule," but the Divine 
 origin of which they take for granted cannot be proved 
 by evidence ; or, if not this, then at least that it is not 
 as a matter of fact demonstrated by such evidence as 
 exists. Now, inasmuch as the argument from Analogy, 
 first applied by the author of this celebrated book to 
 the defence of religion, is a possession for ever, and, so 
 far as regards its method, of eternal value and signifi. 
 cance, there seems no reason why it may not be once 
 
vi ADVEKTISEMENT. 
 
 more employed to combat the present state of mental 
 incredulity and indifference; due care being taken, as 
 will appear in its proper place, to adapt the course and 
 details of the argument to the changes which lapse of 
 time and alterations in the way of thinking have pro- 
 duced in the attitude of those who cannot bring them- 
 selves to regard the Christian religion as being the direct 
 work of God, and His own peculiar gift to mankind. 
 The present writer would be the last to deny that such 
 defences are for the most part best left in the hands 
 of professed champions of the Faith, the clergy and 
 theologians, who have abundant learning, activity, and 
 opportunity for the performance of so sacred a duty. 
 But the crisis being what it is, and men's minds being 
 plainly in a state of doubt and uneasiness, and the 
 objectors constantly affirming that their peculiar diffi- 
 culties are not being met upon their own ground, or 
 by arguments which they consider ad rcm; and, above 
 all, the way of Analogy, of old so successful, not having 
 been tried, the writer has brought himself to believe that 
 there is some excuse for intruding himself though not 
 his name, which could not conduce to the furtherance 
 of his purpose upon the public notice. In so large 
 and open a field of intellectual husbandry there is room 
 even for a private and unlearned person to address to his 
 fellow Christians, more especially laymen, those reasons 
 which have from time to time appeared to himself to 
 afford a reasonably strong presumption that Nature and 
 Revelation have proceeded from the same Author, and 
 that therefore the materials of a credible and rational 
 religion are placed at the disposal of mankind. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 INTRODUCTION : THE NATURE OF THE NEW ANALOGY, 
 
 ESPECIALLY AS COMPARED WITH THE OLD 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ON THE PRESUMPTION AGAINST A SUPERNATURAL 
 
 REVELATION , 33 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON THE ANALOGY BETWEEN REVELATION AND NATURE 
 
 VIEWED GENERALLY . 50 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ON THE IMPROBABILITY FROM ANALOGY THAT REVE- 
 LATION WAS PRODUCED IN THE COURSE OF 
 NATURE 81 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 PAGR 
 
 ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION 07 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OX THE REVELATION OP THE FATHER . . .118 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON THE REVELATION OF THE SON . . . .153 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHRIST . . .182 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 4 
 
 ON THE ANALOGY OF REDEMPTION WITH NATURE . 199 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ON THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST TO DEATH AND 
 
 HIS RESURRECTION TO LIFE . . . .228 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 ON THE REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT . . 259 
 
 CONCLUSION . 28 i 
 
A NEW ANALOGY 
 
 BETWEEN REVEALED RELIGION AND THE COURSE 
 AND CONSTITUTION OF NATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE NATUEE OP THE NEW ANALOGY, ESPECIALLY AS 
 COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 
 
 THE nature of the new Analogy must be deter- 
 mined chiefly "by the kind of objections which 
 reasonable men feel to stand in the way of 
 their accepting the Christian Revelation, or, more 
 generally, by the attitude of their minds towards 
 it. And what we observe is a general and, it is to 
 be feared, growing disinclination either to accept 
 Revelation as true, or even to inquire whether it be 
 true or not, and this not so much because of moral 
 or even of intellectual difficulties, as because men 
 have come to take it for granted that knowledge 
 is impossible and certainty unattainable. And this 
 
2 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 disinclination extends to both branches of religion, 
 natural and revealed, both of which are rejected 
 by the same minds, but, it is very important to ob- 
 serve, upon quite opposite grounds. It is generally, 
 perhaps we might say universally, admitted that 
 the order and course of Nature, nay, its very 
 existence as apprehended by creatures such as we 
 are, do powerfully suggest and even force upon us 
 the ideas which go to make up the fabric of religion, 
 viz., the being of a Creator and man's dependence 
 upon Him in the way of fear, obedience, submission, 
 hope, and the like. But it is contended that there 
 is nothing in the order of Nature to afford us any 
 certain knowledge who or what the Author or Cause 
 of Nature really is ; and, further, that we . have no 
 faculties whereby, even were the conditions of 
 knowledge more perfect than they are, we could 
 by searching find out Glod. Whether this be so or 
 not it is not necessary for us now to inquire ; but, 
 admitting it to be true, the conclusion would seem 
 to follow that it is only by special Revelation that 
 the Creator can be made known to us, and in the 
 next place, that things being as they are, such 
 Kevelation is in a very high degree probable and 
 
L] INTKODUCTION. 3 
 
 to be expected by us. But at this point the 
 objector, cutting himself loose from all considera- 
 tions and probabilities derived from the actual 
 condition of things as we know them, proceeds to 
 treat the history of Revelation as though it were 
 a piece of ordinary history to be judged by the 
 ordinary tests of historical truth, and as though 
 Nature had no influence whatever in predisposing 
 the mind towards its reception or in suggesting 
 a reasonable probability of its being true ; rather, 
 indeed, the reverse. The point of the objection 
 is not (as in the case of natural religion) that 
 Revelation does not afford a sufficiently clear and 
 substantial knowledge of God, a thing which I 
 have never seen denied, but that there is no suffi- 
 cient evidence for its having happened (being, as 
 it certainly is, beyond the laws of Nature and 
 above our common experience), as the history says 
 it did. Which, when we look at it attentively, 
 really seems to come to this, that natural religion 
 must be rejected because it is not supernatural, 
 and Revelation because it is. 
 
 But while the objection, by taking the Christian 
 -apologist at a disadvantage, certainly contrives to 
 
 B 2 
 
4 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 place him under serious embarrassment, and goes 
 far, if persisted in, to make agreement impossible, 
 yet the bare statement of it would seem strongly 
 to suggest that a way there must be out of the 
 difficulty if we try to find it. Harder, indeed, 
 than to prove a negation is it to prove an affirma- 
 tive to minds whom negation satisfies, nor will the 
 attempt be made in this present book. But the 
 mass of mankind are not thus easily satisfied, nor 
 does it seem as if objections of this sort had as 
 yet made much way with them : they appear to 
 treat them as ingenious rather than sound, un- 
 answerable rather than convincing. And it may 
 be possible to put a different complexion upon the 
 matter if we succeed in uniting what the objec- 
 tion keeps steadily asunder, namely, natural and 
 revealed religion. 
 
 In Eevelation the existence of God is pur- 
 ported to be proved to us by evidence ; in Nature 
 His will, attributes, and modes of government 
 are displayed. Hence the order of thought is as 
 follows : Nature first impels us to suppose that 
 there must be a creating God; Eevelation next 
 informs us that the supposition is true, and further 
 
i.] INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 explains His relations to us ; and thus we become 
 enabled to trace the operations and intentions of 
 God in the world at large. 
 
 Now if we assume (that is, conduct the argu- 
 ment as if there were no preliminary reason for 
 thinking it to be the case) that the Author of 
 Nature is not directly the Author of Kevelation, 
 except in the sense in which He may justly be 
 called the Author of all things that happen or 
 that are, then there can be no difficulty in 
 arriving at a conclusion adverse to the credibility 
 of the Christian faith, for we are still without 
 direct proof of God. Bat if, on the contrary, we 
 can find solid reasons for believing that the 
 course of action attributed to God in Eevelation 
 .is such as might be expected from the Author 
 of Nature if the two are so consistent with 
 each other and so much in harmony as to afford 
 a presumption of their having been derived from 
 the same original cause then we have positive 
 reasons and a sure warranty for a religion fitted 
 to carry the hopes and sustain the burdens of 
 the human race. Hence we are put upon this 
 inquiry first of all : Are there reasonable grounds 
 
6 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 to be obtained from an examination of Nature 
 and Kevelation for alleging that they are the 
 offspring of the same Mind, and that both form 
 part of the order and constitution of that larger 
 Nature that is to say, of the universe itself by 
 which our present world is conditioned and in 
 it included ? Or we may state the same issue in 
 another way, as thus : When we compare what 
 is told us of God in Eevelation with what we 
 know to be true of the Creator in Nature, is it 
 more likely that the same Power which gave us 
 Nature also gave us Eevelation, or that men (who 
 they were and how they accomplished their 
 work being at present certainly undiscovered) 
 invented, not of necessity designedly, the latter, 
 and succeeded in getting it passed off upon 
 the world as being the work of the Creator 
 Himself ? 
 
 Now, the only method known to reason by 
 which identity of origin can be proved between two 
 different systems, is by likeness of phenomena 
 that is to say, by Analogy; which kind of argu- 
 ment, it may be here observed, has grown pro- 
 digiously in force and use since the time it was- 
 
i.] USTTRODUCTIOK 7 
 
 first applied to the defence of religion, so much 
 so as would almost of itself justify the undertaking 
 of a new Analogy. For the human intelligence has 
 of late years earnestly bent itself to the task, im- 
 posing it upon itself as a kind of serious moral 
 duty, of summing up in the fewest formulas, or 
 of tracing to the same origin, or of including in 
 their appropriate classes, all that immense variety 
 of processes, phenomena, individuals, which, until 
 the mind of Grod, working through the mind of 
 His creatures, breathed upon them, were a mere 
 chaos to the beings who lived among them and by 
 them. For all science is but the perception of like- 
 ness. I say all science, because the perception of 
 difference is, l>y itself, a mere negation, and of 
 value only so far as it leads to the perception of 
 similitude. It is useful to know that one thing is 
 not like another for the ultimate purpose of dis- 
 covering what it is like, and so of giving it its 
 proper place in the general arrangement of phe- 
 nomena. And as the human mind has definitely 
 committed itself to this method of investigation, 
 it follows that the argumentative stress of Analogy 
 is much increased thereby, nor are we entitled to 
 
8 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 be startled neither, as a matter of fact, are we 
 startled at the most amazing, seemingly far- 
 fetched, and altogether original analogies, which, 
 in a previous state of thinking, wonld have seemed 
 nothing but fanciful, audacious, and perhaps irre- 
 verent guessing. No length of time or distance 
 of space, no external difference of form and use, 
 no distinotion between matter and spirit, animal 
 and human, physical and moral, dead and living, 
 does in the least avail to hinder the human mind 
 from pressing forward in its task of grouping 
 phenomena by the likeness they bear to each other, 
 or of discovering affinities and connecting-links 
 where at first sight it would seem impossible that 
 any should exist. Wherefore a new Analogy 
 betwixt Nature and Revelation, supposing it to be 
 established even in a faint degree, will carry more 
 weight with it in the estimation of the public, 
 and will even be in some sense of a more positive 
 and efficacious value than the old. In itself, 
 indeed, it can be at the present time merely ger- 
 minal and tentative ; but failure itself, be it ever 
 so absolute, need not be discouraging so long as 
 the method pursued be in accordance with the 
 
L] INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 present practice of human thinking, and with the 
 requirements of the religion that has to be defended. 
 So far for the value of the new Analogy taken 
 generally, which we shall now proceed to examine 
 more in detail, with the special object of fixing 
 the sense in which the three leading words God, 
 Nature, Revelation are to be employed without 
 departing from the conditions which the kind of 
 argument imposes upon us. And perhaps a safe 
 and satisfactory way will be to compare the new 
 Analogy with the old in respect of the meaning 
 attached to the words in question; from which 
 comparison it will appear, unless the writer greatly 
 deceives himself, that we are strictly following the 
 method prescribed by the master-mind, and are 
 using these words in what is essentially the 
 sense he employed them in; but also that 
 certain points there are, arising merely from the 
 different way men have of regarding things in 
 these latter days, which mark the place where the 
 argument begins to take a fresh departure, leaving 
 the accustomed highway, and which also to some 
 extent open up a view of the new road along 
 which our journey must be pursued. 
 
10 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Tliis is the description of the argument from 
 Analogy as we find it in the introduction : " If 
 there be an Analogy or Likeness between that 
 system of things and Dispensation of Providence 
 which Revelation informs us of, and that system of 
 things and Dispensation of Providence which ex- 
 perience together with reason informs us of, i.e. the- 
 known course of Nature ; this is a presumption that 
 they have both the same Author and Cause ; at 
 least so far as to answer objections against the 
 former's being from God, drawn from anything 
 which is analogical or similar to what is in the 
 latter, which is acknowledged to be from Him ; for 
 an Author of Nature is here supposed." 
 
 Now this passage, down to the words " Author 
 and Cause/' contains a description of the method 
 of analogical reasoning as employed in the cause of 
 religion which all who presume to approach that 
 subject can, or rather must, adopt as their own, nor 
 need we desire a better account of the aim of this 
 present treatise. But after this the author goes on to 
 say that he means to use this Analogy to answer ob- 
 jections which have been made against the Christian 
 Revelation, because of what it contains and teaches J> 
 
L] INTRODUCTION. 11 
 
 aud this he does (in the words of Origen, by whom 
 the idea of Analogy was first started), by saying 
 we may well expect to find the same difficulties in 
 Scripture as are found in the constitution of Nature. 
 Now, if we remember that men do not nowadays 
 find difficulties in the contents of Kevelation so 
 much as require better evidence for it ; or, if we 
 like to put it thus, that their chief, if not only 
 difficulty, is in the existence of the supernatural 
 element in which Eevelation does differ from Nature, 
 at least apparently, it will follow, as has already 
 been hinted, that the new Analogy must adduce 
 positive evidence that the two have the same Cause, 
 in spite of the presumption to the contrary drawn 
 from that wherein they differ. It is not because 
 the two have the same difficulties, but because they 
 can be proved to have similar methods, laws, cha- 
 racteristics, ideas, a consistency of operation, and a 
 striking capacity for combination, that men will 
 now be brought to believe in the truth of the 
 Christian religion. Hence the exact point at which 
 the new departure begins may be placed at the 
 words "at least" in the above description; for 
 there need not be, and there is not by the nature 
 
12 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 of the case, any limitation to the evidential validity 
 and constraining logic of Analogy, which is to the 
 full as competent to establish a case as to refute an 
 objection or explain a difficulty. 
 
 The next subject that presents itself for con- 
 sideration is the meaning which the author of the 
 Analogy attached to these three words God, 
 Nature, Revelation ; and herein, first, the essence 
 of that meaning in which we gratefully copy him ; 
 second, certain modifications and developments 
 resulting from improved ways of thinking or in- 
 creased information vouchsafed to man in these 
 later days a matter, be it observed, of capital im- 
 portance to the right understanding of the new 
 Analogy, because, for one thing, it is owing to 
 these improvements, and that in ways that can be 
 distinctly traced, that we may expect larger and 
 more positive results from its employment without 
 being thought over-sanguine. -But it should not 
 be forgotten that the author himself did practically 
 extend his use of Analogy much beyond the per- 
 haps rather narrow office, of answering objections 
 namely, to which in words he confined it. 
 
 First, as to what we mean when we speak of 
 
L] INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 God. The closing words of the above quotation, 
 <f for an Author of Nature is here supposed/' have 
 been much objected against, not as being improper 
 or unfair in the author's use of them and as against 
 the opponents he was controverting, but because 
 they appear to postulate the very thing which now- 
 adays is in dispute whether we can ascertain by 
 reason or otherwise the existence and attributes of 
 God. But the objection is more verbal than real. The 
 being of God is supposed only in the way and for 
 the purposes in and for which it cannot but be 
 supposed if men are to discourse of religion at all. 
 For that some Power exists, even if you choose to 
 call it the Unknowable, all are agreed, as well as 
 that it attracts the thoughts and emotions of man- 
 kind to itself. And to call this Power the Author 
 of Nature, and then to regard Nature as revealing 
 His mind and will, is quite allowable, provided 
 we avoid deriving arguments from His Abstract 
 Being or drawing conclusions concerning His mind 
 and will other than are to be deduced from Nature, 
 that is, the order of things as we possess and can 
 verify and expound them which is just what 
 the author of the Analogy has carefully done on 
 
14 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the one hand, and avoided on the other. And 
 that his "supposition," as he makes and uses it, 
 is justifiable, may be abundantly shown if we 
 pay attention to the results of modern thinking 
 on the subject. 
 
 The reason why we are justified in assuming 
 an Author or Cause of Nature if, that is, we are 
 to speak of religion at all is founded upon the 
 truth, first of all, that we are unable to conceive 
 of anything as being uncaused, and therefore not 
 even the universe itself, much less that very 
 small portion of the universe which is all that we 
 mean, or at any rate ought to mean, when we 
 speak of things as being "natural." Nor is there 
 the faintest indication from what Nature teaches 
 us to lead us to try and imagine that it is with- 
 out cause, or to help us in the least degree to 
 mount above or escape from this primary law 
 of our rational understanding. For even if we 
 were able to conceive of Nature as uncaused 
 that is, as self-existing we should only be in- 
 troducing surreptitiously, under cover of the word 
 "self," another unknown factor into the sum of 
 things, and the "self" of Nature would be but 
 
T.J INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 another, and that a very improper, uncouth, and 
 misleading, name for God. And modern specula- 
 tions about the origin of the world do but make 
 this truth more distinct and impressive ; for men 
 are now commonly taught to speak and debate 
 concerning the formation, not only of this earth 
 of ours, but of the solar system itself, even of the 
 sun, from which, so they say, the earth was framed. 
 Nor is there the least difficulty in the supposition, 
 or the least improbability in the belief, that time 
 was when all the vast space now occupied by 
 the solar system was a mere blank emptiness till 
 what shall we call them ? forces, powers, creative 
 germs, of the existence of which elsewhere we 
 have plain ocular demonstration, acting from 
 spheres outside our present system of things, 
 established and by slow degrees elaborated the 
 world in which we live. For it is as easy to 
 conceive of the origination of a world as of an 
 atom, and of a universe as of a world. The fact 
 then being first, that we cannot think of the 
 world except as being caused ; and, secondly, that 
 we are very plainly made aware of the existence 
 of other spheres which may have, and very 
 
16 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 probably (judging from what we know of the 
 origin of the earth) did have, an existence 
 anterior to our system or Nature ; it follows that 
 we are fully entitled to assume a Cause of 
 Nature, and if a Cause, then, due care being 
 taken what use we maks of the supposition, 
 of an Author as well. For Author is but the 
 term for the highest form of Cause known to 
 us, viz. a Personal Being, and is therefore the 
 proper word to employ, not merely from motives 
 of reverence and natural awe, but for the strict 
 purpose of philosophical discussion. And when 
 I speak of taking due care, I mean this : Men 
 begin by thinking of an Author of Nature, and 
 then unconsciously come to regard Him as a 
 Personal Being like themselves. Then as there- 
 are plainly many things in which He differs from 
 men, they put these differences in combination 
 or in contrast with His supposed Personal Being; 
 and out of this they gather ideas such as Eternity, 
 Infinity, Equality of Persons, Foreknowledge 
 which are so many notions (true or not it is 
 not our purpose to inquire) imported into the 
 nature of God beyond what the experience of 
 
OR 1 
 
 i.] INTRODUCTION ^^Z^O" 
 
 Nature warrants. And this is what, I repeaf 
 the author of the Analogy has nowhere done, 
 and that he has not done it may perhaps be 
 not unjustly thought the great charm of his book, 
 and a constraining example to his successors. 
 But letting the sum of phenomena or course of 
 Nature, be what it is, and nothing more than 
 it is, there is then no begging any question 
 in assuming that it represents the thoughts 
 and intentions, or declares the will and 
 character of a Divine Author. Thus the law of 
 gravitation may be regarded as expressing the 
 control of God over the motions of bodies. It is 
 indeed in strictness no more than an hypothesis, 
 which may require to be verified from other 
 sources ; but on the other hand the name and the 
 idea of God, or Personal Creator, is at once the 
 first, most natural, most easily grasped, most lofty, 
 and, for these reasons, the most legitimate and 
 befitting synthesis of the universe. And in this 
 provisional if so you like to call it sense, and in 
 no other, it was used by the author of the Analogy, 
 and will be used in this present treatise. 
 
 Secondly, as to what we mean when we speak 
 
 c 
 
18 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 of Nature. Until recent times, and certainly at 
 the time when the Analogy was composed, Nature 
 was commonly thought of by the mass of public 
 opinion which, without having scientific know- 
 ledge, submits itself to the guidance of those who 
 have somewhat as follows: It was regarded as 
 consisting of a number, that varied more or less 
 according to the philosophical comprehensiveness 
 of the comprehending mind : a number or aggre- 
 gate, I say, of separate things i.e. forces, or sub- 
 stances, or genera each of which was believed to 
 have had an origin independently of the others, 
 save that they were the offspring, though not at 
 the same time, of the same creating Will. And 
 the relations of these were supposed to be arranged 
 by immutable omnipresent laws impressed upon 
 them from the very beginning of things. That is 
 to say, the laws which regulate the co-ordination of 
 things in space were beginning to be understood 
 by the learned and accepted by the multitude, 
 whereas the laws which regulate the succession of 
 things in time, so far as they regard what we may 
 term the primal or prae- chronological things, were- 
 not yet attempted to any great extent save by 
 
L] INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 unverified conjectures. But these, as we very well 
 know, carry the mind a long way back, into the 
 very origin of things, long before they assumed 
 the shape they have now, and into their mutual 
 relation in the way of cause and effect. Nor is 
 it absurd to suppose (though the idea rather takes 
 away the breath) that gravitation itself may have 
 been caused by some previous, totally inconceiv- 
 able, state of things in the world of that which we 
 call "matter." 
 
 Now, the language of the author of the Analogy, 
 always aiming at strict and even painful accuracy 
 according to the standard of his age, gives plain 
 evidence that he conceived of Nature as we have 
 above attempted to describe. For he speaks always 
 of the Constitution and Course of Nature, whereby 
 (so at least it would seem, and so surely the whole 
 book goes to show) he makes it clear that in his 
 way of thinking Nature was constituted by the 
 Creator in a particular way, so as to run a particular 
 course, in obedience to the natural laws which its 
 very constitution impressed upon it; whence the 
 Creator is also the Governor of the world. But 
 Nature presents itself, to our ways of thinking, in 
 
 c 2 
 
20 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the inverse order ; and we should, so far as a mere 
 reversal of the order of words can do it, indicate 
 our view of the case by speaking of the course and 
 (consequent) constitution of Nature ; that is to say, 
 of the course or succession of phenomena as having 
 fixed the present constitution of things. We can- 
 not but recognise, even if we will not welcome, 
 the idea of development ; that is, of a principle or 
 principles running throughout Nature and fixing 
 by irresistible, and at the same time discoverable, 
 methods, its order and constitution. Hence we do 
 not conceive of the mind of Grod as creating and 
 then sustaining, but as moving from infinity by 
 the agency of powers that are always progressing 
 towards creation (no better word seems to present 
 itself) and natural order. Thus the very process 
 whereby the will of God operates in creating, the 
 actual course which that will pursues in framing 
 the constitution of Nature, is more and more laid 
 open to us, so that we can gaze upon the very 
 arcana of the creative mind ; that is to say, those 
 few leading principles which, as they may with 
 patient searching be discovered by those who apply 
 themselves to the investigation of Nature, so may 
 
i.] INTRODUCTION. 21 
 
 they by reverent inquiry be understood in their 
 religious significance by those who apply themselves 
 to the knowledge and worship of God. 
 
 The above considerations do certainly seem to 
 hold out an anticipation of the possibility and 
 value of a new Analogy between Nature and 
 Revelation, by the simplicity and brevity which 
 they import into our conceptions of the former. 
 And if we use the Darwinian theory simply to 
 describe a way of thinking about things that has 
 taken possession, apparently for good and all, of 
 the human mind, and which in its general tendency 
 no one now disputes (not entering into any con- 
 troverted points nor blaming theology for, very 
 naturally, holding aloof from it), we shall be able 
 to see in the words " course and constitution of 
 Nature " a simple definite idea, and, as it were, a 
 fixed method of procedure, which may help us to 
 make it, both as a whole and in some details, a 
 subject of comparison with any other dispensa- 
 tion that claims to have proceeded from the same 
 Author. 
 
 Thirdly, as to what we mean when we speak 
 of Revelation. The author of the Analogy does 
 
22 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 not appear to have anywhere definitely put to 
 himself the question which sounds so natural to 
 us : What exactly do we mean by Revelation ? 
 But in chapter vii. of the second part he virtually 
 answers it by the declaration that "this Revelation, 
 whether real or supposed, may be considered as 
 wholly historical ; }J and in the fifth chapter, on 
 "the particular system of Christianity/' he has 
 given a very sufficient account of what the history 
 may be taken to cover. And this, when we examine 
 it, is neither more nor less than the life of Jesus 
 Christ. Thus he begins with that verse which the 
 present writer, long before he thought of ventur- 
 ing upon this task, had always regarded as con- 
 taining the sum and substance of the Christian 
 faith : " God so loved the world that he gave His 
 only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on 
 Him should not perish;" or, again, "the Son of 
 God loved us and gave Himself for ns." And 
 in a later part of that chapter he sums up the 
 "particular manner in which Christ interposed in 
 the redemption of the world/' i.e. by living and 
 dying in it, and rising from the dead at the last. 
 Now all this he includes under Christ's office as 
 
i.] INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 Mediator, because, as lie himself lias told us in 
 the first words of this chapter, " there is not any- 
 thing relating to Christianity which has been more 
 objected against than the mediation of Christ 5 ' 
 and to answer objections was the purpose of his 
 book. Nor, if we take the word in a general sense 
 as expressing the instrumentality whereby God 
 revealed Himself to His creatures, would it be less 
 suitable for our present undertaking. But inas- 
 much as it is commonly taken to signify one 
 special aspect of Christ's mediatorial work, i.e. 
 the sacrificial, we shall do better to retain what 
 was the author's primary conception of Revela- 
 tion : first, that it was a history; second, that it 
 was a history of Christ's human manifestation. 
 
 Let the following then stand for the meaning 
 in which Eevelation will hereafter be used : That 
 God, out of love to the world, sent His Son to 
 live the life of man in it : that the Son addressed 
 Himself to the task of saving mankind from their 
 sins by a life of perfect virtue and holiness, by 
 the performance of benevolent actions through 
 the power His Father had entrusted him with, 
 by the teaching of a perfect and efficient morality, 
 
24 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and, perhaps above all, by that instruction con- 
 cerning the Father and His relations towards His 
 (no longer creatures but) children, which we receive 
 as of binding and absolute authority: that in the 
 performance of this work He was put to death 
 and raised from it the effect of these great trans- 
 actions being to afford a certain means of redemp- 
 tion from sin and death to those who accepted 
 Him as their Saviour : that by virtue of these 
 events He is solemnly, and in the face of all men, 
 instituted King and Judge of mankind, with each 
 individual member of which He is brought into 
 personal and spiritual communion : finally, that 
 the Christian Church was instituted as the means 
 whereby all the blessings His work confers may 
 be appropriated by His disciples and carried on 
 to those who are not yet His people. 
 
 If it be objected, as may not improbably be 
 the case, by the defenders of Kevelation, that 
 much more than this is of the essence of Chris- 
 tianity, and necessary to salvation, and by its assail- 
 ants that it is responsible for many other doctrines 
 than these, and must be prepared to maintain 
 them, I answer deferring for the present an 
 
i.] INTBODUCTIOK 25 
 
 investigation into the essence of the Christian 
 religion by means of analogy, and not disputing 
 the truth of either of the above propositions 
 that such other doctrines, be they what they 
 may and as true as you please, cannot, according 
 to the plan we have proposed to ourselves, be 
 treated as belonging to that part of the 
 Christian Dispensation which it is possible to 
 bring into comparison with the course of Nature. 
 For what we have set before ourselves is to 
 discover some analogy between that which may 
 with certainty be attributed to God in Nature 
 and that which may be believed to be true of 
 Him in Revelation; in other words, the punctum 
 comparationis consists in what God, by His own 
 power and exercise of His will, in obedience to 
 His own character, without admixture of human 
 co-operation or even knowledge, has plainly and 
 beyond all doubt done in creation as all men 
 know, in redemption as Christians believe. And 
 if the course of Nature and contents of Revelation 
 be as we have defined thein respectively, then 
 it may be affirmed that, upon the first blush and 
 prior to further examination, they are such as 
 
26 A NEW ANALOGY. [cn^r. 
 
 admit of being brought into comparison one 
 with the other. Of which, if any Christian doubt, 
 let him call to mind the opening verses of the 
 fourth Gospel, and be at peace with his fears. 
 
 A similar answer may be given to the not 
 unnatural objection that this method of pro- 
 ceeding gives special prominence to the so- 
 called supernatural element in Christianity, to 
 the detriment of those natural appeals which 
 Holy Scripture addresses to the conscience or 
 the emotions, or the sense of beauty or the 
 instincts of humanity itself. Shame indeed were 
 it if a Christian writer should seem to disparage 
 these; nor is the author unaware of the existence 
 of this melancholy tendency in Christian literature, 
 not only of the past but even of the present 
 time. But for the purpose we have in view such 
 arguments would be not merely irrelevant but 
 intrusive, because the comparison is to be made, 
 not with anything that is excellent in morals or 
 true to human nature, but with the work of God 
 in the course and constitution of Nature. If our 
 purpose were to prove religion by miracles, the 
 objection would apply in all its force; but as it 
 
i.] INTRODUCTION. -27 
 
 is to prove Kevelation in history (whether super- 
 natural or not) by its analogy with Nature, our 
 argument does not pass by, still less supersede 
 those other arguments to which I allude, but 
 rather runs a parallel 1 course with them to the 
 same goal. 
 
 We are now in a position to define the new 
 Antilogy, adopting the language, mutatis mutandiSj 
 of the old, and for convenience of contrast throwing 
 it into the form of answering objections, which 
 of course any argument, though positive in its 
 own nature, can be made to assume. 
 
 "If there be an analogy or likeness between 
 the system of things and Dispensation of God 
 which Revelation informs us of, and that system of 
 things and Dispensation of God which experience, 
 together with reason, informs us of i.e. the 
 known course of Nature this is a presumption 
 that they have both the same Author and Cause, 
 certainly so far as to answer objections against 
 the former's being of God drawn from the fact 
 that it differs from the latter in one respect, 
 namely, the supernatural element/' And here 
 let it be noted that the objection does not now 
 
28 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 take the form that sufficient evidence for a 
 Revelation is impossible, but that the evidence 
 as we have it is not sufficient to make reasonable 
 belief, still less reasonable certainty, attainable; 
 that is to say, that we have to deal with a state 
 of mind that comes to the discussion of the 
 evidence and probabilities of the case under a 
 certain prejudice, which, to show that the word 
 is not being used offensively, we will further call 
 natural, against the Christian belief in the life 
 of the Son of God upon earth. But this prejudice 
 can, I think, be reduced almost to zero by the 
 exhibition of an analogy between Revelation and 
 Nature of such a kind as to afford a strong 
 presumption that they have the same origin : 
 certainly I know no other way by which this 
 result, so desirable in the interests of religious 
 belief, can be brought about. 
 
 Before bringing this chapter to a close, in 
 excuse for the length of which it may be pleaded 
 that the possibility and method of a new Analogy 
 is at present more essential than its details, a few 
 words must be added by way of deprecating any 
 further comparison with the old that might leave 
 
L] INTRODUCTION. 29 
 
 
 
 the writer under a just stigma of pretentiousness. 
 Let us then pay to the memory of Bishop Butler 
 that unfeigned tribute of admiration with which 
 a further study of his great work has inspired the 
 writer. Apart from the purely philosophic faculty, 
 which few persons have possessed to greater per- 
 fection, these two things may be affirmed con- 
 cerning him : first, that he introduced a new and 
 highly rational way of dealing with religious 
 demonstration namely, the method of Analogy 
 or comparison with Nature; secondly, that his 
 book may be quoted as one of the few that at a 
 blow accomplished that whereunto it was sent 
 Venit, mditj vicit. Men do not now allege those 
 objections against Christianity which seem so 
 plausible till they are found to be inherent in the 
 constitution of things or to lead up to problems 
 which we have no faculties to approach. Nay, it 
 will hardly be deemed fanciful if we attribute in 
 some degree the present difficulties in respect of 
 religion to the influence of the Analogy in con- 
 straining men to think that Eevelation must 
 resemble Nature if it is to be pronounced credible, 
 and that the existence of a miraculous element 
 
30 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP, 
 
 breaks this condition. In which case it becomes 
 more than ever a duty to inquire whether the 
 door which Butler once for all threw open has 
 got closed against the efforts of human reason to 
 discover the truth about religion. 
 
 Rather let us affirm that the progress of 
 thought has cleared the path which he first jour- 
 neyed over, and has made it in some respects 
 easier for smaller minds to follow his method of 
 reasoning. For one thing, we shall be spared the 
 necessity of that almost painful reference to the 
 fact that Christianity and Nature were schemes 
 ' ' very imperfectly understood." This falling back 
 on man's ignorance and on the limitation of human 
 faculties was at once necessitated by the method 
 of his argument, and is perfectly justifiable when 
 used in the last resort to answer difficulties which 
 are inherent in the very fabric of things, the 
 human mind included. But the new Analogy 
 may be said to depend rather upon the extent of 
 our information and upon our ability to discover 
 the methods of Divine working in Nature and in 
 Revelation. And what is more, further informa- 
 tion, as future generations gather it in, and a more 
 
i.] INTRODUCTIOK 31 
 
 just and accurate way of thinking, as it gains pos- 
 session of the intelligence of mankind, can but 
 fortify and fill up the Analogy, supposing it to 
 exist, or expose and overthrow it (a thing of 
 which there does not now seem any trace) if there 
 be no connection between Nature and Revelation 
 in the way of a common origin. For what, after 
 all, is our plan but the very simple process, recog- 
 nised universally as the proper task of man, of 
 bringing religion into combination with things 
 known and knowable by means of its likeness to 
 them? And why should not religion present 
 many features of resemblance and adjustment to 
 Nature, if only we look for them ? How, indeed, 
 can it help doing so if the same God be the 
 Author of both ? To what may we not attain as 
 we surprise more and more the hidden secrets of 
 Nature's working on the one hand, and the hidden 
 springs of man's moral and spiritual being on the 
 other ? In the perpetual struggle of the human 
 mind to arrive at similitude, identity, simplicity, 
 it may well be that analogies lying close at the 
 roots of all Being will more and more reveal them- 
 selves to our eyes. A great and wide sea truly 
 
32 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. i. 
 
 upon which to venture, and the ship but a weak 
 and ill-furnished raft pelago truci, ratem fragilem. 
 But some one of old has said : " They that go 
 down to the sea in ships, that do business in great 
 waters, these see the works of the Lord and His 
 wonders in the deep." 
 
WXVB'KSITT 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 ON THE PRESUMPTION AGAINST A SUPERNATURAL 
 REVELATION. 
 
 IT is a fact that the preliminary and, if not the 
 only, certainly the fatal objection in the minds of 
 those who reject Revelation is to be found in the 
 supernatural element which it avowedly contains, 
 and which, indeed, makes it what it is. Accord- 
 ingly, the second chapter of the second part of 
 the Analogy (to which part alone this treatise 
 bears any relation) is devoted to the consideration 
 of what the author calls " a supposed presump- 
 tion against miracles." The arguments by which 
 he endeavours to remove or dimmish this pre- 
 sumption, which by us cannot fairly be called 
 " supposed," are mainly these : first, that there 
 are innumerable things in the Dispensation of 
 
34 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Providence of which we are wholly ignorant, 
 Nature being vast beyond all our imagination, so 
 that all that is opened to our view is but a point 
 in comparison of the whole; and, secondly, that 
 at the beginning of things which here, as else- 
 where, he speaks of as a settlement there must 
 have been a creative Power outside of the con- 
 stitution of Nature, which, indeed, was framed by 
 it, and that this Power may well be supposed 
 capable of operating again upon the world. All 
 which is unquestionably true, and possesses an 
 importance which no change in our ways of think- 
 ing can ever wholly destroy, for the facts upon 
 which he builds his reasoning are certainly facts 
 of Nature itself. But it must be admitted that 
 this way of stating them is no longer suited to 
 the form which objections against Eevelation 
 nowadays assume. For in the appeal to man ; s 
 ignorance the objector is beforehand with us, and 
 alleges his ignorance of all that lies beyond 
 natural law as the very ground of his unbelief. 
 And, again, to suppose that laws made at the first 
 constitution of Nature may be upon fit occasion 
 superseded is not so very difficult a task after 
 
n.] ON A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 35 
 
 all, nor does it make a very extravagant demand 
 upon our common sense; but then this is no 
 longer the way in which we are taught to think 
 of Nature. Kather we are summoned to discern a 
 natural course of things growing out of a few 
 simple elements acted upon by a few general laws, 
 so that interference with but one particle of 
 Nature's handiwork sends a shock through the 
 whole system of things, and cannot, in the pre- 
 sent state of the human mind, be accepted with- 
 out serious mental discomposure. Nor can it be 
 denied that the presumption against a certain 
 event having taken place once, drawn from the 
 fact that it has never taken place at any other 
 time, is, upon the face of it, exceedingly strong. 
 It is incumbent, therefore, upon us to endeavour 
 to find out in what the strength of this presump- 
 tion consists, and how much weight is in fairness 
 of reason to be attached to it. For some objections 
 there are to Christianity to be likened to the 
 strength of Samson, which was not to be resisted 
 till discovered where it was placed, and then 
 it was easy to shear his locks. And this surely 
 is the case: that reason, as experience widens, 
 
 D 2 
 
36 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 grows more and more suspicious of presumptions 
 one way or another. 
 
