SOME MODERN DIFFICULTIES NINE LECTURES. BY THE REV. S. BARING-GOULD, M.A., AUTHOR OF ' THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF, 'LIVES OF THE SAINTS,' ETC. LONDON : W. SKEFFINGTON, 163, PICCADILLY. 1875. 637 PREFACE. Six of the following lectures were delivered " ad Clerum " in the Trophy Room of S. Paul's Cathe- dral, by kind permission of the Dean and Canons, in the week before Advent, 1874. They were listened to with attention and interest, and I was requested to publish them. Their object is to draw the attention of the Clergy to some of the difficulties which beset minds at the present day in the matter of Christian belief; and to show that, granting nearly every- thing established by natural science and Biblical criticism, our Faith in God the Creator, and in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, need not be shaken. I desire also to protest with all my heart against the attitude assumed by so many of the Clergy towards science and Biblical criticism. It seems amazing that it should be necessary for one to utter a word of warning on such a subject, but the follow- ing extract from the ' Times ' of December 1st, 1874, a 2 MS2138O iv PREFACE. which came into my hands whilst these pages were passing through the press, proves that such a pro- test is not uncalled for. "The Bishop of l preached on Sunday evening at the first of a series of special Advent services, held in the nave of Cathedral. The Bishop took his text from the nth verse of the 1 8th chapter of S. Matthew ' For the Son of man has come to save that which was lost.' His Lordship compared the history of the four Gospels with the * Gospel of Science,' which had now so many prophets and apostles, and asked what the latter Gospel was. Was it even good news for man ? In it there was no eternity or here- after ; no Divine life, and, properly speaking, no humanity ; that all that was within us was bestial, and we shared it with the brutes no virtue, no vice, good nor evil. It made us mere automatons, mechanically moved according to our molecular structure moved by atoms coming none knew whence and going none knew where. He should not stop to ask whether it were a true or false Gospel or true or false news. He would only ask if it were good news ? That Gospel of Science, if a Gospel at all, was a Gospel for the strong and the clever, but not for the poor, the weak, the sick, or the suffering. It was a Gospel which taught mankind to live as the brutes, in which the strong trampled down the weak and the poor ; it was a Gospel according to which the institutions and hospitals for the sick and the incurable were a scientific mistake. It taught us to fight, to trample, and push our way in the world, no matter what we fought with or what we trampled down, and if we succeeded we could eat, drink, and be merry, for nothing was to come hereafter ; and if we did not succeed, why should we lead a useless life ? for we should be no longer in the fore-front of humanity. Society had no need of us, and we could take ourselves out of the way crawl into a hidden place as a sick or wounded animal did into some deep thicket to die away from its fellows. That was the Gospel that in this our day was set up against the grand old story ' The Son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.' The Gospel for the lost was what humanity needed, not the Gospel for the strong the Gospel for the weak, for the poor, for the dying, for the outcast, for the suffering. That was a Gospel that no 1 I omit the designation purposely. PREFACE. v human philosopher had ever discovered, and that no natural science could ever reveal to mankind. Thank God for the old story in our Bible Gospels that which philosophers had not yet robbed us of. As we stood by the sick beds and looked at the dying, as we minis- tered to the sick and the suffering, we thanked God we had the old story still to prove that the Son of man came to seek and save that which was lost. That was the only safe foundation on which human society could securely rest." Is it not piteous to see science thus misrepre- sented, science which labours night and day to alleviate the maladies of human nature ! It is necessary for the Bishops, as well as our inferior Clergy, to learn that the Gospel of Science is as Divine as any historical Gospels of Christ ; that one is as much a revelation as are the others, that rightly understood there can be no antagonism between them. To pit the canonical Four against the Gospel of Science is like the work of those critics who pit S. John against the Synoptics. Such a passage as that quoted reads like an extract from the ' Osservatore Romano ' on Pro- testant civilization. The same ultramontane viru- lence, misrepresentation, injustice. If to the Ultramontane we say, " Render unto Caesar the things that be Caesar's," we may say to our divines, " Render also to God the things that are God's ;" for the truths disclosed to science are as certainly Divine as are the truths revealed to Apostles and Prophets, only, the truths belong to a different order. The Gospel of Science without Christianity is Vl PREFACE. false because one-sided. And Christianity without science is also imperfect. God has many aspects ; the Church reveals one, science reveals another. For myself, I can truly say that with every fibre of my soul I cleave to the Catholic faith, and to the Gospel of Science ; that with quiet composure I can hold simultaneously the truths revealed to the Church and revealed to science, and patiently wait till apparent contradictions shall be solved by the outpouring of more abundant light. Philo says that the Word, which is the manna feeding the soul of man, is made into two cakes, tasting of honey and of oil, and that the one is the Word revealed through science, and the other is the Word in religion. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT i LECTURE II. ON MYSTERIES 22 LECTURE III. THE MYSTERY OF CREATION 38 LECTURE IV. THE MYSTERY OF MAN 56 LECTURE V. PRIMEVAL MAN 71 LECTURE VI. BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. I. THE OLD TESTA- MENT . .. .. 93 vui CONTENTS. LECTURE VII. BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 2. THE NEW TESTA- MENT 116 LECTURE VIII. THE MYSTERY OF EVIL 145 LECTURE IX. THE INCARNATION .. 161 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. WHEN Peter Abelard appeared before the Council of Sens, he found Bernard of Clairvaux occupying a pulpit in the midst, with a string of extracts culled, or pretended to be culled, from Abelard's writings, which he called on the assembled prelates to condemn. The reading of the passages was demanded, passages of deep philosophic thought in long succession, involving propositions and deductions which the bishops and abbots present had not received mental training to grasp and understand. It was a hot June day; one after another, the listeners, the judges, fell asleep, or drowsed, with their heads on their knees or uneasily reposing on their palms. Others were only kept awake by the fear lest their nodding should be interpreted as consent to the incriminated doctrines. " Damnatis ?" cried S. Bernard after each passage. " Damnamus," muttered the sleepy prelates, and some feebly mumbled only " namus. 