 It is a misfortune of controversies upon serious 
 subjects that they give rise to arguments which 
 prudent advocates must make what haste they can 
 to disavow, if they would gain a hearing for them- 
 selves. Thus the statement that God must be 
 supposed to have left Himself at liberty to dis- 
 pense with His own laws is surely one of the 
 most unfortunate arguments ever propounded. 
 We are compelled by the limits of our nature to 
 regard God under the highest conceptions (human, 
 but idealised) of wisdom, power, and goodness, 
 which, strive as we may, is what we must come 
 to at the last; but this argument compels us to 
 conceive of Him under the stress of man's weak- 
 ness and incapacity of forethought. But, to be 
 fair, this kind of argument has parallels on the 
 other side;, as, for instance, when men fall into 
 the habit almost unconsciously of regarding law 
 as a kind of inevitable necessity fastened upon 
 men and things by a power which is not to be 
 distinguished from fatalism though attired in a 
 new garb ; whereas law (as all the best thinkers 
 
n.] ON A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 37 
 
 see plainly) is but conceptions concerning phe- 
 nomena formed by the human intelligence for 
 itself and for its own use solely out of that part 
 of Nature which is open to our observation, which 
 can never be otherwise than limited, subdued, 
 and overawed by the vastness of the trans- 
 cendent mysteriousness brooding in eternal 
 stillness over the home and mind of man. 
 
 Turning then to interrogate Nature, and 
 admitting to the full the existence of a pre- 
 sumption against supernatural occurrences, we are 
 at once confronted by another presumption that 
 seems to flow just as obviously and naturally 
 from our experience of things as we know them. 
 For experience testifies, and the intimate union 
 of man with Nature, now become evident, supports 
 the testimony, that Nature places at our disposal 
 facilities for answering every question and 
 ascertaining every truth that can fairly be pro- 
 nounced intelligible and useful to us. The 
 intellectual spirit of the day will accept this 
 general statement with ungrudging assent. 
 Problems, for instance, concerning the origin and 
 destiny of man, his conduct and happiness, his 
 
38 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 physical and mental constitution, are presented 
 to us for investigation, and we are encouraged 
 by the record of past successes, by the very 
 necessities of our being, by our interest in the 
 welfare of our kind, to pursue these problems 
 as far as ever our faculties will enable us to go. 
 No doubt there comes a time when all problems 
 in every department of knowledge fade away 
 into the Unknowable, whence all things come and 
 whither they return; but then this is also the 
 point, so wisdom teaches us, at which they also 
 lose their practical interest and their usefulness 
 for mankind in the present stage of existence. 
 And, for now as we journey on we shall stumble 
 over half-concealed analogies at every step, let 
 us observe as we pass that Eevelation owns and 
 respects this natural limitation of our faculties, 
 and professes to tell us about Divine things only 
 so much as it is useful for us to know and 
 possible for us to understand. 
 
 Now certainly among all the problems that 
 have ever exercised the spirit of man there 
 is not one that springs up so regularly or 
 occurs so persistently as this " Do we hold 
 
IL] ON A SUPEKNATURAL REVELATION. 39 
 
 any, and if so, what relations to the Author 
 or Cause of our existence ? " Those who 
 have tried most to rid themselves and the 
 world of this problem only seem to show by 
 their labours and protestations how vital and 
 tremendous a subject it is : their strenuous 
 endeavours to cut the knot which they cannot, 
 or think they cannot, untie, do but call the more 
 attention to it and invest it with a redoubled 
 fascination, as of something that challenges man 
 to his face. Nor may the mind be -put off with 
 demonstrations concerning the impossibility of 
 comprehending the Absolute, or the Infinite, or 
 the uncaused Cause of all things. These are not 
 the things we want to know, nor are these the 
 tasks which Nature sets us to learn. What does 
 concern us to know, and what, if known, would 
 alter the whole course of human life, is, whether 
 there be a God who has respect unto His crea- 
 tures, and whether He means to give us any other 
 life than this. Can anything be of more practical 
 value to us in the way of knowledge than to dis- 
 cover whether we shall live again and see each 
 other once more, and be partakers of the universal 
 
40 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 life ? If it be desirable and full of interest to 
 ascertain how we came to be what we are, it 
 cannot surely be less so to ascertain what we are 
 going to be, and, so deep is the connection, it is 
 only because we are gifted with the power of 
 reflecting upon our. origin that we cannot help but 
 speculate upon our destiny. So that just in pro- 
 portion as men make discoveries about the former 
 do they stimulate inquiry into the latter. Per- 
 haps they do not mean to do so, and perhaps the 
 stimulus does not in many cases reach themselves, 
 but its effect upon the general mind in arousing 
 religious questions is none the less evident. 
 
 We have, therefore, a presumption gathered 
 from our experience of Nature that we shall be 
 able to find, and certainly cannot help trying to 
 find, an answer to every question that fulfils the 
 condition of being useful and intelligible, the time 
 of such discovery being determined by our oppor- 
 tunities and our growth in knowledge, which last 
 again is a very plain fact of experience. And 
 then we go on to point out that religious questions 
 being amongst the number of these problems, 
 there is nevertheless no answer to be had for 
 
IL] ON A SUPEENATUEAL EEVELATION. 41 
 
 them from the course and constitution of Nature 
 taken by itself. We lay this down absolutely, 
 because it is the position taken up by those to 
 answer whose objections the argument of this 
 book is intended. And perhaps it would have 
 been as well to stop with this simple assertion; 
 but seeing that the argumentum ad hominem is 
 never very satisfactory, still less so to look as 
 though we were avoiding expressing an opinion 
 upon a vital topic, we will briefly explain in what 
 sense that which men call agnosticism, or the 
 inability to discover God in Nature, may, in our 
 opinion, be accepted, if not absolutely, at least 
 for the present time and causa argumenti. 
 
 The statement, that men cannot, their reason- 
 ing powers being what they are, convince them- 
 selves of the existence of God by the way of 
 reason only, does not seem to the writer very per- 
 tinent to the matter in hand, seeing that the per- 
 suasion of God may eventually come to man by 
 other means than that of positive demonstration, 
 which at the present time occupies (perhaps usurps) 
 the whole field of knowledge. Theologians should 
 be careful how they surrender other avenues to 
 
42 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the natural belief in God while they are trying, 
 perhaps in vain, to force a passage along the path 
 down which the mass of thinking men happen 
 just at this time to be journeying, i.e. that of 
 sensible experience. If from any means what- 
 ever say from a predominant spiritual instinct, 
 or the testimony of conscience to a morality in- 
 herent in Nature, or even from the bare experi- 
 ence of Nature itself men do actually persuade 
 themselves that God exists, the persuasion will be 
 just as real, though of a different kind, as if they 
 had come by it in the way of strict reasoning 
 from facts. I do not say that they will, but that 
 they may, and if they may, then agnosticism is 
 itself only at most a reasonable probability, and 
 not a reasoned truth. And it is, to say the least, 
 quite conceivable that the long dispute might end 
 in the agnostic, while exclaiming in one breath, 
 " I cannot find God in Nature," being constrained 
 to add in the next, "but I must believe in Him 
 all the same." 
 
 But this let the future decide. For us the stress 
 of agnostic unbelief lies clearly enough in this : 
 that at a time .when men are turning with ever- 
 
ii.] ON A SUPEENATUEAL EEVELATION. 43 
 
 increasing zeal and success to the study of Nature 
 as the one source of all ascertainable knowledge, 
 there does not seem the very faintest indication 
 to show that any solution of religious problems 
 will be obtained from this quarter. If we put 
 this into the language of religion we should say 
 that if we are to judge of the intentions of the 
 Author of Nature from what Nature is and does, 
 which is the very thing we are claiming in this 
 book to do, then there is a determination growing 
 increasingly evident that in this way, for the 
 practical purposes of faith and worship, He will 
 not be known. Two considerations there are that 
 make this impression almost irresistible. 
 
 In the first place, the history of the progress 
 of knowledge informs us that the human mind 
 begins by giving very erroneous and childishly 
 simple answers to the questions which phenomena 
 suggest; that by degrees the mistakes are cleared 
 away, and that in the long run positive truth 
 is obtained. Thus in the field of science the 
 human mind that began by asserting "water is 
 the essential element of all things" ends by 
 discovering that water is composed of two gases; 
 
44 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 whereas in the field of religion the same mind 
 that grasped the idea of the Unity of God could 
 not retain it, still less advance upon it. So 
 that Nature is, as it were, out of analogy with 
 herself. She suggests so many plausible con- 
 jectures, and verifies none of them. There was 
 no necessary impossibility in the belief that there 
 were Gods in every stream or upon every hearth ; 
 or that the world was divided between the God 
 of light and the God of darkness; or that God 
 is an all-embracing Father, a divine Architect, 
 a moral Governor of mankind. Only all these 
 one by one came into favour, could not be verified, 
 and then passed out of favour with the human 
 intelligence, the remarkable thing being that in 
 religious knowledge nations have begun better 
 than they ended. Until it would really seem 
 as though in a spirit of irony, Nature, weary of 
 setting men to weary themselves with making 
 images of the Creator and then breaking them 
 in pieces, induced them to make a caricature 
 instead, and by way of diverting them from 
 the further pursuit of a fruitless inquiry summed 
 
ii.] ON A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 45 
 
 up the long result of man's searching after God 
 in this " Something not ourselves." 
 
 Add to this, in the second place, that there 
 seems no reason that we can imagine why the 
 Creator should not have made Himself known in 
 the course of Nature, seeing that so much has 
 been done in the way of suggesting the idea of 
 His existence and provoking curiosity as to His 
 relations towards us. The argument from design, 
 for instance, only just falls short of succeeding, 
 and cannot even yet be pronounced to have 
 failed. To say that man fails because of his own 
 fault is to talk idly if he had been intended to 
 succeed he would have done so. (It may be well 
 to remind the reader that we are speaking only 
 of arguments derived by reason from experience 
 of Nature, and not of moral or spiritual argu- 
 ments addressed to our conscience or our emo- 
 tions.) But it is the contrast between the ease 
 with which it looks as if information might be, 
 yes, and ought to be, given and the rigorous 
 silence maintained towards us that makes so 
 strong an impression upon the human mind. 
 
46 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Circumstances may change this, but the defenders 
 of the Christian religion must at the present time 
 accept it as a fact with which they have to deal. 
 
 Now it is to find a remedy for this, what we 
 may call unnatural, state of things unnatural 
 because contrary to an otherwise invariable expe- 
 rience of Nature's methods that Revelation is 
 supposed to have been given, and may be defended 
 as intrinsically probable in a world such as this. 
 That is to say, we have, when we come to look 
 at it, two strong and opposed presumptions one 
 against the continuance of an unnatural state of 
 ignorance, and in favour of a belief in the Revela- 
 tion which removes it ; the other against any inter- 
 vention with the fixed course of Nature, and in 
 favour of a belief in the unbroken chain of causa- 
 tion to which experience testifies. What are we 
 to conclude from this ? 
 
 Now, if the courteous reader has any expecta- 
 tion that these two presumptions will be balanced 
 against each other or alleged to neutralise each 
 other, he will be disappointed. Of their effect 
 one way or another we mean to say nothing, 
 because the weight that each has will be not an 
 
IL] ON A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 47 
 
 absolute quantity, but relative to the minds, so 
 very variously constituted, upon which they act; 
 and for a similar reason we put aside (not without 
 difficulty) the temptation to set one against the 
 other, so as to make both inoperative. But what 
 we beg the reader most carefully to observe is 
 that, compared with the positive arguments to be 
 derived for or against the Christian religion from 
 its analogy with Nature, both presumptions are 
 but as dust in the balance ; for in comparing 
 two things together to see whether they are alike 
 or not we are upon the plain firm ground of reason 
 and experience. Everything turns upon whether 
 Eevelation and Nature can be shown to resemble 
 each other so far as to prove identity of origin and 
 unity of design. If no such resemblance can be 
 traced, then Revelation would appear more alien than 
 ever from the spirit and teaching of Nature ; if 
 the contrary, then Revelation would simply become, 
 and would be readily recognised to be, a part of 
 Nature in its larger sense. In the former case the 
 presumption in favour of Revelation as answering 
 our difficulties and filling up a void in Nature 
 would sink into nothingness ; in the latter the 
 
48 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 presumption against miracles would cease to be 
 an effect of reasonable cautiousness, and become 
 a mere prejudice, nay, an idolum theatri itself, it 
 being plainly irrational to set up in the name of 
 reason a preliminary improbability against argu- 
 ments that rest upon reason and our admitted 
 experience of things. So that we are once more 
 brought round, though the writer would willingly 
 have spared himself and his readers the tedious- 
 ness of the journey to the point where we found 
 ourselves at the close of the last chapter. 
 
 But one result has been to vindicate indirectly 
 the philosophical method employed by the author 
 of the Analogy. His philosophical insight taught 
 him that Revelation must be introduced upon the 
 scene as having some relation to the religion 
 of Nature, which relation he denned briefly, 
 as follows : " Christianity is a republication of 
 natural religion/' Constrained by the tenour of 
 our argument, as well as by the change in men's 
 ways of thinking, we, on our part, should rather 
 regard the relation to consist in the answer which 
 Revelation gives to the questions propounded by 
 Nature, thereby making natural religion real and 
 
ii.] ON A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 49 
 
 effective. But whatever form the statement of it 
 may take, the truth itself remains imperishable: 
 that in proportion as men can combine Nature, 
 or, if the expression be preferred, natural religion 
 and Eevelation together, they will be able to 
 build up an inexpugnable fortress that can neither 
 be stormed by assault of doubt, nor starved into 
 submission by agnostic indifference. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON THE ANALOGY BETWEEN EEVELATION AND NATURE 
 VIEWED GENEEALLY. 
 
 WE propose to consider in this chapter the 
 
 points wherein an analogy may be traced between 
 
 the schemes of Revelation and Nature respectively 
 
 taken in their mere outlines as defined in the 
 
 first chapter, and to discover how correspondences 
 
 of a general character may be made out between 
 
 them such as we are wont to expect from two 
 
 sets of things having the same origin. And it 
 
 must once for all be remembered that the 
 
 resemblances to be hereafter set forth are not 
 
 by any means to be supposed to be of the same 
 
 value, more especially since they are addressed 
 
 to differently constituted minds. Those that 
 
CHAP, in.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 51 
 
 appear fanciful to some may strike others as 
 real and significant ; and some may be but 
 superficial, and yet suggestive of deeper likeness 
 lying below the surface and to be discovered 
 in its time. Nor must it be taken as a discredit 
 to the argument that similarities may be pointed 
 out so faint as by themselves to amount to almost 
 nothing at all. For the argument is a cumulative 
 one ; and every resemblance adds something, be it 
 ever so little, to the mass of proof, just in the 
 same way that any resemblance of form and 
 feature, no matter how small, may be assigned 
 as evidence that two persons are blood relations. 
 And it is a peculiar felicity of the argument 
 from analogy that whereas points of resemblance 
 may always primd facie be quoted in proof of 
 community of origin or of kind, points of differ- 
 ence may on the contrary be assigned to that 
 wherein the two are admittedly and obviously 
 not the same, but separate, things. But it will 
 go hard with any one who shall set out to find 
 essential discrepancies between the course of 
 Nature and the events of Kevelation. 
 
 This is perhaps the proper plaee to observe 
 
 E 2 
 
52 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 that the reader must not expect to be pleased 
 with a great deal of that which is thought so 
 much of in these days novelty and originality. 
 The ideas are for the most part the familiar topics 
 of religious literature, only adapted to the purpose 
 or used as the vehicle of instituting a comparison 
 between Nature and Eevelation. And as ideas 
 are not private property, nor patented by their 
 inventors, the author trusts that this general 
 expression of obligation to the writers he has 
 laid under contribution will be deemed suf- 
 ficient. 
 
 When we are called upon to examine two 
 phenomena in Nature, with a view of discovering 
 whether they be, or of proving that they are, 
 effects of the same cause or plans of the same 
 mind, what may we expect in the way of prelimi- 
 nary likeness ? Something that may, perhaps, be 
 expressed in these three words comparison, com- 
 bination, and co-operation. 
 
 First, we expect that it will be possible so to 
 bring them together as that a comparison may be 
 made between them ; and, further, that a general 
 appearance of similitude sufficient to invite the 
 
HI.] REVELATION AND NATUEE. 
 
 mind to further comparisons will be 
 them. To which may be added that the process 
 whereby each has been reduced or brought down 
 to a state admitting of comparison being made, 
 will be also alike. 
 
 Second, we expect that neither of them shall 
 present any marked divergence or obvious repug- 
 nance to the other so as to require alterations or 
 the removal of first and natural impressions 
 before the analogy can proceed. In other 
 words they must combine readily, for to the 
 proof from analogy force is fatal. 
 
 Third, we expect that if (as*in the case before 
 us) they are represented as parts of a larger 
 scheme they must, when brought together, 
 adjust themselves in harmonious co-operation, 
 and so unite to carry out the object which their 
 Author or Cause may be supposed to have in 
 view. To take these in order. 
 
 I. COMPAEISON. The writer is sometimes in- 
 clined to think that many of the strongest arguments 
 for religion, like the common breath of daily life, 
 pass unnoticed, just because they are so common 
 that no one stops to look at them or take them up : 
 
54 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 being the property of every one, no one seeks 
 to appropriate them. Of such is the truth that 
 Nature and Eevelation are capable of being 
 brought into comparison at all, which men 
 take as a matter of course because they are 
 always doing it. And yet what different things 
 are Nature (which is the sum of laws and forces), 
 and Revelation (which is a series of events in 
 history) ! It does not at all follow because 
 phenomena are the effect of the same cause or 
 the work of the same Author that they should 
 fall within the scope of the argument from 
 analogy : thus it would be in the highest degree 
 absurd to be asked to infer from appearance that 
 (say) the same man who grew a field of corn also 
 built the barn to receive it. Nor is there any 
 necessity either from experience or from the 
 reason of the case that the essential doctrines of 
 any given religion should be able to be compared 
 with the essential principles of Nature's course 
 and constitution. And yet the bare description 
 as given in the first chapter of what Nature 
 and Revelation may be defined to be, indicates 
 that such comparison is possible, even if our 
 
m.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 55 
 
 knowledge of what men have thought about them 
 and the very commonest experiences of religious 
 minds did not assure us I will not say that 
 the thing is capable of being done, but rather 
 that it is incapable of not being done. 
 
 What is it in the aforesaid description that 
 makes these two dispensations thus comparable 
 together? Merely that both are traceable to 
 definite beginnings, can be concluded under brief 
 and definite conceptions, can be by proper obser- 
 vation reduced to plain essential principles, and 
 so betray upon the face of them similarities that 
 invite further attention. Thus Christianity is a 
 growth from certain germinal acts introducing 
 forces from out of the universe to act upon the 
 world, and creation itself, so far as it is con- 
 ceivable by us, would seem to be just the same, 
 the word " process " being substituted for " act." 
 In this view the commencement of the course of 
 Nature within the limits of OUR world would be 
 the beginning, and Revelation would be the end of 
 the Creator's work, regarded as something distinct 
 from that small part of Nature which we call ours. 
 And if, as perhaps will be the case, we reach in 
 
56 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Nature at last to some primal force or forces, so in 
 Religion we are already conducted to the love of 
 God as the moving power of the moral world before 
 the formation of which it is revealed as existing. 
 All which, not now to anticipate ourselves by going 
 further into details, is so much a matter of common 
 experience, it so "lies about us" and enters into 
 our ordinary ways of thinking, that we do not stop 
 to inquire how it came to pass or how easily things 
 might have been ordered otherwise, to say nothing 
 of the strong probability that they would have 
 been ordered otherwise but for the sameness of 
 their origin. And we may perhaps conjecture 
 that much of the softening power and potent 
 charm which the New Testament confessedly 
 exercises upon men busied in the interpretation 
 of Nature is due to this primary and artless 
 analogy, which may perhaps dispose them to 
 receive favourably any explanation of that gratifi- 
 cation and that consciousness of an unseen presence 
 of truth, which the New Testament, as they them- 
 selves cheerfully testify, is wont to afford them. 
 
 Now this definiteness of essential principles, 
 common to Nature and Revelation, is not in the 
 
in.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 57 
 
 least a thing to be taken for granted as though 
 prior to experience it were necessary to the mode 
 of thinking about them which the human mind 
 nolens volens must adopt : so far from this, it 
 has only been arrived at as the result of prolonged 
 inquiry and sore conflict. For all we could have 
 told Nature might have remained a mere aggregate 
 of phenomena more or less loosely bound together 
 by laws, and it is only quite of late that men have 
 learnt to think of it as that " Course" to which the 
 term Evolution seems by common consent to be 
 applied. Even so Christianity consists of a vast 
 array of events, doctrines, and institutions, 
 beginning even before Kevelation was given, 
 and it is only now that men are coming (as we 
 have said) to see that, however true and necessary 
 to salvation different persons may think any of 
 these to be, yet for a positive definition of that 
 wherein the Christian religion consists we must 
 confine ourselves to the events of the New 
 Testament history. A sound instinct has indeed 
 at all times warned the best minds that this 
 must be the case, and Butler, as we have seen, 
 took it for granted. It is now, however, becoming 
 
58 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the commonly accepted view ; and that by a 
 process presenting a curious analogy to the 
 discovery of truths of Nature. 
 
 The conception of Nature as a course, known 
 as the Darwinian theory, has been reached by 
 a continual conflict of opinions, always tending, 
 by the discovery of remoter laws and wider 
 generalisations, towards simplicity and unity of 
 knowledge. Ideas about the cause or constitution 
 of natural phenomena have been promulgated, 
 based perhaps upon some approximation to the 
 truth; these have come into conflict with old ones, 
 have been in turn superseded by new ones, until 
 by the survival of the fittest, those ideas which 
 describe the course of Nature in the simplest and 
 most accurate form take their place as reasoned 
 truths and become part of the common stock of 
 information. If any one will mentally trace out the 
 history of Christian doctrine, he will find that it 
 has followed precisely the same law. 
 
 The positive (or we might call them scientific) 
 essentials of Christianity are contained in the 
 life of Christ, but we arrive at this not at all by 
 an immediate effort of the reasoning or spiritual 
 
in.] KEVELATION AND NATURE. 59 
 
 faculties, still less as an expression of individual 
 opinion, but by a long course of conflict, of sur- 
 vival, of rejecting non-essentials, of discerning 
 more clearly what it was that God did or framed or 
 set in motion at the first beginning by the exercise 
 of His sole power. And this is accomplished in a 
 very remarkable way, being no other than through 
 the agency of the various Christian sects or 
 Churches, the very existence of which has constantly 
 been alleged as an argument against the religion 
 that produced them. It has always been felt as a 
 stumbling-block that a religion which assumes to 
 inculcate peace, union, and charity, should become 
 the parent of strife and intolerance; and so no 
 doubt it is. But one of the first results of our 
 analogy is to rebut this moral presumption against 
 the Christian religion by showing that if Kevelation 
 were to be in accordance with Nature, this is just 
 what was to be expected as certain to take place. 
 Truth is discovered by the conflict of various schools 
 of thought rejecting the relative or the transitory, 
 and sects are merely schools of thought hardened 
 into offensive and defensive communities by the 
 kind of doctrine about which they hold different 
 
60 A NEW ANALOQY. [CHAP. 
 
 opinions, and by national or even local peculiarities. 
 But from the mass of opinions there is clearly 
 eliminated faith in the historical manifestation of 
 Christ, as that which all hold in common : those 
 who care to retain the name Christian go to the 
 New Testament history of Christ's life and work as 
 that upon which to establish their faith and their 
 creed. Nor, on the other hand, can any doctrine 
 or institution which is rejected by men, who, by 
 their own profession and in the view of the world, 
 are plainly Christian people, be regarded as 
 fundamental, that is to say, for the positive 
 definition of Christianity. Thus, if anything there 
 were besides this that might be deemed an essential 
 part of the Christian religion, it would be the two 
 Sacraments ; and yet no one who wished to treat 
 it in the purely scientific method could dare to 
 reject the Society of Friends from its ranks. It 
 is true that the boundary line (if such for the 
 purposes of argument there must be) is confused 
 in some measure by the existence of a few 
 excellent persons who, while disbelieving, or 
 perhaps rather trying to disbelieve, the New 
 Testament history, do not nevertheless feel 
 
in.] EEVELATION AND NATUKE. 61 
 
 inclined to give up the noble name of Christian. 
 The strict requirements of logic in an argument 
 of this character may compel us to regard such 
 persons as outside the number of Christian 
 believers in the. essential elements of revelation, 
 nor perhaps will the common sense or usual 
 judgment of mankind find fault with this opinion. 
 But logic is one thing, practice is another, and 
 practically to seek to retain the name of Christian 
 is as honourable to them as it should be gratifying 
 to the mass of Christian believers, who may see in 
 it a strong testimony to the moral powers and 
 spiritual effectiveness of their religion. 
 
 As our main purpose is not to answer objections 
 that have been made to Christianity, we shall merely 
 beg the reader to remark in passing how con- 
 sistent it is with natural processes, and how much 
 to be expected in any religion, if true, that it 
 should not appear early in history, that it should 
 be confined for long to certain types of civilisation, 
 that it should grow as it has done by those 
 struggles and survivals, which we may call, if 
 we please, immoral and unworthy of a divinely 
 planted institution, but which are none the less 
 
62 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 in strict analogy with Nature which is also 
 Divine. 
 
 But leaving this at any rate for the present,, 
 we must insist that Eevelation must have an 
 essential foundation of truth in it, to have 
 survived the rough and searching treatment it 
 has had to endure, not from opponents merely, 
 but from its own adherents. And the proof of 
 this is to be found in our experience of Nature's 
 method of operations, which is as follows : Keal 
 existence, presenting itself just because it is real 
 in different shapes or on different sides to various- 
 minds and epochs, becomes an object of research, 
 of criticism, of disputation, until at length its- 
 true meaning and essence become apparent, and 
 some final conclusion concerning it is arrived at. 
 Whereas there is a kind of unity about false 
 systems, which does not admit of being disputed 
 about, which, as it were, evaporates in the crucible 
 of criticism. Being the product of some mistaken 
 mind, or relative to some special mode of thinking, 
 they have no root in themselves; but when the 
 sun of knowledge beats upon them, they wither 
 away, no one exactly knows why or how. So 
 
in.] EEVELATION AND NATUEE. 63 
 
 have perished many superstitions, many false 
 systems, many erroneous, though for the time 
 useful and attractive, creeds. Witchcraft, Pro- 
 tection (as a thing capable of intellectual defence 
 by competent inquirers), the Divine Eight of Kings, 
 may be received and believed in, but only upon 
 condition that people think the^ same way con- 
 cerning them, and that, too, the way in which 
 they were first promulgated. So that whatever 
 men may now think of the sectarian spirit, 
 without it there would have been no Christianity, 
 and it is but the exhibition in the field of 
 religion of the law that governs all demonstrations 
 of real truth. The evil of it lies not in difference 
 of opinion, but in violence of temper. 
 
 But at this point we must step aside for an 
 instant to meet one of those ingenious objections 
 or rather ways of putting things, which seem to 
 suggest the consoling thought that the ingenuity 
 with which objections are started bears some pro- 
 portion to the readiness with which they are 
 answered. Men allege that Christianity is either 
 primitive, mediaeval, or modern ; it is either Latin, 
 Teutonic, or, "longo intervallo," Greek; it is either 
 
6-4 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Catholic or Protestant, either Trinitarian or Uni- 
 tarian ; and so on. But as all these religious sys- 
 tems are (so they allege) in many respects defective, 
 and in no respect absolutely and exclusively true ; 
 as moreover they have been associated with im- 
 perfect morality and erroneous notions; therefore 
 Christianity, which is composed of these, is no 
 better than they are, is only relatively true like 
 them, and is doomed to perish with them. And 
 men talk in all gravity of Christianity as being 
 responsible for the crimes and blunders of Christian 
 people. But this is just as reasonable as if we 
 should say that there is no absolute morality or 
 fixed truth because there have been many schools 
 of opinion about them; or that the course of 
 Nature is a delusion because men were so long in 
 finding it out; or that the principles of the 
 English Constitution are responsible for party 
 selfishness and violence. What Christianity is 
 responsible for is the Revelation contained in the 
 life of Christ, and for nothing else. The stream 
 issues pure and wholesome from its source, how- 
 ever much it may be polluted in its progress 
 towards the sea. Nor can anything be justly said 
 
in.] KEVELATION AND NATUKE. 65 
 
 agaiost the moral perfection of Eevelation till the 
 world has realised the spirit of Christ and of His 
 teaching, and found it morally defective when tried 
 by the touchstone of experience. 
 
 II. COMBINATION. The proposition that there 
 is no intrinsic repugnancy between the systems of 
 Nature and Kevelation may easily be thrown into 
 an affirmative form by exhibiting the kind of 
 regard that each may be said to have for the 
 other. But it is well to remind ourselves that, 
 had the two been derived from different sources, 
 traces of repugnancy and incompatibility must 
 have appeared in every feature. That nothing of 
 the kind takes place affords a strong probability 
 that their origin is the same. The most obvious 
 way of stating this fact is that not one doctrine 
 or truth peculiar to either dispensation requires 
 to be modified or altered by any other doctrine 
 or truth peculiar to the other. No doubt 
 theologians have always yielded to the tempta- 
 tion of endeavouring to force an interpretation 
 upon Nature that their own doctrines seemed to 
 require. No doubt also natural philosophy has 
 been seduced into the affirmation that there is no 
 
66 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 place in the world for religious "belief. But time 
 and conflict have done their inevitable work, and 
 there is a growing disposition to recognise that 
 no truth of Nature can be inconsistent with 
 religion, and none of religion contradictory to 
 Nature. Here once more Kevelation is responsible 
 only for itself ; incompatibility with Nature, to be 
 fatal, must be discovered there. But there is no 
 conceivable opinion about Nature conceivable, 
 that is, scientifically which a man may not hold 
 and yet also hold along with it the Revelation of 
 Christ. We doubt whether Analogy will reveal 
 any more convincing evidence than this, which is 
 only not surprising because it is taken so much 
 as a matter of course. For Revelation claims to 
 reveal .something of the relations of the Creator 
 to the world, and reason, applying itself to the 
 study of Nature, makes practically the same claim 
 (even if in unnecessary rigorousness of statement 
 we are obliged to substitute Cause for Creator) ; 
 and this is so managed by the former as to leave 
 the latter in absolute possession of its own domain, 
 and of entire freedom for its own proper work. 
 Revelation is guilty of no intrusion in this respect, 
 
in.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 67 
 
 for it does not contain one single word that can 
 be tortured into the expression of an opinion 
 upon scientific subjects, and this is the very 
 reason, one may conjecture, why Kevelation is so 
 brief and so exclusively religious. But this will 
 come before us more naturally under the head of 
 the teaching of Christ (see Chapter VII.), which 
 alone it concerns the Christian advocate to main- 
 tain, as being the authoritative and responsible 
 expression of the truths and methods of the 
 Christian Faith. Only we may go on to point out 
 that whatever impression is made upon our minds 
 by the Master's non-interference and strict self- 
 limitation, is further increased, even to a pitch 
 of astonishment, when we reflect that it was 
 strictly carried out by the poor unlearned men 
 who have preserved the account of His life and 
 teaching for us. For if that account be a genuine 
 expression of their own ideas about their Master, 
 then the early Christians were sharers in a dis- 
 pensation that involved the exercise of other than 
 natural powers, and yet they managed somehow 
 to avoid interference in the way of opinion or 
 dogmatising with natural laws, and they never 
 
 P 2 
 
68 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 once yielded to the temptation of using those 
 special gifts of information which they certainly 
 thought their Master possessed, to answer questions 
 which belong to reason and experience to discover. 
 They one and all display a genuine unconscious- 
 ness that their religion was even so much as 
 suspending any of the Divine arrangements in 
 Nature, in which they acquiesced implicitly, not 
 because, as reason teaches us, these were unalterably 
 fixed by law, but because they were in accordance 
 with the will of God, whose Son they (the disciples) 
 proclaimed. They felt, of course, that something 
 was being done in and for Nature by its Maker, 
 something special and beyond His usual ways of 
 operation, but quite in harmony with the will and 
 attributes of the Creator of the world and of man. 
 We have, then, a so to call it natural treat- 
 ment of Nature by Revelation, in spite of itself 
 containing a supernatural element ; but those who 
 put on the garb of the supernatural are certain 
 of detection unless it be their own they are like 
 the fabled ass in the lion's skin. But it may be 
 replied that the mere exercise of supernatural 
 power involves a disturbance in Nature ; that the 
 
in.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 69 
 
 two are ipso facto divergent, and so incapable 
 of combination. But this is a matter for experi- 
 ence to decide, and experience would seem to say 
 tliat there is positively nothing in Kevelation which 
 the course of Nature feels itself called upon to 
 resent or to shrink from admitting. 
 
 The case seems to stand thus : If certain causes 
 or series of causes produce with undeviating regu- 
 larity a certain set of results, we are entitled to 
 assume first that no alteration can be made in 
 them save for the purpose of producing something 
 beyond their capacity; and, secondly, that if in 
 the process of alteration anything is taken from 
 them, the first set of results cannot be accom- 
 plished as before. Now the course of Nature may 
 fairly be regarded as a machine altogether capable 
 of producing the vast aggregate of phenomena, 
 together with all life, social, moral, and intel- 
 lectual; nor must we be surprised if they whose 
 business it is to study the working of the machine 
 should carefully guard against the intrusion of 
 anything that might argue its insufficiency for its 
 own work, or spoil the regularity upon which their 
 knowledge of it depends. So that it might almost 
 
70 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 seem impossible for the Creator Himself to give 
 a Kevelation tliat should comply with these 
 stringent conditions,, and altogether inconceivable 
 that the human mind should hit upon one capable 
 of satisfying them. But the Christian religion 
 has achieved the task. 
 
 For Kevelation cannot possibly be regarded as 
 taking away from the constitution of Nature, which 
 still remains unalterably competent for the accom- 
 plishment of its own proper work ; rather it presents 
 itself as an addition to supply that which Nature 
 itself could not give, though it seemed to ask for it, 
 namely, an adequate knowledge of the Creator. It 
 is as though the owner of a spinning machine, 
 wishing at a particular moment to add another 
 colour to his stuff, introduced into a space originally 
 left open for it a thread of the colour he desired, 
 which was immediately taken up into the texture 
 of the piece by the regular working of the 
 machine. And this is no fancy, but, if we look 
 at the history of Kevelation, just what happened. 
 For we have the Creative Power introducing the 
 life of Christ into the world, but not in the least 
 altering the course of Nature, whose wheels pro- 
 
in.] KEVELATION AND NATURE. 71 
 
 ceed with the same monotonous regularity, and 
 so bringing into the world, out of the same 
 original source as the world itself came from, a 
 life that was quite natural and human, that 
 adjusted itself to the world as to its proper home, 
 and that gave to Nature that hue which was 
 wanted, if not to complete the harmony, at least 
 to relieve the tameness of the original colouring. 
 So that if this view of things be correct, and 
 perhaps it will not be seriously objected to even 
 by the more zealous champions of Nature's 
 sovereignty, we may affirm that our second point, 
 namely, the absence of incompatibility between 
 the two systems and consequent power of com- 
 bination, is not only proclaimed as a fact (which 
 it is), but justified from the Analogy of Nature 
 and the teachings of experience. 
 
 III. CO-OPEBATION. Perhaps the force of the 
 Analogy will be best displayed by an illustration. 
 I am taken, let us suppose, to a ship lying in a 
 dockyard, and am told nothing concerning its 
 builder except, what I can see for myself, that 
 he meant it to perform the work proper to ships. 
 I am next taken to a factory, and there am shown 
 
72 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 a set of machinery, boiler, and the rest of it, 
 about the making of which once more I know 
 nothing ; but I am told it is meant for the ship 
 aforesaid, and built according to the plans of the 
 designer thereof. I find, upon inquiry and exami- 
 nation of the several parts, such a correspondence 
 in size and shape and in adjustment of details, as 
 to give me strong reason for believing a state- 
 ment which I have none for disbelieving, so far 
 as the veracity of my informant is concerned, and 
 I accept it accordingly. Even so stands the case 
 as to Nature and Revelation. 
 
 As this illustration dominates the wholeAnalogy, 
 we will take pains to avoid a possible misapprehen- 
 sion. Note, then, that the particular kind of 
 cause selected namely, a living agent is chosen 
 as the most fitting for the matter in hand which 
 it is meant to illustrate, and not as forming an 
 integral part of the argument. The stress of the 
 argument lies in the sameness of the cause, 
 whatever it be, and would remain the same 
 whether the cause was an agent or a material 
 antecedent, or fate, or, in short, anything you 
 please. 
 
in.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 73 
 
 The above illustration may appear to chal- 
 lenge comparison with Mr. Paley's famous 
 argument from the watch which a man was 
 supposed to find upon the ground, and there- 
 upon to infer the work of a designing mind. 
 And we may say again that such arguments, if 
 only because they have pleased the public mind 
 and excited general interest, may be safely 
 credited with a certain essential Tightness of 
 method, even though inevitable changes in men's 
 ways of thinking imply a corresponding change 
 of application of the method. The argument 
 is now very generally thought to be defective 
 because the finder of the watch had a previous 
 knowledge of men whose business it was to make 
 watches, whereas of the existence of a Creator he 
 could have no knowledge it being the thing 
 in question : in other words, the argument failed 
 in so far as the analogy did not hold. But of 
 the above illustration it may be said that though 
 it does not aim at going so far, yet it goes safely 
 up to the point it aims at. I do not know how 
 or by whom the ship was made, or how and by 
 whom the machinery was made ; but I am entitled 
 
74 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 nay, I must do it whether it pleases ine or not 
 to infer that the same mind (or cause) presided 
 over the manufacture of both of them, else they 
 would never have fitted in with each other, and 
 never have co-operated for the end which the 
 bare appearance suggests that they were intended 
 for; or if that word be objected to (but how can 
 we escape from the necessary conditions of human 
 thinking?) then let us say, for which they are 
 plainly suitable. 
 
 Now, is it possible to deny, upon the first and 
 merely external view of things, and previous to 
 any detailed examination of either of the two 
 systems, that the Christian Revelation betrays a 
 remarkable aptitude for co-operation with the 
 course of Nature towards the formation of a 
 religion reasonable enough to satisfy the judgment, 
 and capacious enough to carry the destinies, of 
 mankind? The writer for his part professes 
 himself quite unable to conceive how anything 
 can be wanting for reasonable minds to the religion 
 which has, as a matter of fact, issued from the 
 union of the two, it being remembered here as 
 elsewhere that the various additions to Revelation 
 
in.] BEVELATION AND NATUKE. 75 
 
 that have been made, however true and useful 
 and logical they may be, form no part of the 
 original combination, and cannot be defended, as 
 it can, by Analogy. And the essential element 
 in which this power of co-operation consists is 
 nothing more nor less than that commonplace 
 of Christian doctrine, that Eevelation makes the 
 Author of Nature known to us as a Being with 
 whom we can enter into the very closest moral 
 and spiritual relations. It was for want of this 
 assurance that, to recur to our simile, the ship, 
 though apparently formed in every line for 
 motion, remained immovable for religious purposes 
 until the proper machinery was placed on board. 
 Then in a moment, as a mere matter of historical 
 fact, all that was wanted to give movement, life, 
 and energy to man's religious emotions and 
 natural, if dormant, faith, was supplied to him, 
 and Christianity became, to say the least, one 
 of the many vessels upon which are embarked 
 the hopes of the human race. Useful co-operation 
 consists in one of the two things supplying exactly 
 what the other wants, and it may well be doubted 
 whether the whole analogy of Nature, so fruitful 
 
76 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 in co-operations of this kind, can furnish one 
 more marked or noteworthy than this one of 
 Eevelation with Nature to produce religion. 
 
 And here it is important to insist with all 
 urgency upon the truth hinted at in the last 
 sentence, that the co-operation is mutual, for the 
 ship is at least as necessary to the machinery as 
 the machinery to the ship. And if we attend to 
 the matter closely, we shall perceive that it is not 
 the sufficiency of Revelation taken by itself that 
 constitutes the force of the appeal to our reason 
 and piety, but its union with all that Nature 
 teaches man to hope, to fear, or to think, as being 
 from God. And perhaps we should remember 
 somewhat more than we do that the Christian 
 religion does not depend merely upon the truths 
 laid down or the emotions kindled by the mani- 
 festation of Christ, but upon this as penetrating 
 and interpreting the course of Nature. Not but 
 that the genuine Christian spirit, sometimes almost 
 in its own despite, has evinced a cordial appre- 
 ciation of the religious aspect of Nature, and 
 has striven to concur and co-operate with 
 it. But it seems probable that as more has 
 
in.] KEVELATION AND NATUKE. 77 
 
 perhaps been done in this way in the past 
 than theology is wont to give men credit for, 
 so does much now remain to be done in the 
 future. There are some minds to whom the 
 adoring contemplation of the will of God in 
 Kevelation is enough for the needs of their 
 spiritual being, just as there are others who, 
 taking from Kevelation no more than the assur- 
 ance that the Creator of the universe is the 
 Father of mankind (by what means the assurance 
 comes they hardly care to inquire, so all-important 
 and all-credible is it to them), straightway find 
 themselves able to discover and reverence His 
 will in Nature. This has always been a large part 
 of the unconscious religion of mankind, and it 
 is emphatically the religion hidden perhaps too 
 - much away, as though it were a thing to be 
 ashamed of of the students of Nature in our 
 own time. Nor does there seem any reason why 
 this form or application of religion may not 
 increase, even among ardent Christians them- 
 selves; nor yet any why it ought not, so long 
 as the life and character of Jesus Christ retain 
 their hold over the love and reverence of mankind, 
 
78 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP 
 
 which, it must be observed, is certainly the case 
 at present among all classes of minds. And, to 
 say truth, this is a seasonable and consoling reflec- 
 tion, for it is impossible not to feel some uneasi- 
 ness at what is often said, namely, that the more 
 Christianity recedes from its original source, the 
 farther it spreads over different peoples and cir- 
 cumstances, so much the less value may the 
 purely historical events have for the generality 
 of men, or, at any rate, for some men. The 
 author does not himself share this anticipation, 
 but is not afraid of it, even if it turned out to 
 be a correct guess as to the unknown future. For 
 nothing can undo the past, that Revelation has 
 given life and motion to man's religious instincts 
 by giving certainty and proof to his reasonings 
 about his Creator and Ruler. And this, if the 
 Analogy of Nature is to go for anything at all, 
 affords an exceedingly strong presumption that 
 both have their origin from the same Cause. 
 
 The candid reader must now judge for himself 
 whether a sufficient likeness has been established 
 between the two dispensations viewed generally 
 as wholes to amount to some proof that they 
 
IIL] REVELATION AND NATURE. 79 
 
 come from the same Author, and whether he will 
 care to go into a further examination of the 
 details, which I promise him shall be as short 
 and simple as the kind of subject admits of. 
 But before doing so a preliminary point must be 
 raised and settled. Does the history of religion, 
 it may be asked, afford any ground for supposing 
 that an Analogy between Nature and Revelation 
 could have been brought about by any other 
 means than by the design and will of God ? 
 Thus it is possible that other sets of machinery 
 besides this one might fit the vessel equally 
 well; or, again, that some other person, catching 
 hints perhaps from the master-mind, might have 
 designed the machinery that did fit. So that we 
 have here two distinct questions : First, are there 
 any other religions that present the same kind of 
 resemblance to the course of Nature that the 
 Christian does ? Second, could human nature 
 have devised the scheme of Eevelation without 
 express help from God ? The true answer to 
 these, especially the second, is to be found in 
 the detailed development of the Analogy itself; 
 but it may perhaps be well to indicate very briefly 
 
80 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. m. 
 
 the radical incompetency, as proved by the touch- 
 stone of Nature, of any known human cause to 
 produce even that superficial resemblance, which 
 is all that we have as yet touched upon. 
 
CHAPTEft IV. 
 
 ON THE IMPEOBABILITY FEOM ANALOGY THAT EEVELA- 
 TION WAS PEODUCED IN THE COUESE OF NATUEE. 
 
 THE assertion that the Creator of the world did, 
 by a special act of his own volition, create also 
 the Christian religion, claims for Kevelation a pre- 
 eminence so absolute as to make it certain that 
 the assertion will be jealously scrutinised and, if 
 possible, rejected. Hostility is, under the cir- 
 cumstances, so natural, and so much a thing to 
 be proud of, as being itself a testimony to the 
 supremacy of their religion, that Christian advo- 
 cates ought to find no fault with the expression 
 of it, even were it more acrimonious or more 
 contemptuous than upon the whole, and, taking 
 all things fairly into account, it is wont to be. 
 
 G 
 
82 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Our relations with Nature are so intimate, and 
 of such, paramount importance, that there is an 
 inevitable prejudice against even such an addition 
 as we sketched in the last chapter, and the pre- 
 sent state of human knowledge upon religious 
 subjects puts within men's reach two arguments 
 of which they are not slow to avail themselves. 
 They say that, religion being a necessary product 
 of thought in such a world as ours, Christianity 
 is true in the sense that other religions are true, 
 and that these may be supposed to have been 
 derived from the same source, whatever we take 
 that source to be. And, again, that the same 
 workings of human nature which produced other 
 religions may be supposed to have produced the 
 Christian also. Two most serious and extensive 
 questions, with which happily for ourselves we 
 have in this argument no further concern than to 
 point out what the Analogy of Nature has to say 
 concerning them, which may be done briefly and 
 without much difficulty. 
 
 First, as to other religions. Now, in so far as 
 religion is derived from the workings of the human 
 mind (and this is true, whether we suppose that 
 
iv.] EEVELATION AND NATUKE. 83 
 
 under the human mind is included a divinely given 
 consciousness of God or not), it is clear that the 
 various manifestations of the religious faculty can- 
 not be absolutely compared with each other in 
 respect of superiority or usefulness, because each is 
 the best and only possible for its own sphere, being 
 conditioned, in respect of utility, by what men call 
 environment. Thus two is a smaller number than 
 five, taken absolutely, but as large if it belongs to a 
 sum of things represented by twenty, and the other 
 to a sum of things represented by fifty. So that 
 unless we can find some fixed standard of truth 
 applicable to all times and places, we cannot fairly 
 say that one religion is more true or more essential 
 than another. And even in respect of morality, 
 our own moral ideas make us bad judges of the 
 good or evil of other creeds. 
 
 Now, amidst all that is relative, fluctuating, and 
 dissimilar, there is certainly to be found one fixed 
 standard such as we desire, that is everywhere un- 
 alterably the same ; and this is none other than this 
 very course of Nature itself, which all religions save 
 the Christian have tacitly repudiated. Of Nature it 
 may with truth be said that animum non res mutant 
 
 G 2 
 
84, A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 qui trans mare currunt. The law of gravitation, the 
 form of the earth, the principle of evolution, are 
 the same in the homes of the religions of the 
 East as in Christian lands, and all that we have 
 summed up in the words "course of Nature," 
 such as conservance of force, origin from atoms, 
 natural selection, survival, heredity, correlation of 
 life with environment, have been at work no less 
 persistently in Asia and Africa than in Europe 
 and America. And so comparison of religions, 
 when pursued to its full extent, is seen to be a 
 weapon with a double edge if it shows how 
 much religions have in common, it shows also the 
 essential point in which they differ. And what a 
 difference there is ! 
 
 Would it be considered unfair to say that all 
 civilisations other than Christian have, in their re- 
 ligions, caught and represented every aspect of 
 Nature, good and bad alike, except that which gives 
 to it a spiritual significance, which is the being in- 
 tellectually apprehended as a course and constitu- 
 tion ? Their defect (we mean of the religions) and 
 ultimate cause of failure, has been not that they 
 were too much Nature-religions, but too little, in 
 
iv.] REVELATION AND NATURE. 85 
 
 that they missed that in Nature which is wanted to 
 make religion true in point of fact and wholesome 
 in respect of morality the conception of law and 
 order. Hence they are out of Analogy altogether, 
 there being nothing in them that can be compared 
 and combined with the course of Nature, merely 
 because the requisite materials in the shape of in- 
 formation and ideas have been, as a matter of fact, 
 wanting. They have, on the contrary, displayed an 
 open unconsciousness of natural operation, an indif- 
 ference and incongruity, and finally a complete acqui- 
 escence in quite erroneous views about phenomena. 
 Nor is this quite the worst that must be said of 
 non-Christian religions in respect of their relations 
 to Nature. In the first place, they appear to have 
 succeeded in effecting what Christianity has some- 
 times been accused of trying to effect, but has, 
 in the long run, very plainly failed, namely, pre- 
 venting the investigation of phenomena from 
 making any very appreciable progress, by first of 
 all inventing some theological account of them, 
 and then throwing over such account a veil of 
 religious awe and mystery, to forbid further 
 inquiry. And, in the second place, they have but 
 
86 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 too commonly succumbed to those superstitious 
 or immoral tendencies which Nature, in her merely 
 marvellous or sensuous aspects, has almost forced 
 upon religious systems. Knowledge of Nature 
 is the vital atmosphere in which true religion 
 alone can breathe, and it would seem as if Kevela- 
 tion had first set the human mind free to pursue 
 the knowledge of Nature, and then called upon 
 Nature, when known, to co-operate with Chris- 
 tianity itself, in forming an absolute and sufficient 
 religion. And the really astonishing thing is that 
 Christian civilisation has accomplished the investi- 
 gation of Nature, and is at this moment address- 
 ing itself once more to new tasks, in spite of the 
 defiance which the representatives of religion have 
 too often bidden to the discoverers of physical or 
 moral truth, and of the persecutions which they 
 have inflicted upon them. Does not this look as 
 if there were a Divine power and purpose beneath 
 the purely human manifestations of Christian 
 policy and speculation ? This idea we throw out 
 by the way, for the reader himself to think out. 
 It is not perhaps necessary to pursue this topic 
 much further, a somewhat unwelcome task, as it 
 
iv.] KEVELATION AND NATUKE. 87 
 
 cannot but be to those who sympathise with the 
 strivings of human nature, and not the least when 
 they seem to end in failure and decay. But it 
 may be well to complete the argument by point- 
 ing out that the process which has rendered 
 Christianity a system comparable with that of 
 Nature is wanting in all other religions. For we 
 saw that Nature and Revelation have been brought 
 into relation in the way of comparison with each 
 other, because, by the effects of research in the 
 one case, and by the conflict of denominations in 
 the other, they have been reduced to their first 
 principles and traced back to their real essence. 
 But other religions have lost the advantages and, 
 to a great extent, escaped the reproach of sec- 
 tarianism. The relative truths (relative, that is, 
 ' to the conditions out of which the religions grew), 
 which was all they could attain to, will not bear 
 dissection. They may at times give rise to 
 reformation, as when the original truth tries to 
 escape from the corruptions that have fastened 
 upon it, or they may become the exciting cause 
 of factions, which, though not in reality having 
 much further cause for disagreement in doctrine 
 
88 A NEW ANALOGY. CHAP. 
 
 than the Blues and Greens of the hippodrome, 
 nevertheless assume a hostile attitude towards 
 each other. But analysis, controversy, the con- 
 trasted views of those who see one side of the 
 truth more than the other the keen scrutiny of 
 different communities trying to get their own 
 opinions out of the original doctrine these, and 
 such as these, which enter so largely into the 
 religious life of Christendom, they cannot endure. 
 Hence they present a history, upon the whole, 
 without sects, as we understand the word ; and so, 
 though full of beauty and power, at any rate in 
 their beginnings and at their best, they remain 
 outside of the Analogy of Nature, and, to recur 
 to our illustration, do not even make a pretence 
 of being able to devise machinery to fit the ship. 
 Second, as to the possibility that the Chris- 
 tian Kevelation was produced in the ordinary 
 course of things, and by the common faculties of 
 human nature. And here it will be frankly 
 admitted that the presumption that Eevelation 
 was the work of the Author of Creation ought 
 to far exceed in probability any other account 
 that can be given of its origin. Note the words 
 
iv.] KEVELATION AND NATURE. 89 
 
 "far exceed," for in proportion as Analogy is a 
 convincing weapon of reasoning should its proofs 
 be conclusive. 
 
 Now, the conclusion from the Analogy of their 
 parts that a given set of machinery was made for 
 a particular vessel may be rebutted by positive 
 testimony to the contrary, and if evidence was 
 given that another mind designed the work, we 
 should, in spite of our natural amazement at the 
 coincidence, have no choice but to examine and 
 perhaps accept it. But then, as in the illustration, 
 so in religion, we require at once to be shown the 
 Maker and to be told the evidence, and thus the 
 onus probandi is, by the preliminary argument 
 from Analogy, thrown off the advocate of Kevela- 
 tion, and placed upon its opponents. It was at 
 one time thought that a real and formidable diffi- 
 culty was suggested by the obvious question : ' ' Is 
 there any positive evidence for the existence of a 
 designing mind; that is to say, of a Being con- 
 cerning whom we may rightly think under this 
 conception ? " But now the question is shown to 
 be capable of being retorted, and we, in our turn, 
 desire to be informed as to the persons and the 
 
90 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 process by whom and through which a religion 
 was designed that resembled the operations of 
 God in Nature. 
 
 The answer and it is, of course, the only one 
 that the circumstances of the case allow is that 
 Christianity grew out of the religious conscious- 
 ness of the Jewish people, or rather of a few 
 chosen spirits among them, at a special crisis of 
 their history. And though this topic does not 
 belong to our present discussion, yet it may be 
 well to remind the reader that the explanation 
 comes before him as an hypothesis already pro- 
 foundly discredited by the rational judgment of 
 mankind. We may fairly say of it that it is out 
 of Analogy with history before we come to try 
 whether it is not also out of Analogy with Nature. 
 Upon the relation, however, of this theory to 
 history it is not within our province to dwell 
 further than to remind the reader that the 
 reasons for the dissatisfaction with which men 
 already regard it are so serious as the following : 
 The account given by the men themselves who 
 are supposed to have devised Kevelation, and 
 especially the attitude of submissive faith which 
 
iv.] EEVELATION AND NATURE. 91 
 
 was exhibited by all the leading minds of the 
 apostolic age towards it; the extraordinary 
 mixture of credulity and virtue which the theory 
 presupposes ; the unlikeness to any known method 
 of propagating a religion ; finally, the entire 
 failure of all attempts hitherto to give a plausible 
 and consistent account of the history of Revela- 
 tion other than it gives of itself. All which is 
 abundantly set forth in religious literature, but it 
 can never be too much insisted upon. 
 
 But our purpose is to submit this explanation 
 to the touchstone of Analogy with Nature. Now, 
 if it were a question of framing a Revelation that 
 should satisfy the religious instincts or the moral 
 wants of our humanity, we might perhaps find 
 it possible to believe that this was accomplished 
 by a few Jews, and certainly not the less so 
 because they were sprung from the ranks of the 
 people. They were men ; they were good men ; 
 they were filled with enthusiasm ; they longed for 
 the regeneration of their nation, if not of all 
 nations. Hence they may, difficult as it is to 
 believe, have constructed an ideal life and perfect 
 morality out of the materials furnished by the life 
 
92 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and teaching of one among themselves. But how 
 did they contrive to make their religion fit with 
 such marvellous accuracy into the course of Nature ? 
 Already we have seen that this religion of theirs 
 compares, combines, and co-operates with Nature, 
 and we shall see presently how this external 
 Analogy is but the reflex of a deeper and more 
 intensive internal and detailed resemblance. Yet, 
 though good and religious men, they were not 
 natural philosophers, and cared even less than most 
 men about the course or laws of natural pheno- 
 mena. These were, to the founders of Christianity, 
 simply the sphere of the works of God, and as 
 they had in their own belief the resources of 
 supernatural information to fall back on, they 
 might with the utmost imaginable ease have 
 tried to give some special account of them. But 
 not only were they withheld by some mysterious 
 power from intruding into the course of Nature 
 with theological explanations, but they were 
 enabled to devise a Kevelation exactly parallel 
 with it. So that it would really seem no less 
 absurd to attribute the designing of Kevelation 
 to them than to suppose that an engineer could 
 
iv.] KEYELATION AND 
 
 by some happy chance make his machinery 
 fit a ship of which he had no knowledge. That 
 they could accommodate their work to those 
 particulars whereof we ourselves began to know 
 something, as it were, but yesterday, does seem 
 in the highest degree improbable; and, not only 
 that, but unnatural. 
 
 Let the proper conclusion from all this be 
 steadily kept before the reader's mind. The 
 alternatives between which we are to decide are 
 not merely whether the Analogy of Nature makes 
 it more probable than not that Eevelation comes 
 from the Creator, but whether it makes it more 
 probable that it is from the Creator than from 
 the only human source to which it can be 
 attributed. For Kevelation like Nature, exists : 
 . it must have come from some cause or other, 
 and itself tells us what that cause is, and inter- 
 weaves the account of its own origin with its 
 claims upon our mental and moral appreciation. 
 Nor, we may here take occasion to observe, does 
 it avail the objector to lay stress upon the 
 favourable conditions and circumstances which 
 certainly attended both the birth and progress of 
 
94 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP, 
 
 the Christian creed; for in respect of our present 
 argument this is really nothing to the point. 
 For the whole Analogy of Nature obliges ns to 
 conclude that nothing in the world can be pro- 
 duced or survive except the conditions be 
 favourable, and therefore if Christianity had 
 grown up in spite of circumstances, or if it had 
 appeared at an unseasonable time, this would 
 have been a strong argument against its being 
 of God. What then we have to decide is, whether 
 the conditions were not only favourable but 
 sufficient of themselves to produce the effects in 
 question. And this appears to us almost the 
 same as asking whether a carefully prepared 
 field, together with suitable weather, could pro- 
 duce the crop required without sowing the 
 proper seed. 
 
 It remains to be observed that this argument 
 will be strengthened many times over as our 
 Analogy proceeds from a mere general resemblance 
 such as we have pointed out already to those 
 special resemblances of inner spirit and specific 
 detail with which we are next to occupy ourselves ; 
 and at each point, if we succeed in establishing 
 
iv.] KEVELATION AND NATURE. 95 
 
 any to the satisfaction of the reader, he will be 
 invited to consider which of the two explanations 
 as to the origin of Christianity, best suits the 
 facts of the case. But we enforce it thus early 
 in the discussion, because it has already become 
 apparent that Kevelation assumes the form, not 
 of a congeries of doctrines and beliefs such as a 
 number of persons might unite in composing, 
 but of a "course" or "system" or "dispensation 5 ' 
 such as we commonly take Nature to be, and 
 wrought by definite principles into the counterpart 
 of Nature itself. And if we press for further 
 information, we do, as in Nature so in Revelation, 
 but find ourselves in presence of those mysterious 
 sources of all created things which we experience 
 every moment we act or think, but of those primal 
 forces themselves know nothing. And it may 
 well be that the serious reader, with no other 
 apparatus than the New Testament on the one 
 hand, and some trustworthy handbook of science 
 on the other, will be able to find, or perhaps to 
 feel, for himself, so complete an analogy between 
 the origines mundi and the origiones revelationis that 
 he will be inclined to dispense with the comparisons 
 
96 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. IT. 
 
 to which he is next to be invited. Will he believe 
 that no one would be better pleased than the 
 writer himself ? For in both these mysterious 
 regions, where reason stops baffled and the imagina- 
 tion drops down appalled, traces of a primal Being, 
 glimpses of mind, whispers of spiritual voices, 
 indications of forces from far-off places and testify- 
 ing of indiscoverable realities to be revealed in 
 their time, come and go and still persist in 
 returning and haunting the soul with the very 
 presence of the Creator Himself. As they know 
 well who have bowed themselves before the shrine 
 of the living God, either in the creation of the 
 world or in the manifestation of Christ, but they 
 know best who have bowed themselves in both. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 
 
 THE general resemblance, which is all that we 
 have sought as yet to establish between Nature 
 and Revelation, carries with it a strong probability 
 that there is also a similarity between the various 
 parts and separate features. How then are the 
 two systems to be arranged, or into what parts 
 broken up, to admit of further comparison being 
 made ? As far as concerns Nature this being the 
 standard with which the other is to be brought 
 into analogy it is evident that we may take it 
 just as it is; that is to say, as expressing the sum 
 of those general laws or truths concerning pheno- 
 mena which the best minds have laid down and 
 common opinion has accepted; and then we may 
 
98 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 select from these the points to which we propose 
 to show that Revelation bears some likeness. But 
 the truths of Revelation we must try and arrange in 
 some order such as would be accepted by Christians 
 as containing the minimum of their creed, and such 
 as will give us a definite idea of what precisely it is 
 for which we have to find analogies in Nature. 
 
 This, however, if we follow the historical method, 
 is not difficult to do. Let us summarise the account 
 which Revelation gives us concerning God as 
 involving this much at the very least: that the 
 Creator of the world sent His Son to live a human 
 life in it, with the object of redeeming it from evil 
 by the sacrifice of Himself to death and Resur- 
 rection to life, and that the Holy Spirit was sent to 
 carry forward this work. And this will break up 
 into five main portions namely, the Revelation of 
 the Father, the Revelation of the Son, the Method 
 of Redemption, the Sacrifice of Christ, and the 
 Revelation of the Holy Spirit which we will take 
 in their order, believing this arrangement to be 
 upon the whole most compatible with the notion of 
 Revelation as a course, and also quite consonant 
 with what Christians are agreed in accepting as 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 99 
 
 the essentials of their faith, all controverted points 
 being studiously and of necessity avoided both in 
 Religion and Nature, according to the example set 
 us by Butler himself. And we trust to be able to 
 make it clear that the account given of G-od under 
 the threefold manifestation of the Gospel narrative 
 is such as Nature would suggest beforehand, or 
 verify afterwards, as being the kind of account 
 which the Author of Nature would be likely to 
 give of Himself for the good of His creatures. 
 And thus the belief or hope that the Being who 
 made the world according to the course of Nature, 
 is also the Being who redeemed it according to the 
 method of Revelation, will grow into an exceed- 
 ingly strong probability, derived from the same 
 kind of strict reasoning as that whereby positive 
 truth is wont to be established; for (it may be 
 added) no analogies can be admitted such as the 
 poetry or the devout ingenuity of the religious 
 imagination may indulge in, but only such as are 
 established by reason upon the sure basis of actual 
 likeness. 
 
 But we must detain the reader from this (to us) 
 
 pleasing task for yet another chapter, while we 
 
 H 2 
 
100 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 proceed to point out a preliminary analogy of 
 capital importance, which, the threefold Manifesta- 
 tion of God in Eevelation renders possible. It is 
 this : that the testimony for Eevelation includes, as 
 we have a right to expect it would, every kind of 
 evidence by which Nature calls upon us to believe 
 that this or that proposition is true. For as there 
 are more kinds of evidence than one, and as each 
 kind fulfils a special function, and appeals to 
 different considerations, and unites to make an 
 absolute demonstration, it would have been a 
 serious defect in Revelation if any one kind had 
 been omitted. Men could hardly have avoided 
 feeling that one disposition or tendency of the 
 human mind had been overlooked ; they would have 
 argued that all had not been done in the way of 
 proof that might have been done consistently with 
 the course of Nature; and they would have been 
 able to declare with more justice than they can now 
 that Christianity was only adapted to certain, and 
 those lower, types of intelligence. It becomes there- 
 fore a matter of great moment to ascertain whether 
 the testimony we have for Revelation includes every 
 sort of evidence good, moreover, of its kind 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 101 
 
 upon which, we are expected, or rather obliged, to 
 believe that such and such a thing is true in the 
 ordinary affairs of life. 
 
 Now all testimony which is presented to men 
 for reason to consider and decide upon, resolves 
 itself into one of these three kinds evidence of 
 each man's own senses, of competent witnesses, 
 of effects or appearances from which we infer 
 the existence of certain causes or conditions. 
 Broadly speaking, these three form the chief 
 element in questions of natural science, of history, 
 and of moral judgments respectively; but this is 
 intended more for a practical account of things 
 than for a logical analysis, for over-systematising 
 is as often as not the bane of correct reasoning 
 upon practical matters. At any rate these three 
 certainly exist, and may be conceived of inde- 
 pendently, even though in actual experience 
 they run into and involve each other. Nor 
 would it be easy, though we are not concerned 
 to deny the impossibility, to find any other kind 
 of evidence, properly so called, than these; for 
 knowledge gained, say by intuition or by purely 
 abstract reasoning, supposing such to be possible 
 
102 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP, 
 
 (which, once more, we have no wish to deny), may 
 be good knowledge, but is not founded upon 
 evidence at all. And perhaps every single phe- 
 nomenon in Nature may be said to afford occasion 
 for evidence of this threefold character: thus, if 
 we wanted to obtain the strongest possible 
 assurance that a certain tree is standing in a 
 certain place, we should have to see for ourselves ; 
 that it was planted under such and such circum- 
 stances, we should have to ask those who were 
 present ; that it is a useful tree, and so to be re- 
 tained, we should have to examine its effects in 
 respect of fruit, shade, soundness, picturesqueness, 
 and the like. Such being the state of the case 
 in regard to the nature of evidence, and there 
 being a plain difference between what we see for 
 ourselves, what others have seen and told us, and 
 what we conclude from results concerning things, 
 i.e. abstractions, that cannot be directly sub- 
 mitted to the senses at all, we go on to point out, 
 and are surely justified in making much of it, that 
 some power or other has so ordered the course 
 of Kevelation as that it presents evidence of this 
 threefold character, and so leaves, as it were, no- 
 
OP 
 
 'II, 
 
 v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATlT^^^^Q 1 ^^^ 
 
 stone unturned, no method untried, to convince 
 men that it contains a true account of God. 
 
 We shall place the evidence of witnesses first 
 in our brief discussion of the testimony of 
 Revelation for several good reasons. To begin 
 with, it covers at least three-fourths, if not more, 
 of the beliefs of mankind. All history by the 
 nature of the case, all that part of science which 
 depends upon the records of observations made 
 by a comparatively few persons, a great proportion 
 of the common experiences of life by which 
 conduct is determined, rest upon no other founda- 
 tion than our belief, itself founded upon experi- 
 ence, that men may be upon the whole trusted 
 to speak the truth when they have no interest in 
 telling a falsehood. No doubt nothing is more 
 common than for interests in the direction of false 
 testimony to arise, and it is equally a matter of 
 fact that mental defects are the cause of much 
 mistaken evidence. Against this may be set 
 another fact equally indisputable that selfish 
 aims or intellectual perversities have an inevitable 
 tendency themselves to betray their own presence 
 or their own possibility, and to that extent can 
 
104 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 be guarded against. Certainly the instinct of 
 mankind claims for the veracity of human nature 
 (apart from disturbing influences) something of 
 the same trustworthiness that it claims for the 
 veracity of Nature itself (apart from misleading 
 appearances); both, it seems to feel, are necessary 
 for the conduct of the affairs of life. Nor is 
 this instinct unwarranted by human relations with 
 external or material things, with which upon any 
 view the mind is so intimately connected that 
 the first impressions made upon the judgment by 
 phenomena have in this sense the first claim upon 
 us, that to say what in our opinion we see or 
 hear or think we know comes first in Nature. To 
 falsify the testimony of our senses is a second and 
 more artificial process, though following so hard 
 upon the first as to be barely distinguishable from 
 it. And certainly, as we have said, man, if he is to 
 live at all, must believe in his own power of dis- 
 tinguishing between the true and the false, whether 
 it arise from honest mistake or from selfish 
 prejudice, or from what, as too commonly is the 
 case, a fatal mixture of both. But if our belief in 
 the natural veracity of average human nature is 
 
v.] OX THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 105 
 
 thus firmly rooted in our constitution, much more 
 is our belief in the veracity of good men, when 
 they speak of things of which they have had 
 experience and may be presumed competent to 
 testify. Here we have at times a dilemma of a very 
 painful character presented to us to decide whether 
 an extremely improbable assertion be true, or an 
 extremely trustworthy man be guilty of error. And 
 if the error be such as to make the witness morally 
 culpable, our perplexity increases to the verge of 
 distraction, so that we have to struggle against 
 giving way too much to the feeling that we could 
 rather distrust the evidence of our own senses than 
 have our confidence in the general veracity of 
 human nature rudely overthrown by the discovery 
 that a good man was, whether from inadvertence to 
 plain fact, or selfishness, or prejudice, or what not, 
 guilty of deceiving us in a matter of which his own 
 senses had made him cognizant. People of edu- 
 cation have an instinctive abhorrence of attributing 
 falsehood to their equals. 
 
 The reader may perhaps have too hastily con- 
 cluded that we were about to quote in this con- 
 nection the testimony of those whom we call the 
 
106 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Witnesses of Revelation, that is, those from whom 
 we have received the account of it; and he may 
 perhaps have felt some not unnatural weariness at 
 the revival of an unsatisfactory topic. But we 
 have in mind a much nobler theme, the testimony 
 which Jesus Christ bore to the attributes and the 
 designs of His Eather, such testimony being the 
 only way in which the Creator could, according 
 to the Analogy of Nature, be made known to 
 His creatures. And what we have to insist on 
 is, that the scheme of Revelation provides that 
 first and admirable kind of evidence, the testimony 
 of a good man to what he knows of his own 
 knowledge to be true. And be it remembered that 
 length of time does not impair the value of this 
 testimony, but increases it. We know as well as 
 the early disciples what His account of God was, for 
 they have told us what they thought it was very 
 unmistakably; and we can put it together better 
 than they did, survey it as a whole, and test its 
 value by the moral judgment of successive genera- 
 tions of men. Nor does any man affect to doubt 
 either that Jesus Christ assumed to give informa- 
 tion about God from the resources of His own per- 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOE REVELATION. 107 
 
 sonal knowledge, or that this information is easily 
 to be gathered in its main outlines from Holy Scrip- 
 ture. It is perhaps not necessary to quote passages 
 in proof of that which is the special characteristic of 
 His teaching, and has always been regarded as con- 
 stituting its impressiveness and importance ; but 
 this one may be recalled as particularly decisive : 
 "All things are delivered unto me of my Father, 
 and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither 
 knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he 
 to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." 
 
 See, then, the point at which we have arrived. 
 Everywhere He pledges His credit, the credit of 
 such an one as Jesus the Crucified, to the truth 
 of what He tells us concerning God. How are 
 we to escape the force of the argument derived 
 from the fact that this kind of evidence is afforded 
 us by Revelation, and that it is so pre-eminently 
 good of its kind ? If it be not the case that God 
 was His Father and had sent Him to save the world ; 
 if the designs of God towards mankind were not 
 what He represented ; if He had no other means of 
 knowing than other men ; if, in short, in His own 
 language, He did not in some real sense speak 
 
108 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the things as His Father had taught Him, then the 
 larger and more important part of His testimony is 
 founded on error, and we are driven to that moral 
 paradox which the Jews themselves were too 
 sensible to admit : " He is a good man and He 
 deceiveth the people." To which paradox criticism 
 not seldom finds itself absolutely shut up, and we 
 are by no means unfamiliar with the attempt to 
 draw the portrait of a good man sadly mistaken 
 from the beginning and gradually growing worse. 
 But happily we are also familiar as with a more 
 rational opposition so with a much more pleasing 
 spectacle. For we see men in the strength of 
 reason and the honesty of pure motives making 
 havoc of all the outward fortifications of religion, 
 only to arrive at the inner shrine, and there to sink 
 their conquering weapons in the presence of the 
 Man whom they find there. tc Is He one/' we can 
 almost overhear them whispering to one another, 
 ( ' whose religion we do well to overthrow ? Is He 
 likely to have pledged His character and honour to 
 false, even if honest, assertions, or sold His soul to 
 dreams and fancies ? If He has, then how can we 
 trust any man, especially upon the most serious and 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 109 
 
 vital questions ? And is it possible to find content- 
 ment or satisfaction in life, when there exists, as 
 shown by this fatally crucial example, so cruel a 
 contrast between what men are, or seem to be, in 
 the way of goodness, and what they convey to us 
 in the way of mistaken impressions and delusive 
 beliefs ? " 
 
 The second of the three kinds of evidence 
 found in Nature is paralleled in Eevelation by 
 the manifestation of the Son of God upon earth, 
 in the sight and hearing of the generation and 
 people among whom His life was passed, and 
 who had the same sort of opportunity as all 
 men have of testing the truth of statements 
 that concern outward facts. And here we must 
 begin by limiting to its own appropriate and some- 
 'what narrow sphere the effect which evidence of 
 this sort can exercise in the determination of 
 religious belief. These are times in which the 
 demand for what men call positive fact is much 
 insisted on, and Christian writers appear to be in 
 some danger of yielding to the temptation of trying 
 to find it where it does not exist, or of attaching 
 undue importance to it where it does. No doubt 
 
110 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the evidence of the senses as to matters of fact is 
 the foundation of all positive demonstration, and is 
 infinitely the most decisive and convincing of all 
 kinds of testimony, to the comparatively few, that 
 is, who by the nature of the case can themselves be 
 the witnesses of any particular phenomena. But 
 in questions of history we gain nothing by calling 
 it " positive " or " scientific," because in no case 
 can we obtain it except at second-hand ; we know 
 what certain persons thought they saw or heard, 
 but we know no more. And in the case before us 
 our ignorance concerning the witnesses is so great, 
 and our means of testing their competency so 
 small, that the mere fact that certain men ap- 
 pealed to the evidence of their own senses, as 
 proof that they were telling the truth cannot in 
 all fairness go for much in the way of experimental 
 demonstration ; much less ought we to think of it 
 as standing alone, or having an innate supremacy 
 over other kinds of testimony. 
 