1 ' 7 2 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. Abelard turned on his heel and left the Council. He refused to argue his case before such an assembly. And what was the ground taken up by Abelard, against which Bernard called down the thunders of the Gallican hierarchy ? That to believe aright, it is necessary to have an intelligent conception of the objects of faith ; that the powers of the mind should be called in to show that Christianity is not an incoherent jumble of dogmas, but a rigidly co-ordinated system of truths, such as the reason can admit without abdicating its throne. After a long winter, minds were bursting from sleep, were expanding, and stretching towards light and air. The time was come for the Church to throw herself into the heart of this young, vigorous life, and if she were divine, to direct its aspirations. Bernard's horizon was too narrow for him to admit the possibility of such a course. It never over- leaped his abbey walls. When, at the exhortation of his friends, he entered the Paris schools, it was only to preach with fervid eloquence to the assem- bled scholars to fly the tree of knowledge a serpent was coiled about it to come forth out of Babylon, and bury the new-found talent in the heavy clay of monastic routine. If I do not mistake, we stand at a period in the history of intellectual development not unlike that of the twelfth century. There were daring THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 3 speculators then ; there is no lack of audacity in speculations now. The Church, forgetting the shriekings of the Clairvaux prophet, accepted the task Abelard claimed for her, and produced Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventura, who led the swollen stream of thought into sober channels. It may be that we are dazzled with the flash, and stunned with the explosion of new ideas falling round us on every side ; that our old land- marks seem to be made the butts at which modern speculation is hurled. But this is no excuse for our remaining idle, stark, wincing, sighing at every plunge of the iron hail. We are often vastly in error if we conclude that because new opinions by their explosion shake our towers, that therefore they are levelled against them. To shut our eyes to the questions searching hearts and racking souls around is selfish and cowardly ; yet, alas ! it is the most common refuge. Is our only attitude to be one of flight, our only harness ignorance ? Are we to be like the tailor in battle, who sewed a plate of iron over his back, and ran away ? Is the position of the pursued ostrich, with its head under the sand, either digni- fied or prudent ? We cannot prevent the questions which are in B 2 4 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. the wind from lighting and germinating all around us, in the fields we are set to dress. What patient life-long study, what concentrated thought brought to bear on a vast accumulation of carefully collected and finely sifted data, have we got in modern science ! How conscientious in its treatment of the subjects it handles, how cautious in drawing deductions, how logical in application of them ! And what is the answer from countless pulpits, not in England only, but in France and Germany as well ? An anathema. The effervescing curate shrieks "Damnamus," and the easy rector mumbles " namus ! " and who heeds ? Not the Abelards ; they turn on their heels with a sneer at the fool's paradise we have created for ourselves, and refuse to dart their logic into our heavy ears. Not the active, expanding minds of the readers of our day they see nakedly which way reason runs. Authority is a wherry blundering across its path, to be run down and swamped, if it will not clear out of the course. It is a mistake, it is worse than a mistake, it is an injustice, to condemn opinions which we have never seriously set ourselves to understand. If the conclusions arrived at be sound, let us accept them ; if they seem to us to controvert established beliefs, either those beliefs are human glosses on divine revelation, or the scientific conclusions rest on insufficient data. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 5 It is a mistake, it is worse than a mistake, it is a sin, to assume that a new scientific or critical discovery ruins the foundations of our belief, be- fore we have thoroughly mastered it and have had time to estimate its bearings on religious doctrines. Rome trembled at the Copernican system, and doomed Galileo to recantation. Yet revelation has survived the discovery that the world goes round the sun. " E pur si muove." Let us be cautious lest we, like the Inquisition which condemned the great astronomer, make ourselves the laughing- stocks of the future. At one time the fossil shells in our chalk hills, the saurian bones in our lias beds, were shown as manifest confirmations of the Mosaic narrative of the universal deluge. Scandalized beyond measure were our grand- mothers when geologists parted lias from chalk by a chasm of ages, and protested that even the modern chalk was earlier than the Flood by a thousand centuries. To ruin a cherished evidence of Bible revelation was profanity. To abandon this proof was to wreck Christianity. Yet it is all accepted now. " E pur si muove." And now we have strange disclosures of the law of evolution discovered to rule the world ; of the antiquity of man, and his gradual emancipation from the stage of ape. 6 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. How far these are established on conclusive evidence, how far they are hasty deductions from data inaccurately observed, I cannot now say. What is true will survive, what is erroneous will fall. The survival of one sort of truth cannot im- peril the life of other truths ; though it may sift out truths from conjectures. A robust, long-lived con- jecture is often accepted as a truth. Truth, from whichever quarter it comes, should not scare us. "Reason," says Justin Martyr, " commands those who are good, and lovers of wisdom, to cultivate and love Truth alone, casting aside the opinions of their ancestors if they be wrong." l A few years ago I was invited to attend a meeting of a clerical debating society. The subject of discussion was " Clerical Reading." Fifteen clerics attended. The chairman opened the topic, and each present was expected to speak on it. The first, in a florid speech, declared that one book alone was needed, before whose effulgence every human composition faded the Bible ; let that be the one, the only study of the Christian minister. A second rose and advised the addition to the library of one book more the hearts of his parishioners. A third recommended the daily paper; a fourth the 'Cornhill Magazine;' a fifth Scott's ' Commentary ; ' a sixth Simeon's ' Skeletons.' 1 'Apol.'i.7. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 7 None got so far even as 'The Contemporary Review.' l As I walked sadly home after this discussion, I passed some little boys sitting on a bridge, fishing for gudgeons with crooked pins. They had sat thus all the afternoon, but had caught nothing. Crooked pins catch no fish. We are grievously in error if we think that the attitude of men's minds at the present day is one of hostility to Christianity. There never was a time, probably, when men craved more sincerely for truth, panted more fervently for the water-brooks of God. At the time when the first great expansion of the Church took place, men felt a need for religious truth ; the poor and ignorant because paganism wiped no tears from their eyes ; the wise and learned because they needed something stronger as a stay than the speculations of philosophers. Christianity satisfied two great needs. The down-trodden and suffering wanted hope and sympathy ; the learned wanted a revelation in place of guesses. Christianity held up the cross and crown to the sufferer, and he accepted it without inquiring into the credentials of the Church. Aristobulus, the Jewish Peripatetic, and Philo 1 This incident, related by me to a friend, has already found its way into print from his pen. 8 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. paved the way before Christ to the Greek philo- sophical mind. Dionysius and the Alexandrian school after him supplied the thinkers of the first three centuries with a Christian philosophy nobler, more coherent, surer founded, than those of Pytha- goras and Plato. Christian philosophy went down under the waves of barbarian invasion ; as the waters re- ceded some precious relics only were cast up in fragments. The loss of some of the most valuable books of the Areopagite, Catholic philosophy will never cease to deplore. What Dionysius did for the first age, Aquinas did for the middle age. Then, as before, the want was felt of a rational system of Christian doctrine. If men were required to hold the Faith with their hearts, they would hold it with their understand- ings also. If it were divine it would answer the appeal of the opening intellect, and feed it, as it had fed the heart. The work of Aquinas pre- vented the rupture of intellect from faith. It was full up to the level of knowledge at his day. Knowledge has been increasing since Aquinas wrote his 'Summa,' but the level of Christian philosophy has not risen with it. Science is in advance of theology ; and theology has been steadily losing ground. We look in vain for any token of rebuilding the ruins of Dionysius, and THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 9 enlarging and modernizing the deserted halls of Aquinas. Theology must master the questions of the day, or be crushed to death under them. We stand much in the same position as did the preachers of Christianity when philosophers in the third century, and schoolmen in the twelfth, asked a reason for the hope held up by the Gospel. It may be, it is, shocking to some minds, that what they have regarded since infancy as God's truth should be summoned before the bar of rea- son, and asked to give an account of itself. But it is inevitable, so long as the world is full of religions, each clamouring for the adhesion of man- kind, and each producing claims to be divine. Men in the present day do not object to believe, they feel a need of religious truths, just as did the philosophers and schoolmen of old, but their reason must be satisfied that the statements they are invited to believe are truths. They decline to hook themselves on crooked pins. Now what is the only answer we have given to this very just demand ? It is this : The Bible is God's Word, His re- velation of Truth to the world. But a second question arises, How are we to know that the Bible is God's Word, His revelation of Truth to the world ? rrtie answer given is the only one that can be 10 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. given, By the internal evidence of its truth. Now Biblical critics have set themselves to the task of examining this internal evidence, the task which we preachers of Christianity have set them. If there be that internal evidence, well and good, they will accept our first premises, and become, what we wish them to become, Bible Christians. But if, on the other hand, the first touch of criticism causes our proposition to snap and fly, and discloses flaws in what we protested was sound metal, who is to blame ? Not the critics, they are only doing what we set them to do. We must beware of not resenting the result arrived at ; our duty plainly is to re-examine our faulty propositions. And science, accepting our dogma of the Bible as the basis of all Christianity, the perfect revela- tion of Truth, having arrived at certain conclusions on the origin of species, the antiquity of man, the non-universality of the Deluge, and the like, says : Here are facts which we can prove by overwhelm- ing inductive evidence. They do not accord with the statements in that Book you say is a complete and infallible exponent of Truth ; therefore your assertion is false. What evidence is there to the truths of Christianity ? Is science wrong in taking up this line ? We have forced her to assume it ; we should be the last to blame her. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 1 1 What is the force which urges on our scientific men, our Biblical critics ? Is it not a passionate love of truth ? a craving to find out the truth ? And what is a more healthy sign of divine life than this ? Through all the shams and veneers of modern conventionalities, arms are stretched forth to clasp the true, the firm. Voices cry, when we present them with bold assertions, Are these true, or are they shams only ? Like dying Gothe, souls sick of the yellow glimmer of artificial illumination plead for " more light," not of the same quality, but white and clear, the pure beam of day. It is the cry of health, an appeal from man to God ; and God will not reject it. In what age have there been such revelations as in the present ? And why so ? Because the craving for truth in man is like the rod of Moses ; it taps the fountains of eternal truth, and makes them gush out of the flinty stone. God's revelation answers to man's cry, to man's capacity for receiving it. The healthy reason gasps for truth as the lungs pant for air. Its function is discrimination. But reason is dead and in dust among those who gulp down with equal zest a Catholic verity and a mediaeval figment ; to whom the marvels of Beth- lehem and of La Salette are alike and equally credible. The same principle which would forbid the 12 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. exercise of the reason in matters of Christian faith, would also fatally forbid the Moslem or the Parsee to desert his creed ; would consecrate to all eternity the African fetish and the Hindoo idol. To a certain class, Christianity will be always acceptable ; they will not ask to see her credentials, believing that she bears them on her truthful brow. But this is the same class as that which received her when she first appeared on earth. These will receive her for the same reason, because she satis- fies a need in their souls. Never, never, as long as the earth is full of violence, and men suffer and women weep, will the Cross disappear from the sky. The dying gladiator, that noble relic of classic art, is a picture to us of the wronged and suffering of the heathen world. The side pierced, the life- blood draining away, the head bowed hopeless to the earth. Oh the sorrows of the ancient world, unlighted by a single ray ! The tears only dried by death ! the broken hearts bleeding, bleeding, like an open vein, without a healing hand to staunch and bind them up ! Only the earth to look to in dull despair, on which to fall, into which to be trampled ! And look from that statue to the stone forms on the cathedral front, types also. Martyrs, Magda- lens, with raised eyes, pressing a book against their hearts, and finding therein rest for their souls. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 13 There are fibres in human nature which sound responsive to the vibrations of the strings in the Gospel, as I have heard the chords of a harp tremble and sound when another instrument has been played. But it is not the same with persons in easy cir- cumstances, who have had nothing particular to distress them. A good breakfast, a thriving busi- ness, a* capital dinner, and a comfortable home what do they want more ? There is no room for a want. Such persons have been brought up to adopt no course of action which does not commend itself to their reason ; to invest no capital in any venture which is not secured by guarantees. They are brought up from childhood to accept nothing on trust, to examine everything for themselves, to prove all things before they lean their weight on them. How is this acquired frame of mind to be abdi- cated when it looks to religion ? Such persons are convinced only through their reason. Other persons are open to conviction through their hearts. The door to their souls is through their reason ; the door to others' souls is through the affections. Then by all means let Christianity in by the only entrance that is available, and do not hammer at a door that has been nailed up against the east wind. 14 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. I fear we have been sadly neglectful towards this class. No doubt the conviction of the heart is more beautiful than that of the head, yet, perhaps, intel- lectual faith is as precious in God's sight as that which is emotional. The latter is impulsive and unreasoning; the former, if cold, is more sub- stantial. The constant appeal to the feelings is unwhole- some to the audience, and injurious to the preacher. It tends to make the religion of the former senti- mentality, and to effeminate the mental fibre of the latter. There was a time when the clerk ruled the minds of men. It is not to be regretted that the preroga- tive of learning is no longer confined to a caste ; it is matter of thankfulness that the key of know- ledge is in every hand. But there is one cause for regret, that the clerk in Holy Orders has allowed himself to be out- stripped in learning by the lay clerk ; and it is cause for humiliation that he does not gird up his loins and strive to overtake him. The temper of mind of a past age may have been one of indiscriminate acceptance as truth of every doctrine enunciated, but that was because the instinct of truth was then hybernating. The present age, on the other hand, is actuated by an enthusiasm for truth, and its presence the clergy should be the last to ignore or misinterpret. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 15 It may be more pleasant to the teacher to have his doctrines received without dispute, but it is certainly most mischievous. It is satisfactory to the doctor that his patients should swallow his prescriptions with implicit belief, and reverence his cochineal and water as the elixir of life ; but such a temper, if general, would en- courage quackery. Unhesitating belief in the province of religion would lead to superstition. An unreasoning faith is a tincture, an intelligent one is an essence. God asks of no man a blind faith, and what God does not ask, we should not attempt to exact. All the forces of the human spirit ; every investi- gation in every realm, physical, spiritual, humane ; every artistic creation, even every refinement in the pursuit of pleasure, are the aspiration of the soul towards truth. The truths men see are, indeed, partial ; but they are the irradiations of the sovereign, all-embracing Truth. Truth is a light which invades the soul, and brings to it the sense of certainty ; evidence of a fact or of a law. It does not depend upon the will, which seeks often in vain to elude it ; it masters, penetrates, absorbs the will ; it is a new sensation, like the magnetizing of the needle. The iron bar that lay listless wherever it was flung, when once animated 1 6 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. by this new tendency, rests nowhere but pointing to its poles. If we take the mathematical verities, the clearest there are, is it not certain that so soon as the mind has resolved a problem, it rests in the solution with the relief of an exhausted swimmer who touches land ? Moral truth is not as tangible ; but it does not carry with it less light. It -is produced less from a syllogism than from an intuition of the soul. The jury which pronounces on the guilt of a culprit does not seek the same sort of demonstration as is contained in a geometrical theorem. The research is through an analysis of acts and motives, difficult and precarious, and reason would never thread its way, were it not preceded by conscience with a torch. Truth in the analytical sciences lies at the bottom of the analysis, and the certainty of finding it there constitutes the attraction of the pursuit. Without the conviction that a certain result would crown the effort, there would be no research. This conscience of truth, this passion for truth, establishes a filiation of the human soul from God, who is the plenitude of truth. The instinct of truth is the appeal of man to God through reason, just as love is the appeal of man to God through the heart. So far as we are permitted to comprehend God's THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. \7 design with respect to man, it would appear that each instinct is given to man to lead him to perfec- tion. The man, therefore, who cultivates only the emotional side of his being, is incomplete ; and the same may be said of the. man who sacrifices the heart to the head. One instinct rectifies another, so that there is always a tendency to a general result. An one-sided development is a moral monstrosity. A partial and progressive conquest of truth is the supreme exercise of intelligence ; it is the duty laid on individuals, and on all humanity ; the goal to which they must tend through heart and through head, the windows through which the soul sees heaven, the conduits through which truth flows in. Perhaps future felicity, which religion promises, may consist in the spirit penetrating farther and farther by knowledge and love into the essence of the infinite Being. But in the meantime, the efforts of science from the beginning of the world are the striving of the mind to raise a little now, to-morrow more, the corner of the veil that covers the prin- ciples of facts, the laws by virtue of which they are engendered. But God is the cause of all law, the source of all principles. What, then, is human science but the search after God ? That it is sometimes hasty in its conclusions is not to be wondered at. This arises from the im- C 1 8 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. petuosity of the soul in its pursuit, which obscures its judgment, and leads it to make premature generalizations, and to forget the verity that truths are complex and mutually control one another. I have insisted, somewhat warmly, on the fact that modern science and Biblical criticism are not irreli- gious, anti-Christian ; that, on the contrary, they are eminently religious and Christian, inasmuch as the mainspring of their activity is the passion for truth. This is not, indeed, the light