 And yet, after having made all reasonable de- 
 ductions, we cannot forget that in submitting itself, 
 as it were, to the judgment of the senses, Eevelation 
 has obeyed to the uttermost the demand of Nature 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. Ill 
 
 for this special kind of proof ; of which it may be said 
 that it contributes an indispensable element to the 
 formation of right judgments, not itself so much 
 convincing as being a sine qua non if reasonable 
 conviction is to be attained. Sensible evidence, 
 such as we have to the life and actions of Christ, 
 just hits off that temper of mind which suspects 
 the truth of any Dispensation, unless some one has 
 seen or heard proofs of its existence. And when we 
 reflect how much value is attached to " objective " 
 phenomena in these days, and how easily we may 
 think of a Kevelation as having been given with- 
 out them nay, more, how little there is that a 
 spiritual religion and the testimony of the senses 
 appear to have in common with each other we 
 must be struck with the force of the argument 
 from Analogy, apart from and prior to any inquiry 
 as to the worth of the evidence as it has come 
 down to us. We have only to realise what would 
 have been the position of the Christian religion in 
 such days as these, if no such evidence had been 
 forthcoming. The life of Christ was lived upon 
 earth in full view of the world, and the circum- 
 stances which attended His entrance into and 
 
112 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 departure from it were such as any ordinary 
 observers must have been able to make themselves 
 acquainted with. As for the witnesses who have 
 left us their impressions of the real state of the 
 case, they did just what the Analogy of Nature 
 permits all witnesses to do. They told the world 
 what they believed they had seen and heard ; upon 
 this they founded a system of doctrine and a 
 church ; so sure were they that they had truth on 
 their side that they went everywhere to proclaim 
 it ; and when they were taxed with falsehood they 
 did all that lay in human power not indeed to 
 convince mankind that what they affirmed was 
 true, for this is beyond the scope of human testi- 
 mony, but to convince us that they themselves at 
 any rate believed what they said, for they sealed 
 their testimony in their blood with entire cheerful- 
 ness and assurance of victory. And so they " did 
 what they could." 
 
 This limitation of the proof from sensible 
 experience is the more important, because it 
 removes certain plausible objections which only 
 possess validity so long as we place more upon the 
 argument than it will carry. It is quite true, as 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOE EEVELATION. 113 
 
 men assert, that the testimony of the senses affords 
 a narrow basis for an universal religion, and is of 
 little cogency to many minds. But then this 
 weakness is only because Revelation, in this as in 
 other respects, proceeds so closely in analogy with 
 Nature, from which it will not depart. Historical 
 events can only be proved in a certain way that 
 is, upon the word of those, who witnessed them 
 unless the course of Nature is to be superseded by 
 a standing miracle. And those who reject Kevela- 
 tion avowedly because it is supernatural, can hardly 
 find fault with the evidence for it because it obeys 
 so implicitly the order of Nature. 
 
 But then it is said that more evidence might 
 have been given, for instance, as to the life of 
 Christ after His death. But how ? By the in- 
 exorable law of survival of the fittest, while all 
 were invited, and but for their resistance and 
 defiance might have witnessed His triumph, only 
 a few, chosen because of their faith in Him, were 
 enabled to become witnesses to the risen Lord. 
 And if the defiant rejection of the people at large 
 had been overruled by sheer force of miraculous 
 demonstration, what would have become of the 
 
114 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 course of Nature, what especially of human nature 
 itself in all its choicest spiritual gifts, such as faith, 
 moral discernment, redemption from evil by inward 
 clinging to the good ? And be it remembered that 
 to redeem humanity from evil according to the- 
 course of Nature is the object of Revelation. 
 
 We conclude, then, that Revelation, in offering 
 to the observation of mankind a human life which 
 all men of that age and country might see and 
 judge for themselves, has done all that the- 
 Analogy of Nature (supposing that necessary to 
 be preserved) permitted in the way of positive or 
 experimental evidence; and we urge further that, 
 if we would apprehend it rightly, it must not be 
 separated from the rest of the evidence, amongst 
 which it occupies a place, indispensable indeed 
 (Nature being what it is), but in no way para- 
 mount. That epithet might, indeed, with more 
 propriety be applied to the third kind of evidence, 
 that, namely, from effects to causes, which is to 
 be found in the manifestation of the Spirit of 
 God in history. For by this Revelation is sub- 
 mitted to the moral scrutiny of every man, and 
 it is thus that we can decide (and each man for 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 115 
 
 the conduct of his own life must decide) whether 
 the effects are consistent with the supposed causes 
 and worthy of the Creator of whose Spirit they 
 are the religious expression. And the special 
 point for our argument is not merely that Chris- 
 tianity is to be judged by its moral fruits, which 
 is, to a certain extent, the case with all religions, 
 but that God has permitted us to ascribe all the 
 natural and moral effects of the Christian Kevela- 
 tion to the continuous operation of His Spirit, 
 from which human admixture can be by degrees 
 eliminated; and so it follows that He has been 
 pleased to submit His own works and attributes 
 to the moral judgment of His creatures. If the 
 special operations of the Creator had terminated 
 with the life of Christ, or even with the establish- 
 "ment of the Christian community, there would 
 have been nothing of which men could have 
 asked whether it was morally or religiously worthy 
 of God; and though Christians have been but 
 too ready to claim for their own even crimes or 
 follies the Divine inspiration, yet, had no such 
 claim been possible, we can easily see how fatal 
 
 would the void have appeared in the array of 
 
 i 2 
 
116 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 testimony with which Eevelation has to face 
 the criticism and scepticism and indifference o 
 mankind. 
 
 It is further to be noticed that the Eevelation 
 of the Spirit, by which this kind of testimony 
 was introduced, is regarded in the history not as a 
 mere result of what God has done, but as intended, 
 arranged, and foretold by Christ Himself, who in the 
 most express terms proclaimed that everything in 
 the Church that was done according to the will of 
 God would be due to the guidance and consoling 
 help of the Holy Spirit. So that if men are 
 inclined to admit that the spirit and tendency 
 of the Christian Kevelation is good, they must 
 either ascribe that goodness to the will and 
 power of God, or else reject as untrue the ac- 
 count which Christianity (though admitted to 
 be a morally good system) gives of its own 
 origin. 
 
 We may sum up the argument of this 
 chapter in some such form as this : Seeing 
 that Nature, in order to obtain belief, presents 
 to the human mind three kinds of evidence, 
 and therefore compels her offspring to demand 
 
v.] ON THE EVIDENCE FOR REVELATION. 117 
 
 the same of those who would persuade them of 
 any truth; seeing also that Revelation has 
 been so framed as to afford each of these three 
 kinds of evidence in their order, and each of 
 them good of its sort, thereby betraying an 
 essential likeness with Nature; we conclude 
 therefore, by strict process of reasoning accord- 
 ing to experience and the necessary laws of 
 the human understanding, that the two systems 
 proceed from the same Cause or Author, who, 
 both in the course of Nature and method of 
 Revelation, has designed to have the evidence 
 for His existence, and claims upon our love and 
 worship, submitted to the decision of such ordi- 
 nary faculties as He has endowed His creatures 
 with. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 
 
 IN common life, lie wlio puts a question has by 
 that very fact the power of dictating what shape 
 the answer must take, for it must at any rate 
 be such as meets the special point which the 
 questioner chooses to raise. And whatever may 
 be our opinion as to the power of Nature to 
 make God known to us, there can be no doubt 
 as to her power of so asking the question as to 
 demand answers of a certain kind ; and, not only 
 this, but also of rejecting any idea of Grod or any 
 account of His attributes which does not corre- 
 spond with the natural order of things, these being 
 supposed to be His handiwork, and having at this 
 moment gained so complete a mastery over the 
 
VL] ON THE BEVELATION OF THE FATHER 119 
 
 human intelligence that no opinion inconsistent 
 with them has, or ought to have, any chance of 
 being accepted. Nature's question is not merely 
 whether there be a God, but whether there be a 
 God who can be thought and spoken of in the 
 way that she requires. So that Revelation, like 
 every other theory or system, has to submit to a 
 very rigorous test indeed, from which there is no 
 possibility of escape, save by taking refuge in 
 superstition, which may be defined as believing in 
 that which is contrary to Nature. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the relation of Revelation to 
 Nature in respect of the Creator may be expressed 
 in two ways : First, the main ideas of Revelation 
 must be such as Nature suggests, or, it may be, 
 verifies, the suggestions being collected from the 
 history of religion upon the earth, and the verifica- 
 tions from the results of investigation into law; 
 second, the main ideas of Nature must be repro- 
 duced in the Christian account of God, or, at the 
 least, seen to be in harmony with the teaching of 
 Revelation. A truly noble field for the argument 
 from Analogy to work in, and however restricted 
 by our present capacity and materials, in itself 
 
120 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 quite illimitable in extent and power. Like all 
 knowledge and all speculation, Analogy does of 
 course fail to penetrate the innermost secrets of 
 matter, life, and spirit, and is in itself of a com- 
 paratively humble aim and modest bearing. And 
 this it is necessary to keep in mind, for much 
 objection against Eevelation obtains its apparent 
 force by asking for more in the way of demon- 
 stration than the human faculties can reach or 
 the course of Nature allow. With this caution, 
 then, we proceed to point out briefly, and, it is 
 to be feared, but superficially, some of those 
 features in which the God of whom Christ bore 
 witness answers to the picture of the Creator 
 which Nature delineates in outline or insists upon 
 as being the representation to which all other 
 pictures must conform upon pain of being rejected 
 as unfaithful to the original. 
 
 1. The moment that we try to think of God 
 in Nature we must be struck with the manner in 
 which He withholds Himself and His creative 
 power from the cognizance of man. Whether any 
 certain information can be collected from our expe- 
 rience of things as we know them concerning God 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 121 
 
 is a question upon which men differ, but there 
 can be no dispute that the information is at best 
 very small, and does not touch those essentials of 
 Divine Being which we so long, and very natu- 
 rally, to know. In the way of Nature, God has 
 placed what must be called, in comparison with 
 the extent of the universe, narrow limits upon 
 such faculties as we possess. And when, by means 
 of reason, putting together with the utmost 
 laboriousness such information as the senses give 
 us, we try to trace created things back to their 
 source in time, we find ourselves brought to one 
 definite resting-place, where human inquiry as to 
 the origin and course of Nature appears for ever 
 likely to terminate. In Nature all roads lead at 
 last to the sun, with just perhaps the possibility 
 of a guess or glimpse beyond. And thus the sun 
 plays the part of mediator between the Creator 
 and His creatures. We can see in it the operation 
 of powers that are to us elementary things, though 
 for all we can tell, or rather as we must conclude, 
 they have been in existence either as causes or 
 effects from eternity. And the sun itself, while 
 explaining nothing, or next to nothing, of the 
 
122 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 forces that were before itself, still less of any 
 mind that designed it, testifies nevertheless very 
 plainly that such forces exist, and, judging from 
 their effects, were intended to confer upon the 
 creatures of God such things as light, life, gladness, 
 and the sense of the glory of the Creator. 
 
 Now the life of Jesus Christ is the manifesta- 
 tion of Grod's will and purpose in redeeming, just 
 as the sun is the manifestation of the same will in. 
 creating, the world ; in both we see the need of 
 mediation between such as the Creator is and such 
 as we are. But beyond thus pointing out the 
 parallel, we propose to leave it to the reader to 
 work out, because it cannot in strictness be said to 
 belong to the class of positive analogies to which 
 we almost promised to adhere : the things com- 
 pared are too vast and too remote to be altogether 
 comprehended by pure reason. But,' allowing this 
 to be the case, who can resist referring to such an 
 Analogy, or resist its force when pointed out ? His 
 conception of Himself as the Mediator, who was 
 the light of the world, the sustainer of spiritual, as 
 Ihe sun of physical, life the Being through whom 
 alone access is to be had to the Creator would 
 
vi.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE EATHEB. 123 
 
 alone justify the Analogy by which it is in turn itself 
 explained. In the way of religious knowledge we 
 stop at Him, as in Nature we stop at the sun. He 
 testifies to something, some creative primal power 
 beyond Himself, about which He tells us as much 
 as it concerns our moral life here that we should 
 know, and no more. Surely this limitation of 
 religious information in strict Analogy with the 
 limitation of natural knowledge is very striking. 
 Had He been merely an extraordinary man, trans- 
 ported by the enthusiastic though erroneous belief 
 in His own specially-given capacity to know and 
 make known God, would He have repressed His 
 Eevelation within such narrow, yet such natural, 
 limits ? Would He not have said something to 
 satisfy the cravings of His followers that would 
 have appeared to Him and to them real and solid, 
 though reason would afterwards have had to 
 pronounce it spurious or non-human ? 
 
 But there is more than this. There seems no 
 doubt that a large part of the best religions of the 
 world was due to the worship of the sun, as that 
 through which life and light come to men, around 
 which we revolve as a centre, in which we live and 
 
124 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 move and have our physical "being. So that 
 Christianity may be regarded as the transfer of 
 worship, as soon as mankind was ready, from a 
 material to a personal mediator, from the adoration 
 of Nature to the worship of a moral being. But 
 upon the thoughts which are suggested by this 
 further Analogy we do not enlarge, for to do so 
 would carry us still farther away from the sphere 
 of strict reasoning into that of the religious imagi- 
 nation, whose bow we cannot bend, nor perhaps the 
 opponents of the Eevelation either, else they might 
 cease to oppose and we to answer them. 
 
 The two ideas of God to which we next pass are 
 to be regarded as expressing the highest and most 
 essential notions concerning the Divine Being, to 
 which the intelligence of man and his moral or 
 emotional consciousness respectively have attained. 
 The first of these declares that God must be 
 thought of (if at all) as One ; the second, that He 
 must be thought of as the merciful Father of His 
 creatures. We proceed, therefore, to point out the 
 relation of Nature and Kevelation to each other in 
 respect of these great thoughts. 
 
 2. The unity of God was first decisively 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 125 
 
 announced by the Christian Kevelation in such 
 a way as to render it a permanent possession 
 of human thought. We do not even except 
 the Jewish religion, partly because it must be 
 regarded as a preparatory anticipation of the Chris- 
 tian, but still more, because, like Islam, Jewish 
 monotheism was a very partial and imperfect 
 representation of the true doctrine. It was nega- 
 tive, in the sense of denying the existence of any 
 God save the God of the Jewish nation, rather 
 than positive in the sense of affirming the true 
 Unity, i.e. that God is One and the same in all His 
 dealings and all His relations with mankind. And 
 it is important to remember that, in the very heart 
 of Christianity itself, there has been a long and 
 unceasing struggle against the polytheistic spirit, 
 and that practical monotheism has only in compara- 
 tively later times been able to establish itself as the 
 only satisfactory, if not the only possible, creed for 
 reason to affirm and hold. 
 
 Now this inherent difficulty in the establishment 
 of monotheistic belief throws a strong light upon 
 the course of earlier religious history, in which we 
 find that, in spite of many earnest attempts, men 
 
126 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 either did not grasp tlie idea of the unity of God at 
 all, or if at all, then imperfectly, or if perfectly, 
 then not permanently. What, then, was the cause 
 of this inherent incapacity or this ever-recurring 
 weakness'? The answer is simply this : That Nature, 
 until its course and constitution are known, does 
 not suggest the idea, or, as we might put it, does 
 not ask with sufficient clearness the question, " Is 
 God one?"" Polytheism is a perfectly possible and 
 not at all unnatural creed. The sun itself, which 
 has done so much to originate the beliefs of men, 
 fails us here, for it is but one among the starry 
 host to whom men have paid divided homage. Nor 
 did the conception of righteousness, supposing it to 
 have played a larger part in the formation of creeds 
 than can at all be proved, avail to establish the 
 idea of the unity of God, in a world where evil 
 might justly be assigned to another equally potent 
 deity, or where at the very best the righteous will 
 of the Creator appeared to be constantly interfered 
 with and His judgments broken in upon by chance 
 or fate or some malignant and powerful being. So 
 that we are not to wonder that, even under an 
 express Revelation, much more in the religions 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 127 
 
 which had only Nature for their guide, monotheism 
 was of very slow and precarious growth. 
 
 The case, then, stands thus : Eevelation chal- 
 lenged the attention of mankind to the true 
 doctrine, and by the mouth of a few Jews asserted, 
 in spite of the appearance of Nature to the contrary, 
 that unity was the right interpretation of Nature's 
 course and constitution. And now, after genera- 
 tions of weary waiting, Nature, when properly 
 appealed to, comes in afterwards to acknowledge 
 the correctness of the challenge, and to verify the 
 doctrine which Revelation put forth, as (what it 
 was) practically a new thing in the world of 
 thought. We know now, as men never knew 
 "before, that Nature is fashioned according to one 
 plan : it is open to us to decline to see any will at 
 all in Nature, but it is not open to us to see more 
 wills than one. The bare conception of law, of the 
 isolated oneness of the earth, of the uniformity of 
 human nature, began long ago to make this the 
 only possible conception; but the later march of 
 discovery has stamped it with the seal of absolute 
 truth. Primitive atoms cannot have had more than 
 one Maker ; gravitation is not the thought of two 
 
128 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 minds ; the law of conflict and survival (with all 
 the moral issues therein involved) is not the expres- 
 sion of two contradictory wills. So that, not to 
 prolong discussion, Eevelation has been more than 
 justified by the Analogy of Nature in the prophetic 
 declaration of the unity of God. 
 
 Now this combination of two Dispensations to 
 enforce the true doctrine of God upon mankind 
 may appear a matter easy to be explained, if we 
 choose to forget that the doctrine only appears so 
 obvious because religion has taught it for nearly 
 two thousand years ; or how easily either Dispensa- 
 tion might have remained silent or spoken in unde- 
 cisive or hesitating language. Once more we must 
 observe that we lose some of the strongest argu- 
 ments for the truth by taking things for granted. 
 But even apart from this we have to point out that 
 if the Jews, including the Saviour Himself, did not 
 know it by some experience of their own, then they 
 guessed it, and that rightly from some intuition of 
 Nature, which Nature as then interpreted did not 
 warrant. And the thing to be accounted for is, 
 how they came by their intuition so strongly and 
 clearly that it survived and triumphed before the 
 
vi.] ON T5E EEYELATION OF THE FATHER 129 
 
 knowledge of the course of Nature, or of Nature as 
 a course, called by men Evolution, came once for all 
 to justify their prescience. The very philosopher 
 who argues that God cannot be known, confesses 
 his obligation to the early Christians by not think- 
 ing it worth while even to make mention of the 
 existence of gods as a possible belief. So that, 
 even upon so plain a theme as the unity of God, 
 Analogy finds opportunity for vindicating the 
 divine origin of Revelation, and of attributing it 
 to the Author of Nature, the unity of which Revela- 
 tion first proclaimed, and human research has, 
 somewhat tardily, substantiated. 
 
 3. The Fatherhood of God is a doctrine more 
 or less clearly arrived at by many religions, and 
 is perhaps the root of all religion wherever it has 
 passed into a moral stage. This involves, it will be 
 seen, an inversion in the order of the Analogy, for 
 natural religion now comes first to announce, and 
 Revelation to verify and establish, the truth. But 
 how real a thing must an argument be that can 
 bear to be thus twisted about, and set now in this 
 light and now in that ! 
 
 The truth before us has been apprehended by 
 
130 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the human mind in exact proportion to the force 
 and clearness with which Nature suggested it. 
 The bare reason of things would indeed indicate 
 that, as men must think of God as the highest 
 conceivable Cause, Fatherhood must in some way 
 be attributed to Him, and that in spite of poly- 
 theism itself Diviim liominumqiie pater. But 
 while reason could do little more than silently 
 leaven the human mind with this thought, expe- 
 rience (so the most competent authorities assure 
 us) was bringing it home to the imagination 
 through the medium of the all-embracing, all- 
 protecting, omnipresent Sky, from which, so it 
 appears, the name of God in many languages has 
 been derived. And yet, although men arrived at 
 the idea very generally and early, though it was 
 a true and worthy conception of the Creator, and 
 though it was always a religious, and at times 
 even a moral, force in the world, it never gained 
 a consistent, still less an exclusive, hold upon the 
 human heart. There seems to have been wanting 
 a touch of reality that is to say, of the actual 
 relations and obligations involved in the connec- 
 tion of parent and child to give the bare idea 
 
vi.] GIST THE KEVELATION OF THE FATHER. 131 
 
 vitality, and to make it morally interesting. 
 Reason was never quite able to convince itself, 
 things being as they are, that the Author of 
 Creation intended to have Himself thought of as 
 a Parent, and the imagination that caught a 
 vision, perhaps but transitory, of an Eternal 
 Father behind the veil of the sky, could not 
 deliver itself from the conclusion that in the sense 
 in which the Creator was the Father of man, so 
 was He of all living creatures. Still less could 
 the mere imagination prevail against the new 
 knowledge that was abroad in the world, over- 
 clouding the religious aspect of the sky in pro- 
 portion as it gave a clearer insight into its material 
 composition. And so men hesitated, and finally 
 lost their way, about what is perhaps the greatest 
 truth that the mind of man has ever aimed at. 
 
 Now at this point Eevelation, in its turn, 
 comes in to verify the teaching of Nature by 
 exhibiting the idea realised in actual fact, in what 
 we might call a positive working shape, for in 
 it God is set forth as the Father of Christ, who 
 is also the " Son of Man," calling all men His 
 
 brethren, and who showed by actual experiment 
 
 K 2 
 
132 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 that a perfect human life was compatible with 
 Sonship to God. So that what reason points to 
 and Nature had endeavoured to inculcate is here 
 proved by example, and thus the something 
 wanting, the touch of reality that gives life and 
 power to the musings and emotions of mankind, 
 is hereby supplied. And then the machinery of 
 religion, which may be defined as the truth in 
 respect of man's relations to God, began to move 
 under the breath of inspiration, no longer fitfully, 
 as when every now and then great and enthusiastic 
 spirits have applied themselves to throw energy 
 into its various parts, but smoothly and regularly, 
 and with no more likelihood of coming to a stop 
 than the wheels of Nature itself. For there does 
 not seem any probability at present that mankind 
 will go back from the belief that the Creator is 
 also their Father, or that they will be able to 
 dissociate their belief from the Eevelation of God 
 in Christ, or to hold it in any other way than 
 that which the Sonship of Christ makes so easy 
 and so convincing for them. 
 
 The next ideas of God which we shall consider 
 are two, of which one belongs to the very essence 
 
vi.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE FATHER. 133 
 
 of Revelation, but Las little apparent connection 
 with Nature, and the other is absolutely necessary 
 to Nature, but has little or nothing to do with 
 Revelation. These are that God loves the world 
 and that He rules it by undeviating law. What 
 relation, then, do the two systems bear to each 
 other in respect of these apparently antipathetic 
 conceptions? Is there any interference with one 
 another, as would be the case if a God who rules 
 by law were incapable of love, or a God who 
 loves unable to be thought of as ruling by law ? 
 Or are they barely consistent with each other, as 
 would be the case if each, without repudiating the 
 leading principle of the other, nevertheless betrayed 
 no affinity towards it and gave it no support ? Or 
 does the essential idea of each find abundant, 
 though latent, similarity in the other so as to 
 suggest the inference that they are counterparts 
 in one comprehensive system designed by the 
 Creator of all things? If the latter alternative 
 can be at all established, it will have to be con- 
 ceded that the argument from Analogy has gained 
 a vital triumph. 
 
 4. The love of God is the first article of the 
 
134 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Christian creed, for if He does not love tlie world, 
 then the motive and reasonableness of Revelation 
 no longer exists. And this love was boldly and 
 positively asserted by the Christian religion from 
 the very outset in the face of that despondency 
 and hesitation which was the result of man's 
 experience of natural things. For Nature had not 
 succeeded in putting mankind upon the road that 
 led to faith in the love of God. It is true that 
 reason would seem to affirm that God must be 
 thought to care for a world which He created and 
 continued to sustain, and also that the beneficent 
 aspect of Nature's works had not escaped the 
 attention of the best minds as testifying to the 
 same truth. But among men confronted with so 
 many dark and sad experiences of life, the truth 
 made little progress and showed no vitality. In 
 such a scene as this love seemed out of place. It 
 was not a word that expressed any distinct attri- 
 bute of creative power; it did not naturally pre- 
 sent itself as a first impression from the experience 
 of things as men knew them; and yet, if love 
 cannot be gathered from a first impression, how 
 can it be proved by process of logic? Perhaps- 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 135 
 
 God loved some and not others, or some at one 
 time and not at another, or perhaps the good, or 
 perhaps the beautiful, or perhaps the wise; but 
 that He loved all the world in all its aggregate of 
 toil, sin, conflict, and woe, seemed an impossible 
 idea. 
 
 The love of God is, then, the characteristic note 
 of Revelation, the challenge it threw out to Nature, 
 the critical assertion by the veraciousness of which 
 it must be judged. There is no difficulty in the 
 fact that the assertion, when made, was taken by 
 the human mind upon trust, because it was asso- 
 ciated with the belief that God had proved His 
 love by the mission of Christ, and if we might 
 start from that primitive faith now, all argument, 
 whether from Analogy or not, would be quite 
 " unnecessary. But what we have to show is not 
 that God loves the world because He sent His Son 
 into it, but that we may gather from the course 
 of Nature itself, as men now apprehend it, a 
 reasonable probability that the Creator does love 
 the world, and therefore may be thought likely to 
 have sent His Son to redeem it. 
 
 Perhaps, before we come to the more 
 
136 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 scientific aspect of Nature, we might fairly 
 allege the results of a more mature and en- 
 lightened experience, due in large measure to 
 the steady moral progress of the human race. 
 And we might state them in some such pro- 
 position as the following: that whatever we in- 
 stinctively or by general consent term " natural" 
 is associated with pleasure to the partaker 
 thereof. To explain the meaning of this in 
 detail. Thus, men must live, and therefore 
 everything connected with the partaking of 
 food, from the bare gratification of hunger up 
 to social festivity, is united with pleasurable 
 sensations. Again, the human race is to be 
 continued, and therefore everything connected 
 with marriage, home, and the bringing up 
 of children affords natural pleasure. Again, in 
 order to live a man must work, and therefore 
 in a virtuous and well ordered life, work and 
 the rewards it brings and the successive steps 
 upwards it involves are all sources of happiness. 
 So also the effects of scenery, of the seasons, 
 of discovery, of invention, and many other 
 things included in the constitution of Nature. 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 137 
 
 Pain on the [contrary seems naturally associated 
 with moral evil and abuse; and if men were 
 reasonably virtuous might almost disappear, save 
 in what pertains to sickness and death, which 
 as the link that connects us with the unknown 
 universe must remain, and are so treated by 
 Kevelation, as a mystery not to be solved by 
 our present faculties. It would be very foolish 
 to seek to explain away the existence of evil, 
 but we may fairly urge, now that we have 
 had experience of the growth of man in com- 
 fort and happiness, that Nature in her most 
 real and deepest utterances does so far indicate 
 a beneficent purpose or upward tendency as to 
 make the proclamation of the love of God credible 
 to the reflecting mind. 
 
 The above argument is perhaps one that appeals 
 more to the feelings than the reason, and would 
 not therefore avail with those who take the 
 pessimist view of life. On the other hand, we 
 may claim for it that the feeling which responds 
 to it is that of the larger part of mankind, taken 
 at their best and most natural selves. But as 
 though Nature were resolved in the end to justify 
 
133 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP.. 
 
 expressly the incomparably daring assertion of 
 Revelation, ft God so loved the world/' we have 
 learnt in these later days that happiness is, by 
 the law and necessity of things, associated with 
 life that it is the mainspring, as it were, which 
 sets in motion creative energy and progressive 
 civilisation. For the survival of the fittest means, 
 when translated into the language of morals, the 
 survival of the happiest, for life in Nature is 
 identical with happiness in man. We maintain 
 the struggle for existence because the pleasure 
 of victory makes conflict possible, and happiness, 
 as a state of mind, is the reflective sense that 
 victory has been attained. Through pleasure it is 
 that we emerge from evil to good, from a lower 
 state to a higher, from inferior grades of civilisa- 
 tion to the superior; this law of existence being 
 taken here merely as a fact that everyone admits, 
 and not as an exclusive philosophy of things about 
 which there may be many disputes. So that, what- 
 ever may be the impressions that different minds 
 form as to the actual state of things, which 
 means their views as to happiness in the abstract 
 or as to the happiness of the human race, they 
 
vi.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE FATHER 139 
 
 must admit so far as their own is concerned, 
 that the actual course of things sets forth a 
 progress to life through happiness, experienced 
 by each man as he obeys the law of his exist- 
 ence; Nature itself keeping pace with his 
 endeavours by constantly discarding the evil 
 and conserving the good. In other words, we 
 may justly infer that the Author of Nature has 
 so arranged as that happiness and life shall go 
 together, and be the appointed destiny of man- 
 kind, so far as we will appropriate them by 
 the methods which Nature prescribes, reason 
 discovers, and virtue practises. But to will to 
 make persons happy is the specific action of 
 the quality termed love, and the only test 
 whereby its presence may be ascertained. We 
 might therefore conclude even from Nature that 
 the Creator loves the world, but this is to 
 impose a heavier weight upon the argument 
 than our purpose requires. For us it is sufficient 
 to affirm that the order of Nature, now that 
 men are beginning to perceive what it is, gives 
 an exceedingly strong probability to the Chris- 
 tian doctrine, that God loved the world and 
 
140 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 therefore sent His Son to redeem it from evil. 
 And as the preachers of this doctrine, thus 
 justified by later investigation, could not have 
 inferred it from anything they knew or had 
 experience of, and have themselves expressly 
 disclaimed any natural origin for their belief, 
 it would seem that the argument from Analogy 
 is as strong as could well be imagined. 
 
 5. That the Creator works by invariable law 
 is as necessary to the student of Nature as 
 His love is to the religious believer ; this granted, 
 it cannot further concern him, so far as he is 
 merely a student of Nature, whether will or 
 fate, or matter itself, is to be regarded as the 
 origin of all things. Now the attitude of 
 Jesus Christ towards the laws of Nature will 
 come on for consideration in its place, but so 
 far as regards His testimony to His Father's 
 method of operation, an attentive reader of the 
 New Testament will certainly discover nothing 
 inconsistent, but much that is compatible, with 
 the idea of pure law. Morally and physically, 
 that is to say both in His relations towards 
 men and phenomena, the Father was regarded 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 141 
 
 as directing all tilings by an unswerving will, 
 that was always working consistently with itself, 
 and an overruling mind, that was always pur- 
 suing one plan. The proof of this lies upon 
 the surface of the history, and must be left 
 on the whole to the knowledge and judgment 
 of the reader, who wih 1 also be asked whether 
 a single sentence of Christ can be alleged that 
 impugns the doctrine of the reign of the law. 
 But perhaps the reader will be helped in this 
 inquiry if we go on to show that two doctrines, 
 eminently characteristic of Christ, are nothing 
 more nor less than the religious expression of 
 the idea of universal law. 
 
 In the first place, one of the attributes 
 most certainly ascribed to God in the New 
 " Testament is Providence, or that which in the 
 prescience of an all- seeing mind arranges all 
 events and shapes them to the furtherance of 
 its own supreme design. Not to quote instances, 
 the Sermon on the Mount (St. Matt. ch. vi.) is 
 a complete and sufficient account of Christ's 
 teaching in this respect. Now if we think of 
 God as Nature seems to tell us to do, namely, 
 
142 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 as setting in motion a few (or one) simple laws 
 acting upon a few (or one) kinds of elementary 
 materials (which, is as far as our knowledge will 
 warrant us in proceeding) we gain a clear concep- 
 tion of the reasonableness of divine Providence. 
 It is no longer a merely mystical expression of 
 God's infinite and transcending power, but a 
 plain account of what He does in ways that 
 men themselves imitate, and achieve great results 
 in proportion as they imitate them correctly. 
 For provision is the knowledge of results follow- 
 ing by fixed law from causes over which we 
 exercise control. Thus our provision that a 
 friend has reached or will reach Edinburgh a 
 few hours from the time he left London is 
 possible, because we place confidence, liable to 
 be disappointed only by that species of human 
 imperfection called accident or caprice, in an 
 innumerable series of arrangements which we 
 have made to secure that precise result. So 
 that we have no difficulty in comprehending the 
 doctrine which Christ taught in strict Analogy 
 with Nature, that God numbers the hairs of 
 our head, or does not let a sparrow fall un- 
 
YI,] ON THE EE DELATION OF THE FATHEB. 143 
 
 noticed; everything must happen in this and 
 not in another way. It is perhaps not necessary 
 to point out that we are not trying to show 
 that God may be omniscient, which were a 
 very impertinent task, but that by putting 
 Eevelation and Nature together, God has made 
 the method of his Omniscience in some degree 
 intelligible, and therefore rationally credible, to 
 His creatures. 
 
 But there is, in the second place, another 
 characteristic of Christ's doctrine, more im- 
 portant for our own present argument, and not 
 nearly so well known. The invariable rigour 
 of law suggests and explains that severity of 
 God, which at all times all thinking men, nay 
 all men without thinking, have ascribed to Him. 
 The course of Nature moves with inflexible 
 directness, careless it should seem of the hu- 
 manity that, with all its hopes and fears and 
 sensitiveness to suffering, falls crushed beneath 
 its wheels; nor does it to our vision regard 
 moral distinctions, still less the cry of human 
 pain or the prayer wrung from mortal agony. 
 "Never morning wore to eve but some heart 
 
144 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 broke/' and that from no fault of its own, but 
 by the pressure of merely material causes, which 
 no care can avert nor innocence disarm. This 
 is why men rebel against God, and it is this 
 which makes their professions of faith often so 
 sadly unmeaning. To know that it is His law 
 enables us to acquiesce, but does not help us 
 to believe. 
 
 Now if there was a man anywhere who 
 might have been expected to shut out this view 
 of God from his religious teaching, it was 
 surely Jesus Christ. Filial knowledge of His 
 benevolent intentions, which He so frequently 
 proclaimed, a heart touched in every fibre by 
 compassion for His brethren, a mission which 
 obliged Him constantly to rely upon the love 
 of God, these and many similar reasons would 
 have compelled a merely human teacher to dis- 
 guise, as far as possible, the truth from him- 
 self and his followers. Whereas it forms a 
 conspicuous feature in Christ's teaching about 
 God, for no other reason that we can think of 
 than that He rightly interpreted the Analogy 
 of Nature. Thus He contemplates the death, 
 
vi.] ON THE EEYELATION OF THE FATHER. 145 
 
 perhaps the painful death, of a harmless bird 
 as simply something that the Father assents to, 
 and yet not one of them is forgotten. The 
 Giver of rain makes no distinction between the 
 just and the unjust. The fact of a man being 
 born blind must be accepted just as it stands, 
 and not put down to the fault of anyone. So 
 the tower of Siloam falls and kills people no 
 more guilty than the rest the very kind of 
 accident that arouses natural resentment in our 
 souls. But it was in the dealings of God with 
 the people in the way of approaching destruc- 
 tion, that Christ's perception of the immutable 
 severity of divine law becomes particularly pre- 
 dominant. Thus His reference to the Flood and 
 to the destruction of the Cities of the Plain is 
 an instance of the argument from Analogy 
 employed by the Lord Himself to describe the 
 settled method of God's rigorous justice, pro- 
 ceeding in its course which nothing could avert 
 when Himself had been put to death; and 
 however much His heart might bleed inwardly, 
 He nevertheless with unsparing hand and 
 terrible detail, with all kinds of pathetic touches 
 
146 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 to heighten the effect, foretells the downfall of 
 the Jews, as the certain consequence of moral 
 law working its own punishment. It was thus 
 that He looked Nature and History steadfastly 
 in the face, giving to them a religious inter- 
 pretation, but never yielding to the temptation 
 of explaining away the inexorable severity with 
 which Nature and History do the will of God. 
 So that the Analogy holds good even under so 
 decisive and searching a test as this. And 
 the outcome of it all is, that we gain this for 
 a definition of practical religion on God's side; 
 it is (( grace working by law." 
 
 The way in which this idea of "practical 
 religion" is carried out in the scheme of Reve- 
 lation is such, that in it God is represented as 
 offering Redemption to man in strict accordance 
 with the Analogy of Nature, thereby enabling 
 man to accept it without doing violence to his 
 own moral constitution. And this brings us to 
 the last point of the Analogy, the treatment 
 in Revelation of man's free agency. 
 
 6. Moral freedom, as distinguished from 
 philosophical notions about free will, forms an 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 147 
 
 essential element in the constitution of man, 
 and must be recognized by every system, 
 religious or otherwise, that purports to be 
 established for his benefit. Now the union of 
 "grace and law" is accomplished as soon as 
 we remember that law is not merely, perhaps 
 not chiefly, to be regarded as expressing the 
 overruling will of God; it is quite as much the 
 control or limit that He places upon His own 
 will in order that ours may be set free. We 
 are not in the least ashamed of these anthro- 
 pomorphic expressions, for if the Almighty had 
 intended us to think of Him under other than 
 human forms of thought, doubtless He would 
 have enabled us to do so. Law, then, is 
 essential to freedom. Tyranny means simply 
 a will that acts upon no discoverable system, 
 but only to please itself. The children or sub- 
 jects of the tyrant are not free to act, because 
 they cannot calculate the consequences of their 
 conduct, whereas in Nature they know what 
 will follow, and order their conduct accordingly. 
 And this was just the teaching of Christ about 
 
 God's method of dealing with us, long before 
 
 L 2 
 
148 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 human investigation had enabled us to realise 
 that it is Nature's also. Because God's laws 
 are so inexorable, therefore man must repent : 
 this is the burden of every discourse, the warn- 
 ing of every parable. "On whomsoever it 
 shall fall, it will grind him to powder." And 
 thus the knowledge of unalterable law both 
 fixes the standard of amendment, which may be 
 defined as conformity to the law, and also gives 
 the motive for man's self-determination to that 
 change in the direction of goodness which 
 religion calls repentance. Upon this delicate 
 topic a single word too much or too little 
 might have thrown the Lord's teaching out 
 of harmony with Nature's; but no such word 
 is to be found. 
 
 And furthermore, what we may call the tone 
 in which Christ represents the Father as ad- 
 dressing Himself to His creatures, abundantly 
 justifies the Analogy we are seeking to establish. 
 For as Nature and Eevelation agree in pre- 
 supposing that the operations of God are regu- 
 lated by law, it follows that He must recommend 
 His ways to the judgment of His creatures, in 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 149 
 
 expectation that He will be justified before 
 them, in proportion as they inquire and obey. 
 This is perhaps the exact point at which the 
 idea of a merciful Creator melts into that of 
 a loving Father, for this is the very secret of 
 all parental action towards our children. The 
 laws of Nature are written upon the surface, or 
 hid beneath the depths; but they are always 
 there where men seek for them in the . right 
 way, nor do they force men to obey them in 
 any other way than by the consequences which 
 disobedience and ignorance entail. Even so 
 God recommends His Son to mankind as the 
 embodiment of true and saving religion, leaving 
 them to appreciate His merits and His work 
 for themselves, and putting no force upon 
 their will, save the evil results that rejection 
 of His claims brings with it in natural order. 
 A lovely touch in the Parable of the Vineyard 
 expresses this natural expectation on God's part. 
 "But last of all He sent unto them His Son, 
 saying, They will reverence my Son." Nor is 
 there the least impropriety in thinking of God 
 as te expecting," so long as we make sure that 
 
150 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 His "expectations" will in the event be ful- 
 filled. As, to crown our Analogy, it has been 
 in Nature and Eevelation alike. Who, save the 
 Creator, could have expected that the race of 
 savage beings who first crawled upon the earth 
 would in time come to discover the laws which 
 guided the world from the dust of which they 
 had sprung? Or who, save the Father, could 
 have expected that the human beings, who in 
 the very lowest depth of moral abasement put 
 His Son to death, would in time come to wor- 
 ship Him as their redeeming God? And thus 
 is God justified by His children alike in Nature 
 and in Eevelation. 
 
 The above considerations are now submitted 
 in all confidence to the reader's judgment, in 
 the hope of doing something to convince fair 
 minds that doubt indeed, but do not prefer 
 doubt for its own sake. And such may very 
 fairly be challenged at this critical point in our 
 argument, to point out any radical dissimilarities 
 that might be set against the profound likeness 
 we have been alleging, and, as we think, pro- 
 
vi.] ON THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 151 
 
 ving. Is there a single idea in the revealed 
 account of God which Nature pronounces to be 
 inconsistent with the Creator or Cause from 
 which she came ? Very glad would the author 
 be to examine such, if only for the reason 
 that a good answer to objections often has 
 more effect upon the mind, though illogic- 
 ally, than the statement of positive proofs: it 
 is easier to show that two things are not un- 
 alike in certain particulars, than that they are 
 alike generally. But he cannot discover any 
 dissimilarities for himself, and does not know 
 that any are now being alleged. So that, in 
 the absence of any such unlikeness, and in the 
 presence of such resemblances as present them- 
 selves without an effort to the inquiring mind, 
 we have a right once more to conclude : that 
 the account of God given in Revelation is so 
 much in harmony with the methods of His 
 creative work made known to us in Nature, as 
 to raise a strong probability, irresistible until 
 rebutted, that the same Power called both into 
 existence, and designed that, taken together 
 
152 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. vi. 
 
 they should afford to His creatures such an idea 
 of their Creator as might produce in them those 
 emotions of love, fear, faith, together with holy 
 obedience, that go to form a complete and saving 
 religion. 
 
UNIVERSITY) 
 
 . CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON THE EEVELATION OP THE SON. 
 
 THE Analogy between the course of Nature and 
 the Revelation of the Son must, it is plain, move 
 upon very different lines from those upon which 
 we have been constructing the Analogy between 
 Nature and the Revelation of the Father. For God 
 being regarded as the Cause of both systems, the 
 Analogy consists of a resemblance of methods and 
 attributes that may be discovered in each of the 
 two as of one who Himself is quite outside of 
 them, save in the relation of eternal Cause and 
 never-ceasing effects (we mean outside of them 
 in respect of His essential being which cannot 
 be known by such as we are). But the Revela- 
 tion of the Son took place within the limits of 
 
154 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Nature itself, and under circumstances that made 
 Him, being Man, as much an object of know- 
 ledge, or at any rate of inquiry, as any other 
 human being ; so that the Analogy consists, speak- 
 ing broadly, of the relation which His manifes- 
 tation presented to the general sum of things 
 called by us Nature. And this is a matter more 
 of general description than of the bringing to- 
 gether, for purpose of strict comparison, par- 
 ticular ideas such as we were engaged upon in 
 the last chapter. Perhaps the subject might be not 
 improperly raised by the question, Is the mani- 
 festation of the Son such as we may fairly predicate 
 "naturalness" of it ? And this difference of point 
 of view, together with the different treatment it 
 necessitates, is an advantage to our plan, both 
 because it helps us to cover a larger field, and 
 also keeps the argument off from that artificial 
 symmetry which thoughtful minds are wont, and 
 that with justice, to distrust. 
 
 The history of Jesus Christ, like that of other 
 men, can be presented in the threefold aspect 
 of life, character, and teaching, in each of which 
 respects the question of " naturalness " can be 
 
vii.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE S( 
 
 submitted to the decision of reason. But to a 
 considerable extent the question in each case is 
 decided by the New Testament record and by 
 the common confession of mankind, as soon as it 
 is asked. And this must be taken as the reason 
 why we do not feel compelled to enter at length 
 into circumstances of which the reader must be 
 supposed to have information sufficient at any 
 rate for him to test, what after all no one denies, 
 the general naturalness of Christ's manifestation 
 in history. The real danger is, here as elsewhere, 
 rather that men should overlook the cogency of 
 facts so well known and so commonly accepted, 
 that they do not stop to observe their significance. 
 And there is special reason for recalling to mind 
 at this part of the argument how easily these 
 natural touches and aspects in the history of Christ 
 might have been absent, and how their presence 
 in such really overwhelming force can only be 
 accounted for by the supposition that Eevelation 
 is in accord with Nature because it comes from 
 the same source if man had made Nature (or even 
 understood it) we might then have attributed the 
 naturalness of Christ's manifestation to man's 
 
156 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 unaided agency. In this state of the case, then, 
 all we feel it necessary to do is to mention the 
 special features in the Revelation of the Son that 
 go to make up this appearance of naturalness, and 
 to call attention to some less known considerations 
 that make it, not one of appearance only, but of 
 real and inward conformity. 
 
 1. The life of Jesus Christ, from His birth 
 to His death was, with one exception to be noted 
 presently, a purely natural human life ; this is what 
 the Christian instinct has apprehended under the 
 doctrine of His perfect manhood. In so far as that 
 life lay within the limits of natural order (His 
 entrance into, and departure from which, are clearly 
 understood by Christians to be supernatural) it was 
 lived in what we might almost call ostentatious 
 conformity to all the conditions that Nature im- 
 poses upon human beings. The pains which the 
 history (short as it is) takes to bring this fact out are 
 really quite extraordinary. His birth was that of 
 other men, His early years were those of a working- 
 man in a village home. We are informed, inci- 
 dentally it might seem so far as the narrators were 
 concerned, but of Divine purpose so far as the 
 
vii.] OK THE REVELATION OF THE SON. 157 
 
 future history and completeness of the Christian 
 religion is concerned, that He felt all the common 
 bodily wants hunger, thirst, pain, weariness and 
 shared the common blameless weaknesses of 
 humanity such as temptation, doubt, surprise, 
 disappointment, and even embarrassment. This 
 last, by which we think His conduct towards the 
 Syrophoenician woman, and again in the case of 
 the adulteress in St. John's Gospel may fairly be 
 described, is of importance because it depicts Him 
 as enduring that perplexity which Nature inflicts 
 upon us in what men call a choice of evils. Then, 
 too, the history, by merely passing touches, takes 
 care to let us know that He discharged excellently 
 all the common relationships of life such as son, 
 brother, master, servant, host, guest, friend, citizen, 
 " patriot, and king ; thereby showing how, out of the 
 common stuff of Nature's manufacturing, a religious 
 life might be lived on earth and by man. He loved 
 flowers and children because, in addition to their 
 natural charms, they taught Him something about 
 God. The very weakness of human nature He so 
 endured as to consecrate it to God and to a Divine 
 purpose, and the tears of Christ are stored in the 
 
158 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP, 
 
 treasure-house of human memory. That He was 
 in all things like unto us (sin only excepted) was 
 one of the most certain impressions made upon the 
 minds of those who had the best means of knowing 
 Him, and it is because they have so depicted Him 
 that He has gained so complete a hold upon the 
 heart of mankind. And all this was done by men 
 who, believing as they did in His supernatural 
 origin and destiny, had the strongest inducement 
 to pass over the merely human aspect of His life. 
 And we may surely assert that if the account of 
 Him were merely a tradition of a noble life by 
 devoted followers, this belief of theirs would have 
 added some touch of unnaturalness or betrayed 
 some lack of sympathy with customary order that 
 would have marred the completeness of our 
 Exemplar, and so hurt our faith. 
 
 That our Lord's conformity to Nature was not 
 merely accidental, but formed part of His own 
 self-conscious intention, proof of a very remarkable 
 and convincing character can be alleged. As a 
 mere matter of historical criticism no portion of 
 His life presents so much difficulty as the account 
 of His temptation, which must, to be true in any 
 
VIL] ON THE REVELATION OF THE SON. 159 
 
 sense at all, represent His own views and thoughts 
 about that mysterious event. And yet, if we look 
 at it, it is clear that the victory consisted in the 
 determination upon the part of a Being conscious of 
 supernatural powers, not therefore to depart from 
 the order of Nature, but to do His work in life 
 as other men do theirs. The inducement to error 
 in this way constitutes the entire force of at least 
 two out of the three temptations, namely, to 
 support the wants of Nature then and thereafter 
 by miraculous power, and to gain the adherence 
 of the people by miraculous defiance of Nature's 
 laws. It seems, we must venture to say, almost 
 impossible to over-estimate the conclusiveness of 
 such an Analogy as this, all the circumstances being 
 taken into account. 
 
 This brings us to the exception above alluded 
 to. There is a unanimously concurrent testimony 
 that Jesus Christ had, and exercised for purposes of 
 good, a power of doing miraculous works. Now 
 let us at once admit that no fair argument can ever 
 find an Analogy in Nature for powers avowedly 
 supernatural, we shall but deceive ourselves if we 
 try, as men sometimes do. To say, for instance, 
 
160 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 that He merely accelerated the processes of Nature 
 entirely forgets that the time which these processes 
 take is an integral part of the laws, still more of 
 the course, of Nature. We must, then, accept this 
 part of His life as we accept the Resurrection, 
 because the dispensation to which it belongs, when 
 taken as a whole, presents analogies with Nature of 
 such a kind as to amount to a strong proof that the 
 ivhole is from God. And having done so we may 
 easily perceive that no Revelation of God could 
 have been complete that did not show to us an 
 irresistible outburst of Divine love, that could not be 
 controlled whenever there were wrongs to adjust or 
 suffering to relieve. And if, we may add, the 
 Revelation of the Son had been devoid of all 
 miraculous works on His part, His origin and 
 destiny remaining what the history represents 
 them to be, the foundation of the Christian faith 
 would not have been thereby affected. We do not 
 therefore believe in Christ because of His wonderful 
 works, but in His works because first of all we 
 believe in Him. 
 
 We affirm then that, in the common phrase, 
 " the perfect humanity of Christ/' there resides a 
 
viz.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE SOK 161 
 
 notable Analogy with human Nature, or rather 
 with that part of Nature called human; and we 
 press this argument the more urgently upon the 
 reader's notice because its very familiarity detracts 
 from the effect of its appeal to our intelligence, so 
 that we have need to remind ourselves in how 
 many other ways God might have revealed Him- 
 self or even his Son otherwise than He has done, 
 had He not designed, perhaps we might even 
 say, had He not been constrained by His own 
 consistency with Himself, to make the Kevelation 
 in accordance with the course of Nature, and so 
 enable His creatures to judge concerning its truth 
 for themselves. 
 
 2. The consideration of Christ's moral being, 
 which we next approach, has given the author more 
 anxiety and the performance of it less satisfaction 
 than any other part of his work. The difficulty 
 of making a comparison between something wholly 
 moral and Nature which is, to say the least, 
 material before it is moral is sufficiently plain; 
 and yet, on the other hand, Nature has a distinct 
 claim to a voice in the matter. For if a person 
 appears assuming to represent the moral attributes 
 
162 A XEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 of the Creator, Nature can insist that these shall 
 be such as meet with her approval, and may be 
 properly predicated of the ideal man, whose form 
 and fashion she sets us upon constructing out of 
 such moral materials as the order and constitution 
 of the world afford. Now the moral ideas which 
 men have, as a matter-of-fact, gathered from 
 Nature, may perhaps sufficiently for our present 
 purpose be indicated in the attributes which they 
 have assigned to their gods, one or two of which 
 we will therefore go on to consider. We may, 
 however, fairly plead that this particular Analogy 
 cannot be properly accomplished till more has been 
 done by human inquiry, in the way of showing how 
 morality is related to material Nature. 
 
 Nature's first and simplest demand would seem 
 to be that the perfect man should possess the 
 various qualities which are called virtuous or good. 
 But as these are made up of contrasts i.e. those 
 that are associated with what we call strength or 
 weakness respectively there is an inherent diffi- 
 culty in combining them, in one character, over 
 which difficulty Polytheism stumbled, and' ended 
 by assigning various characteristic qualities to dif- 
 
VIL] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE SON. 163 
 
 ferent divinities, in despair it should seem of 
 concentrating them in one ; and thus it failed in 
 the task which Nature sets the reason of man to do. 
 Which task, however, has been accomplished 
 in the Kevelation of Christ. For it is this very 
 combination of two sets of qualities that gives 
 Him the first moral claim upon our allegiance. 
 On the one hand we have tenderness, meekness, 
 humility, sympathy, patience, and many more 
 similar qualities ; on the other hand we have 
 heroism, physical and moral courage, indignation, 
 
 the love of liberty, the spirit of command. For 
 the most striking illustration of this let us take 
 His public entrance into Jerusalem, which we 
 boldly call the most heroic act in history, and 
 which, nevertheless, was specifically associated with 
 
 ' meekness and sorrowful weeping. So again we 
 have united the royal dignity of a King and the 
 absolute humility of the Saviour; the strenuous 
 will and the submissive resignation ; the lofty reso- 
 lution and the patient endurance. But not to go 
 further into detail we assert, perhaps without the 
 chance of being contradicted, that the account of 
 Christ's moral qualities has been so arranged as to 
 
 M 2 
 
164 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 leave that impression of symmetrical completeness 
 which Nature asks for. 
 
 Nature's second demand of the perfect man may 
 be described as that abstract quality called holiness 
 or righteousness, which is always predicated of 
 God (the voice of reason coinciding with the 
 instinct of healthy reverence) wherever the mind 
 of man has apprehended the unity of the Divine 
 Being. The will of God then becomes identified 
 with moral law, and is thereby placed beyond the 
 reach of our criticism. Just as men accept the 
 physical phenomena of Nature as final, beyond 
 which it is useless to strive to penetrate, so do 
 they, so must they, accept as final the moral 
 attributes of the Creator; or if they refuse to 
 acknowledge His existence, then we may substi- 
 tute for that word the ideal man who would fulfil, 
 supposing him to exist, all the righteousness which 
 Nature makes possible to her offspring. There is 
 an almost infinite suggestion of moral attributes in 
 Nature which, if so it please our stubborn wills, 
 we can adore and love. But criticism implies that 
 the thing criticised can be brought into relation- 
 ship with similar things for purpose of comparison, 
 
VIL] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE SOK 165 
 
 and we cannot do this in the case of Nature, there 
 being only one world known to us : there is no 
 possibility of saying that there is too much of this 
 or too little of that ; that there are shades of good 
 and evil which we can set off against each other ; or 
 (above all) that the character in which these attri- 
 butes inhere is good or bad, better or worse, than 
 any other. 
 
 And so there arises the idea of abstract unim- 
 peachable holiness as belonging to the perfect 
 man. That this ideal is fulfilled in the account of 
 Jesus Christ can hardly, we think, be denied 
 especially in view of the plain fact that criticism 
 has hitherto failed to make an impression upon 
 it. The word " character/' which has come to be 
 applied (wrongly as it seems to us) to His moral 
 Being, conveys an erroneous notion about Him. 
 For character, as the word implies, is a very 
 marked and definite thing; it is the stamp im- 
 pressed upon a particular man's moral constitu- 
 tion, so engraved and fashioned, raised here 
 depressed there, light in one place dark in 
 another, as to afford a distinct notion what 
 manner of man he is. But this is quite unlike 
 
166 A iN-EW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the account we have of Christ, of whom we surely 
 cannot say that He was better in one respect 
 than in another, or that He diverged from the 
 standard of goodness which Nature has taught 
 us to set up or to acknowledge when set up by 
 Him, or that He was of any particular type or 
 cast of character at all. However we may explain 
 the fact, it remains true that the history is so 
 devised as to place Him above the power of moral 
 analysis in the same sort of way as Nature is 
 planned to reveal the incomparable and unde- 
 finable holiness of the Creator. 
 
 Nature's third demand, which concerns rather 
 the working of the perfect character in actual 
 practice, is that it should display a constant sym- 
 pathy with good and antipathy towards evil; a 
 truth which the religious instinct has expressed in 
 the doctrine common to all mankind, that the 
 gods punish wickedness and reward virtue. Now 
 it is one of the happy results of recent discoveries 
 that the justification of this demand, together with 
 the meaning of this sympathy and antipathy, are 
 found embedded as it were, in the moral strata of 
 Nature itself. For the modern doctrine is that,. 
 
ML] ON THE KEYELATION OF THE SON. 167 
 
 by the course of Nature is meant an increasing 
 tendency on the part of man, to improve himself 
 and his surroundings according to the law of 
 development, which Nature lays down for reason 
 and experience to find out and profit by. Whence 
 it follows that all men who would be accounted 
 good must love that which makes for the carrying 
 out of Nature's plan, and hate that which makes 
 against it. 
 
 Now it is not too much to say, that the moral 
 history of Christ in its practical aspect may be 
 summed up under one or other of these two 
 conceptions, and that He realised absolutely 
 Nature's ideal. This will come before us when 
 we treat of His redeeming work ; at present a 
 mere glance at some of the best known features 
 in His moral conduct is sufficient. Sympathy 
 with right meant with Him the meekness which 
 attracted the sorrowful, the earnest call to repent- 
 ance, the mercy that pleaded with them and for 
 them, the sacrifice of self to save men from sin, 
 the freely -granted pardon, the exhortation to do 
 the will of God, the aching heart and burdened 
 spirit, the lamentation over the city that " would 
 
168 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 not" allow Him to save her from destruction. 
 Antipathy to evil took the form that one who 
 knew the design of Nature must needs make it 
 take; a terrible indignation against those whose 
 capital crime was this, that they kept from the 
 way of righteousness men, who, in themselves, 
 were quite capable of being saved. He saw His 
 opponents as men, who, by causing " little ones 
 to offend," hindered the will of God for man's 
 improvement revealed in the course of Nature. 
 Nor was His wrath a casual or exceptional 
 breaking forth of anger just as occasion 
 called for it; it glowed at white heat in all 
 His discourses and parables, as those who 
 care to look for tokens of it may easily dis- 
 cover. And it can only be explained, together 
 with the denunciations of punishment to which it 
 gave birth, as expressing the Divine determination 
 to put down all that stands in the way of the 
 fulfilment of God's benevolent intention for man's 
 ultimate good. Of this assertion those who apply 
 themselves to the study of the New Testament, 
 no matter with how little learning or talent, 
 are competent judges. As children of Nature 
 
vii.] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE SOX. 169 
 
 we know that her practical morality may be 
 summed up in love for what is right and hatred 
 for what is wrong, and we can see the moral 
 being of Christ on its practical side summed up 
 in the same affections, all cross lights and con- 
 trasted qualities that form the infinite variableness 
 of human character being in His case omitted. 
 And when we have realised the true state of 
 the case we must then decide for ourselves as 
 to what conclusion it legitimately points. 
 
 The last demand that Nature makes is that 
 the perfect man should have that complete 
 sympathy with herself, with the course and order 
 of things, which may be termed happiness in 
 living or the mere joy of existence. Testing this 
 once more by the standard of what mankind have 
 attributed to their deities, we find that to be 
 associated with natural things in the way of 
 pleasure and interest was a cardinal point in the 
 religious ideas of classical paganism, which, we 
 may observe, as being pre-eminently a nature- 
 religion, affords us very apt illustrations. But 
 in the grave and serious monotheism of the 
 Hebrews the same thought is expressed with in- 
 
170 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 comparably more of dignity and moral worth : 
 " God saw everything that He had made, and behold 
 it was very good." And the works of God again 
 declare His glory and show forth all His power \ 
 returning, as it were, joy for joy : "0 all ye 
 works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord ; praise and 
 exalt Him above all for ever." But at this point 
 once more the deeper research of modern days 
 has come in to sanction this association of the 
 sense of joy with the course of Nature, and to 
 justify the demand for it from any character 
 claiming to be perfect. For, as we have already 
 noticed, the course of Nature is so ordered that 
 all animate beings advance to a higher stage of 
 excellence by the mere joy of existence, which 
 arises out of the victory over conflicting circum- 
 stances in the struggle for survival. The capacity 
 for joy lies at the moral heart of Nature, let it 
 be taken away and there would be no reason 
 why sentient beings should care to prolong life 
 or to continue the conflict. So that Nature can- 
 not choose but demand of all who would represent 
 her moral characteristics to perfection, that they 
 should discern and appropriate this joy of progress 
 
VIL] OX THE KEVELATION OF THE SOX. 171 
 
 as being the necessary condition of all moral 
 continuance. 
 
 Now, as we well know, this is not the first 
 nor the most characteristic view of things which 
 the Christian Revelation presents to our notice : 
 rather it protests against the mere satisfaction 
 with things as they are and against the mere 
 enjoyment of the best of all possible worlds as 
 sure to end in terrible moral confusions. And so 
 Christianity makes its first appeal to the heart 
 of man by depicting the Man of Sorrows as ex- 
 pressing the Divine sympathy with' the sorrowful- 
 ness of life, and this, in obedience to the cry of 
 humanity, which suffers so much at the hands 
 of Nature, whose very joy is a survival out of 
 much uuhappiness. 
 
 And this first impression, with its inexhaustible 
 cup of consolation for the sinner and the sufferer, 
 endured for many ages of moral disorder and deep 
 misery, until, in accordance with a law from which 
 not even the greatest truths, if they are one-sided, 
 are exempt, it was seen to be in imperfect harmony 
 with Nature, and so gave rise to reactions which 
 had their roots and their justification in the purely 
 
172 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 natural gladness of living. Thus in the semi- 
 pagan revival before the Keformation, and in the 
 movement of the eighteenth century, of which 
 Nature was the password, the principal actors 
 were thrilled with the joy of life, action, know- 
 ledge, and humanity. To them Nature was all- 
 sufficing; and they insisted, often with forced 
 laughter echoing over a troubled scene from sad 
 hearts, that men had only to follow the leadings 
 of Nature and be happy. And so, resenting the 
 sorrowful view of life, they fought Christianity 
 to the very death in the very spirit of an over- 
 wrought and therefore not permanent reaction. 
 
 Which reaction has now in great measure 
 abated in proportion as earnest minds have come 
 to see how true the story of the Man of Sorrows 
 is to experience, and how essential to any adequate 
 moral rendering of the world in which we live. 
 Now, therefore, if ever, is the opportunity for 
 Christianity to do its part in the work of recon- 
 ciliation, by completing its own representation of 
 the moral being of its Master. And this it can 
 do by claiming more distinctly than hitherto, upon 
 the plain testimony afforded by Christ's words 
 
VIL] ON THE REVELATION OF THE SON. 173 
 
 and life, that joy of existence which Nature 
 demands and He so plainly possessed. For be it 
 observed that He Himself speaks never of His 
 sorrowfulness (as an abiding quality), more than 
 once of his joy, nor does His life present merely 
 the aspect of unceasing sorrow, but also of cheer- 
 ful, hopeful, laborious energy; lived indeed towards 
 the latter part in the deepening gloom of the 
 shadow of the Cross, which again was relieved by 
 the radiance of the resurrection. It affords, per- 
 haps, a hint how much more is yet to be got out 
 of the Christian religion, that it might be difficult 
 to quote one discourse of any celebrated preacher 
 in which the joy of Christ is expressly and ex- 
 haustively treated. The plan of this work forbids 
 any detailed account of this feature in His moral 
 being, but we may remind the reader of one or 
 two points that bear upon it. 
 
 We call attention, in the first place, to the fact 
 that upon one memorable occasion He displayed 
 an exultant joy, as marked as His moment of in- 
 tense sorrow in Gethsemane ; for we read (St. Luke 
 ch. x. 21) a in that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit/' 
 and the word used OjyoXAiao-aro) is as much descrip- 
 
174 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 tive of the strongest possible feeling as the words 
 used to describe His agony. The occasion was the 
 return of His disciples with good news concern- 
 ing the effect of their preaching, by which intelli- 
 gence His joyful sympathy with the progress of 
 goodness was powerfully excited. Analysed, this 
 sympathetic joy will be found to be derived from 
 the destruction of the power of evil conceived 
 ideally (v. 18) ; from the gathering in of persons 
 to the kingdom of heaven, which equals the last 
 achievement of moral progress (v. 20) ; from His 
 entire acquiescence with the will of God, revealed 
 as it is in the course of Nature and of history 
 (v. 21); and, finally, from the consciousness of 
 being an instrument of blessedness to others 
 (v. 23). His parables, again, are steeped in the 
 gladness of Nature's operations, being founded 
 upon happy experiences of domestic and social 
 life, agriculture, and trade, or upon simple natural 
 phenomena, in all of which the better side of 
 things predominates, though the evil is never 
 once lost sight of: even in such a parable as the 
 destruction of the husbandmen He specially 
 notes that the kingdom will be given to another 
 
VIL] ON THE BEVELATION OF THE 
 
 nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And from 
 the beginning of His ministry to the end of it 
 there is a fulness of joyful anticipation both for 
 Himself and for mankind when redeemed by Him, 
 which has never been approached in the teaching 
 of any other man. 
 
 But what for ever determines this question for 
 Christians is His own testimony to His spiritual 
 joy. As though to leave this last impression 
 upon the heart of man, He goes to betrayal, 
 agony, and death with the words ' ' my joy " 
 repeated emphatically in His last discourse and 
 closing prayer to God. And all Analogy, 
 now that men have begun to understand the 
 course of things, justifies the assertion that He 
 bore and conquered death because of the supreme 
 joy of existence to which Himself testifies. If 
 He was human in the perfection of His sorrow, 
 He was divine, as Nature accounts of divineness, 
 in the perfection of His joy, so that we do Him 
 wrong if, in His name, or to carry on His work, 
 we throw ourselves out of sympathy with the 
 natural gladness of things; although this fault is 
 not to be confounded with that stern and necessary 
 
176 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 protest against selfishness, self-satisfaction, and 
 deadness to sin and suffering which the contempla- 
 tion of the joyful side of Nature, taken by itself, 
 is apt to promote. The tendency of the life of 
 Christ as of Nature is always towards unity, 
 wholeness, combination of opposites, adjustment 
 of contradictions. But without entering further 
 on the joy of Christ, which we suspect to be 
 full of hidden beauties and deep analogies, to be 
 revealed hereafter, we say simply that, contrary 
 to what might have been expected beforehand, 
 it betrays a complete resemblance to that which 
 Nature suggests as being the most suitable spirit 
 for her children to be possessed by. 
 
 3. The naturalness of Christ's teaching to 
 which we now turn might almost be taken as 
 conceded by fair opponents ; at any rate, the 
 answer which Kevelation makes to the demand 
 of Nature becomes more decisive as the demand 
 assumes a more peremptory tone. Now the 
 course of Nature, being made up of forces that 
 are ever tending by fixed law to certain pro- 
 gressive results, must be held to be sufficient for 
 all the purposes (other than religious) of humanity, 
 
TIL] ON THE EEVELATION OF THE SON. 177 
 
 and the knowledge of this course as acquired by 
 reason and experience in like manner must be 
 held sufficient for the same purpose: supernatural 
 information, except for purely religious instruc- 
 tion, is as fatal to the course of Nature as super- 
 natural intervention itself. Now this being so 
 we are to remember, what has been already 
 pointed out, that not by one single word did 
 Christ give any opinion about natural phenomena, 
 or assign for them supernatural causes. He did 
 not interfere in His teaching with any knowledge 
 that men have, or may acquire, of the universe, 
 of its laws and processes, nor is there anything 
 that men say or think at the present moment in 
 the investigation of Nature which requires to be 
 altered because of anything that Christ said or 
 " taught. In everything He paid scrupulous defer- 
 ence to the prerogatives of reason, and never 
 committed Himself to any opinion that reason 
 can even criticise, still less pronounce inaccurate. 
 This is, of course, as it must needs be, one of 
 those general statements that are asserted as 
 true, subject to disproof from facts, which in 
 this case may be safely challenged ; but there 
 
178 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP; 
 
 is also one piece of positive proof as well. All 
 religious systems must contain a cosmogony of 
 some sort, and it is here that they come into 
 conflict with science; even the primitive and art- 
 less cosmogony of the Hebrews having been sub- 
 jected to the common lot of being strenuously 
 disputed over. But the Christian cosmogony, as 
 contained in the first thirteen verses of St. John's 
 G-ospel (for so it certainly is), presents nothing 
 that can conflict with any positive demonstration of 
 reason from the apprehension of phenomena. It 
 is a purely spiritual or religious account of Creation 
 so constructed as to fall in with any material or 
 scientific account that the human mind may attain 
 unto. 
 
 But though Nature does not claim by itself 
 to afford a religious knowledge of G-od so as to 
 bind upon us the obligation of obeying and 
 adoring Him and this, we say, because of the 
 hypothesis with which we started, and which 
 would perhaps hardly be disputed even by Theism, 
 which has never been wont to rely merely upon 
 arguments drawn from the constitution of Nature, 
 such as, for instance, the argument of design 
 
VIL] ON THE BEVELATION OF THE SON. 179 
 
 yet it does claim to be able to supply to the 
 religious spirit tlie materials out of which its 
 teaching is composed, just as it does in the 
 kindred spheres of poetry and morals. To which 
 must be added on the part of the teacher a 
 genuine appreciation of Nature's aspects and 
 voices, upon which a religious interpretation is 
 to be placed for in religion as in other things 
 Nature will not endure to be thrust aside or dis- 
 pensed with. Now that this, and much more 
 than this, if it were thought necessary to go 
 further into details, was fulfilled by the teaching 
 of Christ., no one needs to be reminded. Surely 
 no one ever made so natural a use of natural 
 scenes as He did. He grasped clearly the secrets 
 of God's working in Nature, and thus was able 
 to use it to explain and illustrate the same work- 
 ing in the spiritual order, bringing out at every 
 step in His teaching analogies the most beautiful 
 and subtle. Thus, to take the first few examples 
 that present themselves : He spoke of Himself 
 under such illustrations as light, food, drink, a 
 vine, a shepherd, a bridegroom, and the like. 
 The two rites He ordained were merely washing 
 
 H 2 
 
180 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and partaking of food applied to religious pur- 
 poses. His parables ranged over the common 
 scenes or duties of daily life. He said one of 
 the finest and deepest things ever said concern- 
 ing flowers, in order to contrast the beautifulness 
 of God's creation with man's artificial splendour. 
 The sight of children suggested to Him a living 
 picture of the Heavenly disposition. The sun 
 and stars above, mountains and hills below, were 
 also pressed into the same service. And so He 
 drew religion from Nature as other men draw 
 poetry, art, law, or morals, which He for His 
 part left to each man to do in his own sphere 
 as God had appointed, never interfering with the 
 march of the human intelligence in pursuit of its 
 own proper aims, but submitting Himself, as 
 became a dutiful Son, to the conditions and limi- 
 tations which His Father has imposed upon His 
 created work. 
 
 Thus far, we think, there will be found no 
 serious difference of opinion between the students 
 of Nature and Kevelation respectively, as to the 
 Analogy which the Lord's teaching presented to 
 the course of Nature, but the question as to the 
 
VIL] ON THE KEVELATION OF THE SOK 181 
 
 relation of His teaching to natural morality gives 
 rise to serious controversy, and must be sepa- 
 rately considered. Much that has been said in 
 this chapter, must have struck the reader as 
 being only something that could not help being 
 said in such an argument as this; something on 
 the other hand may have been propounded to 
 draw the bonds of Analogy between the two 
 systems closer than could have been expected 
 beforehand. Meanwhile, we ask the reader once 
 more to discover or even imagine any other 
 reason for the phenomena we have pointed out, 
 than that which the history itself assigns being 
 the perfectly adequate and reasonable explan- 
 ation that both systems had the same Author. 
 And if he can find any resemblance in all the 
 long roll of human experience, or if he can by 
 taking thought imagine how it came to pass 
 except by the power of God, let him erase this 
 chapter from the tablets of his mind, and forgive 
 the writer of it for having intruded upon his 
 attention to no purpose. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHEIST. 
 
 UP to this point it lias been possible to avoid all 
 controversies with those who have made the book 
 of the world or the book of Revelation their 
 special study, for the writer has simply accepted 
 what each are agreed upon in a general way as 
 being true, and also essential to their respective 
 dispensations. Differences of opinion concerning 
 details or special topics, which, however important, 
 are still subordinate, he has been able to pass over, 
 not because he has no opinion of his own about 
 them, but because, following herein the example 
 of Butler, he can regard them as lying outside 
 the lines of his argument. And it is astonishing 
 how well the two sets of students get on together, 
 
ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHRIST. 383 
 
 so long as one does not use the authority of 
 religion to enforce some interpretation of natural 
 order, or the other retaliate by denying an his- 
 torical event in the supposed interests of Nature. 
 But we have now arrived at a point where there 
 exists a serious and substantial difference of 
 opinion, and where the two may be compared to 
 armies encamped in the same territory which each 
 asserts belongs in whole or in part to itself. Into 
 this dispute we must therefore enter so far as may 
 be necessary to establish an Analogy between 
 Nature and Kevelation precisely in respect of that 
 wherein there is a present appearance of contrariety 
 and discordance ; such Analogy being all the more 
 effective because it will have been won, so to speak, 
 out of the fire. 
 
 The question is none other than this : " To 
 whom does the field of morality belong ? " Can 
 we discover what we ought to do by the experi- 
 mental investigation of Nature (including history), 
 or must we accept the methods and standards of 
 moral excellence from a divine revelation especially 
 given us ? 
 
 Let us remember that we have postulated 
 
184 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 throughout that Nature must be regarded as 
 sufficient for all the purposes which, judging by 
 our experience of things, were designed by the 
 Creator, and which culminate in that vast phrase : 
 "The growing civilisation of mankind." So that 
 the interpreters of Nature are compelled to affirm 
 that morality, or the duty of man towards man in 
 the various relationships of life, may be gathered 
 by reason from Nature, that such morality is 
 adequate for all the needs of the human spirit, 
 and that conduct adjusted by this standard is good 
 in every sense of that word. 
 
 On the other hand, Christians, equally jealous 
 for their Master's honour, have seemed to assert 
 we say seemed, for it may be that popular 
 Christianity has committed itself to more than 
 its own best authorities would allow that Jesus 
 Christ revealed moral truths which reason could 
 not otherwise have discovered; that the founda- 
 tions of His moral teaching were not merely 
 superlatively excellent in degree (which all admit), 
 but sui generis ; and, further, that believers in Him 
 have special means of deciding rightly questions 
 of common morality, which they ought to employ, 
 
vm.] ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHRIST. 185 
 
 and we suppose the world at large to defer to, by 
 the mouth of doctors and theologians. Thus, 
 such and such a thing is wrong upon Christian 
 principles, such another thing has "been decided by 
 the authority of Christ; a certain policy for 
 instance, say a war, is pronounced to be against 
 Christian morality, though, as the other party 
 rejoins, it may have been begun from the 
 customary motives that decide such transactions. 
 Which assertions are sometimes warmly repudiated, 
 and in its hottest moments the common voice of 
 public opinion accuses those who make them of 
 exhibiting what it calls the spirit of priestcraft. 
 Or if the said policy be accepted by Christians in 
 general, then they are open to the censure 
 that their morality is below that of Nature and 
 humanity. And thus arises an unhappy, and surely 
 an unnecessary, quarrel. 
 