in which they are regarded by pious souls reposing in traditional belief. The daring speculations of science, of criti- cism, of philosophy, afflict them with a panic. The water of their pool is troubled ; they cannot think that an angel has descended into it, to give it healing virtue. The progress of science is viewed with appre- hension, as though threatening the precious realm of faith ; every discovery is a Khivan expedition bringing science nearer to their confines, and con- veying a threat of invasion. Better intervening wastes of barbarism than such close proximity with civilization everywhere. No doubt that scientific and critical and philo- sophic speculation is often daring ; but what would science, criticism, philosophy be without specula- tion ? To deprive them of it is to pronounce their THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 19 death warrant. Speculation is to science what the tendril is to the vine. Before it ascends, it thrusts out a feeler, and that feeler is a conjecture. If it lays hold of facts, it pulls up all its wealth of leaf and fruit a stage higher. Speculation is to science what the eye is to the snail. The daring guess is projected forward to survey the ground before it creeps onward. No doubt that scientific men and Biblical critics have shocked somewhat roughly preconceived ideas, and we may wish to address them as Virgil ad- dressed Dante : " Look how thou walkest. Take Good heed thy soles do tread not on the heads Of thy poor brethren." But if they have been rash and rough, have not the clergy been unduly suspicious of them, unjust towards the motive that actuates them ? There is temper lost on both sides through mutual misunderstanding. The clergy and pious laymen are not wilfully obscurantists, hugging doc- trines in which they do not believe, nor are scientific men actuated by an iconoclastic spirit. If it frighten the former to see questions agitated which they thought were for ever set at rest, it irritates the latter to hear on all sides the shrill piping of those who lie stiff and stark in the icy C 2 20 THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. fetters of an unbending orthodoxy, like the spirits Dante saw in Cama : "Moving their teeth in shrill note like the stork," l and always in condemnation. When I see the activity of minds, the general agitation of spirits, which characterizes this age, I cannot doubt but that a divine breath of life has passed over the earth, a magnetic wave which has attracted and set trembling the needles within. This is no evil influence at work. Evil produces torpor, death ; good produces life, activity. We are at a transition period in the life of Christianity, who can doubt it ? The last word on Christianity has not been uttered. Every divine verity contains in itself manifold truths, and the epiphany of each manifestation is preceded by a movement in the spiritual world. The days of the Lord never come, unless there is first an awakening of the dead. The excitation of minds in the third century preluded the advent of theology. Through the preceding age Christianity had been a religion of facts. Then, without abandoning one fact, it unfolded a theology. The convulsions of the sixteenth century were the precursors of a new manifestation, under which we now live ; Christianity became a system of philan- thropy. Again, after a long rest, the forces which stir 1 Dante, 'Inferno,' xxxii. THE ASPECT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 21 spirits are moving. Never, perhaps, since the dawn of the Day Star, has there been such a shuddering, a rending of tombs, and rising from the dead. Does this presage the death of Christianity ? God forbid that we should entertain such a thought ! It precedes the advent of a new expansion, a new revelation of the truth contained in Christianity. Each manifestation has answered some need felt by the age which saw its birth. And the sense of that need is evoked by the touch of God. II. ON MYSTERIES. AT the entrance of an Egyptian temple stood on either side a range of sphinxes, symbols to all who entered that they were approaching mystery. It is over the sphinxes in Christianity that men stumble nowadays. Why, they ask, should there be mystery in religion ? Why should we be called upon to give credence to that which we cannot understand ? A religion to be divine, to be suitable for man, must be devoid of mystery. The objection is plausible enough, but its plausi- bility is all that it has to recommend it. -In the temple of every human science, if the sphinx does not watch at its gate, it crouches within, in its last recess, behind a veil. Penetrate as far as you will, through the propylaeum, the nave, thrust aside the veil on which the eyes of genera- tions have rested, and which they have been con- tented to regard as inscrutable, press on into the sanctuary, and the mysterious sphinx is there. In every science we have to admit the presence ON MYSTERIES. 23 of the inexplicable, the insoluble. We give a defi- nition of it, and are satisfied that by naming it we have learned all about it. The definition of one age becomes the question of the next. The mythic father of the House of Cleves was by name unknown ; unknown he dwelt with his bride at Nymwegen, for a year and a day. A fatal curiosity urged her to ask his origin. Then a swan leading a shallop by a silver chain came swimming down the Rhine ; the sad bridegroom entered the boat, and the swan swam away with him into the region of mystery, and was never seen again. Science embraces mysteries and accepts them as facts, she governs, becomes a mother by them ; but her fatal curiosity prompts her to ask too closely their nature, their origin, and they disappear from her sight. The final answer of to-day is the starting point of inquiry to-morrow. We are ever in pursuit, but never attain the perfect solution of every enigma. One mystery involves another, like Chinese puzzle-boxes. We open one, it contains a second, the second a third, the third a fourth, and so on till we come to the last ; but in Nature there is no last box to be broken open, the succession, is infinite. It is unjust to expect of religion, what is ad- mitted as necessary in science, to argue that mys- tery is unsuitable to the service of man in the realm of religion, when we live and act upon the 24 ON MYSTERIES. assumption of unsolved mysteries in our daily transactions. Who doubts the identity of his personality with the little child of thirty years ago, and the youth of twenty ? And yet that identity is a mystery. Of what am I constituted ? I am a congeries of matter, that is my body ; my soul is the resultant of all the forces packed up in the atoms of which my flesh, and blood, and bone, and nerve are composed. But what is that which collects material, dis- tributes it, builds up neurine cells here, weaves fibrine there, forges rubies in the caverns of lung and heart, and rolls them in the rivers of artery and vein ? What is that which assimilates some matter and rejects other ? In the midst of the incessant flux of matter and change of forces, where, what am I ? I have not an atom in my body which con- stituted part of me when I was a little child ; not a force that acted on my centre then acts on it now. Why then am I the same ? What creates my identity ? How explain my memory ? How comes it that lighting suddenly on an old copy of ' Red Ridinghood ' I had pored over when I first learned how to read, and have not seen since, causes such a trembling in the finest, inner- most fibres of my heart ? That crimson cloak and gamboge basket are perfectly familiar to me ON MYSTERIES. 