 Now the gist of the dispute lies in this. Men 
 can only accept a moral doctrine upon the ground 
 of reason working by experiment, or upon the 
 authority of the person who offers it, such authority 
 in turn depending upon their belief that the 
 teacher has a divinely-given right to tell us what 
 
186 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 we could not have found out for ourselves, and 
 therefore must receive without criticism. So that 
 morality comes, in the last resort, to rest upon a 
 Revelation attested by miracles, which the inter- 
 preter of Nature is at once driven to reject, and so 
 cut the whole matter short, sometimes, it must be 
 confessed, in an acrimonious and uninquiring spirit. 
 The Christian believer, on the other hand, is 
 equally positive that Christ has done something for 
 morality which surpassed the unaided powers of 
 man, and he in his turn is apt to grow con- 
 temptuous towards Nature Nature, of which his 
 Master never said one word that was not sympa- 
 thetic and respectful. And as is so often the 
 case, either is more able to harass and confound 
 the other than to establish his own case, even to 
 his own satisfaction. 
 
 We have thus then an admirable field for test- 
 ing the conciliating power of the argument from 
 Analogy, and we begin by asking, whether these 
 pretensions in the way of moral teaching are any- 
 where in the New Testament expressly claimed for 
 Christ or by Him. Surely not ; at least upon the 
 first view of things. It does not anywhere appear, 
 
vni.] ON THE MOEAL TEACHING OF CHRIST. 187 
 
 that He was communicating to the world moral 
 truths, which, but for His intervention, must have 
 remained in abeyance for ever, for this is the 
 true description of a supernatural teaching. Now, 
 going a little below the mere surface, let us submit 
 the teaching of Christ to the most obvious and 
 decisive test, that of originality. To adopt a 
 familiar and practical view of the subject, we may 
 speak of originality as having regard to the method 
 whereby moral improvement is to be gained, to the 
 standard proposed for our attainment, and to the 
 particular maxims inculcated upon us as containing 
 the essence of the whole. Now the method of 
 Christ was that of cleansing the heart, of working 
 from within outwards, of acting upon the spirit, of 
 making the tree good first of all. And His standard 
 of excellence was that of self-sacrifice, of giving 
 up ourselves, even life itself, in the assurance that 
 this was to gain the very life for which we were 
 created. Now to call this original, in face of well- 
 known facts, is really out of the question : Nature 
 had certainly set men upon this track long before 
 His time. Curiously enough a superficial view of 
 the two most famous nations of antiquity is suifi- 
 
188 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 cient to settle the matter. Was not the purification 
 of the inner-self the essence of all that was most 
 excellent in the moral philosophy of the Greek? 
 Was not the sacrifice of self to the higher claims of 
 duty and patriotism the secret of the dominion 
 which the Eoman had acquired over the world? 
 What Jesus Christ did was to combine these two 
 together, to make them into living forces by His 
 exquisite way of putting them,, and by the incom- 
 parable example of His own life and death. But 
 this is not the part of one who aims at superseding 
 Nature, but rather of one, who was enforcing, with 
 new spiritual energy, what others had tried to 
 promulgate and establish before Him. 
 
 The case is even stronger when we come to 
 what is perhaps a more definite test, namely, the 
 special commandments and maxims which Christ 
 laid down in His teaching. He made it part of His 
 work to correct the imperfect or perverted maxims 
 of " them of old time," but the new ones were not 
 above the standard of enlightened Gentile teaching, 
 though put with infinitely more vital power and 
 practical persuasiveness. Indeed, He expressly 
 accepted the old law in its true meaning in words 
 
viii.] ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHEIST. 189 
 
 that might be well regarded as decisive : " Think 
 not that I am come to destroy the law or the pro- 
 phets; I am not come to destroy but to fulfil." 
 And in agreement with this declaration He refused 
 more than once to give any new commandments of 
 His own, referring inquirers, who tried to get from 
 Him " counsels of perfection/' to the old Law, as 
 quite sufficient to confer eternal life if kept. Nor 
 did He ever let fall any hint to show that in His 
 opinion men were unable to discover moral truths 
 or put them into suitable maxims ; it was the doing 
 that He warned them was so difficult. In proof 
 whereof let these three considerations be duly 
 weighed. 
 
 1. Jesus Christ never interfered with existing 
 institutions or customs which the moral teaching of 
 that day allowed, though He spoke strongly con- 
 cerning religious abuses. Thus, He said nothing 
 about slavery or war. On the other hand, that one 
 most certain law of Nature, for if it be not a moral 
 law of Nature's own making, then there is no such 
 thing, namely, that a man should have but one 
 wife, and should not part from her, so long as the 
 condition of the married tie was fulfilled, He did 
 
190 A KEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 most strenuously enforce. Keligious ordinances 
 again, such as oaths, He dealt with, but not with 
 any that are only moral. 
 
 2. He gave utterance to many moral dicta, 
 which in spirit bore strong resemblance to the 
 sayings both of Jew and Gentile teachers. This 
 is frequently urged as an argument against Reve- 
 lation; and Christians have tried to nullify it by 
 pointing out special features, which make His 
 moral maxims not merely different in degree, but 
 different, that is, supernatural, in kind. But it is 
 another felicity of the argument from Analogy, 
 that the more similarities abound, the more likely 
 is it that Nature and Kevelation proceeded from 
 the same cause; and every discovery of fresh 
 correspondence with the admitted truths of other 
 teachers has for long seemed to the present writer 
 a strong point in favour of the Christian religion. 
 For it shows that the founder of our faith did 
 not supersede the natural morality which His 
 Father had given to His children ; nor again their 
 natural powers for finding it out by reason and 
 inquiry, in this presenting a strong contrast to 
 other founders of religious movements who have 
 
VIIL] ON THE MOEAL TEACHING OF CHRIST. 191 
 
 not been apt to treat the moral constitution of 
 Nature with that deference, which we are beginning 
 to see is due to it. 
 
 3. The special directions which Christ at times 
 gave to meet particular cases are, so far as we can 
 judge, of a practical character, and suited to the 
 wants and duties of common human life. No 
 doubt they can be made to have a supernatural 
 appearance, in so far as impossibility of attain- 
 ment would give them that appearance, by being 
 pressed in their literal meaning. But if we put 
 aside metaphorical expressions (such as turning 
 the other cheek, which His own conduct subse- 
 quently explained), or those injunctions which 
 were limited to the very special missionary work 
 upon which His disciples were engaged, and which 
 required unusual and striking effects, we shall find 
 that His practical advice was such as common 
 morality would approve, and wise men would try 
 to follow. Thus unconditional forgiveness of 
 injuries is no part of Christ's doctrine ; as the 
 conduct of the king, who ordered his servant to 
 be sold because he could not pay the debt, and 
 forgave it only upon his prayer for mercy, plainly 
 
192 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 shows. Take again the case of the owner of the 
 vineyard, who insisted that the contract with his 
 labourers should be strictly kept ; of the lord, who 
 so sharply censured his servant for not employing 
 his money to advantage ; of the slave, who was 
 not excused his work in the house because he had 
 done it in the field. But in a multitude of well- 
 known facts we can only appeal to the general 
 effect of the whole, and test it by a crucial instance. 
 And this we consider to be the Lord's particular 
 and detailed injunctions concerning quarrels, which 
 we are too apt to dismiss as impossible of per- 
 formance, because we do not like to make the 
 attempt. These are, first of all, to try private 
 remonstrance : " Tell him his fault between thee 
 and him alone;" then arbitration: "Take with thee 
 one or two more ; " then law : ' ' Tell it unto the 
 assembly ; " then finally the open breach until 
 repentance has made it up : " Let him be to thee 
 as an heathen man and a publican." It would be 
 difficult to point out any course of conduct more 
 reasonable, more consistent with experience and 
 common sense, or more likely to be practically 
 effective than this. And He appears to have 
 
VIIL] ON THE MOEAL TEACHING OF CHEIST. 193 
 
 enlarged upon this subject contrary to His usual 
 wont, because in quarrels it is a proper course of 
 action at each step, and not merely principles or 
 rules, that helps men to keep themselves in the right. 
 
 So far then we think that the protest against 
 supernatural interference with the moral course of 
 Nature is warranted by the teaching of Christ 
 Himself when closely examined. But the proposi- 
 tion, which satisfied perhaps the colder piety of the 
 last century, that Christ merely republished the 
 code of natural ethics in a very effective manner, 
 and illustrated it by a life of peculiar sanctity, 
 will never content, nor ought to content, the 
 genuine Christian instinct, which demands for its 
 Master's work far more than this; and when we 
 look at the facts of the case does not ask in vain. 
 
 For to sum the whole matter up in one brief 
 word, what Christ did was to make morality 
 religious, by turning it into the very material 
 out of which a religious life is woven : just as 
 He did by human life and character, with the 
 scenery of the world, and with history, so did 
 He by moral teaching. Morality in His hands 
 became a duty which we owe to God, which He 
 
 o 
 
194 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 has constituted in and by the order of Nature, 
 and therefore expects of us, which He will judge 
 and reward. Once more we must appeal to the 
 reader's knowledge of the New Testament to 
 verify an assertion so commonplace as this, only 
 adding a few brief examples to set him upon 
 the right track. He inculcated the very ordinary 
 duty of obedience to the civil powers in such a 
 way as to make it of Divine obligation by adding 
 the words : " Kender unto God the things that 
 are God's," and again, while submitting Himself 
 in His own person to the Eoman authority, by 
 saying : " Thou couldest have no power against 
 Me, except it were given thee from above." Duty 
 to one's neighbour, even though expressed in the 
 old language, becomes quite a new thing in respect 
 of motive and obligation, when it is realised that 
 all alike owe a primary duty to God, and to love 
 one's neighbour as one's self surely the perfection 
 of nicely-balanced rational morality gains another 
 significance when God is proclaimed as the Father 
 of all men without exception. Not to take anxious 
 thought about the morrow does not appear a very 
 fruitful or valuable piece of advice, except it is 
 
viii.] ON THE MORAL TEACHING OF CHEIST. 195 
 
 associated with belief in a loving Providence, in 
 whose sight the very hairs of our head are 
 numbered; and forgiveness of injuries is but an 
 impracticable undertaking for most men, till they 
 have recognised their own need of forgiveness 
 from God. Again the very method of morality, 
 i.e. the purification of the inward spirit, is a 
 process that has but little chance of being generally 
 adopted, unless it is associated with the reward, 
 that follows upon it in natural order, of " seeing 
 God." Similarly the standard of morality, i.e. 
 sacrifice of self, is seen in quite another light 
 when it is offered to the Creator of the world, 
 and accepted by Him as the fulfilment of His 
 laws impressed upon the course of Nature. But 
 beyond this mere statement we need not now 
 proceed, for the method of morality is involved 
 in the Christian doctrine of Eedemption from evil, 
 and its standard in the Christian law of self- 
 sacrifice, both of which we are next to enter 
 upon. Let us, therefore, conclude the matter by 
 repeating that Christ gave to morality that which 
 Nature could not give it, the vivifying and 
 enlightening power of a true religion. 
 
 o 2 
 
196 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 The result of our investigation would seem 
 to lead us to the conclusion that both sides in 
 the dispute, as before described, will retain what 
 is rightly their own, and surrender the territory 
 which they could occupy indeed but not govern. 
 The pre-eminence of reason in discovering the 
 methods, fixing the standard, and drawing up 
 the maxims of morality according to the course 
 of Nature, is seen to be all the more unchallenged 
 because Revelation is made by one who claims 
 the Author of Nature for His Father, and who 
 therefore, as filial instinct would compel, takes 
 care that the Creator's arrangements in the 
 universe should be respected and upheld. On 
 the other hand the pre-eminence of Revelation in 
 fitting the moral order of things into a larger 
 scheme, giving it religious sanctions and influences, 
 and so putting it into a practical working shape, 
 is equally incontestable. The one surrenders the 
 power of doing right without God, the other that 
 of adding a supernatural morality to Nature's 
 ordering. And this surrender of certain super- 
 natural claims, or half-claims, is really a very 
 happy result, for the more of the supernatural 
 
YIIL] ON THE MOEAL TEACHING OF CHEIST. 197 
 
 that we find in Kevelation, the more likely is it 
 to be brought into conflict at some point with 
 Nature, and then as reason has in the last resort 
 only Nature to go by and judge by, men will 
 be tempted to decide that the divergence between 
 the two, creates so strong a presumption against 
 the identity of their origin, as that no presump- 
 tion from Analogy can rebut it. And so an end 
 of all attempts to maintain the truth of Christianity 
 upon purely rational grounds. 
 
 And let us say further, that out of a merely 
 barren conflict we have been enabled to draw a 
 deep and fertile Analogy between Eevelation and 
 Nature in respect of their relations to morality, 
 seeing that both are found in co-operation to 
 produce those moral ends which Nature pro- 
 pounds but cannot in practice attain; for the 
 perfectly sufficient reason that man cannot by 
 his own power, that is from such information 
 as Nature gives, attain to a satisfactory know- 
 ledge of his relations towards the cause of his 
 own existence. And yet such knowledge forms 
 an elementary and indispensable requisite to a 
 perfect morality, which is at root nothing but 
 
198 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. vm. 
 
 a system of duties following upon ascertained re- 
 lationships, so that for man to order his conduct 
 aright, it is not enough for him to act as 
 though the existence of God might be left an 
 open question, which appears to be the agnostic 
 position; he must try and satisfy himself by 
 every means in his power whether there be 
 or be not a God whom he can approach in 
 prayer and in spirit. And to men who admit 
 this duty in terms, whatever be their practice 
 concerning it, the argument from Analogy is of 
 great value. 
 
 But whatever may be thought as to the force 
 of the Analogy which we have in this chapter 
 attempted to draw out, it will probably be 
 granted, that the attempt to bring about a 
 better understanding between the advocates of 
 Revelation and the interpreters of Nature is not 
 alien from the spirit and intention of this 
 treatise. 
 
CHARTER IX. 
 
 ON THE ANALOGY OP KEDEMPTION WITH NATURE. 
 
 THE Christian doctrine of Redemption from sin, 
 which is equivalent to the religious method of 
 making people good, implies a condition of evil 
 in which men are placed, their incapacity to escape 
 from it, and the exhibition by Divine power of 
 a suitable and sufficient remedy. The design, 
 therefore, of the present chapter is to inquire 
 whether the method of Redemption which Reve- 
 lation discloses, is, so far as concerns these three 
 particulars, in accordance with the Analogy of 
 Nature or not. And we must beg the reader 
 once more to observe that, inasmuch as our object 
 is to bring the method of Redemption into com- 
 parison with Nature, it follows that the various 
 
200 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 doctrines to which the fact of Redemption has 
 given rise, and which, as being based upon the 
 express words of Holy Script are, are exceedingly 
 dear to religious minds, are, and must be, omitted 
 from consideration ; and this not because they are 
 unimportant still less untrue, but because they are 
 the deductions of the spiritual reason from Reve- 
 lation and not Revelation itself, and therefore 
 cannot be brought into comparison with the 
 course of Nature, which certainly exists above and 
 apart from any reasonings of ours concerning it. 
 
 But, perhaps, any prejudice on this account 
 will be disarmed if we go on to say that the 
 account of Redemption to be employed in this 
 chapter will be taken, not only from Scripture, 
 but from that very part of Scripture which the 
 common judgment of mankind has concurred in 
 accounting the most perfect description of the 
 redeeming process that has been vouchsafed to 
 us. And here the word process is to be noted, 
 because it indicates that inherent difference be- 
 tween the old Analogy and the new which the 
 state of opinion and of knowledge forces upon 
 us. As in Butler's estimation Nature was a con- 
 
ix.] REDEMPTION AND NATURE. 201 
 
 stitution of things once for all fixed, so was Re- 
 demption a transaction once for all completed; 
 and he contented himself with collecting various 
 passages in which Christ's mediatorial work was 
 described, and then accepting the generally received 
 deductions from them. But for us, though cer- 
 tainly finding no fault with what has gone before, 
 just as Nature is a simple, definite, and intelligible 
 course producing certain phenomena, so must Re- 
 demption be conceived as a process in human, which 
 is also natural, history, producing certain spiritual 
 results upon the moral disposition of mankind. 
 We must, in short, try and discover Redemption, 
 as it were, in actual working operation, just as men 
 seek to surprise Nature in her secret laboratory. 
 
 The ingenious reader will have guessed to what 
 Scripture we are referring. We know that to St. 
 Paul it was given to comprehend that part or aspect 
 of Christ's life called Redemption, and to expound 
 it to the reason and conscience of mankind; and 
 this not surely because of any merely intellectual 
 aptitude, but because his own spiritual experience 
 had enlightened him as to the spiritual history of 
 mankind. So that the seventh and first part of 
 
202 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, in 
 which he recounts his own spiritual life, may be 
 justly called a religious history of human nature, in 
 which indeed it almost appears to lose itself. 
 
 The main facts of the history are very simple, 
 and coincide with the three before-mentioned con- 
 ditions of the Redeeming process. There was, 
 first, the consciousness of sin, together with the 
 law that forbade it ; then the struggle between 
 himself and sin in which, as victory decided abso- 
 lutely for neither party, the issue was a kind of 
 moral death ; finally, the victory by means of Christ 
 and His redeeming power. Are these, then, facts 
 of Nature and in Analogy with it or no ? 
 
 The first question, the answer to which carries 
 with it the rest of the argument whose direction it 
 shapes, is this., what in the economy of Nature and 
 the phraseology of science is meant by " sin" and 
 ff law." Now the course of Nature is, as we have 
 understood throughout, a progress or development 
 from a lower stage of existence to a higher, which 
 progress on its moral side is commonly called the 
 growth or spread of civilisation. To make our- 
 selves clear it may be well to add that the word 
 
ix.] KEDEHPTION AND NATUKE. 203 
 
 stage may be taken, as the reader pleases, to 
 denote either different sections of natural progress 
 separable from each other and each with its own 
 resting-place, or else merely a continuous journey 
 (as from London to Edinburgh) which, though 
 passing over various railway systems, is practically 
 the same journey in the same train, the various 
 systems combining to bring it about and to give 
 effect to one intention. 
 
 Now it is clear that at every point in that 
 journey, as it is reached by any part of mankind 
 that is visibly obeying Nature's law of progress, 
 there is a standard of moral conduct appropriate to 
 that particular stage of development, just as there 
 is a standard of comfort, knowledge, or mode of 
 living. There is a constant cessation of practices 
 and maxims which are suitable only for a lower 
 stage, and a retention of those which are suitable 
 for moral advancement, reason making an uncon- 
 scious selection from the old and also elaborating 
 new ones as experience widens. Of this law all 
 moral life is one continuous illustration; thus a 
 dog owns inwardly and conforms outwardly to a 
 different standard of conduct from that of his 
 
204 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 progenitors, when they ran free from man's control 
 upon the face of the earth. But then it is a simple 
 matter-of-fact that individuals bring, and must 
 bring, into each stage of moral progress the im- 
 pulses and ideas which they have inherited from 
 previous and less perfect ones, even as the best 
 trained dog cannot altogether overcome the 
 primary instincts of his nature. Any way of 
 stating this truth will answer our purpose; but 
 perhaps the philosophy that traces all moral 
 conduct to the two primary instincts of self- 
 preservation and reproduction is the most available 
 for our purpose, because these instincts are just 
 as strong (perhaps stronger) in the civilised man 
 as in the barbarian, and yet have to submit to the 
 many laws and checks which reason following 
 experience, and experience following Nature, have 
 devised for the regulation of human conduct. So 
 that these two instincts (to say nothing of any 
 others) give rise to natural impulses, which religion 
 calls temptation, to give way to actions which may 
 have been quite right and permissible at one time, 
 but are now quite against our own interests and 
 those of society generally. In plain words sin is 
 
ix.] KEDEMPTION AND NATURE.^^ j&O&j TJ lt\ few 
 
 the tendency to revert to a lower type, according to 
 the impulses of those animal, and, therefore, anti- 
 social passions which St. Paul calls the " law of the 
 flesh/ 1 A striking use of the word " law/' because 
 it seems to show that conduct at one time lawful 
 i.e. in accordance with the then stage of moral pro- 
 gress intrudes itself into the higher stage under 
 the plausible and not altogether unwarranted plea 
 of being also in conformity to Nature's law. Sin, 
 then, is the tendency to revert to the lower type, 
 or, as we might call it (using the phrase somewhat 
 loosely) a survival of that which is unfit. 
 
 It is plain from the above account of things, 
 that moral law must be identified with the voice 
 of the higher standard, acknowledged by reason 
 and conscience to be just, proclaiming to the indi- 
 vidual that he is transgressing the course of Nature 
 by immoral reversion. This voice may come in 
 different ways from a man's moral perception, 
 from public opinion, from positive enactment but 
 its meaning is always that our duty, as prescribed 
 by Nature, is to share in the general advancement 
 of humanity to the higher type. Hence ensues 
 the common struggle of the worse against the 
 
206 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 better nature ; of passion against law ; of natural 
 sinfulness against natural righteousness ; which, 
 common as it is, required, like other great truths, 
 to be discovered, when the time came, by the 
 genius of some great man. And the credit of this 
 is due to St. Paul, or rather to Revelation, which 
 fastened the discovery in the heart and conscience 
 of mankind as the utterance of absolute truth, 
 long before the characteristic discoveries of the nine- 
 teenth century came to vindicate the way of Gk>d 
 in Revelation by demonstrating it to be in entire 
 Analogy with the constitution of Nature, or rather 
 one might say, to be an account of Nature itself. 
 
 The way in which this discovery came about 
 is very plainly made known, and is in no way 
 different from the history of discovery in general. 
 St. Paul saw his own moral history transfigured in 
 his past relations with Christ, and the whole moral 
 history of mankind transfigured in his own, for, 
 law being universal, what was true of himself was 
 true of all the world. He first of all became con- 
 vinced that the higher type had been presented 
 to him, and that deliberately yet violently, of his 
 own free will, and with all the force of his temper 
 
ix.] KEDEMPTION AND NATUKE. 207 
 
 and character, he had preferred the lower Judaism 
 to Christianity, Caiaphas to Christ. This discovery 
 let him into the secret of his past spiritual history : 
 that there had always been a lower and a higher 
 type presented to him, sin and the law; that he 
 had been the victim of a perpetual struggle, of 
 which he could not say that defeat had been alto- 
 gether decisive ; until at length the real test came 
 the only one that could be decisive to a man of 
 his austere character the test of willingness to 
 cast off the personal pride of his own traditionary 
 and national opinions, and to yield to the per- 
 suasions of a new and loftier religion. And then 
 he had failed as completely as the lowest of the 
 poor sensuous creatures whom hitherto he had 
 despised; so that he found out the truth once for 
 all about sin, and once for all made it known to 
 the world, by which it was received as consonant 
 with man's common experience of himself. And 
 we claim, in the fresh light of recent investigation, 
 that the Christian doctrine of sin exhibits an 
 Analogy with Nature of the most positive and 
 deep-seated character, that is not to be denied or 
 set aside by any fair mind. 
 
208 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Man's natural condition in respect of moral 
 evil having been thus expounded, we pass on to 
 the consideration of his capacity to recover himself 
 from it. And here let us note attentively how St. 
 Paul treated the subject, for it is most noteworthy. 
 Strange as we may at first signt think it, he does 
 not blame himself, but offers himself to himself, 
 to his readers, and to God, as an object of com- 
 passion. His cry is not " sinful wretch," but 
 " wretched man." And he speaks of his con- 
 dition as one of death, whereas a man can hardly 
 be found guilty of dying. It was a state of sus- 
 pended animation, of a paralysis of motives, of 
 an incapacity to be of use to himself or others. 
 He had not brought it upon himself, but with 
 the better part of himself had striven against it, 
 and thus discovered that he was as powerless to 
 escape from it as to raise himself from the grave, 
 or, as we might now say, to avoid the struggle 
 for existence which Nature prescribes for all her 
 creatures. This, then, was his deliberate, albeit 
 impassioned, judgment about his own condition, 
 in which, if he was right, and surely Analogy 
 suggests that St. Paul was likely to be right 
 
ix.] EEDEMPTION AND NATURE. 209 
 
 in his own domain of thought, as other great 
 spirits are in theirs, then is the necessity of 
 Kedemption by Divine power established, and the 
 presumption against any supernatural interposition 
 of God turned into a presumption in favour of 
 a Divine completion of creative work in Nature 
 by an analogous work in history. 
 
 But was he right? So far as starting from 
 an experience of the phenomena about him, and 
 accepting them after proper inquiry as the objects 
 for reason to exercise itself about, can make a 
 man right, so far at least may we believe that 
 St. Paul was more likely to be right than wrong. 
 In the Epistle to the Romans, which is his one 
 strictly scientific treatise, he begins by calling 
 attention to the fact that all civilisation was then 
 " reverting to some of the worst faults of the lowest 
 types of morality instead of the prophets, the 
 Pharisees ; instead of the philosophers, the Graecu- 
 lus esuriens ; instead of the Scipios, the Caesars. 
 And had he lived later he might have seen that 
 the moral reaction of the time of the Antonines 
 availed only to arrest, but not to cure, the disease 
 of humanity, which was eventually accomplished 
 
 p 
 
210 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 by Christianity, with the assistance (and in the 
 present state of the world, so small and so well- 
 known, the remark is significant) of fresh materials 
 to work on. And besides this he started through- 
 out from the plain fact that every individual man 
 had sinned and had fallen short of the glory of 
 God ; that death, i.e. the state of spiritual struggle, 
 reigns over all; that the bare idea of a human being, 
 born under our conditions and inheriting our ten- 
 dencies, and yet never reverting to the lower stage, 
 was a quite impossible and irrational conception. 
 That men could not save themselves from evil 
 was, in St. Paul's scheme of positive philosophy, 
 a plain deduction from the admitted fact that they 
 had not done so in any one single case. 
 
 And his own experience had further warned 
 him that good intentions could not be accepted 
 in lieu of righteous performance. With the true 
 instinct of philosophical insight he assigns to them 
 their real value, namely, of alleviating the sense of 
 merely personal guilt, and so preparing the mind 
 for the influence of redeeming power : " I obtained 
 mercy because I, who was as touching the righteous- 
 ness of the law blameless, did it in ignorance and 
 
ix.] KEDEMPTION AND NATURE. 211 
 
 unbelief." But none the less had he been a 
 " blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious/' and 
 would so have ended his days but for the interposi- 
 tion of God. In respect of good intentions, zealous 
 and self-sacrificing effort, knowledge of the Scrip- 
 tures, prayer and religious exercise, he had nothing 
 whereof to accuse himself, and yet had been all the 
 while in the wrong, and dwelling in the weak and 
 beggarly elements, an expression which seems as 
 though intended to fit in with the conception of sin 
 as a reverting to lower or elementary types. And 
 he drew from his own failure the frank conclusion 
 that no one would be likely to succeed, a rare 
 example of a correct generalisation from a perfectly 
 honest investigation of a man's own individual 
 experience of himself. 
 
 This exposition of St. Paul's doctrine, though 
 far too brief to be in itself satisfactory, must be 
 taken as sufficient for the purpose to which we are 
 now to put it, namely, of testing its truth by the 
 information which reason collects from the course 
 of Nature as now understood. To a large extent, 
 indeed, it must be confessed that man's moral 
 capacity is a question of feeling and prepossession, 
 
 p 2 
 
212 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and that arguments on both sides are apt to take 
 the form of rhetorical descriptions of human strength 
 or weakness in order to persuade him to own him- 
 self weak or to think himself strong. Eeason and 
 experience are here as elsewhere the only guide ; 
 but cases there are, and this is one of them, where 
 these oracles like them of old may be bribed by the 
 prejudice of those who consult them to give contra- 
 dictory answers. But if we consult them in the 
 light which the discovery of the course of Nature, 
 moral no less than physical, throws upon the facts 
 of human life, we may perhaps perceive some 
 grounds for concluding that St. Paul's account of 
 the matter is positively true, due regard being paid 
 to the necessarily relative and somewhat shifting 
 conditions of the problem to be solved. 
 
 And yet it may well be that, as might be expected 
 of every natural as opposed to forced Analogy, the 
 problem solves itself by the mere juxtaposition of 
 facts. We have seen that according to St. Paul's 
 view of things the evil of moral life does not con- 
 sist merely in the habitual commission of sin, but in 
 the state of conflict in which without hope of any- 
 thing like absolute victory we find ourselves per- 
 
ix.] REDEMPTION AND NATURE. 213 
 
 manently involved, and the bare existence of which 
 appeared to him a kind of spiritual death, our 
 spiritual nature being what it is. So consistently 
 does he hold to this, that the state of moral uncon- 
 sciousness or absence of striving which we should 
 more properly call death he expressly calls life : " I 
 was alive without the law once, but when the com- 
 mandment came sin revived and I died." But now 
 this deathlike condition of conflict is the very posi- 
 tion into which the inexorable power of Nature by 
 its own fundamental law fastens up every being 
 capable of moral sentiment, for the very method or 
 design of Nature implies that men must advance on 
 the path of moral progress by means of conflict, 
 struggle, and survival. So that the agonised 
 struggle of humanity is but the appointed course of 
 things and man's death is Nature's life. 
 
 This might well be thought to be decisive as 
 far as our argument is concerned; but as the 
 attitude of Nature towards morality is beset with 
 difficulty and controversy, it may be good to point 
 out how the matter stands when the argument of 
 Analogy is brought to bear upon it. And first the 
 much debated question whether words like " duty " 
 
214 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and "ought" are words of Nature's vocabulary, 
 and binding upon the conscience without the aid 
 of religious sanctions, is answered distinctly in the 
 affirmative. For the course of Nature being a 
 tendency upwards according to the law of advance- 
 ment, there is a necessity that mankind should also 
 advance, and a duty upon individuals to share in 
 the upward tendency, and so to conform to what 
 is Nature's most essential idea. And the con- 
 sciousness of duty is merely the apprehension of 
 Nature's inner law. But here we come once more 
 upon that with which we have all throughout been 
 familiar, namely, how Nature sets questions and 
 does not answer them, or demands duties without 
 conferring the power of discharging them, being 
 ever " careful of the type and careless of the 
 single life." And this is just how St. Paul 
 apprehended the matter and described it in words 
 which, allowance being made for difference of 
 subject, might fairly be called as true as a 
 scientific formula : " We know that the law is 
 spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin ; " and 
 again: "The commandment which was ordained 
 to life I found to be unto death." 
 
ix.] REDEMPTION AND NATURE. 215 
 
 That this opinion is not the utterance of a 
 diseased conscience, but the statement of positive 
 truth to be verified by reason and experience, let 
 the following brief considerations (out of many) 
 be adduced to show : 
 
 First, Nature inflicts the penalty of spiritual 
 death, as defined above, for one offence, as much as 
 for many any single reverting to the lower type 
 is equivalent to a definite falling short of the 
 standard of duty which she exacts. This explains 
 that part of St. Paul's teaching which, if he were 
 speaking of sin under the aspect of guilt and 
 punishment merely, would seem so shocking to the 
 sense of justice, namely, the solidarity of mankind 
 in respect of evil, for "God hath concluded all 
 under sin." But taken as a description of the state 
 of misery to which the transgression of law by 
 reverting has reduced the human race, it is simply 
 a statement of facts as we know them. There is 
 in the first place a law of sin transmitting its evil 
 effects from generation to generation, and making 
 obedience to duty practically impossible ; and there 
 is in the second a deadly blow struck against the 
 individual conscience which is all the more sensitive 
 
216 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 to shame in proportion as the man is striving 
 successfully to maintain the higher type. 
 
 But secondly, Nature annexes pleasure to the 
 gratification of instincts quite apart from their 
 morality, whence it follows that as a matter of 
 practice, the words " ought " and " duty " have in 
 Nature's mouth no supreme authority over those 
 who choose to assert that for them happiness lies 
 in the life of sensuousness or selfishness taking 
 these as the embodiment in society of the two 
 primary instincts. These affirm that whatever 
 meaning the words ought to have upon the minds 
 of men, they intend for their part to go on their 
 own way of finding life, which the very absence of 
 moral conflict makes easier and pleasanter to them. 
 Considering how the temptation to sin for the 
 pleasure thereof is embedded in the constitution of 
 man, and how natural it is to do in one stage of 
 advancement what was right in a lower, it does 
 seem a perilous undertaking to persuade the mass of 
 mankind from evil by a reliance upon the superior 
 happiness of virtue. 
 
 To this may be added, that, as there is no possi- 
 bility of undoing the evil effects of reverting to the 
 
ix.] EEDEMPTION AND NATURE. 217 
 
 lower type, Nature kuows nothing of the moral 
 effects of forgiveness. St. Paul's repentance could 
 not bring Stephen back to life, nor undo what Saul 
 of Tarsus had committed against the Church of 
 Christ. Even so men, by their own evil deeds or 
 imperfect characters, prevent the higher type from 
 asserting itself, thwart the course of Nature how- 
 ever unintentionally, and draw others after them 
 to perhaps worse excesses than themselves have 
 reached. Then they become conscious of what 
 they have done (and if they do not, then they are 
 even lower than those who struggle and fail, and 
 all moral Nature may be said to be against them), 
 and find no remedy. It is here that religion 
 becomes an instinct, for unless there had been 
 some power of changing evil into good, it is clear 
 that the gloom which settled at first upon St. Paul's 
 mind must have, in his case as in others, deepened 
 into an abiding despair and distrust of self, of 
 Nature, and of man. 
 
 We have, however, now come to topics which 
 all serious men take into account'; and we need 
 only mention further that, in what concerns the 
 practical treatment of her offspring, the course of 
 
218 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Nature makes but little distinction between the man 
 who reverts to the lower and the man who struggles 
 to maintain the higher type. Innocence and sin 
 are too often blended in one common doom, or often 
 the first suffers because it is good, and the latter 
 survives because it is evil. And upon any view 
 of the matter Nature's demand for obedience is 
 addressed to creatures who, for all she can make 
 them certain of, will be dead, and for ever, to- 
 morrow. So that without going further into well- 
 known details, we conclude that the explanation of 
 man's condition in respect of evil, which is obtained 
 from Nature and which we have called the tendency 
 to revert to the lower type, explains that state which 
 the apostle called death, his account of which has 
 gone far to stamp upon the human imagination that 
 consciousness of its own weakness, and that incapacity 
 to escape from evil, which it asserts to be true. 
 
 We shall at this point take occasion to observe 
 that the hope of realising by gradual development 
 a universal morality far transcending anything we 
 can conceive at this time, does not enter at all into 
 our present subject, however much our sympathies 
 may go along with it. For it is clear that morality, 
 
ix.] REDEMPTION AND NATURE. 219 
 
 like everything else that can be called natural, 
 must always remain a course having its roots fixed 
 in the far distant past ; hence, however high the 
 race may ascend, there will always be the same 
 tendency on the part of the individual to go back, 
 and perhaps as the conscience grows more sensitive, 
 the struggle will be more death-like, and the con- 
 sequences of downfall more irreparable. Ignorance, 
 passion, selfishness, will be relatively the same, that 
 is to say, bear the like proportion to the highest 
 attainable type of conduct that they do now. Simi- 
 larly the idea of duty as self-abnegation in the 
 interests of humanity does not now come up for 
 discussion, though, as it involves the idea of sacri- 
 fice, we may have to allude to it further on. Let it 
 be granted that it is Nature's highest standard of 
 moral perfection (which, however, we cannot do), 
 still man's incapacity to attain that standard, with- 
 out the conflict of which we have been saying so 
 much, remains just as it was before. St. Paul, for 
 instance, had given himself up to serve the cause of 
 humanity as he conceived of it, with what results 
 he himself knew but too well. In fine, to sum up 
 the whole argument, if St. Paul was in any way 
 
220 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 right in describing the natural struggle in the heart 
 against evil as a spiritual death, then it must be a 
 power greater than human that bids the soul to rise 
 up and live. 
 
 The condition of man in respect of evil, and his 
 incapacity to redeem himself from it, having been 
 now traced to their place in the natural constitution 
 of things, of which they form an essential part, it 
 remains finally to point out that the remedy pro- 
 vided in Kevelation is also in accordance with the 
 Analogy of Nature, and such as will fit the occa- 
 sion. To effect this there must be the introduction 
 of a new power with new influences and surround- 
 ings to determine the will or help the will to deter- 
 mine itself (whichever way we choose to put it) 
 away from the lower to the higher type, affording 
 us moral leverage from without, and means of self- 
 purification from within, and turning the conflict 
 into a conscious victory over evil in obedience to 
 the demand of Nature herself. 
 
 Now this power is explained by St. Paul in one 
 brief phrase of expressive gratitude : " I thank 
 God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." Now, it is 
 most observable, that as in the seventh chapter he 
 
ix.] EEDEMPTION ASTD NATUKE. 221 
 
 confined himself to the simple fact of the death of 
 sin, so in the eighth he says nothing of other aspects 
 of Christ's redeeming work, nothing of pardon for 
 guilt or release from punishment, thereby justify- 
 ing us in following Butler's example of leaving 
 these and other doctrines to the domain of theology 
 proper. Nor does he even so much as allude to that 
 absorbing topic, namely, the self-sacrifice of Christ 
 as fulfilling the highest moral standard, and as 
 being on that account the means by which Kedemp- 
 tion was accomplished, which must be our warrant 
 also for reserving that doctrine for separate dis- 
 cussion. What he sees and insists upon is that 
 Christ has become the power of good to him and to 
 all who believe ; and that simply by virtue of the 
 influence of spirit upon spirits which is the most 
 efficacious instrument of moral power, and which 
 Nature provides in abundance for all the relations 
 of men towards each other, but does not (thereby 
 confessing, it may be thought, her own moral 
 incapacity) permit us to feel in respect of the 
 duties which we owe to the moral Ideal, or to 
 Nature herself, or to Nature's author. In fact, 
 ignorance is the parent of sin, and agnosticism 
 
222 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the supreme moral evil from which Kedemption is 
 required. 
 
 The way of Redemption is then summed up by 
 St. Paul simply in the person of Jesus Christ and 
 His moral power over the hearts of men. And if we 
 attend to the further amplification of this primary 
 idea in the eighth chapter, we shall perhaps see that 
 it means in St. Paul's mind that by His Revelation 
 the mark of religion was stamped upon all Nature, 
 the course of which was transfigured as by a 
 celestial light into the expression of a Divine will. 
 And then for the law of succession of phenomena 
 was substituted the spiritual influence of God 
 upon the dispositions of men through Jesus Christ, 
 such influence being simply the voice of Nature 
 made audible, and her method, that is the plan 
 of her Creator, made intelligible. And thus is 
 revealed a purpose of goodness, an affection of 
 love, an intention towards holiness, which gives 
 to human character the spring or moral force 
 necessary for virtuous living and for victory in 
 the struggle against evil. For the discovery of 
 law has no inspiring effect upon the character, 
 whereas the discovery of a purpose instantly and 
 
ix.] REDEMPTION AND NATUEE. 223 
 
 naturally breeds a purpose in the mind of the 
 discoverer, there is something which he can fall 
 in with, and help forward, and live up to. And 
 the idea of a transcendent wisdom carrying for- 
 ward, by express intention, the whole moral life 
 of mankind becomes to us, when we apprehend 
 it, or rather as St. Paul would say, are appre- 
 hended by it, such as St. Paul described at the 
 close of his argument in the ever memorable verses 
 that end the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans, in which, identifying every effort of man 
 towards moral progress with the predestinating 
 will and irresistible influence of God, he surrenders 
 his spirit, his imagination, almost his very personal 
 being itself, to the contemplation of the moral 
 glory by which the course of Nature was, as he 
 saw it in the light of Revelation, encompassed. 
 
 And though it is not in man to discern the 
 future history of his race, yet let us predict this 
 for a certainty : to the dominion of mere law man 
 by the instinct of moral advancement will never 
 return, and yet except between "grace" and law 
 there seems no other option. That dominion has 
 perished for ever under the handling of St. Paul 
 
224 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 ust as every imperfect system makes way for 
 another and a better : all which he himself saw as 
 the law which presides over all advancement in 
 moral as in other branches of knowledge, i.e. 
 where the higher discovery supersedes the lower 
 by mere force of being what it is. If, for 
 instance, men are urged not to revert to the 
 lower type because to maintain the higher makes 
 for happiness, they will, in the present state of 
 thinking, reject this advice as being, what in 
 truth it is, a veiled threat and thinly disguised 
 attempt to override their freedom of choice and 
 action. And in this temper (rightly or wrongly 
 makes no matter), besides catching at all excuses for 
 indulging their own passions or tastes which Nature 
 but too plentifully supplies them with, they may 
 perhaps put this question : " Is the law of advance- 
 ment so certain a thing that we or any one else 
 should be obliged to adapt our conduct to further 
 it ? " And then there may arise a doubt even in the 
 minds of the most enthusiastic believers in the pro- 
 gress of civilisation whether there is any reason, 
 seeing that law is only an induction from experience, 
 for feeling sure that there may not be a cessation 
 
ix.] EEDEMPTION AND NATUKE. 225 
 
 of progress and a permanent reverting to a lower 
 moral type universally : it does not follow that 
 because Nature is advancing to a higher type 
 to-day that it should do so for ever or even for 
 to-morrow. But on the other hand if the course of 
 Nature be the expression of a righteous will then it 
 does follow that, come what will and no matter what 
 happens to the course of material phenomena, that 
 will must always be directing all things and all men 
 to a righteous destination. So that even the very 
 morality of Nature depends for its permanent and 
 decisive value upon the existence of an underlying 
 will. 
 
 If it be said in answer to all this that even the 
 existence of will in and over Nature does not 
 alter the facts of the case, or make life less of a 
 conflict with death for its appointed end, we may 
 urge in reply one special influence of Christ's spirit 
 upon ours to which St. Paul in this chapter drew 
 marked attention : " Ye have not received the spirit 
 of bondage again to fear, but ye have received the 
 spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father " 
 (see also Galatians ch. iv. 6.) Till Christ came we 
 were as children wandering through the desolate 
 
 Q 
 
226 A XEW ANALOGY. [CHAP 
 
 rooms of a house whose . owner we did not know; 
 since His time the world has been alive with the 
 voices of children, and may, if we accept the Chris- 
 tian revelation, become a real home to us so long 
 as we remain in it. The author is not of those 
 who would deny or explain away the evil which 
 exists in the world, and which is at once the 
 reason why men need a religion, and yet cannot 
 feel themselves able to accept it when revealed; 
 rather we find in this contrast the supreme conflict 
 between reversion and progress, the final struggle 
 for a religious life, which here and everywhere is 
 Nature's common law. Only let not those to 
 whom the gloomy view of life comes easiest treat 
 their impression, which is and must be relative to 
 themselves, as though it were a reasoned conviction 
 concerning the condition of the world, for that 
 could only be attained by a comparison with other 
 worlds impossible to be made. And on the other 
 side the belief, that the course of Nature is the work 
 of a Father's will raising His children by slow 
 degrees to standards of goodness quite beyond 
 our present means of knowing or even guessing, is 
 one that presents no kind of improbability in the 
 
ix.] EEDEMPTION AND NATURE. 227 
 
 existing constitution of things, and is itself nothing 
 more nor less than the Redemption of man from the 
 dominion of evil. 
 
 This concludes the Analogy of Christ's re- 
 deeming work with Nature in respect of the 
 disease to be cured, the incapacity of the sufferer 
 to save himself, and the kind of remedy proposed, 
 all of which have been traced to their place in the 
 existing constitution of things, and found to be 
 the very counterparts of the phenomena which 
 Nature is now seen to disclose. We think we 
 shall do well to leave it without a word further to 
 the candid judgment of men themselves. 
 
 Q 2 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 ON THE SELF- SACRIFICE OF CHEIST TO DEATH AND 
 HIS EESUEEECTION TO LIFE. 
 
 ALTHOUGH St. Paul does not in the above-quoted 
 chapter of his Epistle to the Romans make 
 mention of the sacrifice of Christ as being the 
 means whereby Redemption from evil was wrought 
 out, yet there is no truth upon which (as to the 
 essential fact) the common consent of Christendom 
 is more united, or the testimony of the Scriptures 
 themselves more certain. It will, therefore, be 
 a capital point of importance in our argument, 
 if we can prove that so distinctive and vital a 
 part of Revelation is analogous to the course 
 of Nature, and such as the economy of Nature 
 would lead us to expect. 
 
CHAP, x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 229 
 
 Now the idea and practice of sacrifice is an 
 inseparable adjunct of man's spiritual and religious 
 history : that is to say, there are certain instincts 
 which desire and provide for themselves sacrifice 
 in some shape or other, almost as surely as the 
 bodily instincts lead us to satisfy bodily wants 
 with food. So universal an effect demands a 
 cause not less universal, and we must follow the 
 example of all the deepest modern thinking in 
 refusing to account for it by any partial or 
 secondary cause; thus, to ascribe the existence 
 of sacrifice to superstition is almost as useful as 
 to account for fire burning us by its having 
 heat-giving qualities, it does but put us upon the 
 further inquiry into the origin and meaning of 
 superstition. The genesis of which, in respect of 
 sacrifice, is plainly something of this sort. The 
 idea of sacrifice was born and bred in men by the 
 course of Nature from which they came (either 
 in whole or in part), and in the midst of which 
 their physical and moral life grew up and developed 
 itself. But having no rational knowledge of what 
 the course of Nature is, they caught at certain 
 aspects or tendencies of it, which answered to 
 
230 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 their inward thoughts, and embodied these under 
 all sorts of forms, good and bad, sublime and 
 grotesque, in their creeds and religious practices. 
 Thus, all sacrifice bears some Analogy to some 
 part of the course or constitution of Nature. 
 
 Now the Christian doctrine of Eedemption by 
 one definite self-sacrificing act, the consequences 
 of which are supposed to last through all time, 
 is quite peculiar to Revelation, and does not at 
 all look upon the face of it as though it formed 
 part of Nature's ordinary operations, or was de- 
 rived by men's reason or emotions from anything 
 Nature could teach them. It claims to be the 
 work of the Creator of all things, and, therefore, 
 if the claim be true, must be an absolute inter- 
 pretation or embodiment of Nature's law or method 
 of sacrifice, of which, at the time when Revela- 
 tion was given, nothing was known or even guessed 
 at certainly among the Jews. But now that the 
 course of Nature has been in some degree revealed 
 to ourselves in modern times, it can be brought 
 into comparison with the history of sacrifice in 
 Revelation, so that we have now clearly come to a 
 very definite and also decisive point in our argu- 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACBIFICE OF 
 
 ment: Was the sacrifice by which. Christ emanci- 
 pated mankind from the dominion of evil analogous 
 to the kind of sacrifices whereby the course of 
 Nature is carried forward on the path of physical 
 and moral progress ? If it was, then the presump- 
 tion that both dispensations were derived at first 
 hand from the same Author becomes almost irre- 
 sistible, for the science of the nineteenth century 
 is once more seen to be justifying the religion of 
 the first. 
 
 The account which we shall give of the law of 
 sacrifice in Nature will be, as is becoming, but 
 brief, and if in drawing a mere outline of a vast 
 and interesting subject we err against the present 
 state of knowledge, we must make our excuses 
 beforehand. But perhaps no exception will be 
 taken to the general statement that, taking into 
 account the fact of the struggle for existence, the 
 course of Nature proceeds along its path by means 
 of the sacrifice of the weaker to the wants and 
 power of the stronger. That which survives does 
 so not merely out of the destruction of others, but 
 by means of the destruction which itself inflicts. 
 That all things prey upon each other is true in 
 
232 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the natural, animal, and moral world. In the 
 natural world the destruction, so far as concerns 
 the thiog destroyed, is neither conscious nor volun- 
 tary; in the animal world it is the first but not 
 the second ; in the moral world it is both. 
 
 And yet side by side with this phenomenon we 
 find also that the course of Nature *LS carried 
 forward by the tendency which the classes of 
 things preyed upon have to survive over those that 
 destroy them. Setting aside for brevity's sake the 
 world of matter, with the single remark that, in the 
 action and reaction of material things upon one 
 another, the law of sacrifice is woven into the very 
 tissue and fibre of Nature, we go on to point out 
 that the animal world presents the [spectacle of a 
 number of violent or strong (in respect of indi- 
 vidual members) races, whose nature it is to prey 
 upon a number of mild or weaker races, whose 
 destiny it is to supply means of subsistence to their 
 natural enemies. And yet, and herein lies the 
 whole secret of the moral law of sacrifice, as a mere 
 matter of fact the violent races perish and the 
 mild survive. To a large extent Nature herself 
 has brought this about by changes in the surface 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACKIFICE OF CHEIST. 233 
 
 of the earth, climate, and so forth ; but apart from 
 this we see that this law or state of things is 
 inherent in the innermost constitution of natural 
 life. For the violent races by means of their very 
 violence, and by what we may call the consequent 
 lack of social aptitudes and virtues, have an in- 
 evitable tendency to die out through mutual rage, 
 slaughter, and rivalry, whereas the very treatment 
 they inflict upon the mild races does but increase 
 the natural tendency which those races have to 
 multiply, to succeed, to survive. To begin with, 
 they have certain habits, which really means a 
 particular kind of ethical character, that enable 
 them to propagate rapidly, to unite for social 
 welfare, to cultivate self-restraint and toleration, 
 above all to develop, under stress of danger, the 
 mental faculties required to adapt themselves and 
 their modes of living to the demands which Nature 
 makes upon them. So that by degrees there 
 comes about a kind of animal civilisation; the 
 more the violent and anti-social races destroy 
 their weaker but social neighbours, the more 
 do they bring about their own destruction, and 
 the more persistent, by virtue of the very treat- 
 
234 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 merit they inflict, do they cause the opposite type 
 to become. 
 
 Out of this conflict in due time man emerged 
 or found himself placed in it, and forthwith 
 proceeded with the superadded resources of the 
 rational faculty to carry on the same process. 
 The violent races were sacrificed to his needs by 
 being in part exterminated, in part subdued to 
 his will; the weaker races are also sacrificed to 
 the same wants without scruple, though, so 
 humanity teaches, without needless pain or des- 
 troying. And the gentle, serviceable, and social 
 qualities among animals are habitually encouraged 
 by him with the result (whether he intends it or 
 not) of promoting and diffusing that general com- 
 fort and happiness which is so far the design of 
 Nature that all creatures strive after it. The 
 violent races are, on the whole, destroyed, other- 
 wise they would destroy man ; the mild races are,, 
 on the whole, preserved, otherwise man himself 
 would perish : so that the rule of man helps forward 
 Nature's law that gentleness and not violence is 
 the persisting and surviving type of character. 
 And among all the deep and true sayings that 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACEIFICE OF CHRIST. 235 
 
 ever fell from the lips of the Sou of Man, none in 
 respect of natural philosophy viewed morally was 
 ever more profoundly true or prophetic, none ever 
 betrayed a more sympathetic insight into the 
 Analogy of Nature than this : " Blessed are the 
 meek, for they shall inherit 'the earth. 33 
 
 Now the law of sacrifice in animal life repro- 
 duces itself in the moral life which began with 
 the origin of man. The natural impulse of the 
 violent characters (whether in races or individuals) 
 is to prey upon the milder, to make use of them, 
 to bend them to the service of their own passions 
 and appetites. Of this truth the customs of early 
 societies, the institution of slavery, military tyran- 
 nies, invasions, the* treatment of the aged and 
 infants, afford sad and sufficient instances. But then 
 once more this course of conduct did but increase the 
 already innate superiority of the milder characters 
 towards persistency of type by bringing out the 
 social virtues that make for survival. And without 
 such conduct all the more precious qualities of 
 human nature could never have come into being, 
 for meekness, patience, equity, unselfishness, sym- 
 pathy, and reasonableness, are the growth of con- 
 
236 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 ditions caused by violence, injustice, and vice. But 
 these qualities, when once engraved into the moral 
 constitution, have a natural tendency to cause 
 the characters in which they inhere to endure and 
 spread by such influences as the following : The 
 body is purified from passions that enfeeble the 
 very source of life ; the characters of the members 
 of a community adjust themselves so as best to 
 leave each person free to live his own proper life \ 
 above all, intelligence, wisdom, and learning, find 
 their natural place and room to develop them- 
 selves in the bosom of the gentler types of char- 
 acter. And these not only survive themselves, 
 but, being just as determined as the others to assert 
 their right of existence, they by degrees supersede, 
 modify, press out of being the more violent or 
 anti-social characters. For in proportion as the 
 violent use violence to the gentle, so do they create 
 qualities which are more persistent than their own, 
 and these, as experience attests their value, are 
 taken up into the moral being of the whole race, 
 and especially of those peoples or persons who 
 already excel in natural vigour but require to be 
 disciplined and softened. And thus the course 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 237 
 
 of civilisation proceeds on its way, the sacrifice 
 required becoming more moral and inward, not of 
 works, such as life, labour, or fear, but of spirit, 
 such as will, duty, and love. 
 
 In these last words we have come upon sacrifice 
 in the act of changing from passive acquiescence into 
 moral or voluntary action, so as to require the word 
 " self " to be placed before it. And this it does 
 when men become conscious of an obligation to 
 surrender some right or submit to some wrong for 
 the sake of others, and in obedience to a demand 
 made upon them by some law or power of Nature. 
 This is, of course, a description of the ideal, or 
 perfect, self-sacrifice, but we need not occupy our- 
 selves with the perversions or errors to which the 
 instinct of self-sacrifice has given birth further 
 " than to note their existence : to sacrifice one's self 
 is an instinct derived from our conscious participa- 
 tion in the methods whereby the course of Nature 
 advances to a higher moral type, but the bare 
 instinct itself requires to be directed by the dictates 
 of reason in order to be preserved from error. But 
 simply regarding it in its ideal form we may analyse 
 self-sacrifice into four compound parts : the thing 
 
238 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 offered, the persons on behalf of whom the offering 
 is made, the particular good which the offering is 
 expected to bring, and, finally, that (be it person, 
 or idea, or institution, or what not) to which the 
 offering is made. 
 
 Concerning the first three of these no further 
 description need be given than that they range 
 over the whole field of conduct and relationships ; 
 wherever a human being feels himself called upon 
 to give np anything for the material or moral 
 benefit of another person, there the law of sacrifice 
 as ordained by Nature is in full operation. But the 
 fourth requires to be carefully considered and 
 clearly understood, more especially when self- 
 sacrifice is passing from a moral into a religious 
 duty. There must be always a something to which 
 the sacrifice is made, and this something is always 
 Nature in one or other of the aspects she presents 
 or the duties she inculcates, and we may doubt 
 whether even in the most cold and abstract morality 
 there can be self-sacrifice without the consciousness 
 that it is being offered at some shrine or another 
 in religion of course this is a necessary accompani- 
 ment. This something may assume almost as many 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACEIFICE OF CHKIST. 239 
 
 shapes as Nature herself : thus, sometimes it is con- 
 ceived as the will of Grod revealed in the course 
 of events ; sometimes the moral influence of a 
 supremely good man whose orders are a law to us ; 
 sometimes an abstraction under which Nature pre- 
 sents some aspect or product of her own as that to 
 which self-sacrifice is due, for instance liberty, 
 patriotism, truth, and the like. And so it is always 
 something higher than the person who makes the 
 sacrifice, something august and venerable, that has 
 a natural right over him, before whose sanctity he 
 bends his spirit in obedience if not in awe. Much 
 more is it higher than the persons on whose behalf 
 the sacrifice is offered, with whom it must never be 
 identified unless to the confusion of all logical order. 
 It is indeed always above, just as these latter are 
 ' always below, the sacrificing person, inasmuch as they 
 are on a lower scale of moral being, and are them- 
 selves to be improved by the sacrifice which they 
 are incapable of receiving or sometimes of under- 
 standing, of which indeed they are very frequently 
 the mere brutal insensate agents. 
 
 Two illustrations will make this account of the 
 normal type of sacrifice sufficiently clear. The 
 
240 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Eoman general of old devoted his life on behalf of 
 his fellow-soldiers that they might conquer in the 
 battle to something which, on the moral side, was 
 the idea of patriotism, and, on the religious, the 
 will of the gods. The famous French lady sub- 
 mitted to her fate in obedience to the genius 
 of Liberty, whose statue she addressed in such 
 pathetic terms, in the hope that out of her death 
 the blessings of ordered and peaceful freedom 
 might descend upon the nation, which, in the very 
 name of Liberty, was committing such atrocious 
 crimes. And of all such the only fitting description 
 is to be found in the incomparably beautiful lan- 
 guage of Scripture : they " all died in faith, not 
 having received the promises, but having seen 
 them afar off, and were persuaded of them and 
 embraced them." 
 
 The reason why such stress is laid upon the 
 something to which sacrifice must be offered is 
 very plainly because there must be some power to 
 give effect to this faith, without which self-sacrifice 
 would be irrational, because useless. Which office 
 of evolving good out of evil, of fulfilling the designs 
 of those who make the sacrifice (which is equivalent 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 241 
 
 to accepting and rewarding it), may with perfect 
 truth be said to be performed by the course of Nature, 
 to which, prior to and apart from the Kevelation 
 of a Divine will, mankind owe a supreme allegiance. 
 And so we see the mistake of those who place 
 humanity upon Nature's pedestal, because they 
 confound that to which, with that on behalf of 
 which, sacrifice is offered. As it has been said with 
 pathetic wit, " we men know man too well to 
 worship him," so we may add, "or to sacrifice 
 ourselves to him," even though we love and ought 
 to love our fellow creatures (or humanity itself) 
 too well to refuse to sacrifice ourselves on their 
 behalf. Nature herself decides this question, and 
 insists that there shall be something to which, for. 
 this is ever the attitude of sacrifice, we may look 
 up and commit ourselves, and identify our lives 
 with it. All which the course of Nature, infinitely 
 grander and more real than any abstraction called 
 humanity (itself only a part of Nature) can possibly 
 be, can in some sort provide for her offspring. "We 
 may not, of course, deny to any the right of 
 fashioning out of Nature's materials their own 
 idols and setting them up as objects of worship, 
 
242 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 only we are sure that, things being as Nature has 
 constituted them, they will never succeed in getting 
 the common sense of mankind to join in their 
 adoration. 
 
 With the law or method of sacrifice in Nature 
 as we have just expounded it we now proceed 
 to compare the sacrifice of Christ under each 
 of the four above-mentioned heads. But so plain 
 is the Analogy upon the mere bringing of the 
 two things together that it can be expressed in a 
 sentence or two. 
 
 1. That to which the sacrifice of Christ was 
 made was no part or aspect or idea, however 
 noble, of Nature's furnishing, but absolutely the 
 course of Nature herself regarded as declaring 
 her Creator's will. Upon the human side, which 
 is all that the natural reason can deal with, it 
 was because God had made the course of Nature 
 what it is, that the Son of God understood, by 
 an intuition of Analogy, that He who came to 
 save the world must die for it, thereby correctly 
 interpreting in their profoundest depths the laws 
 by which the universe is constituted by its Creator. 
 And thus the faith which made self-sacrifice pos- 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 243 
 
 sible was wrought in Him, because He recognized 
 the will of a supreme Being that could and would 
 accept His offering, first by loving Him who made 
 it ; secondly by making it eternally efficacious for 
 the moral salvation of mankind. All which, as the 
 history shows in very many places, was expressly 
 understood by Himself, as for instance in such 
 expressions as " drinking the cup which His Father 
 had given Him." But what man could interpret 
 the course of Nature as being the expression of a 
 Father's will calling for the death of His Son ? 
 
 2. That which Christ offered was no mere 
 individual thing taken from the mass of natural 
 phenomena, but the crown and consummation of 
 Nature's moral course, the one perfect thing 
 towards which that course incessantly aims, 
 namely, a perfect character, a stainless life, a will 
 in harmony with the will of its Creator. So that 
 the sacrifice was, by the very nature of the case, 
 complete, and made once for all; even if the offer- 
 ing could be made a second time it would but be 
 a repetition, and therefore inferior to the first. 
 The object of Redemption being the moral good of 
 man, and the means, as prescribed by Nature, being 
 
 R 2 
 
244 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 the sacrifice of goodness, it follows that if the 
 goodness be absolutely perfect the redeeming work 
 is accomplished, tf for by one offering He hath 
 perfected for ever them that are sanctified." But 
 what man could impress not merely himself, or 
 his disciples, but the whole Christian world with 
 the idea that he was able to offer to God a 
 blameless life, in our Lord's own words, " to fulfil 
 all righteousness " ? 
 
 3. That on behalf of which the sacrifice of 
 Christ was made was not merely a particular 
 nation or generation of people, but the whole of 
 Nature, animate and inanimate alike, which, in 
 St. Paul's view, was groaning and travailing in pain, 
 and (included in this) the whole family of man. 
 There was no limitation as to time or place, no 
 conditions as to character or rank, all mankind was 
 included within the scope of redeeming grace, for 
 " there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither 
 bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for 
 ye are all one in Christ Jesus/' And this concep- 
 tion of the universality of His sacrifice was not 
 merely the thought of His followers after His death, 
 but was distinctly apprehended by Himself as the 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACKIFICE OF CHRIST. 245 
 
 result of His redeeming work. " I, if I be lifted 
 up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." 
 But what man could conceive the idea of dying for 
 
 the world ? 
 
 
 
 4. The object of Christ's sacrifice was not to 
 effect any particular moral reformation, or establish 
 any special moral goodness, but finally to break 
 the power of evil. Just as we have seen in Nature 
 that violence preys upon mildness, and thus pro- 
 motes its own decay and the ultimate triumph of 
 the type which in respect of the individual is weak, 
 but in respect of the race is strong and persistent, 
 so may we see in Eevelation exhibited in Christ's 
 redeeming death. The violent wickedness of man 
 in its most aggravated spiritual form seized upon 
 a perfect example of mild goodness, and destroyed 
 it with all kinds of bodily and mental torture ; and 
 then, according to Nature's invariable law, the 
 mild and gentle type of character prevailed over 
 its own destroyer, and being, as it is, the embodi- 
 ment of the social qualities that make for survival, 
 itself survived, and became persistent through the 
 Spirit of God working in that society of humanity 
 called the Church of Christ, whose purpose of 
 
246 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 sanctifying the world through the effects of Christ's 
 redeeming action is thereby also traced to its place 
 in the constitution of Nature. But of this here- 
 after. What we have to understand now is that 
 Christ's self-sacrifice is in complete Analogy with 
 the course of Nature, of which, indeed, it is an 
 absolute exhibition and representation under the 
 form of a perfect moral Ideal. The mind of Christ, 
 in fact, caught the true meaning of that spirit 
 which, as His Father had implanted it in Nature, 
 became a law to Him ; nor is the effect of this at 
 all diminished (we may say in passing) by the fact 
 that He was aided in this interpretation by such 
 Divinely appointed helps as the Old Testament 
 Scripture. And so, in language which, as it was 
 His own, shows how plainly He apprehended this 
 effect of His self-sacrifice, He has become the 
 spiritual nourishment of mankind. The very mild 
 or social qualities which made Him an easy prey 
 to human violence have passed into the moral con- 
 stitution of the race and been absorbed in it, 
 besides being the food of every separate spirit 
 that has believed in Christ and drawn goodness 
 from Him. All which is plainly set forth as His 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACKIFICE OF CHRIST. 247 
 
 own idea of His own self-sacrifice in that one 
 characteristic and explanatory act of His, the 
 institution of the Lord's Supper. But, once more, 
 what man could conceive the idea of so living and 
 so dying as to become the spiritual food of all 
 mankind, and to stamp upon the heart of man 
 those social and persisting virtues, the surviving 
 of which is nothing less than the moral progress 
 of the world ? 
 
 The Analogy between Eevelation and Nature 
 in respect of sacrifice has now been established as 
 completely and decisively as the kind of argument 
 admits of, and much more so than could have been 
 at first expected. Incidentally there has also been 
 explained that very important claim which Christian 
 instinct has always made for the self-sacrifice of 
 Christ, of being final and complete, and so of 
 never-ending effect so long as the moral world 
 endures. We are so accustomed for various 
 reasons, the opponents of Christianity themselves 
 hardly objecting, to take for granted this quality, 
 for which we may venture to coin the phrase of 
 "once for all-ness," that it does not occur to 
 us how difficult it must be to make the claim 
 
248 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 good to the natural reason of mankind. For the 
 difficulty is where to find a standard by which 
 the truth of so momentous a claim can be tested, 
 men's ideas of right, or beauty, or usefulness being 
 transitory and relative, and therefore incapable of 
 providing that fixed standard which is indispensable 
 to reason in testing works that are ascribed to God 
 Himself; though, as we have said before, we do 
 not enter upon the question, whether other facul- 
 ties may not approach religious truths without 
 such help. Such a standard, however, is supplied 
 by the course of Nature, being the one permanent 
 and universal law whereof reason makes us aware, 
 so that the self-sacrifice of Christ may be accepted 
 for what it claims to be, because it is a complete 
 realisation of what Nature bids us aim at, and has 
 herself been proceeding by, on her journey towards 
 moral perfection. Must we not say then that 
 Revelation is due to the same cause as Nature, 
 and, compelled by the facts revealed no less than 
 by the necessity of human thinking, pronounce 
 that cause to be a beneficent will ? True, indeed, 
 it is that the discovery of resemblance is a matter 
 of opinion, almost, one might say, of taste ; but if 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACEIFICE OF CHRIST. 249 
 
 we cannot persuade men to do it for themselves we 
 shall certainly hope that they will not, using the 
 name of reason to which we no less than they 
 appeal, refuse to allow the Christian advocate to 
 argue from similarity of phenomena to identity of 
 origin. 
 
 Inasmuch as St. Paul completed the scheme of 
 ^Redemption through sacrifice by his doctrine 
 concerning the Kesurrection of Christ, we have 
 included it in this chapter, though the treatment 
 of it requires much caution, and is entered upon 
 with some reluctance. For upon its physical side, 
 and as an event in history, the KSsurrection, being 
 supernatural, cannot by any ingenuity of ours be 
 brought into Analogy with Nature; it must be 
 accepted upon other grounds such as the evidence 
 of the witnesses, or as being the crowning point 
 of a dispensation which exhibits such convincing 
 analogies as we have been considering, and from 
 which it cannot be severed without practicaUy 
 overthrowing the whole history. But taken upon 
 its moral side as being a victory over evil and 
 involving the rising of mankind from the death 
 of sin, it is in Analogy as we shall shortly point out. 
 
250 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 The course of Nature with respect to sacrifice 
 is this : that if any man within the limits of his 
 personal life gives up that which is his own for the 
 sake of others he will obtain more good, more 
 happiness, more success, more of spiritual life, than 
 if he resolved merely to please himself. But in 
 respect of personal existence, which is not so much 
 a possession as that which itself possesses, Nature 
 is so far out of Analogy with herself that she leaves 
 her offspring in complete ignorance whether she 
 carries out her own law or is unable to do so : if 
 men surrender life they may hope and trust for the 
 best, but the brfok of experience is closed at the 
 grave, and in the presence of death Nature lays her 
 finger upon her lips. Everything that men give 
 up in obedience to Nature's law of sacrifice she 
 promises to give them back in other and better 
 forms, and makes her promise good ; but not life 
 itself, concerning which she promises nothing. 
 Hence, the Resurrection of Christ is in moral 
 accord with the general method of Nature's opera- 
 tions, in that it carries that method one step further 
 and applies it to that personal existence without 
 which the promised victory of good over evil might 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF 
 
 be reasonably pronounced unreal if not delusive. 
 If sin be the consciousness of death, Redemption, 
 to be complete, must involve the consciousness of 
 life. The absolute extinction of personal life that 
 has been voluntarily given up at the demand of 
 Nature, with all the joy of existence, and the many 
 fibres that twine the individual life with the lives 
 of other persons, would be, to say the least, excep- 
 tional, and contrary to that sense of equity which 
 Nature somehow manages to make her creatures 
 expect of her. Whence it follows that although 
 the Analogy does not hold in respect of physical 
 life, there is a moral presumption for the Resurrec- 
 tion, at least as strong as the natural presumption 
 against a miracle ; nor ought we to feel surprised 
 if there be any Revelation that clears up the 
 apparent discrepancy in Nature's working, and 
 displays one harmonious law covering the whole 
 field of human experience. And to this extent, 
 but no further, the Analogy may be pressed. 
 
 What then we may learn from St. Paul's 
 doctrine of the Resurrection to life is, that, accord- 
 ing to the moral custom of Nature in parallel 
 cases, such a Being as Christ could not be per- 
 
252 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 manently holden of death, and that by His 
 rising to life Kedemption was completed by the 
 introduction of such moral influences as the follow- 
 ing : That life is more persistent than death : 
 that the good survives eternally : that natural 
 equity, which is God's law, restores to every man 
 what he has given up in obedience to the law 
 of sacrifice : that violence does not answer even 
 in respect of the individual life, although it 
 seems, within those limits at least, so triumphant, 
 but that mildness does answer : that the perfect 
 moral character, which would seem to be the end 
 and aim of what Nature produces, cannot ultimately 
 be dissipated into the material elements that form 
 the physical basis of life. We are not called upon 
 to decide whether man could or could not have 
 attained to Redemption from evil without the 
 assurance of a future life; it is enough for us to 
 say that, Nature being what it is, and the necessity 
 of Kedemption being what Nature says it is, the 
 Resurrection of the Man who offered Himself to 
 death in obedience to the call upon Him is plainly 
 adapted to give to human character a vital and 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 253 
 
 effective impulse towards goodness ; and, further, 
 that it solves the problem of rewarding men 
 according to their works without exciting their 
 selfish tendencies. And, it may be added, that, 
 as a matter of fact, all that religion has yet done 
 for the moral regeneration of man has, by common 
 confession of all concerned, derived no small part 
 of its inspiration and power from this one source. 
 For our Lord certainly gave Himself up to die 
 in the belief that He should rise from the dead; 
 the apostles gave themselves to the missionary 
 task of establishing the Christian Church in the 
 belief that this had come to pass in His case 
 and would be extended to theirs; St. Paul made 
 the fact of Christ's being alive an integral part 
 of his doctrine of Redemption ; and, finally, the 
 Christian reason accepts it now, as it has done 
 always, and presses forward to spiritual victory 
 in the confident assurance that eternal issues are 
 at stake. And if reason for want of a positive 
 Analogy appears to hesitate, Faith can accept 
 the Resurrection of Christ as the crown and con- 
 summation of a dispensation, every other part of 
 
254 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 wliicli displays profound and essential similarities 
 to the course and constitution of Nature, which 
 has made us what we are. 
 
 ADDENDUM. The Resurrection of Christ re- 
 garded in its relation to the future life (and 
 indeed the future life itself) is not included in 
 the scope of this work, because, taken on its 
 physical side or as an historical event, it is super- 
 natural and therefore not to be brought into 
 Analogy with that Nature of which we have 
 experience. And no doubt this is the reason why 
 Butler passed it over. Moreover, the whole subject 
 has been of late very much gone into, although the 
 present writer must not be supposed to agree alto- 
 gether with all that has been advanced by zealous 
 Christian advocates. Thus the use of the word 
 immortality is somewhat misleading, inasmuch 
 as it seems to beg the question of the inde- 
 structibleness of the vital principle, and to suggest 
 a view of life which experience, if it does not 
 contradict, neither does it warrant. Even more 
 questionable, though evidently urged with good 
 intention, is the attempt to adduce the fact of the 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 255 
 
 Resurrection of Christ as a positive proof of the 
 future life, as will appear from the following con- 
 siderations. 1. The Resurrection of Christ contra- 
 dicts an otherwise universal experience, whereas our 
 future life, as being beyond experience, is neither 
 proved nor disproved by anything reason can tell 
 us ; so that for this, as for other obvious reasons, it 
 is easier for mankind to believe in their own future 
 existence, than in the evidence which is alleged on 
 its behalf. 2. If we regard the future life as a 
 rising again from the dead, it is plain that this 
 rising again must be in our cases a very different 
 thing from the Resurrection of Christ, which is not, 
 therefore, a case in point. 3. Holy Scripture does 
 not make any prominent use of Christ's Resurrec- 
 tion to prove the future life of man. 4. If it had 
 been designed to afford such evidence the course 
 of Revelation would surely have been so ordered as 
 to make it more convincing. 5. The truth which 
 Revelation makes known to us, as the sum of all 
 Christian teaching, namely, that God is our Father > 
 affords, if we will but take the word Father in its 
 natural sense, a much more convincing proof that 
 God, who is not the God of the dead but of the 
 
256 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 living, will not leave His children in death, nor 
 suffer His beloved ones to perish for ever. 
 
 But leaving this, there remains a point upon 
 which a brief word must be spoken, because it 
 touches the credit of the two authors (if we may 
 for a moment join together an inspired and un- 
 inspired writer) to whom alone in these pages we 
 have appealed. St. Paul, in his fifteenth chapter 
 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, seems to 
 be proving the rising again of all men by the 
 Analogy of Nature; and Butler sets out by 
 apparently alleging a presumption in favour of the 
 future life from the same Analogy. Both have been 
 much objected against, and, we are convinced, 
 owing to a misconception of their real meaning, 
 which will pass away if we pay attention to what 
 their argument really means to say. For in both 
 cases they are using the argument of Analogy, 
 not to establish a presumption in favour of the 
 future life, but to rebut supposed presumptions 
 against it ; for the capital error of the Corinthian 
 doubters, as of modern unbelief, was to take for 
 granted that Nature, as we have experience of her 
 operations, affords some proof that man cannot 
 
x.] THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 257 
 
 or will not survive death. Thus the Corinthians 
 felt some difficulty as to the connection of the future 
 body with the present one, to which St. Paul's 
 argument from the Analogy of a seed that dies 
 and lives again was a perfectly logical reply. 
 Again, Butler had in his mind the position of 
 those who thought that there was something in 
 the nature and power of death to make a future 
 life, if not impossible, at least incredible, to which 
 his arguments once more were quite as complete an 
 answer as the objection required. The course of 
 Nature, the testimony of the senses, the opinion of 
 reason have, and can have, nothing to say on one 
 side or on the other. We know that men die, but 
 of the forces that may give them life hereafter, 
 or whether such forces there be, we know 
 nothing. Only there is a superficial, and, because 
 superficial, therefore ever recurring, tendency to 
 suppose that we have some knowledge upon the 
 subject, to infer that death means of neces- 
 sity absolute dissolution, to argue from what we 
 see here to the invisible future. Against which 
 prejudice of our understandings, or rather of our 
 bare senses, argument is necessary, and both 
 
 s 
 
258 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. x. 
 