2$ even the blue patch of paint, extending from the little gown to the wolfs snout, though I have not seen them for thirty-five years. The brain par- ticles, which received that impression more than thirty years ago, have gone through strange travels ; they have been wafted off and utilized by herb and flower;, the bee gathered them out of the heart of a rose, and built them into walls of wax, and the wax has burnt in a lustre at a duchess' ball, and the carbonic particles have drifted away, to be breathed in by the lungs of the fresh grass, and the grass has been consumed by the sheep, which served your meal to-day ; but the old ' Red Ridinghood ' is nothing to you, who have woven these particles into your brain ; and I I cannot look at it without turning my face to the wall. How is this ? What constitutes that identity in me which ' Little Red Ridinghood ' has revealed ? The sphinx is there. I take up on my finger this tiny grain of sand. Little grain, What are you ?* Answer me. There is weight, there is shape, there is colour, there is consistency. I can seat you in a scale, or weigh you in water, and tell your actual or your specific gravity. I can hold you down under a magnifying glass and measure your facets and angles. I can ascertain your powers of polarizing light. I can register your hardness. A hundred years ago you were only a bit of sand. Look up, 26 ON MYSTERIES. granule ; you are silex to-day. We know all about you. Your name is silex. Silex, to be sure, yes, silex, that is flint. Are we satisfied ? May we dismiss you to your place ? No, little atom, we must know more. What is silex ? Why do your crystals always form so many faces ? Why are you not soluble in nitric acid ? Why not disposed to oxidize ? I know as a fact that you are not ; but I want the reason of these facts. Ha ! no answer. The sphinx is there, in the little grain. I doubt the navigation of human reason, which wrecks on a petty particle of sand that I blow from off my nail. There is a mystery, a miracle, hanging daily above our heads. Hitherto it has baffled science. It is a daily enigma, a daily apparent defiance of an universal law. A sphinx set in the sky the sun. The law of the equilibrium of forces and the indestructibility of matter is perfectly established. Yet the sun defies that law, or rather, let me say, we are, as yet, incapable of applying this funda- mental, primary law to it. The photosphere of the sun is composed of incan- descent metallic clouds. We can analyse those fiery vapours, and tabulate the metals of which they are composed. Combustion is chemical action. The metals in ON MYSTERIES. 2/ the photosphere are being combined with some gas, probably hydrogen. The light and heat emitted are the forces given out, as these metals are converted into salts, hydrides, which will be precipitated upon the solid surface of the sun, in an unflagging rain of ash. From the beginning of time there has therefore been an incessant liberation of force in the modes of light and heat, radiated into infinite space. Here and there these waves break upon a planet. We walk and rejoice in their glory and warmth, consume some and roll back others, which ripple away through boundless regions in ever-widening circles. There is, therefore, a daily, hourly, inces- sant exhaustion of the forces in the sun. But if so, then the attraction of the sun must be sensibly diminishing, our orbit be steadily widening, our year lengthening, our seasons ex- panding. Such, however, is not the case. According to the law which science recognizes as infallible, the sun must receive a return of force in exact equivalent to the amount expended. And as the force is radiated into space, from space the equivalent must return, or the balance be destroyed. And whence comes the metallic supply that feeds the voracious orb, and whence the hydrogen to make them flame ? If these had been erupted from 28 ON MYSTERIES. the body of the sun, it would have burnt itself out long ago. Metal once converted into cinder cannot be used up again. It has given off something in marrying hydrogen light and heat, so much latent force, which is now raying away, away, eternally in the vast abysses of space. But if there be a steady accession of material from without, in meteoric showers, for instance, then the bulk of the sun must be steadily increasing under the unfailing cinder rain. And if the mass of the sun be increasing by the acquisition of addi- tional matter, then so is its total weight, its power of attraction. We are being drawn nearer to the sun, our orbit is contracting, our years, our seasons, are shortening. No doubt some day this mystery will be ex- plained. But till it is, science has no right to discredit religion because it is not bare of mys- teries. Mysteries, then, surround us, are above us, under our feet, are in us, are everywhere. We must expect, therefore, to find them in religion ; and the existence of mysteries in the Christian faith is no argument against its truth. Yet to hear the objections raised against Chris- tianity, one would suppose that a mystery was an offence to the understanding ; that it is unendur- able for a rational spirit to be required to admit certain statements which it cannot sound, which it ON MYSTERIES. 29 cannot demonstrate with the precision of a problem in one of the exact sciences. i. Mysteries are relative. A mystery is a truth which we do not under- stand. What is mysterious to me may be perfectly explicable by you. The rising of water in a bent pipe to its own level, to the height whence it entered the tube, is a mystery to the labourer laying down a pipe between a spring and a cistern. To me it is no mystery. I know that what to him is a phenomenon is obedi- ence to a law. The water rises at one end of the pipe to the level at which it enters it at the other end, because the column of air at one orifice must balance the column of air at the other orifice. This is conclusive to the plumber. But I am uneasy about my law. I ask, Why has the air got weight ? And I am told that the air has got no weight ; that weight is only another name for the attractive force exercised on a substance by the earth. But why has the earth this attractive power ? Because it has force of cohesion. The attraction of gravitation is the resultant of the forces of cohe- sion in the atoms which constitute the earth. And why have these atoms cohesion ? What is an atom ? Produce one. 30 ON MYSTERIES. My friends, we are stumbling in the dark over a multitude of sphinxes. But to return to my point. Mysteries, I said, are relative. They are relative to the degree of knowledge in each man. What is mysterious to me is not mysterious to another. The mechanism of the steam engine is a mystery to me. The spectroscope is a mystery to you. A track of light lies before every man, illumined by his own knowledge, but all around, on every side, rise phantoms and darkness. Standing in a fir plantation, and looking straight forwards, one sees an avenue reaching away to light and sky ; but on right and left is a labyrinth. Yet another man a yard or two off, has the same vision of an aisle of tree trunks and o'erarching branches, and where you stand is confusion only. There is a great difference among men in the power of discerning truths, and the discernment of a truth is the rolling back of mystery. There is a difference in aptitude for receiving truths. There is a hierarchy of genius. Some minds are more enlightened, with greater capacities than others. The more extended the knowledge, the less of mystery. All the intelligences of crea- tion stand on different stages of a scale which stretches from earth to heaven, and each has his sweep of horizon more or less extended according to the elevation at which he stands, the highest ON MYS TERIES. 3 1 intelligence commands the widest circle ; but it is a circle nevertheless ; it has its circumference, and beyond that horizon broods mystery. As he widens his circle, he widens his ring of limitations, of the unknown, of mystery. What is a mystery at one time of life is not a mystery at another. This follows from the fact of man being con- stantly undergoing education. Things seen par- tially and imperfectly in early life are seen perfectly in later years. The mist rises as the day advances. 2. The existence of mysteries is a necessity. If mystery be that which lies over the frontier of the known, then mystery must exist wherever knowledge is partial ; and partial knowledge must be, in finite minds. To God there can be no mystery, because He sees all things perfectly in all their relations. But this is not possible with finite minds. The intellect may embrace all the laws which govern nature, but it cannot pursue every application of them to each individual worm or lichen. Are we justified in concluding that we know all the laws and forces of nature perfectly? In 1783 Montgolfier sent up the first fire-balloon. To ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the balloon was a miracle ; it ascended in defiance of the laws of gravitation. When it was ascertained that hot 32 ON M YS TERIES. air was lighter than cold air, the ascent of the balloon ceased to be regarded as miraculous ; it ranged itself -under application of known laws. When it was proclaimed that the chemical con- stituents of the sun and of the fixed stars could be tested, it was thought impossible. Who could mount to sun and star and analyse their flames ? When the spectroscope was exhibited, the state- ment which seemed an insult to reason was acknowledged as true. Modern scepticism objects to miracles, says that those claimed as having been wrought by Christ were impossible. God could not violate His own laws. No, He could not ; but there may be laws and forces at His command which as yet we know imperfectly, or not at all, by which these marvels may have been wrought. We are not justified, then, in asserting that miracles are impossible ; the only legitimate ground of argument against them is defect of evidence establishing that they took place. Man, then, must see things partially; and this partiality in his vision is the cause of mystery lying on his horizon. God could not, even if He would, make mysteries disappear from our eyes. For were He to do so, He would make our reason unlimited ; and infinite intelligence resides with God alone. To give man absolute knowledge would be to cause an explosion ON MYSTERIES. 3 3 in his brain. Infinite knowledge cannot be crushed into limited capacities. "Not by caprice nor by choice," says Dante, " has God kept all things veiled, but by necessity." 3. Mystery is necessary for us. For our happiness. It is mystery which gives zest to every science and to art. For if a science were limited, it would lose its interest. It is the immeasurable depth, the never- exhausted variety, which exists in every depart- ment of the study of nature which draws on the mind, captivates the attention, quickens observa- tion, creates and feeds research as an absorbing passion. The primeval men, says Indian tradition, lived in a subterranean abode. They perceived long fibres hanging to them from above, roots that stretched feeling down for moisture. They laid hold of these- trailing fibres, and crept up and up ; as they ascended they became aware of light and space and air, and so at length they reached the surface of the world. Every science is some such thread let down out of infinite light and truth and space, and up them men are climbing, light brightening, truth growing, space widening around them as they mount. And art is only attractive because of mystery in D 34 ON MYSTERIES. it, because it too lays hold of a fibre of infinity. If it were bound round with impracticable barriers, if it could but mix its colours and vary its designs, like the changing pieces in a kaleidoscope, it would lie down and die of despair. The permutations of a kaleidoscope are so many, the combination of ideas in an artist's brain are so many. There is nothing new under the sun. A hot, hard band contracts the brow. The soul is stunned and stupefied. Greek ecclesiastical iconography is all rule ; and Greek art is no more. A sacrifice of Abraham must have a green tree on the right and a brown tree on the left ; the angel must have one hand up and the other down in a prescribed upper corner. The ram must be caught in a thicket by both horns, and must be in profile. Abraham must be in such a posture, and in such coloured garments of such and such a cut ; and Isaac in such and such. It is said that in every picture you must show a peep of sky, or a way out of it into the sun. There is no opening in Greek iconography for the artist's soul to break out, ruffle its wings, dip them in heaven's dew, and soar skywards. " In that which is secret," says Humboldt, " there is an inexplicable charm, a breath of infinity." S. Theresa, if I remember rightly, had a vision of hell. Not flames and the undying worm were its torment, but its drear monotony; its dark wall ON MYSTERIES. 3$ opened glimpses of no future, were hung with no ideal pictures. Everything was finite, and there- fore the soul perished with suffocation. The soul had lost all sight of God, of the infinite, and this was death eternal. And what is more distressing to the human soul than to be windowless ? Weariness of spirit, ennui, is the languishing of the soul in the presence of things it knows all about. Give it a new pursuit, open it a passage into some fresh path, and life, zest, happiness revive. Take the first and simplest illustration that occurs a Swiss inn in rainy weather. Hour after hour, day after day, of a curtain of falling parallel lines without, of three poor lithographs on the wall, and two Tauchnitz volumes on the table. The monotony becomes maddening. Everything in the room is perfectly well known, every attitude in the lithographs, every situation in the old novels. The mind is dying of boundary. It cannot break through book or picture. Mystery is therefore a necessary consequence of the sense of the infinite ; its presence is the earnest given to the soul that it may expand and aspire. The progress of knowledge does not lead to the destruction of mystery, but to the revelation of more and more of it. Every newly-acquired light throws back the problem without dissipating it ; and if it seems to illumine one mystery, it is only D 2 36 ON MYSTERIES. that it may disclose a grander, more solemn one behind it ; and this is necessarily the case, for mys- tery is only another name for the stage of the infinite at which our reason halts. The reason may grow eternally, and eternally advance, but it never can attain infinity. 4. If, then, mystery necessarily spring into existence through the contact of the finite with the infinite ; if the existence of mystery be a necessary consequence of the finality of man's knowledge, then its presence in Christianity is no argument against the truths of Christianity. If religion did not contain mysteries, if it did not touch the infinite, it could not be divine, it would not be true. It would be no religion, but a cul-de-sac. Every science, nay, every action of our lives, reposes on the assumption of hypotheses. We assume the objective reality of the pheno- menal world, the unity of the thinking I, myself; our freedom, causation, and a thousand other things, which are not demonstrable. To systematize chemistry, the existence of the atom which no man had ever seen or weighed was assumed and given weight ; and on this gratuitous assumption the science of chemistry was reared. The point and the line are defined, and geometry starts to life, but point and line are not ; there are no such things, never were, yet without the assumption of them geometry would be impossible. ON MYSTERIES. 37 What is the unit ? absolute, indivisible ? We have no unit in the world. Everything is com- pound, multipliable, divisible, and subdivisible. Nowhere in the world are we shown the unit en- gendered of nothing, indivisible by itself, which multiplied and divided by itself is always and only one, immutably itself. The existence of the unit is hypothetical, and it lies at the base of numbers and of mathematics. What hypotheses are to science, that revelations are to religion, foundations on which to build. The whole of Christian morals and religious worship stands to the facts of revelation in the same position as the problems of Euclid stand to the definitions and axioms. The fundamentals of religion must be either hypotheses or revelations ; but whether one or the other they must be mysteries, for they relate to the unknown, the unknowable. As Dante in ' Paradise' sings : " The deep things which here I scan Distinctly, are below to mortal eye So hidden, they have in belief alone Their being ; on which credence, hope sublime Is built" III. THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. APART from the world which God has called into being, God is unknowable, because inconceivable. I AM that I AM is the only name by which He can be designated apart from creation. Oblite- rate from your thoughts the existence of the phenomenal world, and try to conceive a notion of God, it is impossible. When we say that God is good, is wise, is infinite, is all-powerful, we use ex- pressions to which we have only a right because of the existence of the world ; and these expressions are purely relative, they describe the position in which God stands to creation. He is good because the creatures of this world are happy ; He is wise, because the laws of this world are admirable ; He is infinite, because space predicates infinity ; He is all-powerful, because force acting through matter emanates from Him. Destroy matter, and what is force ? Remove boundaries, and what is infinity ? Destroy the world, and laws cease to rule, wisdom disappears from our horizon, and with it the con- ception of goodness. THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 39 The existence of the world is therefore the revela- tion of God's nature in relation to phenomena, not in itself, for of that we do, we can know nothing. This truth is well brought out in the Book ' Zohar/ one of the earliest monuments of the Kabala : "Before God manifested Himself," in creation, "when all beings were yet concealed in Him, among the unknown He was the most unknown. Then the idea of God can be given no name, it can only be indicated by an interrogation. He first formed the imperceptible point, and that point was His thought" of creation "and that thought assumed a mysterious and holy form, and He clothed it with a rich and shining vestment ; then the universe was, and God was thenceforth name- able." 1 " Before God had created form in the world, before He had produced any image, He was alone, resembling nothing, inconceivable. For who could conceive Him as He is, before creation ? what was the form by which He could be seen ? " 2 Now, there is a question which man has often asked, and which will always interest him. What is the origin of the world ? As long as man is engrossed only in getting out 1 ' Zohar,' fol. I and 2 ; fol. 105. * Zohar' is a collection of Caba- listic maxims and philosophy, not by one hand, or of one date, but varying from the first to the seventh century. See Frank, " Le Kabale," in the 'Memoires de 1' Academic,' Paris, 1839. 2 ' Zohar,' fol. 42. 40 THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. of the soil what will sustain life, he asks no ques- tions, any more than does the ox or the ass, content with its turnip or thistle. The mind of the Central African negro, of the Australian or Papuan savage, has never done aught but grovel. From time immemorial- it has run on all fours, seeing only pumpkins and maniocs, and seeing them only with an eye to eating them. There are minds that never hatch, that lie per- manently coiled up in their shells, which are to them at once a cradle and a coffin, satisfied with the air-bubble and yelk that nourish embryonic life, without a wish to burst into activity, to the surprises, the contests, aye ! and the conquests of real life. But the moment man begins to think, he begins to ask questions about the world he sees. And these are the leading questions that he asks : 1. How came the world into being ? 2. Why does the world exist ? The rudest people who think have asked, How is it that the world we see, the sun, the moon, the solid earth, the plants, the beasts and birds, have come into existence ? Why is the sun constant in his course, the moon in her phases, the seasons in their sequence, the birds and beasts in their habits ? But it is only after men have cultivated thought, and have learned to look for purposes underlying THE MYSTERY OF CREATION. 41 all action, that they have further asked, Why does the phenomenal world exist ? Till we have found some answer to the first question, it is idle to speculate on the second. Let us, then, take this first problem, and seek its solution. How is it that the world came into being ? Now, before answering this question, let us see what sources of information we have to go to, on which to base a satisfactory answer. First : We have Nature herself to question, but Nature may babble to us of her childhood, she can tell us nothing of her nativity ; she can, however ? reveal to us the laws which govern her, and thence we may deduce a strong presumption as to the processes she has traversed in attaining maturity. Secondly : We have the answers of different religions, which provide us with accounts of the origin of the world. It is very clear that such accounts cannot be founded on the evidence of men. They must be either guesses or revelations. These revelations or guesses may be subdivided into two classes. They yield us, after sifting, one of two answers. They give us a creation or a cosmogony ; they represent the world as creatura, KTi