 St. Paul and Butler used it to meet the form which 
 the prejudice had assumed in their own time. But 
 it is only when they are taken to mean more than 
 this, to be advancing a positive proof instead of 
 merely answering an objection (and perhaps Butler 
 does at times write as though to meet a bad objec- 
 tion were the same as alleging a good argument), 
 that an apparent advantage is gained over them. 
 And this we may be very sure of, that there is 
 always a true meaning in the utterances of such 
 men as these (setting aside inspiration) that survives 
 the wear and tear of time, and may readily be dis- 
 covered if we will look for it, and try to separate 
 the jewel from the mere accidental surroundings 
 peculiar to the time or conditions under which 
 they wrote. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 ON THE EEVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIEIT. 
 
 THE Revelation of the Spirit, as it may be thought 
 the most characteristic, so certainly is it the most 
 surprising to the natural reason, of all the doctrines 
 of which the Christian religion is composed. At 
 the time when Jesus Christ left the world a few 
 hundred persons believed, not without misgivings 
 in their own midst, that He was the Son of God, 
 that He had risen from the dead, and that He was 
 the destined Messiah of the Jewish nation. Out of 
 these materials, which must, at this distance of 
 time, appear so slender as to be well-nigh in- 
 credible, there was to be established an universal 
 religion, which should redeem mankind from evil, 
 and bring the whole world into submission to the 
 
 s 2 
 
260 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 true God. Some power, whether human or Divine, 
 devised the institution of a voluntary community in 
 which the Spirit of God might dwell as an abiding 
 and life-giving influence, and might carryforward the 
 work of Christ to all nations and for all time ; and 
 the design has so far succeeded that Christianity is 
 at this moment the professed religion of civilised 
 man. Confessedly this is the most astonishing 
 phenomenon in all history, and seems by the very 
 strangeness of its success, and by its unlikeness to 
 anything that might be expected to be devised by 
 the human mind, to invite the explanation which we 
 have to give, that the Eevelation of the Spirit in 
 the institution of the Christian Church, being the 
 act of God, was in accordance with the Analogy of 
 Nature which is His w6rk } and that therefore it has 
 combined with the same Nature in carrying out the 
 designs of one Supreme will. Which is what we have 
 to prove in this chapter. 
 
 The account of the Revelation of the Spirit we 
 take, of course, just as it is written in the Acts and 
 Letters of the Apostles, regarding it only under 
 that aspect in which it is capable of being brought 
 into Analogy with Nature; which must be our 
 
xi.] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 261 
 
 excuse, if to the pious Christian sentiment we seem 
 to speak unworthily of the work of the Holy Spirit. 
 Only one feature there is, very prominent upon the 
 narrative as we have it, that it may be desirable to 
 insist upon at the beginning. The Eevelation of 
 the Spirit and the growth of the Church were not 
 the results of an unconscious operation on the part 
 of men who were being led whither they knew not, 
 and, as is the case in all similar great movements, 
 doing simply what work lay before them without 
 an idea as to the marvellous results that were to 
 grow out of their performances. On the contrary, 
 the mind of Christ planned and foresaw everything, 
 and His followers distinctly realised the end and 
 extent of the designs they were chosen to carry out. 
 Although the kingdom which He founded had, at 
 the time of His death, dwindled by the law of sur- 
 vival of the fittest, expressed by Him in His oft- 
 repeated words of pathos, "many are called but 
 few chosen," to the " number of names that were 
 together about one hundred and twenty," who 
 alone could have been present at its formal institu- 
 tion, yet as to its institution and ultimate triumph 
 He never permitted Himself or them to doubt. 
 
262 A NEW ANALOGY. [CIIAP. 
 
 He told them that the Holy Spirit would be sent 
 unto them, and that in His power they should 
 accomplish greater things than He had done. He 
 announced the future glory of the kingdom into 
 which many would come from all quarters of the 
 earth in which it was to be preached, and He 
 figured its growth and appearance under such 
 forcible images as the tree that, when it is grown, 
 ' { shooteth out great branches so that the fowls of 
 the air may lodge under the shadow of it." He 
 spoke of Himself as coming on the clouds of glory 
 and judging the whole earth. And all this pre- 
 science, together with the vast anticipations which 
 He sowed in the hearts of the first Christians, has 
 been literally verified. Why ? Because, we answer 
 once more, Christ, as representing the mind of God 
 to us, framed the Christian dispensation upon the 
 same lines as Nature organises communities upon, 
 and committed to it that religious work, which 
 Nature suggests, strives after, and finally welcomes 
 as the gift of God. 
 
 Organisation, though a word of large extent, 
 is becoming, through the progress of thought, 
 more and more definite in meaning; and if, as 
 
XL] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 263 
 
 seems likely, the method of organisation can be 
 reduced to one type running through all Nature, 
 the argument from Analogy is so far more thorough 
 and complete. But we are concerned with the 
 organisation of communities, and especially, as 
 representative of all the rest, of those two which 
 are based upon the two great pre-rational instincts 
 before- mentioned, namely, reproduction and self- 
 preservation. For the family and. the nation are 
 natural to man in the sense of being necessary 
 and not voluntary ; he must be a member of these 
 societies; nor is he able to separate himself from 
 the obligations which membership imposes upon 
 him. Now the growth of the family and nation 
 is one of the most interesting and extensive sub- 
 jects that the modern way of thinking has opened 
 up, and very much yet remains to be settled 
 concerning it. But enough is settled to enable 
 us to condense the spiritual aspect of this growth 
 (which alone belongs to our subject) into the 
 following brief account, which is in no sense 
 scientific, except that it does not contradict the 
 results of comparative investigation. 
 
 Broadly speaking, we might say that the family 
 
264 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 and the nation were formed by the education of 
 the primary instincts as the race grew in reason 
 and experience. When the earliest progenitors 
 of mankind became capable of taking a rational 
 survey of themselves and their surroundings, they 
 found themselves living as members of a loose 
 aggregate of individuals called a tribe, and under 
 the necessity of making some attempt to subor- 
 dinate the gratification of their instincts to the 
 social life of the tribe, the bare existence of 
 which involved the consequence that each man 
 should place some restraint upon his conduct so 
 as to leave room for his neighbours to live their 
 lives. So that the tribe soon organised itself 
 downwards and upwards; that is, into the family 
 and the nation. Taken outwardly, these consisted 
 of groups of persons whom the natural operation 
 of the two instincts brought into relation with one 
 another. Thus the reproductive instinct collected 
 together blood relations, put a line of demarcation 
 about them, united them in a house or home, 
 and placed them under the government of the 
 father. Similarly the instinct of self-preservation 
 gathered together masses of men according to the 
 
XL] EEYELATION OF THE HOLY SPIEIT. 265 
 
 chances of descent, language, invasion, conquest, 
 migration, commercial intercourse, settled them in 
 one district, and so formed the city or nation. 
 This, too, had its own boundaries and its own 
 head, together with all the links that joined it 
 into one organic whole, each man finding his own 
 life in that of the society, and preserving the first 
 by defending the second. 
 
 Societies thus formed have, like everything 
 else in (at any rate) animate Nature, an internal 
 life as well as an external framework, and this, 
 not for the sake of insinuating an Analogy, but 
 because it is the right word to use, we must 
 call spiritual or the spirit of the community. It 
 may be defined as the development, upon the basis 
 of the primary instincts, of the social qualities that 
 preserve the organisation; and if this be thought 
 but a loose account of the matter, we must re- 
 member that until men know more of matter, life, 
 thought, they cannot be expected to discourse 
 adequately of spirit. We can be much more 
 certain of its existence and more able to discern 
 its effects than we can describe it as it is in itself, 
 even as the Lord, with His instinctive grasp of 
 
266 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 essential truth, expressed it "the Spirit bloweth 
 where it listeth, and ye hear the voice thereof, 
 but cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it 
 goeth." In the family it might be termed domestic 
 love; in the state social or political duty. We 
 can see that it grows up in the bosom of the 
 organisation by the conflict of many wills, out of 
 many experiences of what is best for the com- 
 munity, by the natural tendency of the higher 
 characters to influence the lower, and by the 
 duties which different relationships impose upon 
 the various members. It is like the air men 
 breathe in common and unconsciously, and so 
 sustain their lives. In short, the original instinct, 
 when acted upon by social influences, becomes a 
 moral ideal, ilself a permanent source of feelings, 
 duties, and laws that constitute the life of the 
 community. 
 
 Which ideal, again, as it is perhaps hardly 
 necessary to point out, acts upon the members 
 of the society as a moralising influence. Thus 
 domestic love purifies the character from gross 
 sensuousness, and also from innate passionateness of 
 temper, which mere contact with the lives or wills of 
 
XL] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 267 
 
 other persons is apt to produce. And the spirit 
 of social duty in the same way cleanses the soul 
 of its inbred selfishness, by securing our personal 
 existence along with that of the society. A large 
 proportion of human conduct consists in what 
 men do for the sake of their family or their 
 country, and if for any cause the spirit of love 
 or duty dies out, then the body perishes along 
 with it, just as certainly as, when the body is 
 destroyed by some external shock, the spirit 
 ceases to operate. Whether by external blow or 
 internal decay, or, perhaps from both combined 
 and inviting each other, different branches or 
 specimens of organised societies are always coming 
 to an end; but the instinct, being permanent, is 
 always framing new ones, perhaps of a higher 
 type, out of the ruins of the old. 
 
 Here, then, we have the original type upon 
 which Jesus Christ, by some power or other dis- 
 cerning the lines upon which Nature constructs 
 her social edifices, founded and caused to be built 
 the Christian Church : and if the resemblance 
 should seem so exact and so obvious as to excite 
 suspicion of its genuineness, we reply that it is 
 
268 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 not our fault if, as soon as ever we look at the 
 dispensations just as they are, the Analogy between 
 them should assert itself without need of forcing 
 or explanation. First of all, answering to the 
 inherited instinct, we have the religious sentiment, 
 which has good claim to be considered the first 
 universal idea of man's rational intelligence that ex- 
 perience develops. This sentiment is by common 
 confession the consciousness of the unknown, which 
 is involved in the very notion of knowing, for know- 
 ledge is to acquire, as it were, mental possession of 
 part of a vast hitherto unknown world. Every 
 human being, as he becomes conscious of his place 
 in the universe, becomes aware of himself as 
 related to unknown causes of phenomena (himself 
 included) with whose existence his senses make him 
 acquainted. Now this consciousness Jesus Christ 
 turned from a negative into a positive thought, by 
 revealing the source of all created things as a 
 Father, who had also sent His Son to be the King 
 over the world, and so the original idea passed into 
 the spiritual power by which families and nations 
 are constituted. Only, that being not an inherited 
 instinct but a rational idea, the community formed 
 
XL] EEYELATION OF THE HOLY SPIKIT. 269 
 
 upon it was one of voluntary association and not of 
 force or legal obligation. To the family of God 
 and the Kingdom of Christ every man de facto 
 belongs,, but it must rest with his own will, or with 
 the will of others in making known the state of the 
 case to him, whether he actually joins it or not. 
 
 Hence the Eevelation of the Spirit takes the 
 form of a proclamation of a new spiritual family 
 and spiritual kingdom to all mankind. And 
 thereby it accomplished what the family and nation 
 are plainly unable to do, namely, the organisation of 
 humanity as a whole. We are conscious of the 
 existence of untold multitudes of human beings in 
 whom, inasmuch as we have no definite relations 
 with them, we feel no interest nor acknowledge 
 obligation towards them. The utmost that can be 
 said is that if it came in our way to do them good 
 we should do it, and that the pleasure of learning 
 something about them, and so of realising the 
 common bonds of humanity, creates a kind of 
 agreeable sentiment towards them. But Nature is 
 the reverse of sentimental; and, perhaps, for fear lest 
 we should overlook plain obligations lying close at 
 hand, does not do much to encourage the notion of 
 
270 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 responsibility lying outside the limits of actual 
 friendship ; perhaps, indeed, she condemns it to 
 failure beforehand by the air of ironical respect which 
 somehow she manages to throw into her reception 
 of large and enthusiastic phrases. But let Nature 
 say what she pleases, the thought that a larger 
 sympathy ought to be created between man and 
 man merely as men is plainly a good one, and the 
 Eevelation of the Spirit comes in to redeem it 
 from the region of impractical theorising by uniting 
 all mankind into one family and one kingdom, in 
 strict Analogy with the course of Nature herself, 
 and upon the only basis that of religion suffi- 
 ciently real and also comprehensive to bear the . 
 weight of an universal social organisation. And 
 if we were not so accustomed to take surprising 
 things for granted merely because they are in the 
 Bible, we should be filled with amazement a,t the 
 way in which a few Jewish people took in without 
 an effort (or rather with just so much of effort as 
 to show that Nature was not altogether their 
 teacher) the idea of the unity of the human race 
 and of their own duties towards it. They simply 
 became convinced that mankind was a family of 
 
XL] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 271 
 
 which God was Father, and a kingdom of which 
 Christ was King, and that the Christian Church 
 was founded to be the realisation of these truths. 
 Hence (after a short and very natural reluctance) 
 all men were made free of the Church simply as 
 men, however much the entrance might be nar- 
 rowed by conditions which (rightly or wrongly 
 we do not discuss) were thought to be necessary. 
 And so men are brought into actual relationship 
 one with another in the only way, it should seem, 
 that Nature left open for the Divine purpose to 
 work by, except by departing from Analogy with 
 herself. As a mere plain piece of fact, we are 
 connected with all generations past, present, and 
 to come ; nor was there ever a man who lived 
 upon the earth of whom we can say for certain 
 that we may not be brought into personal contact 
 with him at some time or other, or that his fortunes 
 may not be in some inscrutable way linked with 
 ours. In fact, Kevelation first proclaimed the 
 organic unity of man, which modern thought is 
 now engaged in tracing out. The practical or 
 religious discovery came first, the intellectual or 
 scientific verification comes afterwards, and an 
 
272 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 Analogy between Nature and Religion is once 
 more established as complete and profound as 
 any that we have yet discovered. 
 
 The Spirit by which the Christian Church was 
 animated can be as well perceived and as little 
 explained as that which constitutes the spiritual 
 life of any other society. We define it simply as 
 every influence that the Eevelation through Christ 
 of God's attributes, relationships to us, methods, 
 and intentions, could bring to bear upon the 
 minds and hearts of those who joined the heavenly 
 society. Thus the Spirit is emphatically the Holy 
 Spirit because it reveals the absolutely holy will 
 of God as constituting the law of righteousness 
 to which our obedience is to be paid. Again, it 
 is the Spirit of love, because the parental love 
 of God is revealed as the Spirit that binds the 
 human family together. Again, it comprises all 
 the mild or social virtues (" the fruit of the Spirit 
 is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, good- 
 ness, faith, meekness, temperance "), by which, 
 as exemplified in Christ, humanity grows from 
 a lower to a higher stage in moral advance- 
 ment. Yet once more the Spirit carries on the 
 
OP THK 
 
 xi.] KEVELATION OF THE HOLY 
 
 law of self-sacrifice to God, being as it is tlie 
 eternal Spirit through which Christ offered Him- 
 self without spot to God, and in the bosom of 
 His Church calls upon His people to make the 
 same offering "well pleasing, acceptable to God." 
 And this Spirit was the vital air of the society 
 which all the members breathed in common, or, 
 to use the scriptural expression, "into which 
 they had all been made to drink." It grew from 
 the beginning out of the co-operation of many 
 wills and characters, each affording something 
 that others lacked to the spiritual development 
 of the Church. Hence also came in natural order, 
 laws, institutions, doctrines, ceremonies, and all that 
 completes the Church or attends its development 
 in history. Hence also came distinctively Christian 
 qualities, growing up out of the association of 
 different persons in one community, who thereby 
 became partakers of one spirit, such as liberty, 
 toleration, patience, interpretation of Scripture, 
 missionary energy, the sense of eternity, and, the 
 greatest of all, charity. And as men learnt 
 politically to preserve their personal life by social 
 combination in the state, so they learnt religiously 
 
 T 
 
274 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAF. 
 
 to save their souls by spiritual combination in the 
 church. 
 
 To complete the Analogy we point out finally 
 the moralising effect of the Spirit upon the 
 members of the community, for which the technical 
 theological word is sanctification. Very plainly the 
 spirit of the family or of the nation does not reach 
 the whole moral nature of man, or cover the whole 
 extent of duty and conduct. The mere existence 
 of other societies all founded upon some common 
 idea and tending to some element of moral perfec- 
 tion proves, if proof were needed, that men may live 
 up to the spirit of the family or the nation, and 
 yet be very imperfect in many important particu- 
 lars of conduct and character. But, as the least 
 consideration will show, the Holy Spirit exercises 
 over the dispositions of men an absolute influence 
 towards good to which nothing is wanting and 
 nothing can be added. In so far as it is the 
 Spirit of the Creator of the human personality it 
 must be capable of penetrating into every part of 
 the creative work with a power, so commonly 
 attributed to the Spirit of God in the Bible, of 
 searching, reproving, convincing, purifying, en- 
 
xi.] KEVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 275 
 
 couraging, together witli many similar moralising 
 influences. Being again the Spirit of the Father, 
 " of whom the whole family in heaven and earth 
 is named," there is no fragment of the duty of 
 men towards each other which does not come 
 within the scope of the Holy Spirit, duty being 
 conditioned by the relationship into which the 
 Eevelation of the Spirit has organised all mankind. 
 But, above all, since the Spirit represents the will 
 of the Author of Nature, of which will the course 
 of Nature is also the result and the expression, it 
 follows that the course of Nature is pledged, as 
 it were, to the task of moralising the character of 
 the whole human race, or, according to the familiar 
 Christian doctrine, that it is designed by the Provi- 
 dence of God to produce, as its ultimate fruit, 
 . moral perfection. Whence comes that one mag- 
 nificent thought, which has perhaps done more 
 than any other single thought for the consolation 
 of man and the vivifying of morality, that the 
 course of the world in Nature and in history is so 
 arranged as to educe or evolve good out of evil, 
 and that all the terrible trials and conflicts of 
 human life are part of the Divine plan for discern- 
 
 T 2 
 
276 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 ing between good and evil, with the view of 
 promoting and preserving the one, and destroying 
 and rejecting the other. And so goodness, which 
 abides the test, emerges out of it, survives, and 
 becomes persistent. 
 
 Thus, then, to sum the matter up, we see that 
 the Christian Church has prevailed in the world 
 merely because it was designed and constituted in 
 Analogy with the course of Nature, in the midst 
 of which its lot was cast in order that it might 
 develop itself in accordance with the laws of the 
 universe, of which the Author of Revelation was 
 also the Creator. The tree might be divinely 
 planted, but it drew its nourishment from Nature's 
 soil was breathed on by the same airs and 
 refreshed by the same showers as those which 
 kindly Nature sheds upon her own offspring. 
 Hence we know exactly why it was not unfaithful 
 to its Divine origin, but grew up to be the goodly 
 tree we see now. A comparison with its only rival, 
 the religion of Islam, will illustrate our point. If 
 that religion had been as true and as important as 
 the Christian, if its followers had been as sincere 
 and self-denying, it must still, by the nature of the 
 
XL] KEVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIEIT. 277 
 
 case, have, in the long run, failed, because its 
 method of propagation involved a radical departure 
 from the Analogy of Nature, according to which it 
 is not the force that exacts the sacrifice, but the 
 mild and social qualities that offer it, which become 
 persistent and pass over into the moral constitu- 
 tion of man. So that, quite apart from their 
 intrinsic merits, we have no cause for wonder that 
 the one failed after the brief triumph such as 
 violence can win, to obtain a permanent place in the 
 progressive civilisation of the world, or that the 
 other succeeded in establishing itself as the 
 religion of humanity a very astonishing thing 
 indeed, let it be remarked, until the explanation is 
 forthcoming. And if, as we have been setting 
 about to show, the Christian Revelation is in 
 Analogy with Nature, then so long as Nature 
 remains natural, her offspring will remain Christian. 
 This book, it must be remembered, is not 
 intended to afford an answer to the moral difficulties 
 concerning Christianity, which must be removed or 
 mitigated by propositions addressed to the wants 
 and feelings, the desires and the conscience of men, 
 and if these difficulties are more real and valid than 
 
278 A NEW ANALOGY. , [CHAP. 
 
 mere objections of the reason, so also must the 
 answers to them be. But then moral difficulties 
 have always a tendency to shape themselves into 
 intellectual objections ; men must eventually enter 
 upon this course in order to justify their beliefs or 
 unbeliefs to their reason, and so arguments against 
 a religious interpretation of Nature and of the world 
 grow up easily and thickly in minds that feel the 
 inherent sadness and uncertainty of all things. 
 It is then, and only then, that counter arguments 
 addressed to the reason have any use or place, and 
 if they do not succeed, as perhaps it is impossible 
 that they should, in rooting out the difficulty from 
 its seat in the heart of man, they can at least hope 
 to effect something in cutting down or pruning 
 away the various intellectual doubts in which the 
 moral difficulty from time to time asserts itself. As 
 an illustration of what is meant, an argument may 
 be quoted which the author remembers to have 
 met with and which struck him at the time as the 
 final and perfect expression of moral doubting. 
 An excellent writer, apparently without any preju- 
 dice against the Christian religion, observes of 
 certain reasons advanced on its behalf, that they 
 
XL] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 279 
 
 presuppose the veracity of the Creator of Nature, 
 and that even this was more than could in strict 
 reason be granted. A hundred considerations 
 spring up within our minds to rebut this objection 
 which seems so audacious and irreverent, though it 
 may be but the cry of a wounded and despairing 
 spirit. But in the way of reason it is doubtful 
 whether it can be answered at all, except by an 
 appeal to the course of Nature, taken just as it is 
 and for no more than it displays to our reasoning 
 faculties. For whatever else be dubious or mis- 
 leading, the course of Nature forms the standard 
 of truth by which every doctrine or belief may be 
 tried. Nature does not alter her ways nor deceive 
 us ; so long as like causes produce like effects, and 
 laws operate in the same way, and there is the 
 same upward tendency towards higher types, so 
 long if we make mistakes or evince ignorance it is 
 only by our own fault or lack of insight ; 'tis not 
 Nature but self that leads us astray. So that if we 
 have a Kevelation that exhibits an Analogy with 
 Nature in all essential particulars, we must assume 
 that it comes from the same Author, even if we 
 have no previous ground for presupposing His 
 
280 A NEW ANALOGY. [CHAP- 
 
 veracity, unless, indeed, in spite of the consistency 
 of Nature we choose to assume His inveracity, which 
 is the logic not of doubt but of madness. 
 
 Now it is not to be denied that the moral diffi- 
 culties that take their origin from the evil, the 
 sadness, and injustice of things, may be intensified 
 by the many failures and shortcomings which, spite 
 of its success, mark the history of the Christian 
 Church. For when the heart of men is fit to die 
 within them at the sight of what things are and the 
 thought of what they ought to be, they are told of 
 a Holy Spirit Divinely given to found a heavenly 
 kingdom, and they see Christendom what it is and 
 what it has been ! They half unconsciously think 
 that God should be interfering more plainly in the 
 moral order and even be superseding the natural 
 course of things; failing this they turn away in 
 anger and impatience. But such men are invited 
 to consider that Christendom is what it is and what 
 it has been, because, come what would, the Giver 
 of Revelation will not depart from the Analogy of 
 Nature of which He is also the Creator. We began 
 by affirming the union of Nature or natural religion 
 with Revelation, we conclude the argument by 
 
XL] KEVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 281 
 
 seriously, even solemnly, reiterating it. The tree 
 was Divinely planted, but it has been spared no 
 storms, no tendency to internal decay, no loss of 
 branches, no mutilation at the hands of men. We 
 are bound by the history of the past to believe that 
 God having once for all given a Revelation by 
 Christ through the Spirit, in order to complete His 
 own creative work, will not in religion, any more 
 than in Nature, depart from the method of slow and 
 orderly development by natural causes. To interfere 
 with the ordinary workings of the human mind and 
 will would be to divide His own unity, to break up 
 Nature into fragments, and to defeat His own pur- 
 pose by taking from Revelation its one persuasive 
 argument over the reason of man its appeal to the 
 Analogy of Nature. And against the melancholy 
 experience of evil and failure, the Christian will 
 be able to assert that if we join together the course 
 of Nature with the doctrines of Revelation there 
 will emerge a Divinely beneficent purpose visibly 
 moving upwards by slow yet orderly progress, in 
 which individual men, though sorely tried and 
 often sacrificed, do not ultimately perish, but 
 " shall be accounted worthy " (worthiness in morals 
 
282 A 1STEW ANALOGY. [CHAP. 
 
 being equivalent to fitness in Nature) "to obtain 
 that world and the resurrection from the dead." 
 
 The reader has now before him the necessary 
 materials for deciding whether the resemblance 
 between Nature and Religion, in the very important 
 and critical article we have in this chapter been 
 considering, has been made out to the satisfaction 
 of reasonable minds. Before coming to a conclu- 
 sion it will be proper for him once more to consider 
 whether the persons concerned in the institution of 
 Christianity were likely, out of their own minds, to 
 hit upon Nature's methods; or how it was that 
 among the multitude of paths that were open to 
 them they struck with unerring insight into the 
 right one, in spite of innumerable inducements, 
 which, to the purely human intelligence, might well 
 seem overwhelming, to allow themselves to be more 
 or less diverted into wrong ones. And then, per- 
 haps, he will see good reason for concluding that 
 the history which these persons gave, altogether 
 disclaiming for themselves any merit in the under- 
 taking, and attributing it with one voice to the 
 Spirit of God, contains a simple, true, adequate, 
 and intelligible account of the whole matter. It 
 
XL] REVELATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 283 
 
 will then remain for himself to say whether the 
 circumstances of mankind being such as plainly 
 need and invite the aid of religion, it is worth his 
 while to argue himself out of a belief in that 
 religion which casts a guiding and consoling beam 
 of light upon the mysteriousness of life, and which 
 on the one hand claims for itself an Analogy with 
 Nature, and on the other brings Nature into 
 harmony with the universe. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
 WE do not propose to add anything by way of 
 explanation to the Analogy which we have been 
 tracing, and which must be left to speak for itself. 
 Neither does the argument admit of being sum- 
 marised in any more compendious form than that 
 in which we have already stated it. We merely 
 remind the reader that we undertook to establish 
 a resemblance between the course of Nature and 
 the events of Kevelation sufficiently strong to 
 warrant the belief that both dispensations were 
 derived from the same Cause. We took Nature 
 to be the sum of all phenomena, of which expe- 
 rience informs us, and the course of Nature to be that 
 way of regarding those phenomena, which reason is 
 now bidding us to adopt, all disputed points, such 
 as the freedom of the will, or the origin of life, 
 being purposely avoided. Similarly we confined 
 
CONCLUSION. 285 
 
 our view of Eevelation to those events which can 
 alone be specially ascribed to the will of God work- 
 ing outside of the course of Nature, just as it must be 
 supposed to have done before the course of Nature 
 (as we know it, or as it belongs to our part of the 
 universe) came into being. With the laws and 
 methods of Nature we have, then, compared the 
 whole history of Revelation, beginning with its 
 external appearance and superficial relation to the 
 world in which it was given ; taking next the kind 
 of evidence upon which it is supported; thence 
 passing to the essential part of our subject, namely, 
 the attributes of God ; the life, character, and teach- 
 ing of Christ ; His redeeming work and self-sacri- 
 fice ; lastly, the work of the Spirit in the institution 
 of the Christian society. In carrying out this com- 
 parison we have never been obliged to stop to 
 answer objections, or to explain away incompatible 
 features, or to remove obstacles, the only apparent 
 exception being a discussion as to Christ's moral 
 teaching, where, as soon as a misapprehension was 
 removed, the argument proceeded with the same 
 smoothness and exactness which we venture to 
 claim for it as a whole, and which, where natural 
 
286 A NEW ANALOGY. 
 
 resemblance is the point at issue, is the best proof 
 that it is one of fact and not of fancy. And as the 
 result of the comparison, we have found that the 
 events and methods of Eevelation have been framed 
 in exact accordance with the laws that guide the 
 course of Nature; that this resemblance is not 
 counterbalanced by any contradiction or dissimi- 
 larity between the two, of which no trace has 
 appeared ; that in very many cases truths concern- 
 ing God and man have been proclaimed or acted 
 upon in Eevelation, which were subsequently dis- 
 covered and so verified by man's natural reason ^ 
 and that for this and for other equally incontestable 
 reasons it is impossible to suppose that Kevelation 
 was the work of men to whom, more than to most 
 men, the meaning and methods of Nature were 
 totally unknown. We see, too, that all this has 
 been so managed as that the Christian religion 
 should succeed in doing the work for which it was 
 intended, simply because it grew and energized in 
 conformity with the natural order in which it was 
 placed, and further that no disturbance in man's 
 reliance upon that order, or in his way of apprehend- 
 ing it has been caused. In short, we might sum 
 
CONCLUSION. 287 
 
 up the effect of the whole, in the truth which we 
 have more than once taken pains to point out : 
 that Revelation gives to the course and constitution 
 of Nature that religious significance and spiritual 
 efficacy which, though consistent with all the best 
 and strongest impressions wrought by Nature upon 
 the mind of man, is not capable of positive demon- 
 stration to his reasoning faculties. 
 
 If from this union of the two systems in the 
 dispensation of one will, there emerged a religion 
 that was contrary to man's interests or that laid 
 upon him any unpleasing burden, it is tolerably 
 certain that not by argument merely would he be 
 induced to accept it. But seeing that Christianity 
 is not a religion of this description, involving as 
 it does no further burden than that we should 
 discipline our wills and order our lives in obedience 
 to the Father who loves us, and has sent His 
 Son to redeem us from evil, there can be no 
 valid reason for striving against the conclusion 
 to which the argument from Analogy seems to lead 
 us. Nor does Nature appear disposed to approve 
 of treating it as an open question, to be settled by 
 each man for himself as reason or prejudice may 
 
288 A NEW ANALOGY. 
 
 direct him. For at this particular juncture she is 
 interposing to declare very plainly that there can 
 be no happiness for men, and no moral life for the 
 human race, until the doubt, so grotesque in one 
 view, but so horribly real and fatal in another, be in 
 some way set at rest, whether man is better than 
 his Creator, and upon a higher scale of being than 
 the Cause of his own existence. 
 
 All which is now submitted to the reader's 
 judgment, who, as the matter is one of pure reason 
 deciding as to the evidence from similarity, is 
 asked to approach the consideration of it by as far 
 as possible laying aside all presumption on one 
 side or the other. But justice to the memory of 
 Butler requires us to observe that a previous pre- 
 sumption for or against a given belief is not to be 
 confounded with the probability, one way or 
 another, which may be all that rigorous investiga- 
 tion may bring us to. Nothing has been more 
 commonly, and sometimes not without scorn, 
 urged against him than his assertion (to put it in 
 his own words), " in matters of practice this will 
 lay us under an absolute and formal obligation, in 
 point of prudence and interest, to act upon that 
 
CONCLUSION. 289 
 
 presumption or low probability, though, it be so low- 
 as to leave the mind in very great doubt which is 
 the truth." Now to our ways of thinking this 
 sounds strange enough, yet if we will but attend to 
 the meaning of it, and endeavour to find what i s 
 the true principle upon which it rests, we shall see 
 that, though concealed or spoilt by a poor and 
 transient form, of statement, the truth at which he 
 was aiming is of permanent value and importance. 
 The thought so prevalent in Butler's time of 
 the importance of a prudent regard for our own 
 personal salvation and happiness has been turned 
 by the progress of the religious and moral spirit 
 in man into the clean contrary. Or rather we 
 might say that this regard has been (not at all 
 lost, but rather) merged in a joyful enthusiasm for 
 the welfare of the human race. But in that case 
 we should state his proposition in another form, 
 namely, that he who goes about to deprive the 
 world of its religion embarks upon an undertaking 
 so full of peril to those whose interests he desires to 
 serve, that prudence may well counsel him to speak 
 warily or to keep silence altogether even in presence 
 of but a te low probability." For the moral strength 
 
290 A NEW ANALOGY. 
 
 of the position occupied by the defender of religion, 
 as Butler clearly understood, lies in the fact that 
 the consequences of error on his part are as nothing 
 compared with those on the part of his opponents. 
 If there be no God and no future life, then they 
 who have tried to persuade the world into a belief 
 in the Fatherly love of God and to cast a gleam of 
 delusive happiness upon the life of man, will, 
 together with those they have misled, sleep in the- 
 dust of endless death, careless alike of blame and 
 failure. But it is difficult to over-estimate the 
 responsibility of those who, if the contrary hypo- 
 thesis be true, have diverted men away from the 
 faith that might have made them happy and vir- 
 tuous, by standing between children and their 
 Father : to such the future life itself, no matter 
 what blessings it may bring them, must, by the 
 very fact of its own reality, bring also a bitter con- 
 demnation of the mistaken ignorance in which they 
 strove to shut up their fellow creatures. So that if 
 prudence do not teach a man to act upon a low 
 probability in his own personal belief (and we do 
 not say that it should) it ought certainly to avail, at 
 least so far as to make him careful how he inter- 
 
CONCLUSION. 291 
 
 poses to prevent others from believing what he 
 himself has given up. And Christians will remem- 
 ber that it was to the instinct of personal prudence 
 that their Master appealed in His terrible warning 
 addressed to those "who made little ones to offend." 
 There is the greater reason to urge this, because 
 there is an idea got abroad that moral seriousness 
 of intention is sufficient without the prudent 
 reasonableness that leads a man to decide rightly, 
 that is as things are, and not wrongly, that 
 is as things are not. Which it might well be 
 if personal interests were all that is at stake. 
 Now it was against the want of moral seriousness 
 that Butler directed his injunctions of prudence, 
 because he lived in an age which was in this 
 respect singularly " dissolute," idle, and superficial; 
 even in men like the great philosopher and great 
 historian of that (English) .century the strong 
 instinctive sense of intellectual fairness, which was 
 their chief ornament, was notoriously not united 
 with a corresponding earnestness of moral purpose. 
 Now that this, in its worst and grosser manifesta- 
 tions, has happily passed away, it becomes the 
 task of prudence to insist that the want of intel- 
 
202 A NEW ANALOGY. 
 
 lectual sincerity in the matter of religious inquiry 
 leads to results almost as fatal as a deficiency in 
 moral seriousness : things are, to use Butler's 
 expression, what they are, and if we mistake them, 
 we and others cannot escape the consequences 
 whatever they may be. And what we say 
 is, that the intellectual sincerity applied to the 
 question of religious truth by those who object 
 to Revelation bears no fair proportion to the 
 same quality as employed in the investigation of 
 natural phenomena. Men take for granted any 
 popular view of the Christian religion, and, in 
 assailing that, conclude that they are disposing 
 of Christianity itself. They assume, naturally 
 enough, perhaps, as a matter of temper, but surely 
 very improperly as a matter of cool and cautious 
 reason, that the opposition of Revelation to Nature 
 is what their antagonists in this or earlier times 
 have stated it to be, and that the two are there- 
 fore incompatible, and the former unworthy of 
 a rational intelligence. They do not, in shorty 
 inquire for themselves ; nor, although they now 
 and then let fall hints that they are not satisfied 
 with the popular rendering of Christian doctrine, 
 
CONCLUSION. 295 
 
 do they ever go into the matter with the view 
 of seeing what is the real truth of the case. 
 Nor is their tone and language, even though they 
 may allege some justification from that of their 
 opponents, at all times worthy of themselves and 
 of the immense seriousness of the issue at stake.. 
 For instance, we may see that the men who write 
 the most forcible things against the Christian 
 religion, and take indeed the most pains about 
 it, are in many cases men still yourig ; who, having 
 revolted from the strict religious opinions in which 
 they were brought up, rush with a perfectly 
 genuine conviction into the opposite extreme, for- 
 getting what all the world besides can see, that they 
 are above all other men bound to exercise patience, 
 to let experience do its work, to give themselves 
 time to make up their minds for themselves,, 
 instead of allowing them to be made up for them 
 by any passing impulse, or any rising wave oi 
 opinion, or any influence of some great and 
 honoured master of thought. So that we shall 
 venture, upon the whole, to assert that, due 
 allowance being made for alterations in men's ways 
 of regarding and stating things, Butler's appeal to 
 
294 A XEW ANALOGY. 
 
 tlie sense of prudence and cool consideration of 
 what is best for the welfare of man is not become 
 at all obsolete. 
 
 But the writer will not further pursue a topic 
 so delicate in itself and so little in accordance 
 with his own personal feelings, that only the 
 sense of duty to the illustrious author, whose 
 method he has presumed to copy, would have 
 induced him to say as much as he has. -He 
 is far too sensible of the faults and tenden- 
 cies which beset the weakness of human nature 
 when engaged upon such great matters as 
 the investigation (whether friendly or hostile) 
 of religious belief, and far too keenly alive to 
 the possibility of having yielded to their influence 
 in his own work, to take upon himself to make 
 accusations, for the sake of making them, against 
 other persons wiser and more capable than himself. 
 In the treatise which he now concludes it may 
 be that what seems to him (and was certainly 
 intended to be) cool and cautious reasoning from 
 admitted facts will be condemned by others as 
 ingenious and even uncandid misrepresentations 
 
CONCLUSION, 295- 
 
 of the case or perverted deductions from mistaken 
 premises. But this is for the reader to decide. 
 And in this spirit he bids those who have- 
 accompanied him thus far, farewell. 
 
 CHABLKS DICKENS AJI> KVANS, CRYSTAL FALACK PBSSS. 
 
6T 
 
 34136 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY