LIBRARY 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Deceived DEC 12 1892 ...... 189 
 
 ^Accessions No. /fqo-55~ . Class No. 
 
NATURAL THEOLOGY 
 
NATUKAL THEOLOGY 
 
 (Bifforb Xecturce 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 EDINBURGH IN 1891 
 
 BY 
 PROF. SIR G. G. STOKES, BART., M.P. 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 ADAM AND CHAELES BLACK 
 
 1891 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 Gifford Lectureship Modes of progress in Natural Theology Pro- 
 gress in Natural Science from laws to theories Idea of causa- 
 tion, and limitation of its scientific investigation Conception 
 of a Designing Mind behind the order of nature Qualification 
 of the idea of personality as applicable to the First Cause 
 Evasion of the idea of design Man's free will implies the 
 possession of will as belonging to the First Cause Impossi- 
 bilities in the nature of things Difficulties as to the existence 
 of moral and physical evil .... Page 1 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 Possible evolution of the solar system Bearing of the theory on 
 the argument for design Evidence of design in the structure 
 of animals Darwinian theory Its bearing on the argument 
 Difficulties introduced by extreme views Meaning and legiti- 
 mate use of evolution Enlargement of ideas as to the person- 
 ality of God compatible with belief in His care for individuals 
 Alienation produced by sin Theory of prayer Page 33 
 
 LECTUEE III 
 
 Prospective provision Infliction of pain may conduce to the general 
 good Conditions of lawfulness of infliction of pain on animals 
 Justification of capital punishment Origin of Man, creation 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 or evolution? Theological bearing of the two hypotheses 
 Creation does not make God the author of sin Its general 
 prevalence referable to heredity Question of a future life 
 Argument from difference in the conception of a past and 
 future eternity ..... Page 63 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 Anomaly of man's capacities combined with mortality Anomaly 
 of welfare not in proportion to deserts Hypothesis that man 
 consists of a mortal body and a soul surviving death Evidence 
 that the body is concerned in thought Materialistic theory 
 Difficulties of both psychic and materialistic theories Theory 
 of man's tripartite nature Possibilities which it holds out 
 Recapitulation ..... Page 88 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 Examination of the reasonableness of what professes to be revealed 
 permissible Mind involved in the origin of the system of 
 nature Origin of man Theology not concerned with the 
 mode of creation Original state of man Legitimacy of 
 motives resting on a future state Duty of acting as sup- 
 posed to be right Importance of a due balance between hope 
 and fear The conferring of immortality demands a power 
 above nature ..... Page 112 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 Natural religion fails to satisfy the craving for full conformity to 
 what is right The attainment of such a state may require 
 supernatural means The fault of the guilty may entail suffer- 
 ing on the innocent Moral restitution compatible with free- 
 dom of will Though good may arise from evil, the right course 
 is the best Moral renovation compatible with freedom of 
 
CONTENTS vii 
 
 choice Benefit may arise from uncertainty as to what is right 
 Professed explanations of what is above reason dangerous 
 Free will and foreknowledge Threefold presentation of 
 God ...... Page 140 
 
 LECTUEE VII 
 
 Meaning of evolution Illustration from coal : from certain celestial 
 phenomena "Whether the origin of life on earth can be referred 
 to evolution Whether the adoption of evolution has an atheistic 
 tendency Suggestion of a sowing origin for life on earth 
 Mutual aid in the study of religious questions Uniformity of 
 physical laws Extension to moral laws Permanence of the 
 consequences of the exercise of free will Conclusion of the 
 second instalment of lectures . . . Page 165 
 
 LECTUKE VIII 
 
 Fuller conception of the Divine Being possible through the veil 
 of humanity Advantage of a perfect example Resurrection 
 demands, like creation, a Divine Power But the supposition 
 of resurrection removes certain grave difficulties It is not 
 to be encumbered by adventitious additions Evidence of 
 design from beauty in nature Two theories of the perception 
 of colour Discussion of propriety of prayer for material advan- 
 tages, such as favourable weather . . Page 194 
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 Man's liability, without assistance, to err even as to the knowledge 
 of duty Theories as to the foundation of duty The Utili- 
 tarian System The system of Innate Ideas Advantages of 
 the latter Classification of moral virtues Duty of Truthful- 
 ness Examination of various doubtful cases Application to 
 commerce To the treatment of polygamy in non-Christian 
 countries ...... Page 223 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE X 
 
 Duty of Benevolence Its relation to bargains Discussion of the 
 lawfulness of trade in articles which may be abused Alcoholic 
 beverages and opium Aid to the poor Kindness to animals 
 Duty of obedience to the law Questions arising if the law 
 enacts what is morally wrong, or forbids what is allowable 
 Question as to the moral lawfulness of certain marriages 
 Changing views as to the relations between science and religion 
 Influence of extreme adoption of evolution Conclusion 
 
 Page 249 
 
GIFFORD LECTUKES 
 
 LECTUEE I 
 
 Gifford Lectureship Modes of progress in Natural Theology Pro- 
 gress in Natural Science from laws to theories Idea of causa- 
 tion, and limitation of its scientific investigation Conception 
 of a Designing Mind behind the order of nature Qualification 
 of the idea of personality as applicable to the First Cause 
 Evasion of the idea of design Man's free will implies the 
 possession of will as belonging to the First Cause Impossi- 
 bilities in the nature of things Difficulties as to the existence 
 of moral and physical evil. 
 
 FROM the words of the bequest by which this Lecture- 
 ship was established, it would seem that the idea of 
 the Founder was that it was possible to establish the 
 existence of a God, and to frame a perfect system of 
 rules of duty, simply by the exercise of man's intel- 
 lectual powers, exerted in a manner perfectly analo- 
 gous to that by which the physical sciences have 
 attained their present development. Difficult as the 
 task might be, it was hoped that with due and liberal 
 encouragement it might yet be accomplished. 
 
 Whether it is possible that the noble object of the 
 1 
 
2 TWO CONCEIVABLE MODES OF [i 
 
 Founder can be attained precisely in the manner 
 indicated may well be doubted. Still, I look on it 
 as the duty of the Lecturer to keep that end steadily 
 in view, endeavouring to carry out the spirit of the 
 instructions of the Founder, even though he may not 
 rigidly adhere to the letter. 
 
 In the natural sciences progress may be made in 
 two ways : one by deducing results from ascertained 
 principles, the other by framing hypotheses suggested 
 no matter how, though usually by some observed 
 phenomenon, and trying whether they will so link 
 together observed phenomena as to force on us a 
 conviction of their truth. 
 
 For example, we may start with the ascertained 
 principles of voltaic electricity and electro-magnetism, 
 and deduce therefrom the action of an electro-mag- 
 netic engine, and thus place the efficiency of such 
 machines on a truly scientific basis, and construct 
 them with a view to securing certain predetermined 
 objects objects which otherwise, if attained at all, 
 could only in all probability have been arrived at 
 after a long and laborious series of trials conducted 
 in a more or less haphazard fashion. 
 
 Again, we may study the phenomena of the colours 
 of thin plates, or of the patterns produced when light 
 from a very bright and small source passes through 
 minute apertures, etc., and ascend from these pheno- 
 mena to a conception of light as consisting of undu- 
 
i] PROGRESS IN NATURAL THEOLOGY. 3 
 
 lations ; and finally, by tracing the consequences of 
 that conception and finding how completely they fit 
 in with what we observe, arrive at a full conviction 
 that light is really of the nature supposed. 
 
 In a similar way we may conceive that progress 
 may be made in natural theology in either of two 
 ways : by deducing consequences from what we know 
 or observe, or by assuming for trial the truth of a 
 statement made on whatever authority it may be, 
 and then examining whether the supposition of its 
 truth so falls in with such knowledge as we possess, 
 or such phenomena as we observe, as to lead us to a 
 conviction that the statement does indeed express 
 the truth. It may be that the statement comes from 
 a source which professes to be a revelation made from 
 God to man. But such an employment of it as I have 
 just described is strictly analogous to our procedure 
 in the study of physical science, and does not there- 
 fore seem to be precluded by the terms of the founda- 
 tion of this lectureship. 
 
 At the very basis of natural theology, as the very 
 name implies, lies the question of the existence of a 
 God. Whence arises the belief in the existence of 
 God? Is it (1) intuitive, or (2) handed down by 
 tradition from some primeval revelation, or (3) arrived 
 at by reasoning from what we observe in nature or 
 perceive in ourselves ? 
 
 The feeling of right and wrong, the feeling ex- 
 
4 ORIGIN OF BELIEF IN [i 
 
 pressed by the words " I ought " and " I ought not/' 
 would seem to be intuitive. Of course as regards the 
 things which are deemed to be right or wrong 'there 
 is room for any amount of training, and this training 
 may be erroneous. But the question relates, not to 
 the objects towards which the feeling is exercised, 
 but to the feeling itself; is it innate, or is it simply 
 the result of training ? 
 
 It is very difficult for us, placed as we have been 
 from earliest childhood in a condition of training, to 
 say what would have been our feelings had such 
 training never taken place. But the feeling of right 
 and wrong is by no means confined to civilised 
 nations; it may well be doubted whether there is 
 any nation so barbarous that those belonging to it 
 are destitute of such a feeling. This feeling of obli- 
 gation must not be confounded with a mere fear or 
 desire of consequences. If I refrain from giving 
 myself a smart blow with a switch, which I am free 
 to do or not to do, it is not that I feel that I ought 
 not, but that I do not like the pain which I know 
 would ensue. On the other hand, the feeling of obli- 
 gation may exist quite irrespective of the thought of 
 consequences to ourselves. It is hard to believe that 
 a feeling so general might we not say universal ? 
 can be merely a result of training ; it looks rather 
 like something intuitive. But we cannot entertain a 
 feeling of obligation towards a mere law of nature ; 
 
i] THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. 5 
 
 it implies the recognition of something of the nature 
 of a being ; the recognition at least of some " power 
 above ourselves which makes for righteousness." To 
 this extent it would seem as if the recognition of a 
 God were intuitive. It is true there are some who 
 call themselves atheists, but what they reject in 
 adopting this name is probably a complex idea 
 involving far more than this. 
 
 If belief in the existence of a God were merely the 
 effect of tradition, originating in an assumed revela- 
 tion, whatever may have been the case with nations 
 possessing some amount of culture, it is hard to 
 believe that it could have survived in barbarous 
 races for so many generations ; and yet there appears 
 to be a very general belief in the existence, if not of 
 one supreme being, yet at any rate of beings higher 
 than man. Even if we suppose such a belief to be a 
 corrupted residuum of a primitive revelation, it is 
 hard to account for its preservation unless it fell in 
 with something, tended to meet some want, in the 
 human mind ; and this is not very different from 
 saying that to a certain extent the idea is intuitive. 
 
 The recognition of the existence of God derived 
 from the observation of nature seems to require a 
 farther exercise of the reasoning powers. It is very 
 difficult to divest ourselves in imagination of the 
 effect of early training, and approach the subject as 
 conceivably we might have done if, on this point, we 
 
6 ORIGIN OF BELIEF IN [i 
 
 had received no instruction. Perhaps it will be best 
 to endeavour to imagine how the thing might present 
 itself to the mind of a child on growing up. 
 
 The dawning intelligence of a little child shows 
 him how dependent he is for his wants on others : 
 on his parents, his nurse, those about him. He 
 recognises many things as done by them, and is apt 
 to get an exaggerated notion of what they can do. 
 He soon learns that their powers are more limited. 
 He finds that there are processes going on around 
 him which no human power can effect, leading to 
 results which, though most important to his well- 
 being, and that of his fellows, are such as it is 
 impossible for man to bring about. Some of these 
 bear on the face of them, or at least seem to do so, 
 unmistakable evidence of design. Take, for example, 
 the structure of the eye. The more it is examined, 
 anatomically and physically, the more forcibly is 
 one impressed with the conviction that it was 
 really designed to do that which in fact it does 
 accomplish. Our supposed infant, now come to 
 man's estate, being of a reflecting turn of mind, is 
 led to perceive that there must be some power above 
 that of man, directed by will, through the operation 
 of which these results were brought about. The 
 idea of will involves that of personality. We may 
 contemplate results as brought about through the 
 operation of natural laws ; for example, the change in 
 
i] THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. 7 
 
 the seasons is brought about by the motion of the 
 earth in its orbit combined with its motion of 
 rotation round its own axis, and these again are 
 maintained through the laws of motion combined 
 with the law of gravitation. We may subject these 
 phenomena, and the still more complicated per- 
 turbations, as they are called, of the motions of the 
 moon, to mathematical analysis ; and when we have 
 succeeded in showing that some apparent anomaly in 
 the motion is a necessary result of these laws, we are 
 in the habit of saying that we have explained the 
 apparent anomaly, or perhaps that we have referred 
 it to its cause. But in this sense of the word " cause " 
 there is evidently no room for the idea of will. It 
 would be absurd to say that gravitation chooses to 
 make a stone which had been held in the hand and 
 is let go fall to the earth. If we say that a ray of 
 light in passing from one point to another in a 
 medium of continuously varying density chooses the 
 quickest path, we merely use a metaphorical form of 
 expression, for the sake of avoiding circumlocution. 
 Will, design, implies mind, and mind as we know it 
 is an essentially personal attribute. In this sense 
 we attribute personality to the First Cause. But in 
 speaking of Him as a Personal God, we must beware 
 of falling into anthropomorphism. Personality as 
 we know it in ourselves is subject to limitations of 
 time and space ; and if we venture to speak of God 
 
8 LA VVS AND THEORIES [i 
 
 as personal (in a sense, it may be well to notice, 
 quite different from that in which the term "Person" 
 is used in another branch of theology), we must 
 beware of introducing along with the term those 
 ideas of limitation to which personality, as we know 
 it in ourselves, is subject. 
 
 As this is an important point, it may be well to 
 dwell on it at greater length. 
 
 The general process by which the boundaries of 
 science are from time to time enlarged is of this 
 nature. First, we endeavour to classify the multi- 
 tudinous facts of direct observation, and group them 
 under a comparatively small number of general state- 
 ments which we call laws. These are of an empirical 
 nature, not carrying with them the idea of causation. 
 They prepare, however, the way for a possible future 
 theory which may embrace them all. When the 
 primary empirical laws are shown to be conse- 
 quences of a hypothesis which at the same time 
 explains other phenomena quite different, and leads 
 to no conclusion at variance with observation, we 
 arrive at last at a conviction more or less firm that 
 what was at first a hypothesis assumed for trial is 
 indeed a law of nature. And now the idea of causa- 
 tion enters the mind; we speak of this ascertained law 
 of nature, or at least law which we believe to have 
 been ascertained, and take as such, as the cause of the 
 phenomena with the consideration of which we started. 
 
i] IN NATURAL SCIENCE. 9 
 
 To illustrate my meaning, let me take a concrete 
 example. The apparent motions of the planets 
 among the fixed stars must have been known from 
 prehistoric times, and in fact it is from that that the 
 very name " planet " is derived. Later on astrono- 
 mers determined with accuracy their places from 
 time to time among the fixed stars. The assemblage 
 of observations, each specifying the place of such a 
 planet at such a time, forms the "multitudinous 
 facts" which I have spoken of above. Presently 
 Kepler succeeded, after a most laborious series of 
 trials, in discovering three very simple laws accord- 
 ing to which the motions of the planets take place. 
 The previously observed places of the planets, which 
 for aught we knew might be looked on as arbitrary, 
 save of course that for the same planet they formed 
 a continuous series of some kind, were now linked 
 together in such a manner that they were capable of 
 being expressed for any time when once the numerical 
 values of a few constants were known ; and not only 
 so, but the places could be predicted beforehand, 
 which previously could only be done to a small 
 extent by a process analogous to that of prolonging 
 for a little way an unknown curve at the end of a 
 drawn portion of it. Still, these laws do not carry 
 with them the idea of causation ; they merely repre- 
 sent systematised results of observation. We feel 
 that we cannot rest satisfied with these laws ; we 
 
io IDEA OF CAUSATION [i 
 
 want to refer them to something else, of which they 
 may be regarded as consequences. Presently Newton 
 arises, and shows that these laws are all consequences 
 of an assumed universal gravitation ; of a force vary- 
 ing according to the very simple laws of direct pro- 
 portionality to the mass of the attracting body and 
 inverse to the square of the distance. 
 
 "We have now advanced from mere empirical laws 
 to a theory. We are led to recognise a property in 
 matter whereby it attracts other matter at a distance, 
 and to refer the planetary motions to a force the 
 same as that whereby an apple falls to the ground, 
 and our own bodies are retained firmly on the seats 
 on which we sit. Before such a theory is finally 
 accepted, it is requisite that we should examine it 
 into its minute consequences. With reference, for 
 example, to the planetary motions, it is a consequence 
 of the theory that Kepler's laws are only extremely 
 nearly true ; there ought to be minute deviations 
 from those laws, depending on the gravitation of the 
 planets towards one another. The assumed theory 
 is found to satisfy this rigorous test, and thus we 
 become convinced that we have indeed arrived at a 
 true explanation of the phenomena. 
 
 In thus referring the motions of the planets in 
 their orbits to a general property of matter, that 
 of gravitation, we introduce an idea of causation ; 
 we speak of the attraction of gravitation as the 
 
i] IN NATURAL SCIENCE. 11 
 
 cause of the retention of the planets in their 
 orbits. 
 
 Yet from one point of view the two things seem 
 to stand upon the same footing. In the one case, we 
 have a few simple laws which express completely 
 the motions of the planets (I here suppose the per- 
 turbations of the motion unknown and unsuspected) ; 
 in the other case, we have a still simpler law which 
 not only explains the laws of Kepler but also the 
 planetary perturbations and other phenomena having, 
 at first sight, no connection with the planetary 
 motions. Do the two cases differ more than in 
 degree ? Is there any reason why we should think 
 of causation in the one case more than in the other ? 
 
 The difference seems to me to be this. In the" 
 case of gravitation, we believe that we have arrived 
 at a knowledge of a general property of matter, which 
 we are content to regard as in a certain sense self- 
 existent ; we do not go behind it. The law of gravi- 
 tation is so simple that we hardly think of it as 
 requiring to be accounted for. But in the case of 
 Kepler's laws we have merely a succinct expression 
 for observed facts, not connected with anything out- 
 side the immediate phenomena which are thus 
 summed up. We cannot in any way regard them as 
 expressing laws of nature ; we cannot help feeling 
 that they themselves require explanation. 
 
 So long as we are content to regard the simple 
 
12 LIMITATION OF THE EXPLAINING [i 
 
 laws (such, for example, as the law of gravitation) 
 which express the highest generalisations that we 
 have attained to or expect to be able to attain to as 
 postulates which we refuse to look behind ; to which 
 we mentally attribute a sort of self-existence ; the 
 idea of design in the achievement of the results is 
 excluded ; the results follow of necessity from the 
 postulates just as the propositions of geometry follow 
 from the fundamental axioms. And the domain of 
 natural science does not extend beyond, on the one 
 hand, the discovery of these ultimate laws in which 
 we are content to rest, and on the other, the following 
 of them out into their consequences. Yet, when we 
 think about it, we cannot help feeling that these 
 ultimate laws, as we have been regarding them, are 
 not really such ; that they themselves need to be 
 accounted for, whether we do or do not see any 
 prospect of accounting for them by a process analo- 
 gous to that by which they were themselves arrived 
 at. In the former case, we may entertain a hope of 
 reaching by the methods of science to some still 
 higher generalisation ; of arriving at some law or 
 laws yet more elementary, and of which the laws 
 hitherto considered may be regarded as results. And 
 even in cases where we see no immediate prospect of 
 arriving at any such higher generalisation there may 
 be indications that something of the kind exists. 
 Take, for example, the law of gravitation. We com- 
 
i] OFFICE IN NATURAL SCIENCE. 13 
 
 monly regard this as an ultimate property of matter 
 which we do not attempt to go behind. Yet there is 
 one thing about it which is of a nature to lead us 
 very strongly to suspect that it is itself a consequence 
 of something else. We can conceive of and define 
 mass, if necessary we could even measure it, quite 
 irrespective of weight; in fact, we could do so even 
 if we knew nothing of weight or gravitation. Now 
 the force by which, in consequence of gravitation, two 
 bodies mutually attract each other (though it will be 
 convenient to regard one body as attracting and the 
 other as attracted) is subject to this remarkable law, 
 that it is proportional, other circumstances being the 
 same, simply to the mass of the attracted body. If 
 the attracting body be the earth, it comes simply to 
 this, that weight is a measure of mass. So long as 
 the attracted body is of given nature, gold suppose, 
 we might imagine two such bodies divided into small 
 portions just alike, and it comes merely to this, that 
 the particles do not screen one another from the 
 attracting body. But if the attracted body be in one 
 case suppose gold, and in another marble, we have 
 no reason a priori for supposing that the weights 
 would be equal when the masses were equal ; for our 
 chemical knowledge does not enable us to say that 
 all chemical substances are ultimately composed of 
 matter of the same kind. The fact that two bodies 
 may be compared either as to their relative masses or 
 
14 STUDY OF NATURE LEADS TO THE [i 
 
 their relative weights, and that these two modes of 
 comparison lead to exactly the same ratio, though 
 we cannot tell why, leads us to suspect that gravity 
 itself may be dependent on some physical process 
 which might conceivably at some day be understood, 
 and which, if it were, would enable us to explain 
 gravity as gravity enables us to explain Kepler's laws. 
 In other cases we do not seem to have even a glimmer 
 of an indication of a physical cause which we might 
 hope to be able to make out ; take, for example, the 
 question of the origin of life on the globe on which 
 we live. And yet in this case quite as much as, per- 
 haps even more distinctly than in the other, we feel 
 the want of a cause of some kind for that which exists. 
 
 In every case when we have ascended as far as 
 we are able from phenomena to what we call their 
 causes, we are at last brought up by reaching a stage 
 when we can proceed no farther ; when we are 
 obliged to take the highest laws that we have arrived 
 at as postulates, and reason deductively from them. 
 And yet we do not feel that those highest laws must 
 be as they are ; we feel that they themselves require 
 something to account for them. 
 
 As I have said, the deduction of results from the 
 final postulates at which we arrive when we treat the 
 observed phenomena as presenting problems to be 
 solved by referring them to purely physical causes 
 excludes the idea of design ; we do not think of our 
 
i] IDEA OF A DESIGNING MIND. 15 
 
 highest laws as capable of intention. And yet the 
 study of nature forcibly impresses us with the idea 
 of design lying somewhere. 
 
 This leads us to the conception of a designing 
 mind lying behind the furthest causes, of the nature 
 of what are called second causes, that we are able to 
 attain to, or that we could even conceivably attain to 
 by purely scientific investigation. 
 
 Let me illustrate my meaning by analogy to a 
 thing we are very familiar with. Suppose a civilised 
 intelligent man came from a country where there was 
 no such thing known or heard of as a timepiece of 
 any kind. Suppose he found a watch which he was 
 not at liberty to open for examination. All he could 
 observe would be the motion of the hands. He 
 would notice that the spaces passed over corre- 
 sponded to the interval from sunset to sunset, the 
 same or very nearly so from one day to another ; and 
 for shorter intervals he would find that while he was 
 executing a certain task capable of being repeated in 
 almost exactly the same way, suppose walking over 
 a certain distance at his normal rate, the hands 
 would move through the same angle one time as 
 another. By such observations he would learn that 
 the motion of the hands gave a measure of time, and 
 he would have no hesitation in saying that the watch 
 had been designed for this object, though how it was 
 brought about he would not know. Now, suppose 
 
1 6 E VOL UTION HOW FAR [i 
 
 the watch partially opened, so that he was able to 
 see a portion of the works. He would perceive that 
 the motion of the hands was governed by that of 
 certain wheels, which were in gear with one another 
 in a way that he could follow. He might see even 
 more, and find that there was a spring which 
 actuated the wheels. He would regard the motion 
 of the hands as evolved from that of the wheels, and 
 the motion of the wheels again as evolved from the 
 uncoiling of a spring. He might further find out 
 the balance wheel, and he would see how, by making 
 each step in the motion of the train of wheels 
 depend, as for the time in which it took place, on the 
 performance of an act always the same, the motion of 
 the hands came to be a measure of the time elapsed. 
 But though he would have accounted for the motion 
 of the hands, and the proportionality of the motion 
 to the time elapsed, by evolution from something 
 lying farther back, his original idea that the whole 
 thing was designed to serve for the measurement of 
 time would not be in the least degree weakened. 
 The motion of the hands, it is true, could not be 
 other than it is if we suppose the system of wheels, 
 the mainspring, the balance wheel given; but he 
 would see that these were constructed and put into 
 their places with a view to the function which he 
 originally discovered that the instrument discharged. 
 In a similar way the evidence of design which we 
 
i] COMPATIBLE WITH DESIGN. 17 
 
 find in nature is not destroyed by showing that what 
 we deemed to be a designed result is really an inevit- 
 able consequence of something else, and that again an 
 inevitable consequence of something still farther back, 
 and so on till we can proceed no farther. It is only 
 when we attribute a sort of self-existence to those 
 second causes that are the farthest we have been able 
 to reach, refusing to look behind them, or else when 
 we assume that the chain of causation which we have 
 been able to trace a certain way backward must be 
 capable of indefinite continuation in the same sort of 
 direction by methods of the same character, that we 
 eliminate design from our thoughts. The former is 
 arbitrarily to shut our eyes to all that lies outside 
 the ken of science ; the latter is to presume upon our 
 ignorance, and affirm that we can as it were draw a 
 complete curve from a limited portion of it which 
 alone is given to us. 
 
 Nevertheless it is, I think, the case that we are 
 not so overwhelmingly convinced of design through a 
 study of nature as the man would be in the supposed 
 case of the watch. Why is this ? It arises, I think, 
 from the circumstance that in the case of the watch 
 the supposed civilised observer sees things which, 
 though he may never have seen or heard of them 
 before, are nevertheless analogous to what he or his 
 fellow-men can make ; whereas, in the case of the 
 phenomena presented to us by nature, when we have 
 
1 8 QUALIFICATION OF THE IDEA OF [i 
 
 referred them to their causes, and so on as far back 
 as we can go, we find no power in ourselves to bring 
 about the postulates from which an explanation of 
 the observed phenomena was deduced, or to do any- 
 thing at all analogous. 
 
 But that there should be such a difference in 
 the readiness with which a conviction of design is 
 brought about need not surprise us; that is only 
 what might have been expected from our acquaint- 
 ance with the mode of working of our fellow- 
 creatures, and ignorance of the mode of working of a 
 Being so immeasurably above ourselves as He must 
 be by whom these things were designed. 
 
 When we have arrived at the conception of will, 
 design, as belonging to the First Cause, we are apt to 
 form a conception of a personality subject to limita- 
 tions such as belong to personality as we know it 
 in ourselves. Perhaps some conceptions which we 
 acquire through the study of science may aid us in 
 the endeavour to form some sort of idea, however 
 imperfect, of a personality free from such restrictions. 
 
 Take some general natural law at which we have 
 arrived, suppose the law of gravitation. "We conceive 
 of it as belonging to matter, however remote, as not 
 only retaining the moon in her orbit round the earth, 
 and the planets in their orbits round the sun, but as 
 regulating the relative motions of the components of 
 a double star, situated though it be at a distance which 
 
i] PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD. 19 
 
 is so great that the very lowest value it is permissible 
 to assign to it is such as to require aid from illustra- 
 tions in order that we may form any adequate con- 
 ception of it. In short, we think of this law as 
 perfectly general as regards space ; as irrespective 
 altogether of locality. May it not be possible that 
 the personality which we ought to attribute to the 
 First Cause is something equally exempt from the 
 limitations of locality ? 
 
 I have mentioned one way in which the idea of 
 design may be evaded, but there is another which 
 ought not to be passed by without notice, though the 
 progress of science leads us to discard it. In treating 
 of design, Paley supposes the case of a man walking 
 on a heath, and finding a stone and asking himself 
 how it came to be there. The idea might possibly 
 occur to him that it had always been there ; that 
 having been there from a past eternity its presence 
 need not be accounted for. He contrasts with this 
 the case of a man similarly meeting with a watch. 
 In this case, as he says, the plain indication of design 
 precludes the idea that it had lain there for ever. 
 The two ideas, on the one hand of design, on the 
 other of continuance from a past eternity, seem to be 
 incompatible. But it is conceivable that with refer- 
 ence to something in nature which seems to indicate 
 design, the idea might be formed that it had been 
 so from a past eternity. Suppose a man to know 
 
20 THE PRESENT CONDITION [i 
 
 nothing of geology or history or antiquities, and to 
 trace backwards the succession of the human race. 
 As he sees nothing to limit the succession in the 
 future, so, it might occur to him, there is no occasion 
 to limit it in the past. Why may we not suppose that 
 the succession of father and son, mother and child, 
 which we see going on now, may have been so 
 always ? Why is there any occasion to seek for an 
 origin of the race at all ? The limbs, it is true, look 
 as if they were intended to perform the functions 
 which we see them accomplish, but if they never 
 had a beginning (I speak, of course, with reference 
 to the race, not the individual), there is no room for 
 saying that they were designed to be what they are. 
 Whether this argument is really valid, I shall not 
 stop to inquire, for, as I have said, the progress of 
 science enables us to negative such a supposition, 
 not merely in such a case as T have supposed, where 
 nobody would imagine such a thing, but even in 
 cases in which at first sight the supposition might 
 seem plausible enough. Take, for example, the 
 motions of the bodies of the solar system. By 
 mathematical calculation we can predict for years 
 beforehand what their places will be, and in a 
 similar manner we can calculate what they were 
 years ago. What is to bring us to a stop ? Why 
 may we not suppose that they have been going on 
 just as they are now from a past eternity? 
 
i] NOT ETERNAL BACKWARDS. 21 
 
 We now, however, know that there are actions 
 going on, such for example as tidal friction, which 
 involve a consumption of energy, involve, so to speak, 
 a continual expenditure of capital ; and as this is not 
 replaced, vast as the store at the bank may be, it 
 must be exhausted in time, and could not therefore 
 have lasted through a past eternity. Hence a sup- 
 posed indefinite periodicity does not help us any 
 more than the simplicity of what I have called 
 ultimate physical postulates to dispense with a 
 First Cause of an ultra- scientific nature. 
 
 The reluctance which appears to be sometimes 
 felt, especially by those who have mainly attended 
 to the study of natural science, to admit any cause 
 other than those second causes which lie within the 
 province of science, appears to be clue partly to not 
 attending to the fact that the study of nature itself 
 presents us with problems which have not the slightest 
 appearance of being capable of solution in any such 
 way, partly to the idea that anything of a personal 
 nature necessarily involves limitations which are felt 
 to be incompatible with the grandeur of scale of 
 what we call nature. But in this, it seems to me, 
 men fall into anthropomorphism in the very attempt 
 to avoid it. The idea of will is discarded as being 
 anthropomorphic. But why should it be supposed to 
 be anthropomorphic ? Is it not that we associate it 
 in our ideas with limitations such as those to which 
 
22 FREE WILL IN MAN [i 
 
 our own wills are subject ? If it be said we cannot 
 otherwise conceive of it, in one sense this is true and 
 in one sense it is not. It is a very old question that 
 is expressed in the words, Canst thou by searching 
 find out God; canst thou know the Almighty to 
 perfection ? We are not to expect with our finite 
 minds adequately to conceive of the infinite. But 
 then we are not to attempt in our conceptions to 
 limit the infinite by the finite, but rather to form the 
 highest conceptions that we can through our know- 
 ledge of the finite, and to regard them as still 
 inadequate. 
 
 Let me endeavour to apply these principles to a 
 subject of great importance in itself, which it seems 
 to me there is nothing in the directions of the 
 Founder to hinder me from entering upon, and treat- 
 ing to the extent to which I mean to limit myself. 
 
 I assume that we will admit that in the existence 
 of mankind, with all the powers mental as well as 
 bodily which man possesses, will, design, is involved. 
 It matters not by what secondary processes the 
 growth of the body, the development of the mental 
 powers, may have been brought about. If this be 
 admitted, it will be absurd to deny to the creative 
 will, powers which the created being is found to 
 possess. 
 
 Now there is one power of the possession of which 
 we are innately conscious ; I refer to free will. I 
 
i] IMPLIES WILL IN GOD. 23 
 
 feel that I have the option of moving my hand to 
 the right or to the left, and similarly with regard 
 to innumerahle other actions. The words of every 
 language testify to the consciousness of such a power. 
 Of course I may wish to do a thing that I have not 
 the power to do ; but that is a different matter 
 altogether. A thief might wish to carry away on 
 his shoulder an ingot of gold worth 50,000, but he 
 would not be able. Such an inability does not in 
 the least degree militate against our consciousness 
 of free will. We cannot deny to man's Maker this 
 power which we find man himself possesses. 
 
 Now we know very well that a man may in 
 general act uniformly according to a certain rule, 
 and yet for a special reason may on a particular 
 occasion act quite differently. We cannot refuse to 
 admit the possibility of something analogous taking 
 place as regards the action of the Supreme Being. 
 If we think of the laws of nature as self-existent and 
 uncaused, then we cannot admit any deviation from 
 them. But if we think of them as designed by a 
 Supreme Will, then we must allow the possibility of 
 their being on some particular occasion suspended. 
 Nor is it even necessary, in order that some result 
 out of the ordinary course of nature should be 
 brought about, that they should even be suspended ; 
 it may be that some different law is brought into 
 action whereby the result in question is brought 
 
24 PERSONALITY OF GOD IMPLIES [i 
 
 about without any suspension whatsoever of the 
 laws by which the ordinary course of nature is 
 regulated. I will endeavour to illustrate my mean- 
 ing by reference to something with which we are 
 familiar. Suppose that a clock with an iron pendu- 
 lum had long been observed and rated. Its rate, we 
 know, is determined by the laws of motion and by 
 gravitation. Suppose that on one occasion it went 
 much faster for an hour or two, and then resumed 
 its usual rate. It may have been that some one 
 designedly put a powerful magnet under it, which 
 after a time was taken away again. The acceleration 
 of rate was here produced, not by any suspension of 
 the laws of motion, or of gravitation, but by bringing 
 into play for a time a special force which left the 
 laws of motion and of gravitation perfectly intact, 
 and yet brought about the result that we have sup- 
 posed to have been observed. 
 
 It will probably have been perceived that in 
 what I have just been saying I have had in view 
 the question of the abstract possibility of what are 
 called miracles. This is a question the consideration 
 of which, as it seems to me, belongs quite properly 
 to the subject of natural theology. Admit the exist- 
 - ence of a God, of a personal God, and the possibility 
 of miracle follows at once. If the laws of nature are 
 carried on in accordance with His will, He who 
 willed them may will their suspension. And if any 
 
i] POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. . 25 
 
 difficulty should be felt as to their suspension, we are 
 not even obliged to suppose that they have been sus- 
 pended ; it may be that the event which we call a 
 miracle was brought about, not by any suspension of 
 the laws in ordinary operation, but by the super- 
 addition of something not ordinarily in operation, or 
 if in operation, of such a nature that its operation is 
 not perceived. 
 
 Among the subjects suggested by the Founder as 
 being such as the lecturer might discuss, one is, 
 Whether God is under any or what limitations. This 
 is one, the consideration of which seems to me by 
 no means useless. We apply to God the epithet 
 Almighty, and we are apt to think it derogatory to 
 His power to imagine that there could be any 
 possible obstacle to the accomplishment of anything 
 that we can conceive. 
 
 But is not such an assumption, notwithstanding 
 the appearance of humility that it presents, in 
 reality a disguised form of self-assertion, as if we 
 knew so well what was or was not possible in the 
 nature of things that we can affirm that nothing of 
 that kind can stand in the way of the accomplish- 
 ment of what seemed to us a desirable object ? 
 
 Let me take an illustration from what falls within 
 human knowledge. Suppose that a man had a great 
 number of coins, all exactly alike, and was desirous 
 of packing them in drawers too shallow to allow one 
 
26 MAN'S INABILITY TO PERCEIVE [i 
 
 coin to be put over another, but so broad and wide in 
 relation to the diameters of the coins, that they might 
 practically be deemed to extend infinitely far in 
 lateral directions ; and suppose that the man was 
 desirous of packing them as close as possible. "We 
 can imagine him finding out that the closest mode of 
 packing was that in which each coin was surrounded 
 by six others, which touched it and one another. 
 Suppose now that instead of coins he had a vast 
 number of equal spheres which he was desirous of 
 packing in boxes, the three edges of which were all 
 very large compared with the diameter of a sphere. 
 We may imagine him giving directions to a packer 
 so to pack them that each sphere shall be in the 
 middle of a layer or shell of spheres, each of which 
 touches it, while at the same time the spheres of the 
 layer touch one another in such a manner that each 
 sphere in the layer is surrounded by six spheres 
 which touch it and one another in a manner per- 
 fectly analogous to that of the coins in the preceding 
 example. We may suppose that on examining the 
 mode in which the spheres were packed he was dis- 
 satisfied with the work of the packer, because the 
 conditions he laid down were not fulfilled. It is 
 likely enough that from the analogy of the coins the 
 owner of the balls might think that the way men- 
 tioned above was the proper way in which to pack 
 the balls. 
 
i] NATURAL IMPOSSIBILITIES. 27 
 
 But we know that the proposed task involves a 
 geometrical impossibility, and the reason why the 
 employer desired the packer to do the task was 
 simply that he did not know enough of geometry to 
 perceive that it was impossible. 
 
 Now it seems to me that some of the difficulties 
 which are felt about reconciling the course of nature 
 with belief in its government by a supreme and 
 benevolent Being, which arise from the fact of the 
 existence of much pain and suffering even among the 
 lower animals that we have no reason for supposing 
 are endowed with a moral sense, so as to be account- 
 able for their actions, may very well arise from pre- 
 suming upon our most imperfect knowledge. Take, 
 for instance, the existence of pain, or, still further to 
 particularise, of pain as brought about by the preying 
 of one animal on another. We are disposed to com- 
 miserate the victim ; the thought perhaps arises, Can 
 it be true that all this is brought about through the 
 design of a Being of infinite power and boundless 
 benevolence? But what do we mean by infinite 
 power ? Is it the power of doing anything, of effect- 
 ing any object which we can conceive in our minds ? 
 If this is what we mean, then indeed we may well 
 be in perplexity. There may be obstacles in the 
 nature of things obstacles of the nature of geometri- 
 cal impossibilities which stand in the way of the 
 accomplishment of what we had conceived as desir- 
 
28 FREEDOM OF WILL RENDERS [i 
 
 able, but obstacles of the existence of which we, in 
 our ignorance, had not the slightest conception. So 
 long as we are dealing with the works of man, or 
 with works analogous to such as man can accomplish, 
 the possibilities and limitations of possibility are in 
 some measure known to us. But when we are deal- 
 ing with the works of God, with the whole constitu- 
 tion of nature, we enter on a region lying far beyond 
 what we can explore. It is absolutely impossible for 
 us in such a case to say what is or what is not an 
 impossibility in the nature of things ; what appar- 
 ently desirable end could or what could not be 
 attained without the sacrifice of some object of still 
 greater importance. 
 
 In considering this subject hitherto, I have left 
 out of account the so-called rational creation, and 
 confined myself to the lower animals. I say so-called, 
 because I do not wish to deny the existence of a 
 certain amount of reason in some of the lower 
 animals ; if it be not reason, at any rate it looks very 
 like it. But I do not think we have evidence in 
 them of the existence of a sense of duty, of obliga- 
 tion; of obligation as distinguished from desire or 
 fear of acting or not acting in a particular manner. 
 Hence, in considering the evils to which mankind is 
 or may be exposed, one difficulty enters in over and 
 above those which belong to him only as they belong 
 to the lower animals. Man is endowed with the 
 
i] MORAL EVIL POSSIBLE. 29 
 
 sense of right or wrong ; and a great deal of the 
 evils which men suffer arise from their acting in a 
 manner contrary to that in which they feel that they 
 ought to act ; thereby it may be entailing misery not 
 only on themselves, but also, and even it may be in 
 the first instance, on others who are innocent of par- 
 ticipal^ion in their wrong-doing. Now all this class 
 of evils would be avoided if all men would only act 
 always in accordance with what is right. The ques- 
 tion then arises, If there be no limitation to the power 
 of the Supreme Being, and if He desires the happiness 
 of His creatures, why should not man have been so 
 constituted as always to act rightly ? In that case 
 there might still have been some suffering belonging 
 to his animal nature just as there is in the case of 
 the lower animals ; but at least those dire evils 
 which arise from wrong- doing would have been 
 avoided. 
 
 Now it seems that there are only two conceivable 
 alternatives as to what might have been ; either man 
 must have been endowed with a free will, capable of 
 acting in accordance with the will of God, but also 
 capable of acting in opposition thereto, or else he 
 must have been made a sort of machine, incapable of 
 acting otherwise than in- accordance with the course 
 laid down for him. On the latter plan he could not 
 arrive at the dignity of a being always doing right, 
 though he had the power of doing wrong; always acting 
 
30 RESULTING DIFFICULTY GREATLY [i 
 
 in accordance with the will of God, though he had the 
 power of acting in opposition to it. This is clearly a 
 higher state than that of a mere conscious machine. 
 But the power of doing right from choice involves 
 the power of doing wrong ; and we can hardly con- 
 ceive that millions and millions of rational creatures, 
 each endowed with this power of choice, should each 
 of them and always exercise that power in a right 
 direction. Such a supposition seems almost a con- 
 tradiction in terms. Even if the probability were 
 very great that an individual taken at random, on an 
 occasion taken at random, would exercise that choice 
 in the right direction, still the chance that that 
 would always be so is utterly infinitesimal. I 
 speak here of chance, as I am obliged to do in 
 endeavouring to express my ideas, but I freely allow 
 that it is only a refuge for our ignorance ; there can 
 be no chance to perfect knowledge. Now even with- 
 out going beyond the bounds of natural theology it 
 is readily conceivable that the superiority of the 
 state of those who act aright, though they have the 
 power of acting wrongly, to that of mere conscious 
 machines, may outweigh the disadvantages of free 
 will arising from the evil consequences of its abuse. 
 Still, the difficulty remains a formidable one so long 
 as we are confined to natural theology ; for on the 
 one hand the ideal condition of a perfect fulfilment 
 of duty is not realised even in the case of good men, 
 
i] LIGHTENED BY REVELATION. 31 
 
 and on the other the evils arising from lawlessness 
 are very great. But when from natural theology we 
 pass on to revealed religion the difficulty is, as I 
 believe, if not wholly removed, at any rate immensely 
 lightened. I could fain enlarge on this topic, but I 
 do not consider that it would be in accordance with 
 the tewns of the Gifford Foundation that I should 
 do so. 
 
 In this introductory lecture I have touched in a 
 rather cursory manner on a variety of topics, some of 
 them deserving a much fuller treatment. In some of 
 the following lectures I propose to take up again 
 some of these subjects, and treat them, one at a time, 
 in fuller detail. 
 
 It appears to have been the Founder's idea that 
 it was possible to establish a complete system of 
 natural theology on a purely scientific basis. If I 
 may conjecture from the terms of the will the direc- 
 tion in which he would have looked for its establish- 
 ment, I should suppose that it was that of meta- 
 physics. My own turn of mind is not in that 
 direction ; and if I had thought the Founder's object 
 feasible I should hardly have felt myself justified in 
 undertaking these lectures, but thought that I ought 
 to leave it to some one better qualified than myself 
 to undertake the task. As the matter stands, I 
 think it desirable that men of very different lines of 
 
32 INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS. [i 
 
 study should contribute what they can towards 
 carrying out, if not exactly the Founder's object, yet 
 something as nearly allied to it as the nature of the 
 case allows. My own studies have lain chiefly in 
 the direction of mathematics and physics, and I have 
 drawn upon them for illustrations of my meaning, I 
 hope not so much so as to render myself unintelli- 
 gible to a general audience. 
 
UNI7EESIT7 
 
 LECTUKE 
 
 Possible evolution of the solar system Bearing of the theory on 
 the argument for design Evidence of design in the structure 
 of animals Darwinian theory Its bearing on the argument 
 Difficulties introduced by extreme views Meaning and legiti- 
 mate use of evolution Enlargement of ideas as to the person- 
 ality of God compatible with belief in His care for individuals 
 Alienation produced by sin Theory of prayer. 
 
 ONE of the strongest arguments for the existence of a 
 personal framer of the universe, in the sense in 
 which the word " personal " has been explained in 
 my opening lecture, is that derived from the 
 evidence, or at least apparent evidence, of design 
 which so frequently presents itself in our examina- 
 tion of nature, more especially of living beings and 
 their relation to one another and to inanimate nature. 
 But as in recent times speculations have arisen 
 which seem to weaken the force of what at one time 
 was thought so conclusive, it will be proper to enter 
 into this subject in some detail. 
 
 Let us first consider the structure of the solar 
 system, and more especially that of the earth on 
 which we live. We find it provided with an atmo- 
 
 3 
 
34 EVOLUTION AS APPLIED [n 
 
 sphere which is essential to the carrying on of life as 
 we know it. Its rotation about its axis in the 
 moderate time of twenty -four hours enables the 
 greater part of it to receive periodically the radiation 
 from the sun, without which life, as we know it, 
 could not exist ; and at the same time the period is 
 not so long that the tropical regions and large 
 portions both north and south of them would get 
 alternately baked up and frozen through the effect of 
 radiation. The moderate inclination of the axis of 
 rotation to the plane of the orbit supplies us with 
 the variety of seasons, without that excessive and 
 long -continued heat, alternating with an equally 
 excessive and long-continued cold, which would take 
 place over a very large portion of the surface if the 
 axis of rotation had been inclined at a small angle 
 only to the plane of the orbit. 
 
 Again, the arrangement of the solar system involves 
 a central sun of vast size and at an enormous tempera- 
 ture. Utterly unfitted (as we have every reason to 
 suppose) itself to be a habitation of living beings, it 
 not only by its gravitation keeps the planets in their 
 orbits, but affords at the same time a store of radiant 
 energy so vast that it would require ages and ages to 
 exhaust it. This radiant energy is absolutely essen- 
 tial to the maintenance of life as we know it upon 
 earth ; in how many ways essential is perhaps hardly 
 thought of except by those who have made a special 
 
n] TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM. 35 
 
 study of physical science. On this subject, perhaps, 
 I may be allowed, without the charge of egotism, to 
 refer to some lectures which I delivered a few years 
 ago at Aberdeen, in which I endeavoured to point out 
 a variety of ways in which light, in the widest sense 
 of the word, is essential to the maintenance of life 
 upon the earth. Here, then, we have an arrange- 
 ment admirably adapted to maintain life upon the 
 earth, and, very probably, upon others of the planets. 
 We might well suppose that the structure was framed 
 with a view to this maintenance. 
 
 But the inquiry arises, May we not look on the 
 present condition of the solar system as evolved from 
 a simpler condition, under the action of just the same 
 laws of matter as those we meet with in our study of 
 physical science ? The geological study of the struc- 
 ture of the earth, its figure, and analogies, or at least 
 apparent analogies, that we meet with in the tele- 
 scopic scrutiny of the heavens, lead us to think that 
 in all probability the earth on which we live was 
 originally in a molten condition, utterly unfit for the 
 habitation of living creatures, but from which it sub- 
 sequently cooled down. And if we speculate still 
 further back, we are led to attribute the heat of 
 fusion to the condensation of matter diffused over a 
 far larger space, and brought together by the mutual 
 gravitation of its parts; whether it be that that 
 diffused matter existed in the form of a gas, which 
 
36 E VOL UTION AS APPLIED [n 
 
 was subsequently condensed, or of small discrete 
 portions of solid matter, which gradually came 
 together by their mutual attraction, and having 
 originally been moving in all sorts of ways, produced 
 this great heat required, by means of their repeated 
 collisions. And this process, long since ceased as 
 regards the earth, may still be going on in the 
 central body of our system. 
 
 Now if we take as an initial state that in which 
 matter is spread over space, be it in the form of a 
 gas or in that of a vast number of small masses, it is 
 conceivable that the condition of things which we 
 find in our solar system might have been brought 
 about simply by the operation of the known laws of 
 motion and of gravitation. By an " initial state " is 
 here meant merely a conceivably earlier state which 
 we do not in our speculations go behind. For sup- 
 pose space filled, whether continuously, or discon- 
 tinuously at intervals, with matter distributed with 
 a sort of very rough approximation to uniformity, and 
 having motion varying from region to region, but on 
 the whole having in a given region roughly a motion 
 of translation and a motion of rotation, which domi- 
 nate over the individual motions which differ from 
 this. Then it seems evident that it would tend to 
 collect and condense in patches, the matter of each 
 patch having very roughly the general character of a 
 motion of translation and a motion of rotation. As 
 
n] TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM. - 37 
 
 the condensation very slowly went on, the general 
 tendency would be for the matter mostly to collect 
 into the neighbourhood of a centre, or in some cases 
 it might be into two or more centres, leaving behind 
 portions of matter at different distances, which, being 
 comparatively disentangled from the bulk of the 
 matter circulating round and gradually approximat- 
 ing to the centre of condensation, would be left 
 behind as a ring, the bodies forming which, if they 
 collided at all, would mainly collide with one 
 another ; and while their relative motion would be 
 thus reduced, the comparatively large motion of 
 which they are possessed in common in circulating 
 round the centre of condensation would still remain, 
 so that the tendency would be towards the masses 
 forming a ring ultimately to collect into a single 
 mass forming, as we may say, a planet. At first 
 this would be at a very high temperature as a result 
 of the collisions ; but when these had pretty well 
 come to an end, and the mass cast off had assumed 
 its permanent form, the collected mass would cool 
 down, so as to assume a moderate temperature long 
 before the great bulk of the matter of the patch, 
 which was collecting towards the general centre of 
 condensation, had done with its collisions. 
 
 In our various physical speculations, however far 
 backwards in the real or supposed chain of causation 
 we may go, we are obliged to stop somewhere, and 
 
38 BEARING OF E VOL UTION ON [n 
 
 start with, an assumed condition of things which we 
 treat as initial. In the present case, according to 
 the supposition to which I have referred, we start 
 with a condition in which matter is distributed, 
 with a greater or less approach to uniformity, through 
 space, and attracts according to the law of gravitation, 
 and may further be supposed to be in motion, differ- 
 ently in different parts. I say may ~be supposed to be 
 in motion, because if it were at rest motion would be 
 produced as a result of gravitation ; but the supposi- 
 tion of rest throughout is a very special and therefore 
 restrictive one ; that of motion would be the most 
 general case. 
 
 According, then, to the supposed mode of evolu- 
 tion of the solar system, a mode which physical 
 considerations seem to render probable enough, the 
 argument for design, so far as it is founded on the 
 adaptation of the solar system to the wants of the 
 animate creation, comes to this, that the supposed 
 initial state, containing though it does so much that 
 is arbitrary, or that we may regard as such, was one 
 designed for the welfare in some remotely future time 
 of plants and animals afterwards to be brought into 
 being. Now, I do not say that the argument for 
 design is destroyed by the supposition of evolution 
 to the extent in which I have been supposing it to 
 have taken place, but I think it appeals to us less 
 strongly. And the reason why the appeal is less 
 
n] THE ARGUMENT FOR DESIGN. 39 
 
 strong may very probably be this. We are apt to 
 think of design as we experience it ourselves. Now 
 when an engineer, for instance, designs a certain 
 machine, he starts with certain properties of matter 
 (the tenacity of steel and so forth) over which he has 
 no control. These form his postulates; they lie 
 wholly outside the field on which alone his design 
 is capable of being exerted. Hence, in such a case 
 as that of the evolution of the solar system men- 
 tioned above, we are beset by our anthropomorphic 
 ideas ; we think of the initial state as presenting the 
 postulates outside alone of which design is capable of 
 being exercised. But if we think of the initial state 
 as itself brought about by a Being capable of design- 
 ing, then there is still room for the exercise of design 
 in bringing about the final condition of the system. 
 I grant that by being thus thrown back into a 
 remote region of operations which lie beyond our 
 ken to follow, the evidence of design is apt to strike 
 us less forcibly ; but this is only what we might 
 expect when we attempt to gauge by our finite minds 
 the mind of a Being so immeasurably above us. 
 
 But even if the evidence of design in the adapta- 
 tion of the inanimate environment to the wants of 
 future living things were deemed to have failed 
 altogether, there still remains the consideration of 
 the adaptation of living things to their environment 
 supposed given. To my own mind, it is in living 
 
40 EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN [n 
 
 things, especially animals, that the evidence of design 
 is the strongest. And the higher we ascend in the 
 scale, the stronger it appears to be. Take the struc- 
 ture of our own bodies ; take any one particular part, 
 say the eye. It would be beside the object of the 
 present lectures to dwell at length on the mar- 
 vellous construction of the eye, with its transparent 
 media adapted for the passage of light, arranged 
 with spherical or approximately spherical surfaces, 
 its crystalline lens, all adapted to cast an image on 
 the retina, and not only so, but to remove in good 
 measure the chief defect that of spherical aberration 
 which would beset an optical lens of so large an 
 aperture as compared with the focal length. Then, 
 again, consider the wonderful arrangement of the 
 recipient organ, the retina, with its nerves and nerve 
 fibres ending in microscopic rods and cones ; though 
 here we begin to get out of our depth, as the mode 
 of conveyance from the percipient organ to the sen- 
 sorium is a mystery. Then, again, to pass to some- 
 thing we can better understand, we have that delicate 
 automatically-adjusted screen, the iris, which guards 
 the delicate retina from being injured by excess of 
 light. And the whole of that exquisitely-constructed 
 organ, the eye, is adapted to something quite external 
 to the living being itself, something in its environ- 
 ment, namely light. 
 
 I have selected the eye as being at the same time 
 
n] STRUCTURE OF ANIMALS. 41 
 
 a wonderfully -constructed organ, and one in which 
 we can follow the relation between the structure and 
 the functions better than in many others. I think 
 the evidence of design which it affords must be to 
 most minds wellnigh overwhelming ; though, at the 
 same time, I grant that it requires some knowledge 
 of the laws of light, and also of the structure of the 
 eye itself, to feel the full force of the argument. 
 
 But here it will be necessary to advert to a theory 
 which, if it could be established, would, I will not 
 say destroy, but greatly modify the evidence of design 
 afforded by the adaptation of living beings to their 
 wants. I allude to the famous and highly ingenious 
 theory of natural selection, which is so closely associ- 
 ated with the name of Darwin. This theory starts 
 with certain postulates ; the existence of life ; the 
 power possessed by living things, whether animal or 
 vegetable, of reproducing their kind ; the general 
 similarity of offspring to parents, combined with 
 small variations of detail variations which, in the 
 absence of fuller knowledge, we are to treat as 
 casual. As the effect of reproduction tends to 
 make the number of living things to be supplied 
 outrun a full supply of food, space, and the various 
 requisites for full vigour, in the struggle for existence 
 which ensues, those varieties of form which are better 
 fitted than others for their environment tend to sur- 
 vive, and by virtue of the laws above mentioned to 
 
42 BEARING OF DARWINIAN [n 
 
 be perpetuated. Thus living things tend to settle 
 down into forms each possessed of the property that 
 it presents a maximum of advantage as regards the 
 given environment. A sort of mathematical picture 
 of the condition may be obtained by imagining a 
 smooth undulating ^surface on which are placed a 
 great number of material particles capable of being 
 moved a little from their actual positions at a given 
 moment. They would evidently tend to settle in the 
 various hollows, where the depth below a fixed hori- 
 zontal plane was a maximum. Thus in the actual, 
 case structural conditions which were advantageous 
 might conceivably be kept from great deviation by 
 the perishing of varieties in which the departure 
 from the normal type was at all large; and two 
 different species of living things might be kept from 
 intermixing that is, from being connected by a chain 
 of intermediate varieties like the groups of particles 
 in different, even though neighbouring, hollows in 
 the above illustration. 
 
 As my own studies have not lain in biology, I 
 cannot for a moment pretend to speak with the 
 authority of an expert. I can only take such a 
 common-sense view of the question as is possible to 
 an outsider. It seems to me likely enough that this 
 principle may really operate to a certain extent, and 
 so far as it does, it points out a sort of self-acting 
 mechanism, founded for its action on the postulates 
 
ii] THEORY ON DESIGN. 43 
 
 with which we started, for adapting the structure of 
 the living thing to the requirements of its environ- 
 ment. This, however, does not destroy, but only 
 alters the argument for design. If, indeed, the pos- 
 tulates of the theory were taken as self-existent and 
 uncaused, then I grant the argument would fall to 
 the ground. But I have heard on good authority 
 that Darwin himself regarded the argument for de- 
 sign as rather elevated than destroyed by the adoption 
 of his theory. I cannot say that I myself so regard 
 it; but the question is, What is true in itself? not, 
 What supplies an argument for or against something 
 that one has other grounds for believing to be true ? 
 
 But even supposing the theory to be accepted as 
 accounting for the permanence of more or less neigh- 
 bouring species, it seems to me inconceivable that it 
 should be competent to bridge over the interval which 
 separates remote forms ; and if this requires some- 
 thing more than the mere survival of the fittest, then 
 that " something " which accounts in the main for 
 the existence of these remote forms may largely be 
 concerned in the existence of neighbouring, though, 
 so far as we know, distinct, species. 
 
 Nor is the existence of remote forms of life the 
 only difficulty in the way of deducing them all from 
 a common stock by the mere operation of the causes 
 above mentioned. There are structures so complex, 
 so artificial, so eminently (to all appearance at least) 
 
44 DIFFICULTIES OF EXTREME [u 
 
 having a purpose to serve, that it seems inconceiv- 
 able that they could have been built up by a mere 
 selection of haphazard variations from a type which 
 in consequence of this selection undergoes a slow 
 secular change. Take, for example, that exquisitely- 
 contrived organ the eye. It is true that regarded as 
 a mere optical instrument destined to throw an image 
 on a screen it is subject to some minor imperfections 
 which may be corrected in the work of the optician. 
 But these are of a nature not seriously to interfere 
 with its use ; and in comparing the two it is to be 
 remembered that the eye has, besides its purely opti- 
 cal functions, to satisfy certain unknown conditions 
 relating to nutrition, growth, and reproduction, with 
 which the optician in his work has nothing to do ; 
 and further, that when the image is formed on the 
 screen of the retina the functions of the eye may be 
 said in a certain sense to be only beginning ; there 
 still remains all the provision, which we can trace 
 but a very little way, for connecting the stimulation 
 of a point on the retina with the sensation of a point 
 of light in a definite position in the field of view, 
 and for securing that the stimulation of correspond- 
 ing points on the retinas of the two eyes shall give 
 rise to the sensation of a single point only in the 
 field of view. It seems to me wellnigh inconceiv- 
 able how any one who studies these various arrange- 
 ments, so far as man has been able to follow them, 
 
ii] VIEWS ON EITHER SIDE. 45 
 
 can imagine them to be merely the cumulative effect 
 of casual variations selected in the manner supposed, 
 or can fail to be impressed, perhaps even if he does 
 so regard them, with the idea that they were designed 
 for the office which we find them to fulfil. 
 
 But we are not to jump from one extreme to the 
 other, and because we fail to see how these things 
 can be accounted for through what we call second 
 causes, to assume that each species is the result of a 
 separate and independent creative act, and all the 
 organs belonging to it separately and independently 
 designed. Theism is by no means bound up with 
 any such assumption as that. There are indications 
 plain enough that there are second causes, little as 
 we may know about them, underlying the final 
 results of nutrition, growth, etc. By availing them- 
 selves of methods discovered empirically, but indicat- 
 ing the existence of second causes at work, the 
 cattle-breeder, the florist, are able to bring about to 
 a certain extent varieties such as they may desire. 
 The laws of growth, beneficially though they act as 
 a rule for the living being concerned, sometimes pro- 
 duce injurious effects. The horns of an animal may 
 grow so curved as to press against its skull. Simi- 
 lar instances of untoward growths in special cases 
 are not unknown. These things are analogous to 
 what we find going on in inorganic nature, where 
 general laws, beneficial in their action when con- 
 
46 INTERMEDIATE REGION A [n 
 
 sidered on the large scale, as a whole, may never- 
 theless act injuriously in special instances. A 
 thunderstorm clears the air, and the accompanying 
 rain may often fertilise the parched ground, but as it 
 passes over the country perhaps some individual may 
 be killed by lightning. Such things must happen if 
 the course of nature be carried on by law, as distin- 
 guished from a continuous miracle. We recognise "the 
 few untoward (as we should regard them) events as 
 an inevitable result of the existence of such laws. 
 Accordingly, if perfectly analogous untoward events 
 occur in the organic world, we are led to attribute 
 them to the operation of some general laws, of the 
 existence of which we take them as evidence, even 
 though we may be unable to say what those laws are. 
 Hence, then, in our contemplation of the organic 
 world we are shut up between two extreme limits. 
 One would consist in the refusal to admit the opera- 
 tion of second causes at all, and the demand that 
 everything as to structure, and as to the separation 
 of living things into perfectly distinct species, be 
 referred to distinct and independent acts of a creative 
 power. The other would consist in the reference of 
 everything to second causes, and the refusal to look 
 beyond what we can explain thereby, or for which at 
 least we can offer some hypothetical explanation of 
 that nature which we deem plausible. The first is 
 excluded by the considerations, to some of which I 
 
n] FAIR FIELD FOR INQUIRY. 47 
 
 have alluded, which plainly indicate that there are 
 second causes at work ; the second involves an obsti- 
 nate shutting of the eyes to the fact that there are 
 phenomena which there does not seem to be the 
 slightest prospect of our being able to refer to any 
 such explanation. 
 
 Between the two limits of what we can explain, 
 in the sense of referring it to a proximate cause, and 
 what it seems impossible that we should ever be 
 able to explain by reference to proximate causes, 
 there lies a very wide region of unexplored country. 
 Our ignorance of what may lie in this region does 
 not authorise us to discard what appear, at least at 
 first sight, to be such evident indications of design as 
 we meet with in organised beings ; to assume that 
 these must be explicable by second causes of which 
 we are ignorant, but which, if we knew them, would 
 show the apparently designed results followed inevi- 
 tably from certain simple postulates into the origin 
 of which perhaps we do not care to look. 
 
 There was a time when each species, at least each 
 well-defined species as distinguished from what might 
 be regarded as a variety, was regarded as the outcome 
 of a distinct and independent creative act, and it 
 seemed irreverent to call this in question. This 
 extreme assumption, made in accordance with the 
 supposed requirements of theism, introduces a gratui- 
 tous difficulty in the way of theism itself. We 
 
48 MEANING OF THE TERM EVOLUTION. [n 
 
 observe a general similarity of plan pervading 
 immense groups of living things ; take, for example, 
 the vertebrate animals. The various bones belong- 
 ing to one species of animal are found to answer to, 
 to be homologous with, as it is called, the bones of 
 another species, it may be of a widely-separated 
 genus, and so for the other organs. Now this simi- 
 larity of plan entails the preservation in one species, 
 in a more or less modified or rudimentary form, of 
 parts which in some widely-separated species have 
 an important office to fulfil with reference to the 
 wellbeing of the animal, but which in the animal 
 first supposed appear to be utterly purposeless. Now, 
 if each species were looked on as an independent crea- 
 tion, it is hard to imagine why these (to all appear- 
 ance at least) useless portions of the frame should be 
 constructed ; perhaps even the insisting on the one 
 side of the proposition that each specific form was 
 the result of an independent creative act might give 
 rise on the other to a doubt whether there was any 
 such thing as creation at all. But once admit the 
 operation of second causes, stretching probably far 
 beyond anything that we can follow, and then it is 
 easily intelligible that the maintenance of the general 
 similarity of type may be a necessity of the operation 
 of the general laws. And in order that it should so 
 appear, it is not in the least necessary that we should 
 know what those general laws are. 
 
n] MEANING OF THE TERM EVOLUTION. 49 
 
 la contradistinction to the old idea of referring 
 every observed phenomenon of the nature of the 
 existence of species, the structure of animal forms, 
 etc., of which we saw no explanation to the immediate, 
 interposition of the Supreme Being, we have nowa- 
 days a widely-spread adoption of the idea of evolution. 
 In order to discuss with any profit the bearing of 
 ideas of evolution on Theism, we must first of all ex- 
 plain the sense in which we use the term evolution. 
 
 Now I think that the idea ordinarily attached to 
 it is, that the various observed phenomena are the 
 immediate outcome respectively of something else, 
 from whence they flow as necessary results. In this 
 process we do not think of the origin of these laws ; 
 we take them as we find them, or as they have been 
 arrived at, often slowly, by a long train of scientific 
 investigation. At a later stage of scientific progress 
 these laws are themselves regarded as the outcome 
 of laws yet more elementary, and so on. The imme- 
 diately observed phenomena are thus regarded as the 
 last links in a chain of cause and effect, a chain in 
 which the deduction of link from link does not in- 
 volve the idea of design. 
 
 But the evidence of design afforded by the adap- 
 tation of organs to tfieir functions and of living 
 creatures to their environment is not thus eliminated 
 unless we assume that this process, which we can 
 actually trace only a little way, is capable of in- 
 
 4 
 
50 USE AND ABUSE OF THE [n 
 
 definite extension backwards. But there is nothing 
 to warrant such an assumption as this. Of course 
 what lies outside such, a chain of cause and effect as 
 I have been considering lies by virtue of that outside 
 the ken of science. But so far from its being self- 
 evident that the whole system of nature lies within 
 the ken of natural science, the evidence appears 
 to be exactly the other way. I have already in a 
 former lecture mentioned some things that we do 
 not seem to see the slightest prospect of our being 
 able to explain by merely natural science, and that 
 do not even appear to be of the nature of what we 
 are able to explain in this manner. 
 
 The conclusion, I think, to which we are led is 
 this. We may safely use evolution as a working 
 hypothesis, for trial, in our scientific investigations, 
 nor is it likely that in fair, sober investigation it 
 will fail us; for the most thoroughly convinced 
 theist would naturally suppose that as the mind of 
 the Author of nature must infinitely transcend our 
 own minds, so the contrivances which He employs 
 would run far beyond what we can follow. It is 
 only when we think of natural science as being in 
 itself, in its entirety (as distinguished from the por- 
 tion of it with which we are acquainted) omnipotent 
 for the explanation of the system of nature that 
 there appears to be anything atheistic in evolution. 
 
 And yet even an extreme adoption of evolution 
 
n] THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 51 
 
 is not inconsistent with theism. In following the 
 chain of causation link by link, each proximate cause 
 which we use for the explanation of what follows 
 from it may be looked on as a law laid down, be it 
 mediately or immediately, by the Author of nature. 
 In this way the idea of design is not lost even 
 though the doctrine of evolution is employed in the 
 freest manner. 
 
 To show how evolution may be regarded by a 
 person whose views are of this nature, I may be 
 permitted to mention the substance of a remark 
 made to me by a friend of mine, an eminent biolo- 
 gist, now deceased. Before I was more than very 
 slightly acquainted with him I knew that he was an 
 out-and-out evolutionist. Not knowing whether he 
 were even a theist, I one day made a remark to him 
 of a nature calculated to draw him out on this sub- 
 ject if he felt so inclined. He made a remark to me 
 the general substance of which is as follows : " For 
 my own part I cannot do without a Personal God, 
 but then God's way of working is not like ours. A 
 man makes a poker or a shovel, but God's way of 
 working is so different, with all the forces at His com- 
 mand." I found afterward that my friend was not 
 only a theist, but a sincere believer in Christianity. 
 
 Closely connected with the subject of design, is 
 that of personality, which we attribute to the 
 
52 OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD CONSISTENT [n 
 
 Supreme Being. I have already touched upon this 
 in some of its aspects. On the present occasion, I 
 propose to consider the question from a somewhat 
 different point of view, which I think will be in full 
 accord with the designs of the Founder. 
 
 I have said already that in speaking of God as 
 personal, we must beware of associating the word 
 with the limitations to which personality, as we 
 know it in ourselves, is subject. I endeavoured to 
 illustrate my meaning by reference to the laws of 
 nature, such, for instance, as the law of gravitation, 
 which we think of without reference to the limita- 
 tions of time and space. But in thus endeavouring 
 to enlarge our ideas we run the risk, on the other 
 hand, of overlooking the elements of personality 
 which belong to human beings. We hold inter- 
 course with our fellow-men individually, by conver- 
 sation,, by correspondence, by reading the writings 
 of those whom we may never have seen, who lived 
 perhaps long before we were born. But can there 
 be any intercourse between one of ourselves and a 
 Being who governs the whole earth on which we 
 live, with its fourteen hundred millions or so of 
 human beings, not to mention the various races of 
 animals and plants, and the solid framework on 
 which they rest and grow ? The difficulty of recon- 
 ciling the two ideas is no new one. It was expressed 
 long ago by a Hebrew monarch in those beautiful 
 
n] WITH CARE FOR INDIVIDUALS. 53 
 
 words: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of 
 Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast 
 ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, 
 and the son of man that Thou visitest him ? " I need 
 not say what vastly increased force the subsequent 
 discoveries of science have lent to those old words 
 of David. These countless stars we now think of as 
 suns analogous to our own sun, lighting up it may 
 be, and from analogy it seems likely to be, planets 
 circulating around them, those planets again, it may 
 be, tenanted by tribes of living things, the forms of 
 which, if such there be, we can never know. Surely, 
 any one of us might easily imagine, it is absurd 
 to suppose that the Governor of these countless 
 worlds can pay any individual attention to such an 
 insignificant being as myself. 
 
 But why should it be thought absurd ? Is it riot 
 that in attempting to escape from the limitations 
 which belong to our primary conceptions of person- 
 ality in one direction, and to enlarge our ideas of the 
 term as applied to the Supreme Being, our anthropo- 
 morphism besets us still, and we fail to conceive of a 
 power as belonging to Him which we do not our- 
 selves possess, or at most possess only in a very 
 imperfect rudimentary form ? We ourselves, as a 
 rule, think of one thing at a time, though our 
 thoughts may pass with great rapidity from one 
 subject to another and back again. That they can 
 
54 UNION OF THE ATTRIBUTES OF [n 
 
 do so is certain; whether our minds can do 
 more than this seems to be doubtful. It may be 
 questioned whether the appearance of thinking of 
 different things simultaneously is more than a very 
 rapid oscillation of the thoughts between subject and 
 subject. And yet there are some things with which 
 we are very familiar that look very much as if we 
 really had such a power in at least a rudimentary 
 form. Walking is a voluntary act, under the control 
 of the will ; and yet as we walk along a road our 
 thoughts may be absorbed in something which has 
 nothing to do with our walking, or our intended 
 destination. Reading aloud is not merely voluntary, 
 but requires a certain amount of previous education ; 
 and yet we may go on reading, and reading quite 
 correctly, out of a book while our thoughts are 
 wandering to something else. These things certainly 
 look as if we had to some limited degree the power 
 of simultaneous attention to different things. Why 
 may we not suppose a Being so immeasurably above 
 ourselves as the Author of the universe must be, to 
 possess without limitation a power of which we see 
 some indications even in ourselves ? 
 
 It is by exalting our ideas of God, and endeavouring 
 in our conceptions of Him to remove those limitations 
 which we derive from ourselves, that we are to avoid 
 those errors that otherwise we are so apt to fall into. 
 If we dwell only on His greatness, on the illimitable 
 
n] PERSONALITY AND OMNIPRESENCE. 55 
 
 extent of His dominion, we are apt to lose the 
 element of personality; to think of Him much as 
 we think of the laws of nature ; to adopt a sort of 
 pantheism; to neglect or perhaps even disbelieve 
 His personal relations to ourselves. On the other 
 hand, if we think only of His personal relations to 
 ourselves, we are apt to get crippled ideas of His 
 dominion ; to overlook His omnipresence ; to think of 
 Him as dwelling in temples made with hands ; per- 
 haps to regard ourselves as special objects of His care, 
 and think lightly of His relations to all our fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 It is by combining these at first sight incompat- 
 ible attributes of personality and omnipresence that, 
 without any arrogance or claim of superiority to our 
 fellows, we are supported under the oppressive sense 
 of our own littleness so forcibly expressed in the 
 words of the Psalmist which I have quoted, and feel 
 that we may hold communion with the great Author 
 of nature ; while, at the same time, we obtain a bond 
 of union with our fellows deeper and more wide- 
 spread than that arising from personal predilection. 
 For there is a mixture of character in us all ; we feel 
 it in ourselves, we see it in those about us. Where 
 the good element prevails, we are drawn towards 
 the person possessing it ; yet he may from time to 
 time disappoint us. Where there is much evil we 
 are repelled ; perhaps tempted to neglect opportuni- 
 
56 FEELING OF ALIENATION [n 
 
 ties we might have of drawing out and strengthening 
 the good with which that evil may be mixed. But 
 if we look on our fellow-man as being, like ourselves, 
 an object of God's care, as being one whom God is 
 ready to lead on towards righteousness, if only he 
 will be led, then we are led to regard him as we 
 suppose that God regards him, to forgive his faults 
 as we feel our own faults need forgiveness, to look 
 with favour on any attempts we may see in him to 
 act aright. Thus the common fatherhood of God 
 becomes the strongest bond of brotherhood between 
 man and man. 
 
 But in speaking of what ought to be our feelings 
 towards the Maker of us all, and through Him 
 towards one another, I feel that I have been rather 
 outrunning what natural theology by itself alone 
 can attain to. God is not merely the sustainer and 
 preserver of man, as He is of His other creatures, 
 but the Governor of a being endowed with moral 
 faculties, capable of acting in accordance with His 
 will or of rebelling against it. We are all conscious 
 of having resisted His will, of having done what we 
 ought not to have done, and neglected to do what 
 we ought. Can we regard our Maker as our Father ? 
 Must we not rather regard Him with a feeling of 
 dread, and try to hide ourselves from Him ? 
 
 My subject is Natural Theology, and I must sup- 
 pose these questions to present themselves to the 
 
n] PRODUCED BY THE SENSE OF SIN. 57 
 
 mind of one to whom no news of a revelation made 
 from God to man had ever come. The oppressive- 
 ness of the sense of sin, the feeling of alienation from 
 God which it produces, is well shown by the fact 
 that in barbarous nations the rites which men enact 
 in relation to a being above them mostly take the 
 shape of doing something to avert his anger. Yet 
 even among the heathen there were nobler spirits 
 who attained to a higher state than this ; who looked 
 up to Him as to one who felt kindly towards them. 
 How this might be, it is not, I think, difficult to 
 understand. The wilful resistance to the will of 
 God produces a feeling of alienation from Him ; on 
 the other hand, the doing of what is felt to be right 
 meets with an approving voice within, and is calcu- 
 lated to lead to a hope that in some way sin may 
 be forgiven. Further than this it does not seem 
 that man can go by the exercise of his own reason 
 and moral faculties ; and surely we may hope that 
 these yearnings after God will not have been felt in 
 vain, for in every nation he that feareth Him and 
 worketh righteousness is accepted with Him. Into 
 the fuller hopes held out by what we hold to be a 
 revelation made from God to man, and the more 
 filial feelings which they are calculated to produce, I 
 may not enter, for that is a subject lying outside the 
 domain of natural theology. 
 
 Still, if we claim to have attained in this way to 
 
58 POSSIBILITY OF HOLDING [n 
 
 a fuller knowledge of God than was possible for the 
 seekers after God in the heathen world, we must 
 beware of neglecting what is common^ to us and to 
 them. Surely this fuller teaching was not meant to 
 destroy but to fulfil whatever genuine aspirations 
 after God were to be found in men of old. In the 
 study of any branch of science, it is possible for the 
 student so to devote his attention to the most recent 
 acquisitions, to the novelties of yesterday, as to leave 
 himself but ill-acquainted with the more elementary, 
 but fundamental, principles of the science. So I 
 believe it is possible for a man to get puzzled by 
 running after theological speculations and subtleties 
 to the neglect of what is fundamental and more im- 
 portant. Such perplexities are best got over on the 
 solvitur ambulando principle. Endeavours to unravel 
 the knots are all very well in their proper place ; 
 but after all, it is by endeavouring to follow the will 
 of God according to our lights that these perplexities 
 are best allayed. 
 
 In considering the subject of the relations of man 
 to God, one of the most important questions that can 
 be asked is, Is it possible in any way for man to hold 
 communion with God ? May he address Him in 
 prayer ? What is the object of so doing ? What 
 are the beneficial results that may be expected 
 therefrom ? 
 
n] COMMUNION WITH GOD. 59 
 
 Now, by addressing God in prayer is not to be 
 understood the mere use of the vocal organs. They 
 may be used, and used in words of prayer, and yet 
 there may be no more praying in the matter than 
 in turning round a Chinese praying-wheel. Prayer 
 implies a lifting of the heart to God, and that im- 
 plies a belief that God knows and influences what is 
 passing in our minds. It implies a belief in His 
 omnipresence (for otherwise how should we know 
 that we were not merely speaking into the air ?) and 
 in His personality. It is sometimes said that prayer 
 makes no change in God, but makes such a change 
 in us as to lead God to deal differently with us from 
 what He otherwise would have done. This may be 
 true in one sense, and yet not in another. Doubtless 
 prayer is calculated to make a change in us, and 
 through that change good may result to ourselves 
 and others. But if we think of prayer as a kind of 
 self-imposed exercise carried on by a sort of fiction, 
 as if we were addressing another, when what we 
 really believe is that we are merely attempting by 
 our own exertions to influence our own minds, all 
 the heart is taken out of it. A man would not long 
 care for what he felt to be a sham. In prayer a 
 man as it were lays bare the wishes of his heart 
 before God. He may ask to have them granted 
 (assuming, of course, that the wishes are not in them- 
 selves of anything unlawful), but it does not follow 
 
60 NATURE OF PRAYER. [n 
 
 that they will be. There may be reasons which he 
 does not understand why the granting of what 
 seemed to him desirable may be the very reverse. 
 Hence his request is to be subject to the condition, 
 expressed or understood, that the granting of it is in 
 accordance with God's will. In thus holding com- 
 munion with God the man's own character is elevated. 
 Intercourse with even a human fellow-creature who 
 is eminently good tends to elevate one who has had 
 the advantage of it ; how much more must it be with 
 God ! The prayer such as I have supposed prepares 
 the man for thankfulness in case what he asked was 
 granted, for resignation if it was not. The mode in 
 which the object sought is to be brought about is a 
 thing which it does not concern him to know. It 
 need not involve any deviation from the ordinary 
 course of nature ; at the same time the possibility of 
 some more direct intervention is not excluded. I 
 have said that the mode in which the object sought 
 is to be brought about is a thing that does not 
 concern the man who prays. And yet in one sense 
 it may concern him. The answer to his prayer may 
 be to point out some post which he is to occupy in 
 the chain of events whereby the object is to be 
 attained, some duty which he has to fulfil in order to 
 its accomplishment. 
 
 The views which I have endeavoured to express be- 
 long, it seems to me, quite properly to natural theology, 
 
n] THEORY OF PRAYER. 61 
 
 as bearing on what may be called the theory of 
 prayer. Prayer, however, is to be found as a practice 
 of most nations, even those with little civilisation. 
 It is not to be supposed that uninstructed nations 
 think of it as I have been attempting to explain, 
 and yet its very general prevalence indicates that 
 there is some want in the human mind which it 
 tends to supply. I suppose it originated in the 
 combination of a feeling of desire for some object 
 which a man was unable to effect, or doubted whether 
 he could effect, with a belief that there was a higher 
 being, or higher beings, possessed of far greater 
 power than himself, who might be able to accomplish 
 the object, and who might be induced to yield to en- 
 treaties to do so. This, however, does not by itself 
 involve anything necessarily elevating ; indeed, it 
 may be the very reverse. It may be that the object 
 sought is one of revenge, or success in an unjust war. 
 By itself alone prayer merely implies a desire of 
 furtherance of the objects in the heart, and those 
 objects may be evil ones. In such a case prayer is 
 rather lowering than the reverse; it offers an en- 
 couragement to evil passions. But even if the thing 
 sought were in itself harmless, the praying for it 
 may involve nothing more than a wish to have it, 
 and the prayer may come to be regarded merely as a 
 sort of charm for obtaining it. How completely the 
 idea of prayer may be degraded into that of a mere 
 
62 MISTAKEN PR A YER. [n 
 
 charm, is strikingly shown by the use of a praying- 
 wheel, to which I have referred. Perhaps we may 
 be disposed to smile at the Chinese for using such 
 an instrument. But we should remember the proverb 
 about glass houses. Is there not something of a 
 tendency even among ourselves to treat the mere- 
 saying of prayers as a sort of charm for the attain- 
 ment of the object sought ? 
 
LECTUEE III 
 
 Prospective provision Infliction of pain may conduce to the general 
 good Conditions of lawfulness of infliction of pain on animals 
 Justification of capital punishment Origin of Man, creation 
 or evolution? Theological bearing of the two hypotheses 
 Creation does not make God the author of sin Its general 
 prevalence referable to heredity Question of a future life 
 Argument from difference in the conception of a past and 
 future eternity. 
 
 WHEN we have arrived at a conviction that the 
 whole system of nature is to be referred to a Being 
 who is the Author of it, who governs it, and who 
 designs the happiness of His creatures, it is well that 
 we should study the principles, so far as with our 
 limited powers of understanding we can follow them, 
 on which the government of the world is carried on, 
 and see if we cannot thereby obtain indications of 
 some of our own duties. On the present occasion, 
 as regards this subject, I propose merely to touch on 
 two or three topics relating to practical questions 
 concerning which there is not unanimity of opinion, 
 and as to which it seems to me that hints may be 
 obtained for our guidance by an application of the 
 principle just referred to. 
 
64 FORETHOUGHT FOR POSTERITY. [in 
 
 If we look, in the first instance, at the inorganic 
 framework of our earth, and consider what science 
 has revealed, or at any rate rendered exceedingly 
 probable, as to its past history, we are struck by the 
 ages and ages of preparation which preceded the 
 first appearance of animal or even vegetable life upon 
 it. And after their first appearance, what immense 
 lapse of time there must have been while that vege- 
 tation was growing which is now laid up and at our 
 service in the coal-fields. Ought not we too to 
 exercise foresight for the wants of those who may 
 live long after us ? In freely using the stores of 
 coal and other minerals of which the supply, large 
 though it may be, is yet limited, ought we not to 
 consider it a duty to have regard to the wants of 
 posterity, and at least avoid reckless waste ? Still 
 more is this the case as regards races of animals 
 useful to man, or trees the growth it may be of a 
 great many years, which we ought not recklessly to 
 almost exterminate in the selfish desire to supply our 
 own immediate wants, or accumulate hoards of money 
 without thinking of those who are to come after us. 
 
 Again, as the welfare of the lower animals is pro- 
 vided for, and means furnished for the satisfaction of 
 their wants, it is our duty too to treat them kindly, 
 to avoid cruelty, or the needless infliction of pain. 
 Indeed, our natural feelings seem to teach us as much 
 as that ; to torture an animal for the sake of amuse- 
 
in] WELFARE OF ANIMALS. 65 
 
 ment would generally be regarded with abhorrence ; 
 would be taken as an indication of a low moral 
 tone in the person who so acted. 
 
 But though in the system of nature we find pro- 
 vision for the welfare of the animal creation, yet we 
 find abundant instances in which the satisfaction of 
 the wants of one creature entails suffering on another. 
 The very existence of animals of prey implies the 
 slaughter of other animals which constitute their 
 food. Here the exercise of the will of one animal 
 occasions pain in another. Of course I do not mean 
 that the infliction of pain on the victim is the object 
 of the preying animal ; he wants merely to satisfy 
 his hunger ; still, as a matter of fact, the voluntary 
 act of the preying animal does inflict pain, more or 
 less, on the animal that is going to be devoured. It 
 does not follow that the animals of the class of the 
 victim, nay, nor even the victim itself, are worse off 
 than if no such preying had existed. As regards the 
 animal devoured, it is likely enough that the sum 
 total of the suffering it would have had to pass 
 through in the decay preceding a natural death 
 might much exceed that arising from the short pang 
 it felt in the jaws of its devourer. And the curious 
 experience of Dr. Livingstone shows that even this 
 may really not be anything like as great as it looks. 
 So that as regards the victim itself the chief loss 
 may be the deprivation of the happiness it might 
 
 5 
 
66 LAWFULNESS OF INFLICTION [in 
 
 have had in the rest of its life if it had not "been 
 killed. But assuming that in a given place there is 
 room and provision for a given number at a time of 
 animals of the kind preyed upon, in the case of un- 
 reasoning animals that do not, it is to be presumed, 
 distress themselves by the anticipation of danger, it 
 seems to be a matter of indifference whether the sum 
 total of happiness be distributed over a smaller 
 number of animals with longer lives or over a larger 
 number of animals with shorter lives. Hence even 
 the curtailment of the lives of the animals devoured 
 may not diminish the sum total of the happiness of 
 the animals of the class and in the locality that we 
 have under consideration. 
 
 In carrying on their course of life, the lower 
 animals simply follow their instincts ; at least there 
 is nothing to warrant us in supposing that they have 
 the feeling of right and wrong. We may therefore 
 regard their mode of life as conducted under the 
 sanction of the Author of nature. Man, however, has 
 to ask himself, Is it or is it not right that I should 
 act in such or such a manner ? Now in answering 
 such a question he may lawfully consult the estab- 
 lished order of nature, in case that should throw any 
 light on what the proper answer should be. 
 
 Suppose this question to be raised. Man can, if 
 he wishes, live on a vegetable diet. It is true that 
 he prefers as a rule to use some animal food along 
 
in] OF PAIN ON ANIMALS. 67 
 
 with it if he can get it, and is in greater vigour when 
 he does. But this cannot be obtained without in- 
 flicting on animals whatever pain may be inevitable 
 in killing them ; is it lawful for man to inflict this 
 pain? 
 
 Now in this case the answer, as derived from the 
 analogy of the system of nature, seems very plain. 
 Man is under no moral obligation to become a vege- 
 tarian. But as the fact of the existence of animals of 
 prey, or of animals that are in part animals of prey, 
 and that live in part on a vegetable diet, gives 
 no sanction to wanton cruelty, so in slaughtering 
 animals for food we should avoid as far as possible 
 the infliction of pain. 
 
 These things are so generally allowed that it may 
 seem almost puerile to have dwelt upon them. But 
 they naturally lead up to another question respect- 
 ing which opinions are by no means so nearly 
 unanimous. 
 
 When we lie upon a bed of pain or sickness, 
 which is often worse than pain, we feel how much 
 we should be ready to sacrifice if only we might be 
 well again. We should be ready enough to forgo 
 the use of animal food if we thought that the use of 
 a purely vegetable diet would lead to our recovery. 
 
 In such a case the physician or the surgeon, as 
 the case may be, does what he can to bring us back 
 to health. But the amount of what he can do 
 
68 QUESTION OF LAWFULNESS [in 
 
 depends very much upon what is known as to the 
 rationale of the effect of medicines or the result of 
 operations, or, in defect of theoretical knowledge, on 
 previous experience, or on the results of experiments, 
 if such might be made. But how are such experi- 
 ments to be made? The physician would hardly 
 venture to try on the human subject the effect of 
 some powerful substance given as medicine, if the 
 action of it on the animal economy had not to some 
 extent been investigated. The surgeon who con- 
 templates some new very severe operation would 
 hardly venture on it unless some experience had 
 been gained of the result of a similar operation on 
 some animal. The question arises, May such ex- 
 periments lawfully be tried on the lower animals, 
 involving though they do a certain amount of 
 suffering ? 
 
 From the nature of the case we cannot here refer 
 directly to the economy of nature as regards the 
 animal world below man. But by inference from 
 what has already been adduced I think the answer 
 is very plain. If the difference between health on 
 the one hand and severe pain or sickness on the 
 other so much outweighs the inconvenience of re- 
 striction to a vegetable diet, and if, in order to avoid 
 that restriction, it be lawful to slaughter animals for 
 food, surely it must be deemed lawful to try on 
 lower animals the effects of remedies or presumably 
 
m] OF EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS. 69 
 
 remedial operations, when the knowledge thereby 
 acquired may have such an important bearing on 
 the alleviation of human suffering. And the argu- 
 ment is strengthened by the consideration that 
 whereas the slaughter of animals for food has to be 
 made continually, and on a scale sufficient for the 
 whole of the population to be supplied, the know- 
 ledge acquired through a physiological experiment 
 made on the lower animals is a gain made once for 
 all, and for the whole human race. 
 
 Again, the progress of medicine and surgery is 
 very much bound up with additions to our know- 
 ledge of physiology, and it often happens that 
 important questions in relation to the science admit 
 of solution by experiments suitably conducted on the 
 lower animals. The elucidation of these questions 
 may not perhaps have for its immediate object the 
 relief of human suffering ; but an increase of scientific 
 knowledge constantly leads to important practical 
 applications, often of a kind undreamt of when the 
 experiments which resulted in that increase were 
 first instituted. 
 
 In this case again it seems to me that it is lawful 
 to try experiments on lower animals, even though 
 they may involve some amount of pain. But in 
 both cases alike we should avoid all needless inflic- 
 tion of suffering, by refraining from needless repetition 
 of experiments, by using ansesthetics when not pro- 
 
70 INFLICTION OF CAPITAL [in 
 
 hibited by the nature of the result sought to be 
 obtained, by taking care that in an experiment cal- 
 culated to cause much suffering the end sought to be 
 obtained shall be of such importance as to justify the 
 infliction. 
 
 I have spoken of our duties to the lower animals 
 so far as they may be gathered from what we see in 
 the system of nature. As to similar duties towards 
 our fellow - creatures I need hardly say anything, 
 they are so generally admitted, even though not 
 always acted on. But man is a moral being, en- 
 dowed with a feeling of right and wrong, which he 
 is capable of yielding to or resisting, and is account- 
 able accordingly. In relation therefore to his moral 
 nature, questions arise as to how he should be treated 
 which do not present themselves as regards the brute 
 creation. 
 
 We, most of us, believe that the full consequences 
 of evildoing are not seen in the present life. Yet 
 even if we confine ourselves to those that are, there 
 are some things which we see as following from the 
 government of God that may serve to give indications 
 as to what the laws of man should be ; something 
 tending to correct what at first sight might be sup- 
 posed to be in accordance with the will of a merciful 
 God. 
 
 There are courses of wrong-doing which even in 
 this life bring their own retribution. By engaging 
 
in] PUNISHMENT JUSTIFIABLE. 71 
 
 in a course of drunkenness or profligacy, a man may 
 ruin his constitution for life. Perhaps late in life he 
 may repent, and become really reformed. But his 
 constitution may have been irrevocably shattered. 
 The consequences of his former sin, as far as relates 
 to his constitution, are not remitted. He must reap 
 as he has sown. The law of nature is inexorable. 
 
 Now it is in full accordance with this that in 
 human laws the penalty attached to an offence 
 should rigorously be enforced; assuming, of course, 
 that there are not special circumstances which might 
 justify a remission or mitigation. It is with reference 
 to capital punishment that this principle is chiefly 
 called in question. A man, we will suppose, has 
 wilfully and of malice prepense taken away the life 
 of another man. There is no flaw in the evidence, 
 nothing in the circumstances to indicate that his 
 crime is legally or morally anything short of murder. 
 The analogy of the course of nature, as far as that 
 goes, would lead us to say that the law must take its 
 course. Various other considerations into which I 
 cannot enter, even some relating to what seems 
 likely to be best for the criminal himself, lead to the 
 same conclusion. Yet in such cases we constantly 
 find that there are a number of persons who shrink 
 from the idea of the extreme penalty; and indeed 
 more sympathy often seems to be felt with the 
 criminal than with his victim. 
 
72 ORIGIN OF MAN. [in 
 
 I have already touched on the subject of evolution, 
 with reference to the whole system of nature. But 
 there is one particular branch of the subject with 
 which we are more especially concerned, on account 
 of certain theological bearings which it has, and I 
 think it well that I should dwell on this separately, 
 and in some detail. 
 
 This branch is that relating to the question of the 
 origin of man. Did man that is, the human race, 
 not the individual come into existence, both as to 
 his bodily frame and mental powers, by a very slow 
 continuous transmutation, by steps which from one 
 generation to the next were almost infinitesimally 
 small, though cumulative, and in the long run 
 considerable ; so that some lowly organism, some 
 creature at any rate utterly different from man, gave 
 rise to a progeny which gradually in the course of 
 ages came to be men and women ; or was he formed 
 by the Creator as man, no matter how ? 
 
 From the nature of the case natural science can 
 give no answer as to man's origin. It might con- 
 ceivably have been different. It is conceivable that 
 the rocks might have preserved such a continuous 
 series of transitional forms, beginning with some 
 lowly form of life and leading up to man, that we 
 should have been forcibly impressed with the idea of 
 a continuous transmutation. Yet even this, if it had 
 existed, would have given no indication of a con- 
 
m] ORIGIN OF MAN. 73 
 
 tinuous development of mind in successive genera- 
 tions. Doubtless, if such a continuous series of 
 outward forms had been found, we might have been 
 disposed to think that of mind too there had been an 
 analogous gradual development. But it is notorious 
 that no such series as that supposed exists. Any 
 remains of man belong only to the very newest 
 geological series, and we do not find remains of 
 earlier creatures whose forms lead continuously, or 
 anything like continuously, up to him. We know 
 that a certain amount of variation in the form of an 
 animal, which has a tendency to be perpetuated, at 
 any rate for a generation or two, may be artificially 
 produced by attention to breeding, and we know also 
 that a change to some extent may be made by a slow 
 continuous alteration of the conditions of the environ- 
 ment. We know that a succession of allied forms of 
 animals may be traced in successive geological strata. 
 But that is pretty nearly all ; the rest can be but 
 scientific conjecture. The evidence appears to be 
 utterly insufficient to establish, on scientific grounds, 
 the derivation of man by continuous natural trans- 
 mutation from some different form of living thing. 
 
 And as to a continuous development of mind 
 leading up to the mind of man, of direct evidence 
 we seem to have absolutely none. The theory of 
 evolution is rather weighted with the necessity for 
 supposing that there must have been such a thing 
 
74 ORIGIN OF MAN. [in 
 
 than assisted by any evidence that there was. The 
 little evidence that we have seems rather the other 
 way. As we cannot have fossil evidence as to mind, 
 we can only take the living animals which come 
 nearest to man in form, and see whether we can find, 
 as the theory on trial makes it probable that we 
 ought to find, some approach to the mental condition 
 of man. But the gorilla, the chimpanzee, are not 
 specially remarkable among animals for intelligence. 
 So on the whole the scientific evidence for transmu- 
 tation, in other words for evolution, as applied to the 
 origin of man, seems to me, I confess, of the very 
 slenderest kind. When I say this, I mean the word 
 " evolution" to be taken in the strict sense defined in 
 a former lecture ; I would not myself apply the word 
 to anything that involved a direct interposition of 
 the Creative Will, however slight might, in the first 
 instance, be the change thereby effected. 
 
 The rival hypothesis is that mankind took its 
 origin through a direct act of the will of the Creator. 
 What the nature of the change thereby effected may 
 have been, it is not for us to inquire. It may have 
 involved direct animation of a previously lifeless 
 mass of matter ; it may have involved a change in 
 what was already a living creature of a different 
 kind ; I do not see that we have anything to do 
 with that. From the nature of the case this suppo- 
 sition cannot be verified by scientific methods. Yet 
 
in] ORIGIN OF MAN. 75 
 
 it falls in with the utter absence of forms leading 
 continuously up to man ; it falls in again with the 
 existence of the great gulf which seems to separate 
 the mind of man from the minds, such as they are, 
 of the lower animals, Perhaps the chief difficulty 
 attending it (assuming, of course, that the idea of 
 intervention is not discarded as such) is that arising 
 from the general similarity of bodily structure between 
 man and many of the lower animals. Why, it might 
 be asked, should there be this similarity at all if man 
 came into being by an independent act of the Divine 
 Will ? This difficulty, however, is anything but for- 
 midable. Man is an intellectual and moral being, 
 but he is at the same time an animal, and has wants 
 in common with the lower animals. If their bodies 
 are adapted to their mode of life, it stands to reason 
 that a body constructed on somewhat the same 
 general plan would be suitable to him. And the 
 differences which we do perceive are of a nature to 
 fit him for his mode of life. The appropriation, for 
 instance, of the two lower limbs to walking, and the 
 upright position, set free the upper limbs, and enable 
 the hands to be employed in the various works to 
 which his intelligence directs him. The freedom of 
 his body from hair, requiring him to protect it with 
 clothes, which he has the intelligence to make, and 
 can adapt to the temperature, enables him to live in 
 comfort all over the earth, with the exception of a 
 
76 THEOLOGICAL BEARING [in 
 
 portion of the ice-bound regions around the two 
 poles. The difficulty, therefore, just suggested is 
 hardly deserving of the name, and might well be 
 dismissed even if we knew that man's body was 
 originally formed directly from inorganic matter. 
 But it may just as well have been formed by a 
 designed alteration from some previously existing 
 living form, and on that supposition there might be 
 an additional reason for a retention of the general 
 type, namely, to avoid a needless amount of disturb- 
 ance with the previously existing order of things. 
 The one important question is, Did mankind come 
 into being by a gradual process of evolution according 
 to ordinary natural laws from something previously 
 existing, or by a direct act of the Creative Will? 
 This is a question which has, I think, an important 
 theological bearing ; but if the latter alternative be 
 adopted, then it does not seem to signify in what 
 way his creation took place. 
 
 I come now to the theological bearing to which I 
 have referred. 
 
 Man is a moral being, capable of doing right and 
 wrong, and there is no man who does not do wrong. 
 It would seem as if some of the best men felt as if 
 they oftenest did wrong, the reason being that their 
 standard of duty is so high that they admit as short- 
 comings of duty things that many other men would 
 not think about. The existence of sin is a great 
 
in] OF THE TWO HYPOTHESES. 77 
 
 fact ; let us examine it under the two hypotheses as 
 to the origin of man. 
 
 According to the first hypothesis, the human race 
 in its present condition was gradually formed by a 
 slow process of evolution under natural laws from 
 some lowly animal form. The mental condition 
 would undergo a slow process of development just 
 like the bodily. Sin, therefore, gradually grew up 
 along with the development of the moral nature, and is 
 to be looked on accordingly as part of our nature such 
 as God made it. Sinning is part of our nature, like 
 walking, or eating and drinking. Great sins are to 
 be avoided, just as gluttony should be avoided, 
 though eating is lawful. This theory, therefore, 
 makes God the author of sin. As sin, at least in 
 moderation, is part of our nature, we need not think 
 so very much of it, nor can we expect ever to get rid 
 of it. Nor need we suppose that any very serious 
 consequences will result from it ; for how can we 
 imagine that God, who wills the happiness of His 
 creatures, will hold us seriously responsible for what 
 is inherent in the nature that He has given us ? not 
 indeed given us directly, but resulting from the neces- 
 sary and inevitable operation of the laws which He 
 has established, which comes to much the same thing. 
 We should indeed avoid great sins, and try to im- 
 prove somewhat ; but presently death comes and 
 puts an end to the whole matter. For if man arose 
 
78 SPECIAL CREATION DOES NOT [in 
 
 by continuous transmutation from some lowly organ- 
 ism, it would be flying in the face of the law of 
 continuity to suppose that on dying he leaves some 
 residuum living in an active or dormant state, unless 
 the same were true of his immediate ancestor, and the 
 same again of his ancestor, and so on till we get to 
 some lowly animal from whence he sprang countless 
 ages ago. But this is a supposition so contrary to all 
 appearance, so artificial, so apparently unreasonable, 
 that it would be almost universally rejected. 
 
 According to the hypothesis of man's special 
 creation, we are exempt from the difficulty of making 
 God the author of sin. We should naturally suppose, 
 a priori, that in creating a moral being, God would 
 have created him in a condition of moral uprightness. 
 His retention, however, of that state would depend 
 on the use he made of the free will with which he 
 was endowed. We can see no help for the contin- 
 gency of man's misusing his free will other than not 
 to trust him with it, but to make him a sort of con- 
 scious machine, as I mentioned in a former lecture, 
 which would be assigning him a lower position in 
 the scale of created beings. According to this 
 hypothesis then, the entrance of sin into the world is 
 accounted for without making God the author of sin. 
 The one difficulty which at the first blush seems to 
 beset this theory is that it does not appear to account 
 for the universal prevalence of sin. If each human 
 
in] MAKE GOD THE AUTHOR OF SIN. 79 
 
 being be endowed with free will, and yet none fail 
 to misuse it, the chance that a man would use it 
 aright must be practically infinitesimal ; else some 
 among the countless millions of the human race 
 could not fail to escape the misuse. But if man 
 were created with only such an infinitesimal chance 
 of his making a right use of his free will, does not 
 that come to much the same thing as if he were 
 created a sinner, and does not the present hypothesis 
 as well as the former virtually make God the author 
 of sin ? 
 
 To my own mind the answer to this difficulty, 
 otherwise a formidable one, lies in the natural effect 
 of heredity. We know that there is a tendency 
 towards resemblance between offspring and parents, 
 not merely in features and bodily peculiarities, but 
 even to a certain extent in mental character. It is 
 well known, for instance, that there is such a thing as 
 a hereditary tendency to insanity. Now if man were 
 originally in a condition of perfect uprightness, and 
 if in the use of that free will with which he was 
 endowed, he once rebelled against what his conscience 
 told him was right, it stands to reason that the law 
 of conscience being once broken through should 
 thenceforth be powerless to keep man in a state of 
 perfect rectitude. It may offer a check to his wrong- 
 doing, but that is all ; it can no more fulfil its original 
 function of keeping him in the path of uniform 
 
8o GENERALITY OF SIN REFERABLE [in 
 
 rectitude than an egg that has fallen upon the pave- 
 ment can be made a whole egg again. Hence, if 
 man was originally perfectly upright, and once broke 
 through the bounds which were intended to keep 
 him in that condition, a vast mental change must 
 have come over him. How great the change must 
 have been, none of us can tell by our own experience, 
 never having known the condition of perfect inno- 
 cence. Now if this gigantic change came over the 
 condition of original man, it is in full accordance 
 with what we know of the laws of heredity that the 
 posterity of original man should inherit his changed 
 moral condition. Hence the posterity were never 
 in the condition of original man, and therefore the 
 fundamental assumption tacitly made in the sort of 
 chance problem which I brought before you just 
 now, namely, that the probability of obedience to the 
 law of conscience was to be taken the same for pos- 
 terity as for original man, is one which must be 
 rejected altogether; and therefore the conclusion 
 which was based upon it, namely, that the second 
 hypothesis made God virtually the author of sin, 
 which the first hypothesis did directly, falls to the 
 ground. 
 
 The laws of heredity, it will be observed, are not 
 in any way chargeable with the misuse, by original 
 man, of the free will with which he was endowed. 
 They doubtless have their office to fulfil, whatever it 
 
in] TO THE LAWS OF HEREDITY. 81 
 
 may be. And if evil as well as good is capable of 
 resulting from their operation, that is in full accord 
 with what we see around us in the system of nature : 
 the same fertile land which is available for growing 
 crops for human food is capable also of growing 
 noxious weeds or poison-plants. 
 
 In comparing the two rival hypotheses which I 
 have brought before you, we have seen how the 
 second relieves us from a most formidable moral 
 difficulty which besets the first, namely, that of 
 making God the author of sin. In connection with 
 this the two present us with a very different view of 
 the seriousness of sin. I have mentioned already in 
 what light the first tends to make us regard it. The 
 second exhibits it as having been responsible for the 
 loss of all that might have been man's, whatever that 
 may have been, had man remained in a condition of 
 uprightness, as well as responsible for all the misery 
 which is traceable to wrong feeling and wrong doing 
 all over the earth and all through the centuries. 
 Lastly, with regard to prospects in the future, the 
 first hypothesis holds out to us merely hopes of 
 improvement, imperfect at the best, and cut short by 
 death. The second presents us with a bright picture 
 in the past of what might have been the opening of 
 a glorious day, but soon became overcast and involved 
 in gloom, and leaves us with the feeling Oh if such 
 a state of things could be brought back ! 
 
82 QUESTION OF A FUTURE STATE. [in 
 
 If it be important to study natural theology and 
 avail ourselves of such guidance as it may afford, it 
 is important also frankly to recognise what it fails to 
 do. With regard to the subject last before us, it 
 can but leave the mind in the condition of a field 
 ploughed and harrowed, ready to receive the seed of 
 a better hope, if such there can be found. 
 
 What I have just been saying as to the limitation 
 of the power of natural theology to guide us into 
 truth leads me to refer to a subject on which I can 
 say but little, notwithstanding its vast importance in 
 itself, because I feel myself hemmed in, on the one 
 hand by my own convictions, on the other by the 
 restrictions contained in the Will of the Founder. 
 I have spoken of aspirations, which even by natural 
 theology we are led to entertain, after a condition in 
 which there shall no longer be that imperfection 
 which besets us here in obedience to what is right. 
 But where is such a state to be found ? Does 
 death make an end of a man ; and if not, may it be 
 possible to attain to such a condition in some future 
 state of existence ? 
 
 Is there any such future state of existence? 
 What is the evidence of it ? Can we make out any- 
 thing about it ? Important and intensely interesting 
 as these questions are, natural theology can give but 
 a faltering and uncertain reply. Among the philo- 
 sophers of old there were some who looked with 
 
in] QUESTION OF A FUTURE STATE. 83 
 
 tolerable assurance for a life beyond the grave, 
 though they had but poor evidence to give of it. 
 Even this much seemed to have an elevating influence 
 on the life. Perhaps it would be truer to say that 
 their aspirations after doing right relieved in a 
 measure with them the alienation of man from God ; 
 led them to hope in His mercy ; to trust that in 
 some way He would not cast them away at death ; 
 that there might yet be some good thing for them on 
 the other side of that which, to the eye of sense, 
 seemed to involve their destruction; so that the 
 hope of some good thing beyond, and the aspirations 
 after God, acted and reacted on each other. Ought 
 I not then in these lectures to dwell upon hopes of 
 something beyond the grave so far as natural theo- 
 logy can carry us ? My reply is that though the 
 subject as a whole is one about which I have thought 
 much, and formed a very definite opinion, my belief 
 is that what has been done on the basis of mere 
 natural theology, good though it may be in default 
 of something better, goes but a little way, and even 
 in that is not free from error ; and that as regards 
 the real evidence of a future life, and the conditions 
 of it in so far as they can be made out, we must 
 have recourse to a source of information above man's 
 natural powers : not in conflict with those powers, but 
 supplying them with what by themselves they could 
 not attain to. But this lies outside the domain of 
 
84 ARGUMENT FROM A DIFFICULTY [in 
 
 natural theology, and leads us into a region into 
 which I may not enter. 
 
 And yet, there is one consideration of a rather 
 metaphysical character, which, if I may judge of the 
 minds of others by my own, so falls in with the idea 
 that man's career was not designed to have been cut 
 short, as to all outward appearance it is, by death, 
 that though it may not be of great weight in itself is 
 yet confirmatory of what, on other grounds, we have 
 reason to believe to be the truth. And the reason 
 why I select for mention this ' particular argument is 
 that I do not happen to have seen it brought forward 
 anywhere, whereas the argument derived from the 
 observation that virtuous or evil living do not seem 
 to meet in this life recompense in proportion to their 
 deserts, while yet we feel that God is a Eighteous 
 Governor of the world, and therefore there must be 
 some state beyond death in which men will be re- 
 warded according to their works this argument, I 
 say, is one familiarly known, so that it is hardly 
 necessary to dwell upon it. 
 
 Let us dwell a little upon the idea of time. We 
 look forward to what we expect to take place to- 
 morrow; we look backwards on what took place 
 yesterday ; there is no more difficulty about the one 
 than about the other. Nor is this confined to a short 
 space of time, such as a day. We can look back- 
 
in] REGARDING A PAST ETERNITY. 85 
 
 wards to the landing of Julius Caesar in Britain, or 
 to the fall of Babylon, and similarly we can look 
 forwards to a possible conflict between two nations 
 which we can imagine to take place long after we 
 are dead ; of the two conceptions, one is as easy as 
 the other. 
 
 Nor can we fix any limit of duration in either 
 case. When we think of some event as happening 
 in the remote future, no matter how far off, we can- 
 not help thinking of the time that is to follow it. 
 When we think of any event as having occurred in 
 the past, no matter how far back, we cannot help 
 thinking of time before it. The mathematician may 
 express the place of a planet (supposed undisturbed 
 and unresisted) in its orbit by a formula involving a 
 symbol (t suppose) denoting the time elapsed from 
 the present moment to any future time for which 
 the place of the planet may be required to be known, 
 and the very same formula will serve to make known 
 where the planet was at any assigned interval before 
 the present time ; we have only to make t negative. 
 Nor is there any limit to the magnitude of t in the 
 one case or in the other. 
 
 But now, instead of considering as it were a 
 mathematical abstraction, regard time as occupied 
 by events ; as being, so to speak, the seat of history. 
 As regards the future, we may in imagination extend 
 the time indefinitely ; we may pass in our concep- 
 
86 IDEA OF A PAST ETERNITY [in 
 
 tion from time to eternity ; we may in imagination 
 continue our history for ever. 
 
 But if we attempt to cany time, regarded not as 
 an abstraction but as the seat of history, indefinitely 
 backwards, we seem to be overwhelmed. There 
 seems to be something that we cannot well fathom 
 in an actually written past eternal history. Of course 
 I use the word " written " in a metaphorical sense. 
 Scientifically considered, and on the large scale, the 
 order of nature seems to be one of progress, not 
 periodicity. We may in our speculations think of 
 suns as formed by condensation of matter diffused 
 over space. But how came the matter there ? If it 
 began to condense at the time we first fixed on in 
 our imagination, we ask ourselves, Why did it not 
 condense before? If we say this diffused matter 
 was created, we cannot help asking ourselves, What 
 took place before its creation ? 
 
 This difference in the facility, might I say possi- 
 bility ? of conceiving a past and a future eternity, 
 when time is thought of as the seat of history, seems to 
 correspond to a difference in the condition of man 
 regarded as a being existing in time. Man had a 
 beginning in time (I speak here of the individual 
 man, not the race), and accordingly there may be 
 problems regarding an infinite past that baffle his 
 ideas. But the fact that he is able to look forward 
 to an infinite future falls in with the supposition 
 
in] LEADS US TO THE SELF-EXISTENT. 87 
 
 that, according to his original creation, man (the 
 individual man) was not intended to be brought to 
 an end. Whether on the supposition which even 
 natural theology points to, that he was originally 
 created in a condition of innocence, but fell from it 
 by misuse of the free will with which he was en- 
 dowed, that change made any difference to him in 
 this respect ; whether, that is to say, the fall that 
 has been supposed left him still an immortal being, 
 or deprived him of immortality, or left it still open 
 to him to attain to it, and if so, under what conditions 
 these, I conceive, are questions which it does not 
 lie within the competence of natural theology to 
 answer. 
 
 Leaving then these questions, I would go back 
 for a moment to the consideration of what I brought 
 before you just now, namely, the result of attempting 
 to conceive a past eternity when we regard time as 
 the seat of history. We have seen how, by the 
 freest indulgence of scientific imagination in tracing 
 the past history of the universe, we are at last led 
 up to the self-existent and uncaused. That name of 
 God, I AM, seems to represent the furthest limit of 
 human thought. 
 
LECTUEE IV 
 
 Anomaly of man's capacities combined with mortality Anomaly 
 of welfare not in proportion to deserts Hypothesis that man 
 consists of a mortal body and a soul surviving death Evidence 
 that the body is concerned in thought Materialistic theory 
 Difficulties of both psychic and materialistic theories Theory 
 of man's tripartite nature Possibilities which it holds out 
 Recapitulation. 
 
 TO-DAY I mean to bring before you a subject which 
 I admit is speculative, but which is not therefore, I 
 think, to be discarded as necessarily useless. It has 
 helped to render my own thoughts more steady and 
 definite, and seems to me to be a thing worth think- 
 ing about, whether you incline or do not incline to 
 the ideas which I shall have to suggest. 
 
 If we attempt to frame a system of natural re- 
 ligion by inference from what we visibly observe 
 about us, and have arrived at a conviction that there 
 is an All-powerful Author of nature, and have further 
 been led to regard Him as a being at the same time 
 righteous and benevolent, we encounter some for- 
 midable difficulties to which the things we see around 
 us do not seem to afford any solution. 
 
 First, there is a teleological difficulty. We ob- 
 
iv] MAN'S CAPACITY FOR PROGRESS. 89 
 
 serve in animals, and in man regarded as an animal, 
 an adaptation of the structure to the. wants of the 
 creature, an adaptation of so refined and complex a 
 nature as forcibly to impress us with the idea of 
 design, even though we can go but a little way 
 towards a full explanation of the mode of action of 
 the whole. But man is more than a mere animal ; 
 he is endowed with intellectual powers ; he is capable 
 of continually acquiring fresh knowledge, nor does 
 there seem to be a natural limit beyond which he 
 cannot go. He is prompted by a sort of natural 
 curiosity to go continually onwards in the pursuit of 
 knowledge. The acquisition is made step by step, 
 and the accumulation of the store requires time. 
 Surely, we might have supposed, arguing only on 
 teleological grounds, an indefinite extension of time 
 is intended to be allowed him. But then comes 
 death and cuts short his progress death, which to 
 all outward appearance, makes an end of him alto- 
 gether. Here then appears to be a glaring violation 
 of the teleological law of adaptation to requirements. 
 And this, apparent at least, want of adaptation is 
 rendered all the greater by the power that man 
 possesses of availing himself of the knowledge ac- 
 cumulated by his ancestors. Birds of a given kind 
 go on generation after generation building the same 
 sort of nests, living the same sort of life ; but man 
 instructs his fellow-man in the new knowledge which 
 
90 MORAL ARGUMENT SUGGESTING [iv 
 
 he lias acquired by the exercise of his own intellect- 
 ual powers, commits, it may be, an account of it to 
 writing, and thus enables a succeeding generation to 
 start on a higher level of knowledge than the genera- 
 tions before. Time is required for the acquisition of 
 even a fraction of the knowledge thus accumulated. 
 
 Again, man is a moral being, having a sense of 
 right and wrong, possessed of a feeling of responsi- 
 bility. Surely, we might have thought, as God is 
 righteous, He will provide that the upright man be 
 happy and prosperous, though He may punish the 
 wicked man by allowing him to sink into misery. 
 And doubtless we see a considerable tendency 
 towards such a condition; uprightness does on the 
 whole tend towards prosperity, and wickedness the 
 reverse. But this is hardly a fair answer to the 
 objection, because our observation is derived from a 
 settled state of society, in which, moreover, and this 
 is very important as regards the argument there is 
 far more than mere natural religion tending to in- 
 fluence men's conduct. Yet even in a settled state 
 of society we often see virtuous men suffering much 
 misery, and wicked men prosperous to the end. So 
 that even under these circumstances there is much 
 to perplex us as regards the moral government of God 
 if we suppose that death does what to all outward 
 appearance it appears to do, and puts an end to a 
 man altogether. 
 
iv] A SOUL SURVIVING DEATH. 91 
 
 Accordingly many men of old of a thoughtful 
 spirit, who had no revelation to guide them, were 
 led to believe that death is not what it appears to 
 be, a termination of man's existence, but that there 
 is a state beyond in which he continues to exist. 
 Such a state beyond death might leave room for a 
 continuation of progress here so rudely interrupted, 
 and also furnish opportunity for the requital of a 
 man according to what he had done. If, however, 
 the body were essential to man's being, as that goes 
 to corruption, he must come to an end. Man was 
 accordingly supposed to consist of two parts, the 
 body and the soul, the latter being that to which 
 thought and consciousness belonged; and at death 
 the union was looked on as dissolved, and the soul 
 set free to enter on a new mode of existence. 
 
 But is there any evidence, save the solution or 
 rather possible solution which the supposition affords 
 of certain difficulties which lie in the path of natural 
 theology, that there is anything about man which sur- 
 vives the stroke of death ? When I ask, "Is there any 
 evidence t " I mean, of course, apart from revelation. 
 
 Some have endeavoured to establish the separate 
 existence of the soul and its immortality by meta- 
 physical arguments founded on the supposed nature 
 of the soul itself. I suppose arguments of that kind 
 appear differently to different men ; for my own 
 part I can only say that I have never seen any that, 
 
92 SHARE OF THE BODY IN THOUGHT. [iv 
 
 to me, seemed to have the slightest weight. I will 
 pass on then to what we do know about thinking 
 and consciousness from our own experience. 
 
 Now, when we are walking, we know very well 
 that we are moving our limbs ; we know that it is 
 only by means of our body that we are able to walk. 
 But when we are thinking, there is no direct con- 
 sciousness that we are using our bodies in any way 
 in so doing. If that were all, we might very well 
 suppose that thinking took place wholly through 
 something which was independent of the body. 
 But physiological observation does not lend support 
 to the idea of such independence. The process of 
 thinking is found to be intimately connected with the 
 state of the brain. Diseases affecting the material organ 
 usually are accompanied by a feebleness or erratic 
 condition of the mental powers. In a faint, when 
 the brain is feebly supplied with blood, thought is in 
 abeyance. Something of the same kind takes place 
 in sleep, though the transition from full consciousness 
 to unconsciousness and the return are by no means 
 so sharp in sleep as in a faint. There are, indeed, 
 persons who assert that in sleep thought goes on all 
 the same as in the normal waking condition, and the 
 only reason why we do not know it is that we do 
 not recollect what our thoughts were. But this ap- 
 pears to be a pure assumption made in the interest 
 of a preconceived theory of the separate existence of 
 
iv] MATERIALISTIC THEORY. 93 
 
 that within us which thinks. I do not see how we 
 can conceive of consciousness as existing or thought 
 as carried on during an interval of time in which 
 memory is absolutely non-existent. It seems to me 
 that the purely psychic theory, as it may be called, 
 which would discard the body altogether in regard 
 to the process of thought, is beset by very great 
 difficulties. 
 
 The patent fact that the process of thinking is so 
 intimately connected with the condition of the brain 
 has led others to adopt what may be called a purely 
 materialistic theory. According to this, thinking is 
 simply and solely a mechanical process taking place 
 in the material molecules of the brain, depending on 
 certain motions going on in them, involving a certain 
 action going on in the body and nothing else. Ac- 
 cording to this view, inasmuch as the body goes 
 utterly to corruption at death, the soft pulpy mass 
 constituting the brain being one of the most readily 
 perishable parts, the man must come utterly to an 
 end at death, and therefore the teleological and moral 
 difficulties mentioned above as besetting natural 
 theology remain in full force. Or, at least, if for the 
 sake of evading these difficulties it be supposed that 
 a fresh organism is afterwards created and started to 
 continue the motions that had been performed in the 
 former, just as a tune, a portion of which was played 
 on an organ that was then demolished, might be 
 
 U1U7BRSITY 
 
94 DIFFICULTIES OF LAST THEORY. [iv 
 
 completed on a fresh organ altogether, we should 
 have been driven to a hypothesis at variance with 
 all analogy, violating the law of continuity, and pre- 
 serving personal identity, if indeed it can be said to 
 preserve it at all, only through a sort of special 
 miracle wrought in each particular case. 
 
 But granting that the state of the brain and its 
 activity are intimately bound up with the process of 
 thinking as we know it, say, are necessary to that 
 process, it by no means follows that they are sufficient. 
 On the contrary, the supposition that they are suffi- 
 cient involves great difficulties even without reference 
 to natural theology, much less to revelation. It is 
 difficult to imagine how any such purely mechanical 
 process as that supposed in this theory can be com- 
 patible with free will, with the power of choice, of 
 which we are innately conscious. Again, take the 
 existence of memory. According to the materialistic 
 hypothesis, we can only imagine that what passed 
 through the mind in relation to past events is in 
 some way stored up in the cells of the brain, in 
 some such sort of way as books are stowed away in 
 a library. In addition to the great initial difficulty 
 of conceiving how such a process as thinking can 
 possibly be conditioned merely by certain molecular 
 motions in the brain, we have here the further diffi- 
 culty of understanding how such a soft, pulpy mass, 
 in continual change from the effect of the wearing 
 
iv] ANOTHER THEORY OF THE EGO. 95 
 
 away of tissues and their renewal by nutrition, could 
 possibly retain for years the record of an event which 
 perhaps was not thought of for a very great length 
 of time. 
 
 It seems to me that both theories as to the origin 
 of thought, the psychic and the materialistic, are 
 beset with difficulties. May it not be that the truth 
 lies between them, or rather involves a combination 
 of parts of each? May it not be that there is a 
 something constituting the ego which, on the one 
 hand, is not to be identified with thought, and which 
 may exist while thought is in abeyance ; while, on 
 the other, it is not to be identified with ponderable 
 matter, but yet exercises over ponderable matter a 
 sort of command ? May it not be that thinking is 
 a process which results from the interaction of the 
 ego on the organism with which the ego is associated, 
 over which it is, as it were, placed in command ? 
 According to this view, the ego is something lying 
 deeper down in our nature than thought itself some- 
 thing the destruction of which is not involved in the 
 destruction of the body, inasmuch as it does not 
 consist of ponderable matter something which might 
 conceivably, without any breach of continuity, pre- 
 serve the personal identity between the man who 
 died and the same man in some different stage of 
 existence. 
 
 Perhaps it may help to make the ideas which I 
 
96 ILLUSTRATIVE ANALOGY. [iv 
 
 have broached more readily intelligible if I refer by 
 way of analogy to an instrument recently invented. 
 I allude to the phonograph, that remarkable contriv- 
 ance by means of which the words of a speaker may 
 be audibly reproduced after the lapse of almost any 
 interval of time. In this instrument a wax cylinder 
 receives minute indentations, through the agency of 
 a receiving instrument, from the sounds that are 
 uttered in its neighbourhood ; these indentations it 
 retains, and through them the sounds registered, or any 
 portion of them, may be given out again at pleasure, 
 and that repeatedly, by means of a suitable emitting 
 instrument. I would compare the wax cylinder to 
 the personal being, the ego ; the registration on the 
 cylinder to impressions received from without ; the 
 retention of the marks on the cylinder to the reten- 
 tion by the mind of something that passed through 
 it before, but which is not at the moment thought 
 of ; the giving out of a sound previously registered 
 to the recollection of something that passed before. 
 It will be understood that this is meant only for a 
 rough illustrative analogy ; the comparison is not to 
 be pressed too far into detail ; nor is the possibility 
 of the origination or continuation of fresh trains of 
 thought without the reception of fresh impressions 
 from without at all intended to be denied. 
 
 It is true that this supposition, taken by itself 
 alone, does not wholly remove the teleological and 
 
iv] SUPPLEMENTARY HYPOTHESIS. 97 
 
 moral difficulties that I have mentioned ; it needs 
 to be supplemented by something else, to find which 
 we must go slightly outside the limits of purely 
 natural theology. And the reason why I say that 
 the difficulties are not wholly removed is this. 
 According to the supposition, the ego is something 
 lying deeper down than thought, though intimately 
 concerned in thought. If thought, as we know it, 
 involves an interaction between the ego and the 
 material body, what becomes of thought when the 
 body goes to dissolution ? To this difficulty natural 
 theology might offer a conjecture. Perhaps the ego 
 might be capable of thought by itself; perhaps it 
 may be associated with some other organism, com- 
 posed or not composed of ponderable matter, by its 
 interaction with which thought may be carried on. 
 Still, a conjecture such as this is all that natural 
 theology can offer; but what to it can only be a 
 conjecture is promised according to the Christian 
 religion, which tells us of a future body, of what 
 kind we know not, but still of some kind, by inter- 
 action between which and what I have called the 
 ego thought may conceivably be carried on. 
 
 I am forbidden to dwell on the evidence for this ; 
 but as I said in my opening lecture I do not think 
 there is anything in the Founder's will to prevent 
 me from pointing out how something which we learn 
 only through revelation, if supposed to be true, fits 
 
 7 
 
98 HYPOTHESIS OF AN UNKNOWN [iv 
 
 into and supplies a want which natural theology 
 points out, but is unable to satisfy. 
 
 But perhaps it will be said, Is it not highly un- 
 philosophical to have recourse to the supposition of 
 the existence of an unknown something which you 
 call the ego in the attempt to explain observed 
 phenomena? We know that thinking is accom- 
 panied by activity of the brain. Must it not be to 
 the material organism that we must look for a full 
 explanation of what it consists in ? 
 
 Doubtless, in true philosophy we are not without 
 grave reason to assume, even for trial, the existence 
 of an unknown entity in order to account for observed 
 phenomena. We must first well consider the possi- 
 bility of explaining them through known proximate 
 causes. But if none of these seem to hold out 
 any prospect of an explanation, it is sometimes well 
 to assume for trial the existence of some such cause 
 of which previously we had no idea. The history of 
 the progress of even physical science is not without 
 evidence how some very substantial increase to our 
 knowledge might have been nipped in the bud by 
 an obstinate refusal to entertain, even for trial, the 
 supposition of the existence of some entity of which 
 we had no previous knowledge. Take, for example, 
 the commencement of the modern theory of light. 
 The fact that light proceeds in straight lines from 
 the body that emits it, suppose one of the heavenly 
 
iv] ENTITY ADMISSIBLE FOR TRIAL. 99 
 
 bodies, seems akin to what we know of the motion 
 of projectiles. It is true that we had no direct 
 evidence of the existence of light as a substance; 
 but it did not seem to be stepping far outside what 
 we had direct knowledge of to suppose that it was 
 of the nature of projectiles. But another supposition 
 was started according to which light is not a sub- 
 stance, but consists in the vibrations of a medium 
 filling all space, at least to the remotest visible star. 
 But what of this medium ? What evidence have we 
 of the existence of any such thing? Taking the 
 state of our knowledge at the time when the undula- 
 tory theory of light was started, the answer must be, 
 We have none. Had it been imperative to reject 
 the theory of undulations because it required the 
 hypothesis of the existence of a medium, the so- 
 called ether, of which we had no knowledge, and of 
 the existence of which our senses gave us no direct 
 cognisance, the splendid edifice of modern optics could 
 never have been erected. We know that even the 
 genius of Newton was powerless to explain the 
 curious phenomena of diffraction which excited so 
 much of his attention, and which he subjected to 
 careful experiment, because he took up the corpus- 
 cular theory of light, rejecting the theory of undu- 
 lations, though not, it is true, from reluctance to 
 suppose that any such thing existed as an ether, 
 but for a different reason. We now know with what 
 
ioo DIFFICULTIES IN THE [iv 
 
 beautiful simplicity the complicated phenomena of 
 diffraction have been explained through what we 
 have every reason to regard as the true theory of 
 light. 
 
 And so it seems to me that mere materialism does 
 not hold out any prospect of leading to an explana- 
 tion, I will not merely say of thought, but even of 
 the phenomena of life in the lowliest form of animal 
 or plant. There appears to be a well-marked line 
 of demarcation between inorganic nature and the 
 forms of life. It is true that we get dendritic 
 crystallisations which sometimes simulate in a rough 
 way the outward forms of some kinds of plants. 
 But this does not go beyond the merest superficial 
 resemblance. In crystallisation we have nothing 
 like the formation and multiplication of cells. It 
 would seem as if there were something about a living 
 thing which exercised a sort of command over 
 matter. I do not say that the forces or laws to 
 which inorganic matter is subject are opposed or 
 superseded when matter belongs to a living thing. 
 The chemist has no command whatsoever over the 
 laws of chemical affinity, and yet, by working in 
 obedience to those laws, he is able in his laboratory 
 to form a variety of compounds, some of which do 
 not occur in nature, while others do occur, but are 
 formed perhaps in some vegetable, in some manner 
 totally different from that by which they have been 
 
iv] MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF LIFE. 101 
 
 obtained by the chemist. So, it may be, this un- 
 known something on which life depends acts on 
 matter, without any interference with the laws which 
 belong to it as such, with the result of bringing 
 about the growth, and so forth, of the living thing. 
 
 Whether we shall ever be able to get through 
 scientific observation some insight into that mysteri- 
 ous something on which life depends, and more 
 especially whether we shall ever be able to arrive 
 in this manner at some explanation of the relation of 
 the bodily organism to thought, may well be doubted. 
 As regards the latter, which is what chiefly belongs 
 to our subject, if any progress is to be made, it would 
 seem most likely to be effected through a careful 
 study, both physiologically and psychically, of ab- 
 normal conditions, such as those of dreams, of 
 somnambulism, of the mesmeric state, of double 
 consciousness, of delirium and insanity. But if we 
 lay down as an axiom the truth of the purely 
 materialistic hypothesis, according to which a living 
 thing is simply an elaborate machine, acting by 
 virtue of its construction through the laws which 
 regulate the action of dead matter, and not requiring 
 anything more, it may be that we shall thereby bar 
 out all possibility of advancement, just as we should 
 do with regard to the phenomena of diffraction by 
 refusing to entertain the idea of an ether. 
 
 I said at the outset that the views I had to put 
 
102 POSSIBILITIES SUGGESTED BY [iv 
 
 before you on this occasion did not amount to more 
 than a speculation. I am forbidden to lean on the 
 teaching of what at least professes to be a re- 
 velation. But I do not conceive that there is any 
 impropriety in my just pointing out that the specula- 
 tion I have brought before you seems to fall in with 
 the Scriptural account of our complex nature. Ac- 
 cording to the views of Plato, in which he is very 
 widely followed, man consists of two parts body and 
 soul. But in Scripture we have a threefold division, 
 into body, soul, and spirit, whatever the latter two 
 may respectively mean, a subject into which it would 
 be out of place for me to attempt to enter. 
 
 The speculations into which I have ventured to 
 enter, open out some ideas as to future possibilities 
 which it may be well that I should indicate ; pre- 
 mising that I do not for a moment claim acceptance 
 for these views, though after all they are closely 
 akin to what is very commonly thought by those 
 who believe in a future state at all. 
 
 According to the ideas which I have broached, all 
 our past thoughts, or at least all the exercises of our 
 will, remain impressed upon our being ; capable of 
 being brought out, though at a given time we think 
 of but few of them, and some remain unthought of at 
 all, and seem to have quite passed out of our memory. 
 The activity of the memory depends in great measure 
 on the condition of the body. In extreme old age, 
 
iv] THE THEORY OF TRIPLICITY. 103 
 
 when the vital powers become enfeebled, there is 
 very commonly found a failure in good measure of 
 the memory also. Now, if that on which the past 
 things that concern us are registered, and brought 
 before our thoughts from time to time, be something 
 distinct from that structure of ponderable matter 
 which constitutes the body, and be not destroyed 
 with it, and if it be subsequently connected with 
 put, as it were, in command of a body of a very 
 different nature, specially adapted for the require- 
 ments of the spirit, it is conceivable that all of the 
 past that has been impressed upon our being may 
 be read by the memory with a vividness, with a 
 completeness, with a rapidity, of which, in our 
 present state, we have no idea. It may be that 
 every wrong thing we have ever done will stand 
 before us in its naked deformity ; that every right 
 thing will be remembered with a feeling of satis- 
 faction. 
 
 It often happens that ideas are more clearly enter- 
 tained from being connected with something concrete. 
 Permit me, then, once more to refer to the analogy of 
 the phonograph. The whole of a long speech may be 
 recorded on its cylinders. There the record remains, 
 out of hearing, out of mind, it may be out of recollec- 
 tion altogether. But there it is, capable at any time 
 of being brought out ; capable of convicting the 
 speaker of having said what he ought not to have 
 
104 FORMATION OF HABITS. [iv 
 
 said, if such has been the case. In one respect the 
 analogy fails to illustrate what I have been attempt- 
 ing to suggest. The wax cylinders can but give out 
 what has been impressed on them in succession, just 
 as it was received ; they fail, therefore, to illustrate 
 the supposed activity, and rapidity of passage from 
 subject to subject, which was conceived to belong to 
 memory when the being is in possession of a body of 
 a more refined nature than the present. 
 
 But whatever may be thought of the quickening 
 of the memory in a future state of existence, there is 
 one thing respecting the effect of right and wrong 
 exercises of the will which we know very well by 
 experience. We know that habits, as a rule, are of 
 slow growth. Character is formed by degrees as a 
 result of repeated exercises of the will. I do not for 
 a moment deny that sometimes a change may sud- 
 denly come over a man which has the effect of alter- 
 ing his whole course of life. Yet even in such a 
 case, though a change in the character may begin, 
 it requires time for becoming matured. The man's 
 course may be compared to a curve in which the 
 direction of the tangent takes a sudden alteration. 
 It .may be that the curve, thought of as continuously 
 traced, which had been descending begins to ascend. 
 Yet it does not all at once attain a high elevation, 
 though it may tend to rise more or less quickly. 
 Thus evil habits, the result of repeated evil acts, still 
 
iv] GROWTH OF CHARACTER. 105 
 
 exercise a baneful influence even after a man has 
 begun to reform. 
 
 I was much struck with an illustration of the 
 relation of character to acts which I heard given by 
 the late Professor Clifford in a lecture at the Eoyal 
 Institution. It is, however, one which I fear will 
 only be understood by those who know a little of the 
 planetary theory. Were it not for their mutual per- 
 turbations, the planets would move in their orbits 
 according to the simple laws of Kepler. As it is, 
 however, they mutually disturb each other's motions, 
 though the amount of disturbance in any moderate 
 time is but small. Periodic inequalities, as they are 
 called, are thus produced. But, besides this, a repeti- 
 tion of these disturbances gradually produces a change 
 in the orbits in which the planets move, and this 
 change is not, like the other changes, very small, but 
 takes place very slowly. These alterations are called 
 secular. Now Clifford compared acts to the periodic 
 disturbances, while the gradual change of character, 
 resulting from repeated acts, was compared to the 
 secular variations of the orbits of the planets. 
 
 I think it may conduce to clearness if you will 
 allow me very briefly to recapitulate the views that 
 I have been endeavouring to put before you. 
 
 Physiological observation shows that the brain is 
 largely concerned in the process of thinking as we 
 
io6 RECAPITULATION. [iv 
 
 know it, and that it must be in a state of activity 
 in order that we may think. At the same time there 
 are immense difficulties in the way of the supposition 
 that thinking is nothing but an action of the material 
 organism. The most probable view seems to be that 
 there is an unknown something, not consisting of 
 ponderable matter, but directing the ponderable 
 matter of which the body consists, and that think- 
 ing, as we know it, is the result of the interaction of 
 the two. This unknown something appears to be 
 that on which personal identity depends, and may 
 accordingly be called the ego. Memory would seem 
 to depend on something registered on the ego, the 
 record being capable of being brought into thought 
 by interaction with the material organism. The ego 
 is not destroyed in sleep or in a faint, though thought 
 be for the time in abeyance. As it does not consist 
 of ponderable matter, we cannot affirm that it is 
 destroyed by death, though that causes the material 
 organism to go to corruption ; but we might regard 
 it as likely that thought would stop. But if the ego 
 were then put in command, as it were, of a new 
 organism, thought might be resumed ; and the con- 
 sciousness of personal identity might be sustained, as 
 it now is notwithstanding interruption by sleep or by 
 a faint. And if the new organism, whether material 
 or otherwise, were something more refined, and better 
 adapted for mental activity by interaction with the 
 
iv] RECAPITULATION. 107 
 
 ego than is the present body, which has the wants of 
 our animal nature to provide for, it is conceivable 
 that the activity of the memory and of the mental 
 powers in general might be vastly increased ; it is 
 conceivable that every act of our lives, every act at 
 least in which the formation of character was in the 
 slightest degree concerned, might stand before our 
 memories in full view ; that every wrong and every 
 right action might be remembered with a feeling of 
 pain or satisfaction. 
 
 It is not for a moment pretended that the suppo- 
 sitions here made can be looked on as established, 
 though they seem to fall in with what we know or 
 have reason to believe ; but at any rate they open 
 up considerations as to possible effects of our conduct 
 here which seem deserving of reflection. 
 
 In concluding the first instalment of my lectures 
 for the present year, I should like to speak more 
 fully and frankly on a subject which hitherto I have 
 only briefly touched upon. 
 
 From the words of the will establishing these lec- 
 tureships, it would seem that the Founder thought 
 that it was possible for man, by the simple exercise 
 of his intellectual, arid perhaps also moral, powers, to 
 create a perfect science of the knowledge of God and 
 of man's duty, without having recourse to what pro- 
 fesses to be a revelation made from God to man. At 
 
loS INTERPRETATION OF A PROVISION [iv 
 
 least the lecturer is forbidden to rest in any way on 
 revelation. Indeed, Lord Gifford speaks of the science 
 of natural theology, as he conceived it ought to be 
 and was capable of being made, as perfectly analo- 
 gous to the sciences of astronomy or chemistry. 
 
 Now, in every natural science there is a point 
 beyond which we cannot go, or at least beyond which 
 we have not gone, and very likely see no prospect, at 
 least at present, of being able to go. There may be 
 some slight analogy between natural theology and 
 the natural sciences in so far as this : that something 
 may be done, and that we cannot expect to get to the 
 end of either. But, on the one hand, the methods of 
 investigation are quite different; and on the other, if 
 we restrict ourselves in natural theology to what man 
 can do simply by the aid of his natural powers, I am 
 afraid that we shall get but a very little way. If 
 man's investigation of his own mind is a subject 
 so difficult, and in which so little progress has been 
 made, what must it be as regards any attempts that 
 man can make to explain the attributes of his Maker, 
 and his own relations to him ? 
 
 Again, if it be true (as most of us, I suppose, 
 believe that it is, resting that belief on what we hold 
 to have been revealed) that man is not in his 
 primeval moral state, but that his moral nature has 
 become corrupted and enfeebled, the task proposed 
 naturally becomes vastly more difficult, and the lia- 
 
iv] IN THE WILL OF LORD GIFFORD. 109 
 
 bility to error in attempting to execute it is greatly 
 increased. 
 
 But I can hardly imagine that the Founder meant 
 his lecturers, who presumably would usually be per- 
 sons holding the Christian religion, so to throw over- 
 board their religion as not even, if I may so speak, 
 to take hints from it ; not even to assume for trial 
 what they may have learned from it, and endeavour 
 to make out whether such things fall in with what 
 they are led to by natural theology, perhaps fill up 
 some gap which natural theology perceives, but is 
 unable to deal with. 
 
 In these opening lectures, I have felt myself very 
 much cramped by the provisions of the will, perhaps 
 too slavishly regarded. I am disposed in further 
 lectures to adopt a more liberal interpretation. The 
 lecturer, it may be observed, is only desired not to 
 rest on what he holds to have been revealed, and it 
 does not seem incompatible with this requirement to 
 examine into the reasonableness, on grounds of purely 
 natural theology, of what he believes to have been 
 taught to man in a supernatural manner. I have 
 barely ventured to do this in these opening lectures ; 
 but unless I have reason to think that it would be 
 deemed improper, as being hardly compatible with 
 the Founder's will, I contemplate using greater free- 
 dom in this respect in some subsequent lectures. 
 
 Here, then, for the present I leave these lectures, 
 
i io LORD GIFFORD* S PROPOSAL AS [iv 
 
 sincerely thanking you for the attention with which 
 you have listened to me, and hoping that you will 
 leniently regard my deficiencies, of which I am 
 deeply conscious, in dealing with so great a subject. 
 I hope to resume my lectures in the spring, perhaps 
 about two months hence. The exact time cannot at 
 present be fixed, but of course due notice will be 
 given. 
 
 Lord Gifford advised in his will that besides 
 giving courses of lectures, the lecturers should form 
 special classes for instruction in the manner of 
 ordinary University classes. So far as I am aware, 
 this has not hitherto been done, by the Gifford lec- 
 turers ; and it presupposes the attainment, by natural 
 theology, of the position of a definite science, like 
 astronomy or chemistry. I must confess my own 
 inability so to treat it, and I have doubts as to the 
 possibility of its being thus dealt with. An inchoate 
 science is better promoted by a free interchange of 
 opinion than by the assumption by one man of the 
 position of a professor lecturing ex cathedrd, who is 
 supposed to be a master of his subject, and from 
 whom his class have but to learn. It may be that 
 you have learned something in these lectures, or at 
 least may have had suggested to you some train of 
 thought which seems deserving of being further fol- 
 lowed out in your own minds. But I also may have 
 much to learn from you. My various engagements, 
 
iv] TO THE FORMATION OF CLASSES. in 
 
 and the circumstance that I live so far off as 
 Cambridge, almost preclude much personal inter- 
 course with you. But in default of that I invite 
 any of you who are so disposed to write to me on 
 any of the subjects on which I have touched. I can 
 promise you that the letters will not be neglected, 
 though my engagements forbid me to promise 
 speedy replies. I may mention that my normal 
 address is Cambridge. I regard this invitation as a 
 substitute for what was advised by Lord Gifford, 
 that his lecturer should form a class; a substitute 
 which, while departing from the letter, may, I hope, 
 do a little towards carrying out the spirit of the 
 advice contained in the will of that earnestly- 
 minded man. Having said this, it remains only for 
 me now to say, Farewell for the present. 
 
LECTUKE V 
 
 Examination of the reasonableness of what professes to be revealed 
 permissible Mind involved in the origin of the system of 
 nature] Origin of man Theology not concerned with the 
 mode of creation Original state of man Legitimacy of 
 motives resting on a future state Duty of acting as sup- 
 posed to be right Importance of a due balance between hope 
 and fear The conferring of immortality demands a power 
 above nature. 
 
 FROM the terms of the bequest by which these Lec- 
 tureships were founded, it appears, on the one hand, 
 that Lord Gifford was deeply convinced of the 
 supreme importance of a true knowledge of God, 
 "Whom truly to know is life everlasting," and on 
 the other, that he believed that a true knowledge of 
 God could be attained to by the simple exercise of 
 the natural powers of man's mind, in a manner 
 similar to that in which the physical sciences have 
 been built up. Accordingly, he wishes his lecturers 
 " to treat their subject as a strictly natural science . . . 
 without reference to, or reliance upon, any supposed 
 special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation." 
 I do not think it is necessary to take these words 
 in any extreme literalism. If I may conjecture from 
 
v] ORIGIN OF SYSTEM OF NATURE. 113 
 
 the language of the bequest, taking one part with 
 another, I should imagine that there may have been 
 something of a revulsion in his mind from teaching 
 of perhaps too narrow a character, of a kind in which 
 wide conclusions are drawn from particular expres- 
 sions ; and that he might not object to an examina- 
 tion, in their broad features, of some things asserted 
 on the strength of what professes to be a revelation 
 made from God to man, so far, at least, as to inquire 
 whether they so fall in with what our own reason 
 approves as to receive confirmation thereby. 
 
 To begin, then, with the most fundamental pro- 
 position of all, it is asserted or assumed, in what is 
 commonly held to be a revelation, that the system of 
 nature did not come to be what we find it by a sort 
 of fortuitous concourse of atoms, but was the out- 
 come of the will of a designing Being. This so falls 
 in with what man is led to by his natural mental 
 powers that the idea of a God seems to be pretty 
 well universal in the human race, cultured and 
 uncultured nations agreeing in this. I will not, 
 however, dwell further on this point, for I have gone 
 into it at some length in the former portion of these 
 lectures ; I merely allude to it here that it may not 
 be passed wholly by. 
 
 The changes which we see taking place in the 
 inorganic world have, in great measure, been reduced 
 to order, and shown to be the necessary result of 
 
 8 
 
ii4 EXISTENCE OF LAW IN [ y 
 
 certain invariable laws of a simple character, so that, 
 given the laws, and the initial state with which we 
 start, the subsequent changes follow. And if there 
 are still some cases in which this cannot be done, 
 the analogy of those in which it can be done and has 
 been done leads us strongly to the belief that similar 
 laws are open to our discovery by methods of inves- 
 tigation similar to those by which the laws already 
 known have been arrived at. 
 
 When from the inorganic world we turn to the 
 world of living things, we enter a region of which 
 we know comparatively little. That is to say, 
 though in many cases we can trace sequences, we are 
 not able to say how the consequent results from the 
 antecedent, whereas, in relation to inorganic nature, 
 the process can in many cases even be made the 
 subject of mathematical calculation. Still, as I said, 
 there is abundant indication that even in relation to 
 the phenomena of life stated laws exist. This holds 
 good even of that most wonderful property which 
 living things, animal and vegetable alike, possess, 
 that of reproducing their own kind in apparently 
 endless succession. The tree yields fruit whose seed 
 is in itself upon the earth, and this power is repre- 
 sented as involved in its original creation. 
 
 The amount of variation which we actually ob- 
 serve from parent to offspring, even for very many 
 generations, is but small compared with the differ- 
 
v] THE ORGANIC WORLD. 115 
 
 ence between different forms of living things, be it 
 animal or vegetable, and does not seem to show in- 
 dications of constant progress in the same direction. 
 It is true that the form is to some degree dependent 
 upon the environment, and if a given form be trans- 
 ported into a different environment, a certain amount 
 of progressive change may take place until the form 
 is become that which is normal to the new environ- 
 ment. But the amount even of this change is but 
 small compared with the difference between one 
 kind of living thing and another. 
 
 But the life of man, and even the whole period of 
 authentic history within which scientific observations 
 were made, is but small compared with the time 
 which the records of the past which are preserved to 
 us in the earth's strata, show must have elapsed 
 since living things first appeared upon the earth. 
 If the comparative smallness of the difference be- 
 tween parents and descendants when contrasted with 
 the difference between one form of life and another be 
 due to the limitation of the time over which our 
 observations extend, it is conceivable that by avail- 
 ing ourselves of the indications which fossil remains 
 afford of the kind of forms of life which inhabited 
 the earth in bygone ages, we might get evidence of 
 continuous transmutation from one form of life to 
 another even remote. I do not mean that in order 
 to establish such transmutation we should demand 
 
ii6 LACK OF EVIDENCE OF [v 
 
 that one shall be traceable from another as offspring 
 from parent, but that at least a continuity should be 
 traceable from one to the other by a path partly, it 
 may be, ascending and partly descending. Do the 
 records of the past give evidence of, or render prob- 
 able, such a continuity of passage from one form to 
 another remote from it ? 
 
 This is a subject on which I would wish to speak 
 with diffidence, for I feel that it is only those who 
 have made biology, including palaeontology, a special 
 study who are in a condition duly to weigh all that 
 science has to say on one side or the other towards 
 affording an answer to this question. Still even one 
 whose scientific studies have lain in a different pro- 
 vince, and who has only given some general attention 
 to this subject, can hardly fail to have formed an 
 opinion. To me, I confess, it seems that the gaps 
 which are found in any such attempt to connect 
 remote forms are too great to be bridged over. At 
 the same time there appear to be sequences of allied 
 forms which seem to indicate the operation of some 
 natural law according to which changes exceeding in 
 amount those which we are actually able to witness 
 may have taken place. 
 
 As regards, however, any moral consequences to 
 be deduced from a supposed origin, it is the human 
 race that we are mainly concerned with. It seems 
 to me that the question of man's origin is closely 
 
v] CONTINUOUS TRANSMUTATION. 117 
 
 bound up with questions of the highest importance 
 regarding the character of God, the duty of man and 
 his future prospects, and with ethical considerations 
 arising from those prospects. And though, of course, 
 under the limitations above referred to these ques- 
 tions can only very imperfectly be handled, yet it 
 may not be without use to examine how far any 
 views which we may have been led to entertain are 
 agreeable to reason in the most extended sense of 
 that term. 
 
 As may be gathered from what I have already 
 stated in my earlier lectures, I cannot help regarding 
 it as very important which of two alternatives- we 
 adopt as to the origin of man namely, whether we 
 believe that he originated in a special creative act, 
 or what at least we can only picture to our minds as 
 such, or else came to be what he is by a vast series 
 of separately infinitesimal changes whereby he was 
 derived from some lowly organism; some form of 
 living thing to which we cannot attach the ideas 
 of intellect or responsibility. 
 
 I will not repeat what I have said as to the 
 reasons for the adoption of the former of these alter- 
 natives ; suffice it to say that while the arguments 
 for a continuous gradation derivable from actual 
 observation are immensely short of what would be 
 required to render the conclusion even so probable 
 as to draw us towards its adoption, the moral diffi- 
 
1 1 8 THEOL OGY NOT CONCERNED [v 
 
 culties which .it presents are of a most serious 
 character. 
 
 But in adopting the former of the two alternatives 
 we must be careful not to demand more than fairly 
 belongs to it. We are not in the slightest degree 
 committed by natural theology to the assumption 
 that the first man was formed directly from lifeless 
 matter. All that we have occasion to assent to is 
 that in some way or other he originated by the 
 design of a Power capable of designing, and able 
 to execute that which was designed. How the end 
 was accomplished, is a question into which we are 
 not called on to enter. It may perfectly well be 
 that the mode was one involving a general similarity 
 of plan between the body of man and that of other 
 mammals. The fact of the existence of such a 
 general similarity of plan by no means justifies the 
 assumption of a continuous change taking place by 
 the mere operation of what are regarded as natural 
 causes. 
 
 But if we allow that man took his origin by a 
 creative act of some kind, the question fairly arises, 
 Is his condition such as might be supposed answer- 
 able to such an origin ? 
 
 Now here it may be freely conceded we meet 
 with difficulties to which natural theology alone can 
 offer but very imperfect answers, if any at all. Take 
 for one thing the sad contrast between something 
 
v] WITH THE MODE OF CREATION. 119 
 
 within him that tells him that he ought to act in 
 such and such a way, and the way in which over and 
 over again he does act in spite of his feeling that he 
 ought not. Should we not have expected before- 
 hand that, in a being originating in an act of creative 
 will, there would have been full harmony between the 
 inner guidance and the course of his life? Again, 
 consider the contrast between his powers and what 
 appears to be his destiny. His powers seem adapted 
 for a continued progress to which we do not see a 
 natural limit, but after a course of at the utmost a 
 few decades of years he apparently perishes outright. 
 As regards the first difficulty, to my own mind it 
 is vastly lightened if we may believe that man's 
 present state does not represent his state from tlie 
 first; that originally there was not this discord 
 between the voice within which tells him what he 
 ought to do or refrain from doing and the actual 
 course of his life ; but that, by a misuse of that 
 freedom of choice which belongs to his nature, opposi- 
 tion arose between what he ought to do and what he 
 actually did; and that once obedience to the law 
 impressed upon the heart was broken through, it 
 could not afterwards by natural means be re- 
 stored ; for it stands to reason that the resistance to 
 temptations to do wrong which can be brought about 
 by any natural means cannot be so strong when once 
 it has been overcome as it was originally ; and if the 
 
120 MAWS POWERS OF PROGRESS [v 
 
 initial strength was insufficient, much more must 
 be the strength left after a defection from duty. 
 
 Closely connected with the first difficulty is that 
 arising from the discrepancy between man's power 
 of continued progress, and the cutting short (to all 
 appearance) of opportunity for such progress entailed 
 by death. If we may suppose that death was not 
 inherent in the original constitution of man, or which 
 comes to much the same that means were within his 
 reach, by the use of which he could prevent it, but 
 that he became subject to it when he fell from the 
 original condition of entire uprightness, the difficulty 
 is, if not removed, at any rate greatly lightened. If it 
 be said such an attempted solution does not belong to 
 natural theology, I freely allow that it does not. It 
 is a solution we probably should never have dreamt 
 of merely by the exercise of our reason. But it does 
 belong to the province of the understanding to judge 
 of the reasonableness of the solution, supposing that 
 we have reasons independent of natural theology for 
 thinking that it may be true. . 
 
 I say that if we accept such a supposition, the diffi- 
 culty arising from the apparent incongruity between 
 man's capacity for continued progress and the cutting 
 off, to all appearance, of all opportunity for such con- 
 tinued progress which death brings about is at the 
 least materially diminished. For what would have 
 been the result, in man's fallen condition, of an in- 
 
v] CONTRASTED WITH HIS MORTALITY. 121 
 
 definite continuance of his life ? Progress may be a 
 progress in evil as well as a progress in good ; even 
 an increase in real knowledge may be turned to ill 
 account. And progress even in a right direction re- 
 mains imperfect, being marred by that want of full 
 agreement between the dictates of what is felt to be 
 right and the actual course of the life. Hence it is 
 well conceivable that a continued existence in our 
 earthly life, taking it all in all, might not be a boon, 
 but the reverse. 
 
 But it may be said, Is not the idea of such a con- 
 tinuance purely chimerical ? Are not the lives of all 
 animals terminated by death, and as man is an 
 animal, must it not be the same with him ? What 
 is the use of speculating as to what might have been 
 under a supposed condition as to man, for which we 
 have no analogy in animated nature ? 
 
 The reply to this is that, so far as we know, man 
 is unique among animals in the possession of an in- 
 tellectual and moral nature. It may be that, accord- 
 ing to his original condition, means were provided 
 in connection in some way with his unique 
 moral nature, whereby he was exempted from the 
 decay and death to which all the rest of the animal 
 kingdom was subject ; but that with the loss of his 
 original moral condition he ceased to be in possession 
 of those means, and became subject to decay and 
 death like all other animals. 
 
122 MORAL SOLUTION OF [v 
 
 And as it is conceivable that, in connection with his 
 unique moral nature, there may in his original con- 
 dition have been open to him an avoidance of decay 
 and death, notwithstanding his animal nature, so is 
 it not conceivable that, animal though he be, death 
 may not necessarily be to him a termination of all 
 living existence ? More especially, if by any means 
 a restitution is possible to the original condition of 
 complete uprightness which we have supposed, is it 
 imaginable that therewith there might be an intro- 
 duction into a condition of living existence which is 
 not subject to be cut off by death, as to all outward 
 appearance is the case with our present mode of 
 existence. And if it be objected that there is no 
 indication that any of our senses enable us to per- 
 ceive of any such prolongation of living existence, it 
 is to be remembered that, on the other hand, we do 
 not witness such a condition of perfect uprightness ; 
 the utmost we see is some sort of approach towards it, 
 marred, however, by many a failure and imperfection. 
 It may be that such a great moral change as we have 
 been supposing demands a breaking up of man's 
 animal nature, and some sort of reconstruction lying 
 as much outside the ordinary course of nature as we 
 have been led to believe that his original creation 
 lay. And if this be so, that there should be no 
 natural indication of survival of the stroke of death 
 is only what was to have been expected a priori. 
 
v] THE ANOMALY OF DEATH. 123 
 
 It is obvious that a belief in the existence of some 
 state of life beyond the dissolution of man's animal 
 frame is calculated to exercise a powerful influence 
 on his conduct. It did so to no small extent even 
 in ancient times with nations who had no revelation 
 to guide them. And the way it in such cases oper- 
 ates appears to be this. There is a voice within 
 which approves or condemns us according as we act 
 conformably to what we feel to be right or wrong. 
 This leads us to regard ourselves as being under the 
 rule of a righteous Governor of the world, and to 
 look forward with hope or fear to what may happen 
 to us after the dissolution of the animal body. In 
 default of any definite information on the subject, the 
 active mind of man draws a picture out of its own 
 imagination, conformably to its instinctive feeling of 
 right and wrong, of some condition on which the 
 mind can dwell, instead of wandering about among 
 ideas which can take no definite shape. Thus, for 
 example, the ancient Egyptians had a pretty definite 
 picture of what they supposed would take place. 
 It is needless to say 'that we believe that we have a 
 clearer light to guide us than was open to them ; but 
 even to us there is a vast deal about a future state 
 of which we must for the present be content to 
 remain in ignorance. 
 
 I have said that belief in a future state is calcu- 
 lated, through the hopes and fears which it entails, 
 
124 REGARD TO FUTURE HAPPINESS [v 
 
 to exercise a powerful influence on our conduct. 
 But it may be objected, Is not this a low and un- 
 worthy motive to set before us ? Ought we not to do 
 right simply from the love of right, quite irrespective 
 of consequences ? Might it not even be better that 
 we should not be tempted to attend to such motives 
 at all? Are they anything better than a refined 
 form of selfishness ? Would it not be more noble to 
 throw overboard all belief in, or at least all attention 
 to, a life after death, and do right simply from the 
 love of right; to act for the good of our fellow- 
 creatures from purely benevolent motives ? 
 
 These questions are so far the outcome of right 
 feelings that they demand an attentive consideration. 
 I think, however, that when they are fairly scrutinised, 
 it will be found that the disparagement which they 
 indicate of any influence on our conduct of hopes 
 and fears in connection with a future life rests upon 
 fallacies. 
 
 First, as regards the charge of selfishness. Atten- 
 tion to what is for one's own good does not constitute 
 selfishness. It may be for a man's good that he 
 should deny himself some present gratification in 
 order to lay by money for his old age, to provide for 
 a time which may probably be coming when he will 
 no longer be able to work for his own support or that 
 of his family. Thrift is not selfishness, though it 
 involves consideration for a man's own interest. It 
 
v] IS NOT SELFISHNESS. 125 
 
 is only when we disregard the good of others for the 
 sake of our own advantage that we are chargeable 
 with selfishness. Hence,, if we are stimulated to do 
 what is right by the thought of future consequences 
 to ourselves, it does not follow that in so acting we 
 are guilty of selfishness. It would only be on the 
 supposition that by such a course of conduct we 
 were injuring others while benefiting ourselves, that 
 we should be fairly open to the charge of selfishness. 
 But when I say injuring others, it must be under- 
 stood that it is in relation to society as a whole. A 
 right action, though beneficial to society as a whole, 
 may entail suffering on an individual, as when a 
 malefactor receives punishment, though even as 
 regards the malefactor himself the punishment, 
 though apparently injurious to him, may really even 
 to him be beneficial in the long run. It is only on 
 the supposition that a right action was injurious to 
 society in the widest sense that the question could 
 arise whether the performance of it, in so far as that 
 performance was influenced by a consideration of the 
 actor's own advantage, was fairly chargeable with 
 selfishness. But to suppose that an action right 
 in itself can lead in the long run, and when every- 
 thing depending on it is supposed to be taken into 
 account, to injurious consequences, seems to me to 
 be impugning either the power or the goodness of 
 the Kuler of the universe. We need not, therefore, 
 
126 INDIVIDUAL GOOD AND GENERAL [v 
 
 attempt to follow out the consequences of such a 
 supposition. It would be something like spending 
 a lot of time over following out the consequences of 
 the supposition that the squares constructed on the 
 sides of a right-angle triangle exceeded the square on 
 the hypotenuse. 
 
 But I must here answer one or two possible 
 objections. It may be said that sometimes good 
 comes out of evil, and therefore we do not know but 
 that in acting rightly we may be hindering some 
 greater good which might have arisen if we had 
 acted differently. 
 
 Now it is quite true that sometimes beneficial 
 results do follow indirectly from wrong actions. 
 For example, the character of a good man may be 
 strengthened and improved by the suffering which 
 he is called on to undergo in consequence of the 
 action of those who unjustly oppress him. And, 
 indeed, the only solution of the mystery of the 
 existence of evil, and its being suffered to continue, 
 seems to be that thereby an exaltation of character 
 is rendered possible, and qualities drawn out for 
 which otherwise there would not ' have been any 
 exercise. But these results are indirect, and such as 
 cannot be foreseen. For example, if A be tempted 
 by B to do wrong for the sake of some apparent 
 advantage, it may very well be that in case he 
 resists the temptation his character is strengthened 
 
v] WELFARE INSEPARABLY CONNECTED. 127 
 
 and improved by the trial to which it has been sub- 
 jected. But besides that (by hypothesis) that was 
 not B's motive in subjecting him to it, the other 
 alternative is open, and for aught that B could tell, 
 A might have yielded to the temptation. I say, 
 then, that the good effects which sometimes come 
 about from evil actions are such as could not be 
 foreseen, and are exceptional, and even when they 
 do occur we are unable to say but that greater good 
 might have resulted from an opposite course of 
 action, whereas right actions do, as a rule, lead to 
 visibly beneficial results ; and even if we fail to see 
 them they may very well exist, though they are 
 hidden from our view. 
 
 Hence, when a man is impelled in two directions, 
 the one towards what he feels to be right, though the 
 following of it may entail some suffering, or the for- 
 going of some advantage, the other towards what he 
 feels to be wrong, there is no occasion that he should 
 separate the consideration that the path of duty is, 
 as he believes, that which is best for himself in the 
 long run from the consideration of its effect upon 
 mankind as a whole. The whole of the consequences 
 of his action it is beyond his ken to calculate, but he 
 may rely upon it that the right course is at any 
 rate more likely to be for the welfare of mankind 
 than the opposite course. 
 
 Hence the question does not really arise of pitting 
 
128 PARENTAL GOVERNMENT OF GOD. [v 
 
 his own highest good against the welfare of man- 
 kind in general. The two go hand in hand, and 
 we may say of them, "What God hath joined 
 together let not man put asunder." There is no 
 use in puzzling ourselves as to what might be our 
 duty or our moral condition in a purely imaginary 
 world. 
 
 Hence, then, I take it that a consideration of what 
 is for our own ultimate good as a motive to right 
 action is not to be condemned as if it were mere 
 selfishness. I grant that if it stood by itself it 
 would be quite compatible with a character which 
 was hard and unloving. But as belonging to 
 Christian teaching it does not stand by itself, but 
 forms one item of a complex whole. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that there is somewhat of 
 a latent self-assertion lying at the bottom of the 
 inquiry whether it is not selfish to be influenced 
 by a consideration of what is for our own final good. 
 We think of ourselves as masters of the situation, 
 rather than as falling in with a plan which is 
 arranged for us. When we think of ourselves as 
 all children of a common Father who wills our 
 highest welfare, and that we should be at peace and 
 in harmony with one another, the wishing for what 
 He designs for us does not carry with it any idea of 
 selfishness. We ourselves are as much objects of 
 His care as are others, and if we wish for the welfare 
 
v] FILIAL FEELINGS TOWARDS HIM. 129 
 
 of mankind in general, there is nothing corrupt in 
 including ourselves in the number. 
 
 Take for illustration the feelings of a little child 
 towards its parents, whom I will suppose to be good, 
 right-minded persons. He looks up to them, depends 
 upon them, feels assured of their love to him, and of 
 their wishes for his welfare. It may be they hold 
 out as an inducement to him to act rightly the hope 
 of something that they will give him if he acts 
 rightly. He receives this as from them, and the gift 
 helps to increase his attachment to them, provided 
 at least that the thing is not overdone, so as to lead 
 him to expect it as a matter of right, or at least as 
 a matter of course. Subject to the same proviso, if 
 from acting contrary to the intentions of his parents 
 he fails to obtain it, he feels that he has only himself 
 to blame, and the loss does not cause him to doubt 
 his parents' love to him, or prevent him from loving 
 them. In a similar way the hope of receiving good 
 from God if we seek to please Him, provided we do 
 not look on it as a right but as His gift, instead of 
 nourishing selfishness draws our hearts towards Him. 
 
 I have spoken of certain difficulties arising from 
 the circumstance that occasionally a wrong action 
 may, apparently at least, bring about a useful result, 
 and a right action, on the other hand, a result which 
 seems to be disadvantageous. I have pointed out 
 how ill qualified we are to judge whether the conse- 
 
 9 
 
130 DUTY OF ACTING AS SUPPOSED, [v 
 
 quences are really advantageous or the reverse, as 
 they seem to be, since to trace the complete chain of 
 consequences is quite beyond our powers. But the 
 difficulty may oftentimes be apparent only, and may 
 arise from our making a mistake as to what the right 
 course of action really is. The imperfection of our 
 knowledge, and still more the imperfection of our 
 obedience to what is right, may often cause us to 
 suppose that to be right which in reality is wrong. 
 And accordingly a real disadvantage arising from an 
 action which we deemed to be right may really be 
 chargeable upon the mistake we made in supposing 
 that it was right. 
 
 The possibility of this connects itself with a 
 question of some interest Is it right to act in a 
 manner which we mistakenly suppose to be wrong, 
 and is it wrong to act in a manner which we mis- 
 takenly suppose to be right ? 
 
 It seems to me that the answer to this question 
 must be, as regards the action itself we are bound to 
 act according to what we think to be right, But if 
 we act wrongly, thinking that we are acting rightly, 
 though we may not be to be blamed for the act 
 itself, it does not follow that we are exempt from 
 blame in all that concerns it. We are responsible 
 for all that is involved in the formation of our 
 opinions ; and when an erroneous opinion has been 
 formed as to a matter of duty, I think it is generally 
 
v] THOUGH WRONGLY, TO BE RIGHT. 131 
 
 if not always the case that something has been wrong 
 I mean morally and not merely intellectually wrong 
 in the steps by which that erroneous opinion has 
 been formed. Such a great number of conditions 
 involving the exercise of choice, many of them per- 
 haps forgotten, are concerned in the formation of an 
 opinion, that the person himself who has entertained 
 a wrong opinion may not perceive wherein he has 
 done wrong in the steps that led up to it ; much less 
 can a different person apportion to him the blame 
 that he really deserves. 
 
 Accordingly, we should always be tolerant towards 
 those who act as they think rightly, even though we 
 ourselves should be thoroughly convinced that the 
 action is wrong. The action itself and all that led 
 up to it, taken as a whole, may be wrong, but it may 
 be quite beyond human power to apportion the 
 blame. 
 
 But though we should be tolerant in our estimate 
 of the blame, it does not therefore follow that such 
 actions should be left unpunished. The welfare of 
 society may demand that they should be repressed 
 by punishment, and the severity of the punishment 
 may even seern to be out of proportion to the moral 
 gravity of the offence, or at any rate to such moral 
 obliquity as can be proved. In so far as the punish- 
 ment may be out of proportion to the moral fault, it 
 is to be looked upon as the man's misfortune rather 
 
132 IMPORTANCE OF A DUE BALANCE [v 
 
 than as a just requital for his misdeeds, in much the 
 same way as we look on an accident that happens to 
 a man who is engaged in some dangerous calling, 
 which, nevertheless, it is important for the interest 
 of society should be carried on. Thus in time of 
 war it may be necessary for the safety of an army 
 that offences against military rules should be pun- 
 ished in a manner quite out of proportion to the 
 moral fault committed. 
 
 I have referred to the advantage for a right course 
 of life of hopes and fears connected with a possible 
 future state of existence. But it is important that 
 there should be a due balance between the hopes and 
 fears. What that balance should be, it is not for man 
 to decide ; and mischief may be done by his taking 
 it into his own hands to apply either motive exclu- 
 sively, or in undue excess. Doubtless the formation 
 of a character in which right is done from motives 
 of love, and the free choice of right, is the goal to be 
 aimed at ; and perfect love, it is said, casteth out fear. 
 But perfect love implies perfect obedience, and while 
 that is imperfect there is need that motives derived 
 from hope should be supplemented by fear of the 
 consequences of doing wrong. Without that we 
 might become like spoiled children, and think very 
 lightly of the wrong things that we had done. But 
 as it is said that perfect love casteth out fear, so I 
 think it might equally be said that perfect fear 
 
v] BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR. 133 
 
 casteth out love. We can comprehend this from 
 what we see in ordinary life. The captain who 
 commands the loyal service of his crew is not the 
 martinet who punishes with the utmost severity the 
 most minute dereliction of duty, thinking to keep 
 the men to their work because they dare not do 
 otherwise, though they fain would escape if they could 
 from the thraldom they are under ; nor of course, on 
 the other hand, is he the indulgent easy-going man 
 who preserves no discipline. The commander who 
 best secures the love and obedience of his crew is 
 the man who treats them with kindness and firmness 
 duly apportioned. 
 
 It may seem useless to dwell on this which is so 
 very obvious. Yet I do not think that it is by any 
 means so superfluous as might at first sight appear. 
 For, unless I greatly mistake, there is a tendency in 
 some quarters to think that it is impossible to exag- 
 gerate the terrible consequences of wrong- doing to 
 the wrong-doer himself; that the more frightful the 
 picture we draw the better, in order that men may 
 thereby be made the more afraid to offend. The 
 punishment is even represented as partaking of the 
 infinitude of the Being against whose laws the offence 
 was committed ; and Leibnitz long ago attempted to 
 justify in this way the theory he was supporting, 
 though I do not think that his attempted justifica- 
 tion is generally allowed to have been successful. 
 
134 INSUFFICIENCY OF [v 
 
 Now it may be perfectly true that, as a rule at 
 any rate, men think far too little of the ill conse- 
 quences, even to themselves, of the wrong which 
 they do. But it by no means follows that therefore 
 it is well to represent those consequences in the most 
 frightful possible light, like throwing on plenty of 
 mud in hopes that some may stick. For, in the 
 first place, such exaggerations, involving error as 
 the very name implies, may introduce difficulties 
 of belief which may cause the entire statement to 
 be disbelieved. And, in the second place, supposing 
 even that the statements were believed, it by no 
 means follows that they are calculated to bring 
 about the end we ought to have in view ; nay, they 
 may be even hostile to its accomplishment. For it 
 is not the turbid stream that we are to seek to clarify, 
 but the fountain from whence the stream issues that 
 needs to be cleansed. The mere repression of wrong- 
 doing through fear of punishment is not enough. It 
 may make a man a more useful member of society, 
 just as a horse may be trained to draw burdens and 
 so to become useful to man. It may even be, and 
 doubtless is calculated to be, beneficial to the man 
 himself as guarding him against greater excesses, and 
 placing him in a more advantageous position for 
 something better. But fear, so long as it stands 
 alone by itself, seems to have no tendency towards 
 that renovation of the will which leads a man to do 
 
v] THE MOTIVE OF FEAR. 135 
 
 right because he loves the right. Nay, when excess- 
 ive, it may even be adverse to his attainment of such 
 a condition, as being inimical to love. 
 
 Natural religion can but point with uncertain 
 hand to the probability of an existence of some 
 kind beyond the grave. The strongest argument 
 for it, the only argument which to me seems to have 
 any weight at all, is what I may call the moral argu- 
 ment. By the moral argument I mean that derived 
 from the consideration that something of the kind 
 seems to be required to satisfy our conviction of the 
 justice and goodness of God. But if man, by the 
 exercise of his natural powers, can only reach some 
 more or less probable expectation of a future state, it 
 stands to reason that he could form no assured idea 
 of the conditions of such a state, supposing that there 
 is one. Nevertheless, there are some considerations 
 bearing on its asserted moral condition which so fall 
 in with what we might expect as to lend confirmatory 
 evidence to what, on other grounds, we might be dis- 
 posed to accept as true. 
 
 It has already been noticed that the difficulty 
 arising from the fact that, on the one hand, we see in 
 man (the individual man and not merely the human 
 race) an apparent capacity for indefinite progress, 
 while, on the other hand, the opportunity for such 
 progress is, to all appearance, cut off by death that 
 this difficulty, I say, is greatly mitigated, if not even 
 
136 RESTITUTION OF IMMORTALITY [v 
 
 removed, provided we may suppose that man is not 
 now in his original state, in that moral state for 
 which his moral and intellectual nature was adapted, 
 but that having fallen from it through misuse of the 
 free will with which he was endowed, he became 
 subject to death like the lower animals. 
 
 If this be so, it seems to stand to reason that 
 restitution to a condition in which he would no 
 longer be subject to death would only be possible, 
 or perhaps I should rather say permissible, on con- 
 dition that in some way means were provided whereby 
 the discrepancy between the inner voice of duty and 
 what he actually does should be finally removed, and 
 man brought back in that respect to what we have 
 supposed his original condition to have been. And 
 as we see by experience in this life, in which alone 
 we have any experience to guide us, that character 
 may be developed in a downward as well as an 
 upward direction, in a direction tending from as well 
 as in one tending towards such a condition as we 
 have supposed, it may be that the means of entry 
 into that higher condition, analogous to what we 
 have supposed man's original condition to have 
 been, will not become actually effective for the 
 whole human race indiscriminately, but only for 
 some ; and, further, that whether they do or do not 
 so become effective may depend on the tendencies 
 developed in man's present life. 
 
v] MAY DEPEND ON CHARACTER. 137 
 
 It follows therefore that, so far at least as our 
 own ideas of what appears suitable may be a guide, 
 the prospect of attainment of a condition in which 
 man's capacity for continued progress shall not be 
 cut short by a death of some sort, is dependent 
 upon the development of a character here of such 
 kind as to lead in the desired direction under altered 
 and, as yet, unknown conditions. 
 
 I say, under altered and unknown conditions. 
 For we are not to think of a future condition of 
 being as if it were merely a continuation of the 
 present ; as if we recovered from a faint and then 
 went on just under the same conditions as before. 
 Truly, such a supposition would be disheartening, 
 and might well lead us to despair of ever attaining 
 to such a moral condition as we have supposed. For 
 even the best men are far from having reached that 
 condition of full harmony between what they do and 
 what they feel they ought to do that we have been 
 considering. The prospect of a battle always to be 
 maintained, victory never won, is not an inspiriting 
 one, not one calculated to sustain the soldier in his 
 conflict. 
 
 How that brighter condition at which I have 
 hinted is to be brought about, is a question which it 
 lies beyond the power of natural theology to answer. 
 Yet some consolation may be derived from considera- 
 tions which show that we might expect it to lie 
 
138 THE RESTITUTION DEMANDS [v 
 
 beyond her. For, if it were otherwise, we should 
 then naturally expect to be able to explain, or at 
 least partially explain, how it was to be effected ; 
 and if we did not see our way towards any such 
 explanation, our hopes that such a thing could come 
 at all might be seriously shaken. 
 
 From this point of view it is even consolatory 
 that outward appearances give us no indication that 
 death is other than what it seems to be, the abolition 
 of living existence. For then, if there is to be a 
 future life at all, and natural theology gives us 
 some grounds for expecting it we must look for it 
 to a Power above what we call nature, to a Power to 
 which we must refer the first inception of life on 
 earth, and the origination of the human race. If the 
 forfeiture of physical life depended on moral condi- 
 tions, and its restitution demands what is tantamount 
 to a creative power, it well may be that the moral 
 restitution we have been considering, the possibility 
 of which formed the motive (if such a word may 
 reverently be used) for the restitution of physical 
 life, itself too involves the exercise of a similar 
 power. But if so, we have no reason for suppos- 
 ing that the modus opemndi would be one which it 
 would lie within our natural powers to explain. 
 
 And even when from natural theology we turn to 
 what we regard as a revelation made from God to 
 man, we find indications of the mode whereby this 
 
v] A POWER ABOVE NATURE. 139 
 
 moral restitution is to be effected that lie beyond 
 and above what we can follow. Yet the partial 
 glimpses which we get of what the restitution 
 involves fit in with what we feel to be right, or 
 observe in the government of the world, in such a 
 manner as to lend increased credibility to what 
 claims our acceptance on other grounds ; and if in 
 certain instances the reverse appears to be the case, 
 it arises, I think, from the restless mind of man 
 having been over-desirous of prying into mysteries, 
 from his having endeavoured to make a sort of 
 philosophical system out of propositions whose 
 mutual dependence it is above our powers in our 
 present state to explain. 
 
 I hope to follow out this subject somewhat further, 
 but I must leave this to my next lecture. 
 
LECTUEE VI 
 
 Natural religion fails to satisfy the craving for full conformity to 
 what is right The attainment of such a state may require 
 supernatural means The fault of the guilty may entail suffer- 
 ing on the innocent Moral restitution compatible with free- 
 dom of will Though good may arise from evil, the right course 
 is the best Moral renovation compatible with freedom of 
 choice Benefit may arise from uncertainty as to what is right 
 Professed explanations of what is above reason dangerous 
 Free will and foreknowledge Threefold presentation of God. 
 
 WE all are keenly sensible of the grievous defects of 
 our conduct from the standard of what we feel it is 
 our duty that it should be. Now, what sort of pro- 
 spect, if any, does natural religion hold out to us of 
 being able to put an end to this state of things, and 
 bring our whole course of life into full conformity 
 with what we feel to be our duty ? 
 
 The only prospect, as it seems to me, which natural 
 religion can hold out of an attainment of the desired 
 end is by urging us to put out all our strength, all 
 our resolution, in following that which is right. 
 Apparently it is quite within our reach, for we are 
 innately conscious of the freedom of our wills to do 
 or not to do. But experience shows that, with all 
 
vi] MORAL RENOVATION. 141 
 
 our resolution, we constantly more or less give way. 
 And, indeed, on the suppositions to which we have 
 been led as to the original state of man, we could 
 hardly expect that it could have been otherwise. 
 For if there were a time when man followed the 
 leading of what he felt to be right and lawful, and 
 yet subsequently inclination was too strong for him, 
 and he swerved from the path of duty, it stands 
 to reason that his powers of resistance would be 
 weakened thereby, so as to be unable to act as an 
 effective barrier against the commission of wrong. 
 Natural religion, then, can but leave man in a state 
 of hopeless thraldom, seeing what is right, aspiring 
 after it, but too weak to stem the opposing tide, so 
 as always to follow it. For it is not enough some- 
 times to do right and sometimes not. When we do 
 wrong conscience still condemns us for so doing, so 
 that even in spite, it may be, of some progress 
 towards the right, conscience still condemns us for 
 the wrong, and we feel as far off as ever from that 
 full satisfaction to which we aspire, which would 
 arise from perfect harmony between what we feel to 
 be right and what we actually do. 
 
 Now, if the exercise of a power above the ordinary 
 course of nature be required in order that death may 
 not be what it seems to be the extinction for ever of 
 living existence is it not conceivable that there may 
 also be means provided for the renovation of man's 
 
142 WHA T RENO VA TION MA Y REQ UIRE. [vi 
 
 moral nature equally transcending what, as belong- 
 ing to our present moral nature, we know by our 
 natural reason? If so, we need not expect to be 
 able to find them out for ourselves, and it may 
 well be that in our present state we are not able to 
 comprehend them, but only to get some glimmering 
 notion of their general nature. A person born blind 
 could form no adequate notion of the sense of sight ; 
 but if it were possible that he could gain sight as the 
 result of an operation, he would then understand 
 what it meant. May there not be something analo- 
 gous as regards man's introduction into a condition 
 in which there will be full conformity between the uni- 
 form tenor of his life and what he feels to be right ? 
 
 And yet, to keep to our illustration, as a person 
 born blind, on being informed about some of the 
 properties of light, might be able to do something 
 towards their investigation, so it is conceivable that, 
 little as we can comprehend from experience of the 
 actual conditions of a state in which there would be 
 complete harmony between what is felt to be right 
 and what is actually done, or of the means whereby 
 that condition is brought about, there may yet be 
 features about it which harmonise with things of 
 which we have experience in the course of the world. 
 
 We know that even in this world faults and 
 crimes oftentimes bring evil consequences in their 
 train ; as, for example, when a man undermines his 
 
v i] ILL USTRA TION. 1 43 
 
 constitution by drunkenness, or reduces himself to 
 penury through extravagance. It may happen also 
 that the evil consequences which a fault committed 
 by one man is calculated to bring about may be 
 averted in a manner which entails suffering on 
 another. 
 
 For example, suppose that a general entrusted a 
 soldier with the duty of keeping watch to guard 
 against a surprise by the enemy, but that in conse- 
 quence of the man's deserting his place, whether 
 through cowardice or slothfulness or the attraction 
 of something else, the enemy succeeded in taking 
 possession of a post which gravely threatened the 
 safety of the whole army. It may be that, in order 
 to avert the threatened disaster, it was necessary to 
 move up troops to attack the post occupied, and 
 dislodge the enemy ; and that in the attack some 
 were killed or wounded. It may be that, had this 
 not been done, the delinquent would have perished 
 with many of his comrades, but that through the 
 attack safety was procured for the army generally, 
 the delinquent being included in the number. 
 
 In such a case we see that the fault of one man 
 entailed suffering, not upon himself (of course I am 
 not here referring to any compunction that he might 
 have felt), but upon others who were not in any way 
 partakers of his fault, and that through their suffer- 
 ing safety was procured both for the delinquent 
 
144 THE RENOVATION MAY REQUIRE [vi 
 
 himself and for others. But in ordering the attack 
 it was not the object of the general to inflict punish- 
 ment upon the attacking party in lieu of the man 
 who had brought the mischief about, but to avert 
 the disaster which the delinquent's dereliction of 
 duty was calculated to bring about ; and if it were 
 said that the general had punished one of the men 
 wounded in the attack instead of the man whose 
 misconduct had rendered the attack necessary, it 
 could only be by a mode of speaking which is 
 highly metaphorical, so much so as to be calculated 
 to run the risk of leading to misapprehension. 
 
 In the case we have imagined it is conceivable 
 that the man whose neglect of duty had rendered 
 necessary the attack, might be so struck with the 
 tremendous consequences of what he perhaps at the 
 time looked on as a very trivial dereliction of duty, 
 and especially with the suffering which his fault had 
 been the means of bringing on a comrade who was 
 in nowise concerned in it, that he turned with 
 horror in future from any temptation to neglect his 
 duty, and became one of the best and bravest soldiers 
 in the army. And the more the man had previously 
 attended on the whole to his duties, the more likely 
 would it be that such would be the result. But it is 
 conceivable also, if the man were previously one who 
 cared only for himself, and did his duty, so far as he 
 did do it, only for fear of the cat, that he might con- 
 
vi] THE SUFFERING OF ANOTHER. 145 
 
 gratulate himself on the safety of his own skin, and 
 care nothing for what had happened; and so the 
 very exemption from punishment for his fault, and 
 the knowledge of the mischief that that fault 
 had caused, might leave him a worse man than 
 before. 
 
 Now, if it be asserted that the restitution of man 
 to a condition so far analogous to what we have been 
 supposing to have been his original condition as that 
 in both alike the government of the life was always 
 in accordance to what was felt to be right or lawful, 
 could only take place through a method which 
 involved suffering to one wholly innocent, if, I say, 
 this be asserted, there is nothing in it in contra- 
 diction to what we see going on in the government 
 of the world; nothing, therefore, to lead us to a 
 rejection on a priori grounds of the proposition 
 asserted, as being contrary to what we believe of 
 the character of God. And we see, further, that it 
 is conceivable that the method adopted should have 
 the designed effect in the case of some and yet fail in 
 the case of others. 
 
 Furthermore, it is conceivable that the restitution 
 supposed may be effected, not merely without any 
 interference with the freedom of the individual will, 
 but even without that sort of semi-compulsion which 
 arises from the fear of the consequences of doing 
 wrong ; that the right may be done from love of the 
 
 10 
 
146 DIFFICULTY AS TO GOOD [vi 
 
 right, and so complete obedience may be reconciled 
 with complete freedom. 
 
 I am forbidden by the terms of the Foundation to 
 rest upon a supposed revelation made by God to 
 man. But I think it perfectly allowable to point 
 out the analogy between what is asserted on the 
 strength of what professes to be such a revelation 
 and what we can ourselves observe in the ordinary 
 government of the world. And I think the bearing 
 of what I have recently been saying on what I pre- 
 sume most of us accept as having been, as we believe, 
 revealed, rough as the analogy may be, will not fail 
 to be perceived. 
 
 In our study of nature we are most forcibly im- 
 pressed with the uniformity of her laws. Eeasons 
 have indeed been brought forward why we should 
 believe that something more than the operation ol 
 those laws, or rather of such of them as are open 
 to our observation and experiment, is necessary to 
 account for the whole system of nature such as we 
 see it. But none the less is it true, that those 
 uniform laws are, so far as we can judge, the method 
 by which the ordinary course of nature is carried on. 
 That is to say, if we recognise the ordinary course of 
 nature as designed by a Supreme Being, that it is 
 according to His will that the course of nature 
 should, as a rule, be carried on in this regular 
 methodical manner. We should expect, therefore, to 
 
vi] - ARISING OUT OF EVIL. 147 
 
 find the operation of regular laws in the moral, no less 
 than in the physical world, although their existence 
 is less obvious on account of the freedom of the will. 
 
 Now, by the very idea of the term, that which is 
 wrong, by which is meant not necessarily that which 
 is supposed to be wrong, but that which is rightly 
 supposed to be wrong, is something which is opposed 
 to the will of God. But as we are bound to suppose 
 that what He wills is, when everything is taken into 
 account, the best, it follows that though good may be 
 brought about through evil, nay possibly even a kind 
 of good that could not otherwise arise, yet the balance 
 of good when everything is taken into account must 
 be on the side of the good. What I mean is this. 
 Suppose a man has in some particular matter just 
 two alternatives to choose between, and one is judged, 
 and correctly so, to be right and the other wrong. 
 If he choose the wrong it is quite possible that some 
 good consequence might result from his action which 
 would not otherwise have come about. But we are 
 bound to suppose that when all the consequences of 
 following the two alternatives are taken into account, 
 the balance of good in the total results must be in 
 favour of the adoption of that one of the two alterna- 
 tives which is right. 
 
 Hence though the extreme ill consequences which 
 a wrong action is calculated to bring about ill con- 
 sequences suppose to the wrong-doer himself may 
 
I 4 8 THE RIGHT COURSE IS THE BEST. [vi 
 
 be averted, and he may possibly be led in the end to 
 do only what is right, it by no means follows that 
 his condition will be as high as it might have been 
 if he had chosen that one of the two alternatives 
 which was the right one. For while actions depend 
 upon an exercise of the will, taking the word 
 " actions " in the widest sense, including for instance 
 the control of the thoughts in so far as it is voluntary, 
 character is something more than this, and is not to 
 be formed in a moment by an act of the will, but is 
 ordinarily a plant of slow growth, gradually formed 
 as the result of repeated exercises of the will, though 
 grafted on the stock of congenital dispositions, which 
 very probably are in part hereditary. Thus two 
 men might conceivably absolutely avoid everything 
 that was wrong, following completely that which was 
 right (though I do not say that that is a condition 
 which is ever attained in the present life), and yet 
 one might be much superior to the other in the 
 positive elements of character; one, for instance, 
 might be a man of warmer affections than the other, 
 of a more loving and a more lovable character. 
 And one bad effect, as it seems to me, of an exag- 
 geration of the final evil consequences of evil-doing 
 to the evil-doer himself is that it leads him to con- 
 centrate his attention on avoidance of these extreme 
 evil consequences, and think that if he is safe from 
 these the rest does not matter. 
 
vi] FREEDOM OF CHOICE. 149 
 
 I have spoken of the choice between two alterna- 
 tives, one right and the other wrong. But in most 
 cases when we have to exert our wills there are a 
 variety of courses open between which to choose, 
 and the question arises, Is there only one of these 
 right, the others differing only by being more or less 
 wrong, the wrongness of some of them, it may be, 
 consisting merely in the fact that they are alternative 
 to, and therefore their adoption excludes, that one 
 course which by hypothesis is said to be right ? Or 
 on the other hand, may two or more of those courses 
 be equally lawful, so that the man may do just as he 
 likes as to which he will adopt ? 
 
 Now, as far as man's laws go the thing is plain 
 enough. I go out suppose with some money in my 
 pocket, and I am free to spend some of it in the 
 purchase of a book, or of some other article for use 
 or ornament, and the law of the land does not call 
 me over the coals for doing the one or the other. 
 Innumerable instances occur in which a man may 
 do this or that, and nobody thinks of blaming him 
 for exercising his option in the one way or the 
 other. 
 
 But there are cases in which though the law can- 
 not touch him some of his fellow-creatures may 
 reasonably think him to blame. For example, he 
 may have others depending upon him, and he may 
 be tempted to spend more than is reasonable in the 
 
 UJU7ERSIT7 
 
150 WHETHER THE RIGHT COURSE [vi 
 
 purchase of some article of mere luxury. In this 
 case society, in so far as they were acquainted with 
 the case, would blame him, and he ought to blame 
 himself. 
 
 But there is a voice within more searching in its 
 demands than the law of the land or the require- 
 ments of society. There may be reasons for or 
 against this or that course which are known only to 
 the man himself who is called on to make the choice. 
 It may happen, for instance, that some course is 
 perfectly lawful in itself, but cannot be followed 
 without the neglect of some duty which the man 
 feels that he ought to be doing. 
 
 But though the range of lawful choice is at any 
 rate thus narrowed, the question still remains, Is 
 there any such range at all? In other words, Is 
 there such a thing at all as a choice between two 
 alternatives which is lawful inforo conscientiae ? Is 
 there not in every case some course which alone is 
 the best, which therefore alone is right if a man 
 would follow completely the will of God ? 
 
 I think a strong teleological argument may be 
 brought to bear on this question. The possession of 
 any power is on teleological grounds an indication 
 that there is some intended lawful exercise for it. 
 Of course the power may be abused ; but the possible 
 abuse of it is no proof that there is no lawful use for 
 it at all. Now, we are conscious of the possession of 
 
v i] IS NE CESS A RIL Y UNIQ UE. 151 
 
 a freedom of choice, and we may therefore, I think, 
 legitimately infer that it was intended that there 
 should be a lawful exercise of it. But this could 
 not be if on every occasion there was but one of all 
 possible courses which was right. On that supposi- 
 tion the only use, so far as one can see, from a moral 
 point of view of freedom of choice would be to serve 
 as a means of temptation temptation, that is, in the 
 sense of testing. It is as if we should suppose that 
 man was endowed with eyes in order that his obe- 
 dience might be proved by his always keeping them 
 shut, or with ears that he might keep them stopped 
 up, lest he should ever be charmed by the sweetness 
 of music. I think then that the conclusions of 
 Natural Theology on this problem are in full accord 
 with common sense, and with the way in which we 
 commonly regard it, in saying that the answer to 
 the question must be that there is such a thing as a 
 choice between lawful alternatives ; that there are 
 cases in which in deciding between two alternatives 
 we may lawfully choose that which we like best. 
 
 But the bounding line between what is lawful 
 and what is unlawful is oftentimes indistinct and 
 difficult to make out. It seems as if in the question 
 of choosing between two alternatives there were in 
 different cases a continuous gradation between an 
 instance in which one course was plainly and pal- 
 pably right and the other wrong, and an instance in 
 
152 BENEFIT OF IMPERFECT CLEARNESS [vi 
 
 which in choosing between the two on the ground 
 of rectitude there was merely a suspicion of an 
 infinitesimal preference for one rather than the 
 other. 
 
 I think a person might oftentimes feel a wish to 
 know plainly and for certain whether out of two 
 alternatives one was right and the other wrong, so 
 that he might adopt the right, or whether both were 
 alike lawful, so that he was free to choose whichever 
 he liked best. But it does not follow that it is best 
 for him that the distinction should always be thus 
 sharply drawn. His aspiration after such a state 
 may be taken indeed as an indication that there may 
 be such a condition designed for man. And we can 
 readily conceive of such a state as being a happy 
 state ; a state in which the man freely takes his 
 choice among things lawful without the slightest 
 misgiving to mar his enjoyment as if in making his 
 choice he had not been doing quite right, while on 
 the other hand he never thinks of doing what is 
 wrong but turns from the idea with abhorrence, nor 
 has the slightest hankering after anything which 
 could only be obtained through breaking through the 
 law of right. And a condition something like this 
 is pictured to us as being the original condition of 
 man ; free to eat as he liked of the fruit of the trees 
 of the garden, one only being strictly and sternly 
 forbidden to him. 
 
vi] AS TO THE COURSE OF DUTY. 153 
 
 But the enjoyment of such a condition presup- 
 poses perfect uprightness on the part of man ; and 
 failing that, supposing him to be in a condition in 
 which the law of right -doing has been broken 
 through, a condition nevertheless from which it is 
 possible that he could be raised through means pro- 
 vided, it is quite conceivable that it might be the 
 reverse of beneficial to him that the boundary 
 between right and wrong should in all cases be 
 sharply and clearly marked. For then the smallest 
 transgression would assume the character of high- 
 handed rebellion ; and as by hypothesis the man is 
 in an imperfect state, he would be liable to fall again 
 into open disobedience, and the ill effect of it upon 
 his character would be aggravated by the clearness 
 of the light against which he had sinned. Hence in- 
 stead of being gradually led on towards an improved 
 condition the fear is that he would only become 
 worse and worse. But the existence of a sort of 
 sliding scale of clearness as to duty seems, on the one 
 hand, to afford greater play for the exercise of love 
 in doing what is somewhat doubtfully believed to be 
 right ; while on the other, a transgression involves a 
 smaller shock to the character when the thing com- 
 mitted is only suspected to be wrong than would 
 have been the case had it clearly and unmistakably 
 been known to be so. We see then that in a state 
 of probation the withholding of unmistakable light 
 
154 IDEAL CONDITION OF A RIGHTFUL [vi 
 
 in many cases as to what is right or wrong may 
 be made the means of gradually winning over the 
 character to that which is right. 
 
 So long as there is this contest between duty and 
 inclination, man's happiness must be imperfect, even 
 independently altogether of any physical pains or 
 discomforts to which he may be subject. But we 
 can imagine a state in which this struggle would no 
 longer remain, from the full conformity of man's 
 will to what is right, in other words, to the will of 
 God. In such a condition man would serve, not as 
 a servant, but as a sou, not from compulsion in any 
 degree, but from choice, finding his delight in that 
 service. The contrast between these two kinds of 
 service seems to me to be referred to in those words 
 with which we are familiar, If ye have not been 
 faithful in that which is another's, who will give you 
 that which is your own ? 
 
 That which is your own. Have we not here a 
 picture of the lawful exercise of that free will, that 
 freedom of choice, with which man was endowed ? 
 In such a condition a man would do what he liked, 
 and yet without rebuke, for he would only like what 
 was right. But the right course is not necessarily 
 unique ; were it so, his freedom of will would have 
 no play ; he would be somewhat in the condition of 
 an automaton. In a social condition in which each 
 individual had a wide option as to what he should 
 
vi] EXERCISE OF FREE WILL. 155 
 
 do, and yet never misused his freedom of will, there 
 would be room for endless variety, and yet the evils 
 would never arise which spring from an abuse of that 
 freedom. 
 
 This condition is not, however, reached by any of 
 us in the present life, though good men make some 
 approach towards it. We need, therefore, to be 
 cautious in the exercise of our freedom of will. 
 We may not always do just as we like, even though 
 that be not directly and in itself sinful. We are far 
 more apt to indulge ourselves in what we like, even 
 though there may be something not quite right about 
 it, than to deny ourselves what we wish from a mis- 
 taken notion that it is wrong when it is not. Hence 
 self-denial, even as regards things lawful, may be 
 useful in its proper place as a branch of self- 
 discipline, as helping us to keep our desires in 
 hand. But we are not to suppose that mere object- 
 less self-denial is well pleasing to God, who giveth 
 us all things richly to enjoy, to be received with 
 thanksgiving. The notion that it is lies at the root 
 of asceticism. And in this connection it is worthy 
 of note that in the law of Moses it was even enjoined 
 upon the Israelites as a religious duty that on certain 
 occasions they were to enjoy themselves. They were 
 directed to tithe the produce of their land and to eat 
 it before the Lord in the appointed place. And if 
 this was too far off they were to turn it into money, 
 
156 DANGER OF ALLEGED EXPLANATIONS [vi 
 
 and bring the money with them, and when they got 
 to the place to lay it out in the purchase of whatever 
 they liked for food, and eat it there and rejoice. 
 They were also, as we know, directed at an assigned 
 time to " afflict their souls " as a memorial of their 
 sins. The rejoicing and the afflicting themselves 
 were both alike enjoined, the one in connection 
 with the bounty of God, the other in connection 
 with the sin of man ; as if to keep alive in their 
 minds that God willed their happiness, and that the 
 unhappiness that they experienced was brought upon 
 them through their own fault. 
 
 I have already more than once dwelt on the 
 difficulty we with our finite minds feel when we 
 endeavour to grasp the idea of God. I have men- 
 tioned it in connection with the attempt to reconcile 
 the ideas of omnipresence and personality. As I 
 have reason, from a letter I received, to think that 
 what I said on the latter head may have been mis- 
 understood, it may be well to repeat, and to state 
 more distinctly, that the term " personality " was 
 used in a qualified sense; as merely asserting the 
 possession of mind, will, design, in contradistinction 
 to an assemblage of what are looked on as mindless 
 laws of nature. 
 
 But naturally the difficulty of reconciling the 
 ideas of omnipresence and personality is not the 
 
vi] OF THINGS ABOVE REASON. 157 
 
 only one which we experience when with our finite 
 minds we attempt to gauge the infinite. And when 
 we come across such difficulties it is well to remem- 
 ber that oftentimes they may be such as we do best 
 quietly to accept as being beyond us. An attempt 
 to give a rational account of what is really above 
 reason may even lead us into error, and, if I mistake 
 not, has not un frequently done so. 
 
 But it is one thing to be above reason, it is quite 
 another thing to be contrary to reason. I believe 
 that sometimes propositions which are above reason 
 are rejected on the ground of their being contrary to 
 reason. And the cause of their being supposed to be 
 contrary to reason is, that an attempt is tacitly and 
 unwittingly made to gauge the mind of the Infinite 
 by our own finite minds. But though the employ- 
 ment of reason has its limits, it has a legitimate field 
 of exercise even in matters of religion. And in 
 saying this I would not confine the word " reason " 
 simply to the intellectual powers. We have moral 
 as well as strictly intellectual powers. The question, 
 Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? 
 implies, if I mistake not, the recognition of our pos- 
 session of such powers, and a declaration of our 
 responsibility for the use we make of them. Taking, 
 then, the word " reason " in this wide sense, it may, I 
 think, be said with truth that we should render unto 
 reason the things that be reason's, and unto faith the 
 
158 MAN'S FREE WILL AND [vi 
 
 things that be faith's. And errors may arise, and 
 have arisen, from making the field of either encroach 
 upon that of the other. It may be, as I was saying 
 just now, that a proposition may be rejected as con- 
 trary to reason when it is only above it, and was 
 supposed to be contrary to it simply because the 
 proper province of reason was erroneously extended. 
 On the other hand, a proposition which really goes 
 against reason may be asserted, and assent to it 
 claimed, because it is erroneously supposed to be 
 included in a province which is rightly claimed as 
 belonging to faith. And the ill effect of this latter 
 is not confined to driving into scepticism men of 
 earnest minds, who by a more rational treatment 
 might have been retained ; it is fertile also in sowing 
 disunion among persons who hold in common what 
 they would agree in regarding as the most important 
 parts of a faith as to which, in those respects, there is 
 no difference between them. 
 
 Let me now refer to another question, to a diffi- 
 culty with which we are very familiar, regarding 
 which the origin of the chief embarrassment lies, as 
 it seems to me, in the refusal quietly to recognise 
 that the solution of the difficulty lies in a region 
 which is above our comprehension. 
 
 We are innately conscious of the possession of 
 free will ; in other words, of the power of choice. 
 We may speculate as we will about the origin of 
 
vi] GOD'S FOREKNOWLEDGE. 159 
 
 that free will ; one man may say that the will is in 
 all cases directed by God Himself; another man 
 may say that man is an elaborate machine ; that his 
 thoughts and his will are all determined by the 
 motions of the molecules of which his body consists, 
 so that he is as much an automaton as a wound-up 
 watch. But none of these speculations interfere in 
 the least with the consciousness which we possess of 
 that which we call the freedom of our wills. Now, 
 it is impossible for any of us to foretell in what 
 manner another man will, on a given occasion, 
 exercise his freedom of choice. From a knowledge 
 of his character we may sometimes form a very 
 probable guess, but that is all. Now, suppose we 
 are told that God foreknows the action of man, are 
 we driven to the alternative either of saying that the 
 statement is incredible, or that the freedom of the 
 will is only apparent, and that everything is fixed in 
 an inevitable course ? I need not say that the diffi- 
 culty involved in this question, or rather, as I should 
 say, in giving a negative answer to it, is one with 
 which we are very familiar. But it seems to me 
 that the difficulty turns upon this, that having no 
 power ourselves of foreknowing the manner in which 
 a given individual, on a given occasion, will exercise 
 his freedom of choice, and not even being able to 
 conceive the possession of such a power as belonging 
 to ourselves, we are apt, therefore, to deny it as 
 
160 DIFFICULTY OF RECONCILING [vi 
 
 belonging to God, and therefore to adopt one or 
 other of the alternatives mentioned. But this comes 
 to taking our own minds as a measure of the mind 
 of God. We cannot deny that freedom of will of 
 which we are innately as conscious as we are of our 
 own existence ; it would, indeed, be immoral to do 
 so, as the whole of our responsibility depends upon 
 our possession of that freedom of choice. If we are 
 asked how we reconcile it with God's foreknowledge, 
 the answer must be simply, We cannot tell ; but to 
 deny that it can be reconcilable in any way is to 
 take our finite minds as a measure of the mind of 
 the Infinite. 
 
 In my former lectures I ventured to throw out 
 some suggestions which I thought might perhaps aid 
 us a little in endeavouring to form some conception, 
 however inadequate our highest conceptions must be, 
 of the overwhelming idea of God. In the attempt 
 we meet with ideas which, to our finite minds, 
 appear almost mutually exclusive, and yet they are 
 all essential, and our ideas would be liable to be 
 erroneous, perhaps to an important degree, if we 
 were to discard any. 
 
 When, for example, we contemplate God as the 
 First Cause of all, as omnipresent, as exempt from 
 limitations of time and space, the idea seems almost 
 intangible, too abstract to be taken in. We are in 
 
vi] DIFFERENT ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 161 
 
 danger of falling into a sort of pantheism; the 
 element of personality seems to fall into the back- 
 ground ; we are tempted to think that a Being so 
 vast can hardly have any personal relation to our 
 individual selves ; that our course in life is regulated 
 by general laws as uniform and as inflexible as the 
 laws which regulate dead matter. I would not for 
 a moment disparage this latter view provided it be 
 properly qualified, and associated with other ideas 
 which do not find their place in the mere physical 
 world. 
 
 On the other hand, the voice of conscience within 
 us speaks to us of a personal Being, to Whom we are 
 accountable, with Whom we seem, as it were, to be 
 isolated. In this conception we, to a certain extent, 
 are apt to lose sight for the moment of His govern- 
 ment of all the hundreds of millions of our fellow- 
 men, just as much as ourselves, and of all the vast 
 universe, of the immensity of which the present 
 state of our scientific knowledge gives us such an 
 exalted conception. 
 
 Still this conception, though personal to ourselves, 
 is yet in a certain sense what we may call intangible. 
 Our senses give us no cognisance of any intercourse 
 between ourselves and an invisible Being not our- 
 selves. The thought may naturally arise within us, 
 Is it in any way possible that we should have inter- 
 course with such a Being in some manner more or 
 
 11 
 
1 62 DIVISION OF THE COMPLEX [vi 
 
 less analogous to that in which a man holds inter- 
 course with his fellow-man ? 
 
 In any wide and comprehensive department of 
 human knowledge and study, we find it expedient 
 not to attempt to grasp the whole at every moment, 
 but to pay more special attention, sometimes to one, 
 sometimes to another, branch of the entire subject. 
 This is conducive in the end to a more thorough 
 mastery of the whole, provided we do not so confine 
 ourselves to one branch as to neglect others. Such a 
 confinement leads to a one-sided and imperfect edu- 
 cation ; to an exaggerated estimation of the relative 
 importance of the branch specially selected, and a 
 depreciation of the others. It is analogous to the 
 effect of certain trades on the development of the 
 body, in which the constant employment of some 
 particular muscles leads to an abnormal development 
 of those in constant use, combined with some approach 
 to atrophy in those which but seldom come into play, 
 interfering thereby with the full symmetry of the 
 human frame. Nor is the one-sidedness and conse- 
 quent imperfection of the knowledge acquired through 
 such a course as I have indicated the only ill effect 
 of it ; there is danger that the very completeness, so 
 far as it can be called complete, of the knowledge 
 gained in some very special branch may tend to 
 make the holder of it conceited, tend to lead him 
 to look down on his fellows, whose knowledge, it 
 
vi] IDEA INTO SEPARATE PARTS. 163 
 
 may be, is as great as his own, but relates to subjects 
 of which he knows hardly anything. 
 
 Now, this principle, which applies to the pursuit 
 of secular knowledge, is equally, I think, applicable 
 perhaps I should say applicable in an even higher 
 degree to theology, whether natural or that which 
 deals with the supernatural. I am not to dwell upon 
 the latter, but I may remark in passing that I think 
 that this one-sidedness, the vehement insisting upon 
 some one point, or, it may be, some few points, to the 
 neglect of a symmetrical cultivation of the whole 
 field, has been a fertile source of misunderstanding 
 and disunion. 
 
 Let me return now to the subject with which I 
 started, namely, our conception of the being and 
 attributes of God. If any subject of contemplation 
 be overwhelming from its vastness, surely it must be 
 this. In attempting to gain some true conception, 
 however inadequate our conception must be at the 
 best, may we have recourse to what has been found 
 to be useful in attempting to make ourselves 
 acquainted with some extensive department of 
 secular knowledge, and divide the complex idea 
 into portions which can be dwelt upon separately, 
 yet not so as to neglect any ? 
 
 We have seen how difficult it is to think of God 
 as the First Cause of all, as the Ruler and Sustainer 
 of all the worlds and of all that is in them, and yet 
 
1 64 THREEFOLD PRESENTATION. [vi 
 
 as a Being having a personal relation to our indi- 
 vidual minds. And even if we had arrived so far as 
 readily to combine these different aspects, still the 
 desire is felt of, at least, the possibility of a more 
 direct, a more palpable, as it were, communication 
 between God and man. 
 
 Now, it is worthy of note that the Christian 
 religion does present to us such a threefold aspect 
 of the Divine Being; allows us, and yet without 
 any departure from monotheism, to think of Him 
 separately as the source and fountain of all, or as 
 a Spirit influencing and holding converse, as it were, 
 with our individual minds, or again, to contemplate 
 His character through the veil of humanity, in a 
 manner suited to the limitations of our human 
 capacities. But this is a subject into which I may 
 not further enter; though I did feel at liberty to 
 point out how a particular portion of what the 
 Christian religion teaches falls in with and satisfies 
 certain cravings of natural religion. 
 
LECTUEE VII 
 
 Meaning of evolution Illustration from coal : from certain celestial 
 phenomena Whether the origin of life on earth can be referred 
 to evolution Whetherthe adoption of evolution has an atheistic 
 tendency Suggestion of a sowing origin for life on earth 
 Mutual aid in the study of religious questions Uniformity of 
 physical laws Extension to moral laws Permanence of the 
 consequences of the exercise of free will Conclusion of the 
 second instalment of lectures. 
 
 IN several of my previous lectures I have referred 
 briefly to evolution, either by name, or indirectly by 
 discussing the possibility of the present state of 
 things having arisen, by the operation of such laws 
 as those which are subject to our investigation, from 
 a condition which was at any rate very different 
 from, and more elementary than, the present. At 
 the present day what is called evolution is very 
 much in the air, and it may not be amiss to discuss 
 at some little length the question, Is or is not evolution 
 consistent with theism ? Or if it be not inconsistent, 
 has its maintenance, or has it not, a tendency towards 
 atheism ? 
 
 Now, there is no use attempting to discuss such a 
 question unless we start with clear ideas of the sense 
 
1 66 MEANING OF EVOLUTION. [vn 
 
 that we attach to the terms that we employ. What, 
 then, do we mean by evolution ? 
 
 Let us take our coal-fields, and ask ourselves the 
 question, How did that coal originate ? Was it created 
 just as we see it ? Or was it formed by the operation 
 of natural laws, such as those which, form the subject 
 of scientific investigation, from something which was 
 not coal at all, but quite different ? 
 
 The scientific man gives no hesitating answer to 
 this question. He finds in the coal the remains of 
 a vegetation now extinct. He is acquainted with 
 chemical processes which go on in dead vegetable 
 matter which go, to say the least, a certain way 
 towards that considerable change which must have 
 taken place before woody or leafy matter could be 
 changed into something like coal. He finds in 
 studying the structure of the earth evidence of past 
 changes whereby what was once a mass of luxuriant 
 vegetation might have got covered over, been subjected 
 to great pressure, and, it may be, to a moderately high 
 temperature as well. Everything leads him to the 
 belief that the second of the two alternatives mentioned 
 above is the one he must adopt. He may express this 
 briefly by saying that the coal was formed by evolution. 
 
 But in thus expressing himself, " evolution " is in 
 no sense whatsoever regarded as a cause. Nay, it 
 does not even describe the process of formation ; it 
 merely expresses the general character of that process 
 
vn] ILLUSTRATION FROM COAL. 167 
 
 as being one which takes place naturally under the 
 operation of chemical, mechanical, etc., laws which 
 are known, or if not wholly known, yet at least 
 analogous to those which are ; laws, accordingly, 
 which are open to our investigation. 
 
 Now, no one who knew anything of science would, 
 I think, suppose for a moment that there was any- 
 thing at all atheistic in thus attributing the formation 
 of coal to a process of evolution. But we can, I 
 think, without much difficulty imagine a man, say 
 of a devout turn of mind, who knew absolutely 
 nothing of science, who was in the habit of dwelling 
 in his thoughts on the immense usefulness of coal to 
 man, and regarding it as a direct gift from the Creator, 
 perhaps supposing that it had been created exactly 
 as we find it. Perhaps such a man, on hearing a 
 rumour that some scientific man had asserted that 
 coal was formed by natural causes from something 
 quite different, might be shocked, might imagine 
 even that he must be an atheist. Perhaps our 
 unscientific friend, after a time, might get some 
 inkling of the evidence on which the scientist relied, 
 and might be induced to come round to his opinion. 
 It is conceivable that in the change his faith might 
 be made to totter a bit. But it would not be evolu- 
 tion which was chargeable with this, but his own 
 narrowness of views, his own antagonism to the 
 opinions of his neighbour, whom he had put out 
 
1 68 ILLUSTRATION FROM CERTAIN [vn 
 
 of court without a hearing. When he had recovered 
 from his shock he might perceive that he was per- 
 fectly at liberty to retain his former belief that the 
 coal-fields were designed to be used by man ; only 
 his previous notion of the way in which that design 
 was carried out had to be amended. 
 
 Take now another phenomenon. Some years ago 
 a new star, or at least a star which, if it existed before, 
 had been quite inconspicuous, burst out in the con- 
 stellation of the Northern Crown, and after remaining 
 bright for some time gradually faded away. Now, 
 what are we to think of this event ? We cannot get 
 at the star to examine it as we can. a piece of coal. 
 We cannot, accordingly, have quite the same evi- 
 dence that the conflagration, whatever may have 
 been its nature, was brought about by natural 
 causes. Shall we suppose that it was the destruc- 
 tion of a world, brought about by supernatural 
 agency? Perhaps the grandeur of the scale which 
 our knowledge on the enormous distances of the 
 fixed stars obliges us to attribute to the phenomenon 
 might dispose the minds of some to entertain such a 
 view. But I think there is no doubt what answer 
 scientific men, however firm their theism might be, 
 would be disposed to give as to the alternative they 
 would adopt. Though we do not actually know what 
 occasioned the outbreak, yet the phenomena are so 
 closely akin to what we are able to refer to natural 
 
vn] CELESTIAL PHENOMENA. 169 
 
 causes that we cannot hesitate to include them in 
 this category. In the meteorites which are often- 
 times actually detected in the act of falling to the 
 earth, from which they are picked up, in the shooting 
 stars, which, we have reason to believe, are the same 
 thing on a smaller scale, we have evidence of the 
 wandering about of solid bodies in free space, and 
 of their coming into collision with other bodies. 
 We know that the collision of two large bodies, 
 moving relatively with velocities comparable with 
 those of the planets in their orbits, would produce 
 an enormous development of heat and light, as is 
 seen on a minute scale in the gleam of light which a 
 child produces by drawing one over the other two 
 silicious pebbles which he has picked up on the 
 seashore. Such a collision as I have mentioned 
 might be competent to produce that vast exhibition 
 of glowing hydrogen of which the spectroscope gave 
 us evidence as having occurred in that outbreak. Or 
 it may have been brought about in a different way 
 more nearly resembling that which we find to be 
 continually occurring in our own sun, on an enor- 
 mous scale as judged by the dimensions of the earth, 
 though a scale which must be minute compared with 
 the outbreak in that temporary star. We see, then, 
 that in this case, though we cannot lay our finger on 
 the precise process going on, we have every reason 
 to compare it with the ordinary processes of nature. 
 
1 70 CAN THE ORIGIN OF LIFE [vn 
 
 Take now a third phenomenon. We know that 
 life in various forms exists on earth. We have 
 strong physical reasons for believing that the earth 
 was once in a molten state, a state, therefore, utterly 
 unfit for its habitation by living things. How, then, 
 did life originate upon earth ? Even though we may 
 be unable to give any scientific account of its actual 
 origin, is there something which we can scientifically 
 examine that seems so far akin to the origination of 
 living from dead matter as to raise some degree 
 of probability that such a thing is possible by mere 
 natural causes ? 
 
 Now I think the scientific answer to this question 
 must be in the negative. For my own part I may 
 say that I know of nothing at all analogous to it. 
 The most eminent biologists and the most careful 
 experimentalists seem to have come to the con- 
 clusion that, so far as our investigation can carry 
 us, life can only come from life. Here then we 
 are brought face to face with the alternative of 
 either admitting the probability of the exertion of 
 some creative power above the ordinary course of 
 nature, or of rejecting any such agency and sticking 
 to evolution in spite of all appearances pointing to its 
 inadequacy. Of course we may assume evolution for 
 trial, as a guide to our researches, so long as we bear 
 in mind that it is only assumed hypothetically, for 
 that purpose ; but to adhere to it when there appears 
 
vi i] BE REFERRED TO EVOLUTION ? 171 
 
 not the slightest prospect of its competence to ac- 
 count for the phenomenon presented does, I confess, 
 seem to me to indicate an animus in the direction 
 of endeavouring to dispense with a Creator. If such 
 there be, I cannot say that the adoption of evolution to 
 such an extent as this is quite consistent with theism. 
 But we must not judge other men for the con- 
 clusions which they are disposed to draw as to 
 the origin of some phenomenon presented to our 
 consideration. A due estimate of the probability 
 of a phenomenon having arisen from natural causes 
 involves a just weighing of any scientific evidence 
 that may seem to indicate something analogous in 
 the domain of what clearly belongs to science to 
 investigate ; and the amount of scientific knowledge 
 of what may possibly bear on the question pos- 
 sessed by one man may be very different from 
 that possessed by another, even though he be a 
 man of science. And for those who are not 
 scientific there only remains the still more difficult 
 appreciation of the weight to be attached to the 
 opinions of scientific men. It is not every opinion 
 of a scientific man, or even of several scientific 
 men, that may safely be relied on; and a person 
 who is quite unable himself to judge of the 
 alleged scientific evidence can only form an opinion 
 by estimating the soundness of judgment of the 
 scientific men who say that there is good evi- 
 
172 HAS THE ADOPTION OF EVOLUTION [vii 
 
 dence of the phenomenon to be investigated being 
 really analogous to what belongs to the domain of 
 science. 
 
 Hence the evidence in the minds of different 
 men for or against the adequacy of natural causes 
 to account for a given phenomenon may easily, 
 and may quite properly, be different. Accordingly 
 one man may believe that the phenomenon is to 
 be referred to natural causes though they have 
 not yet been made out, without any weakening of 
 his theistic belief, while for another man thus to 
 refer the very same phenomenon, in spite of the 
 (to him) violent improbability that any such ex- 
 planation is possible, or rather what would be 
 a violent improbability if it were not that the 
 alternative supposition is put out of court, betrays 
 an animus hardly consistent with theism. 
 
 It seems to me then that evolution is not to 
 be charged with a tendency towards atheism, or 
 that it has such a tendency, according to the 
 way in which it is used. If we merely say 
 to ourselves, If this phenomenon is referable to 
 natural causes it belongs to the domain of science, 
 and came about by evolution, and I will set my- 
 self to endeavour to make out how it came, there 
 is nothing atheistic in that. If, on the other 
 hand, we say, Every phenomenon presented to us 
 must have come about by evolution, and by that 
 
vi i] AN ATHEISTIC TENDENCY ? 173 
 
 alone, ignorant though we be of the existence 
 of anything at all analogous in the domain of 
 science, that does seem to be putting out of court 
 the existence of a God, and that of course would 
 be atheism, or tantamount to it. 
 
 To illustrate my meaning I have taken the 
 particular phenomenon of the first appearance of 
 life upon the earth. I have called it a pheno- 
 menon for the sake of giving it a name ; but it 
 is not of course that in the strict sense of the 
 word, inasmuch as it is not anything presented to 
 our observation, but an inference from things that 
 are; an inference, the scientific grounds of which 
 are so strong, that we may be pardoned for speak- 
 ing of it as a phenomenon. In order to avoid 
 interruption in what I wished to explain, I have 
 tacitly supposed that the only alternative lay be- 
 tween referring the origin of life on earth to a 
 creative act and supposing that living things, or 
 at least some form of life, arose by natural causes 
 from dead matter. But having chosen this par- 
 ticular illustration I wish to say a few words in 
 reference to a suggestion which has been thrown 
 out, which would refer the first appearance of life 
 on earth to neither of what I have been treating 
 as the sole alternatives. 
 
 In his presidential address at the meeting of the 
 British Association in this city in 1871, Sir William 
 
174 SUGGESTION OF A SOWING [vn 
 
 Thomson referred to this problem, and gave an 
 illustration of what a scientific explanation might 
 be. A stream of lava becomes after several years 
 covered with vegetation. How is it that we get 
 here forms of life where life there had been none? 
 We know that the seeds were wafted by the wind, 
 and possibly in other accidental ways as well, and 
 finding a soil not unsuited to them, though pre- 
 viously it had been barren, they germinated and 
 produced the plants we find. Might we suppose 
 a sowing origin for the first occurrence of life in 
 any shape on the previously molten earth, now 
 cooled down sufficiently for the reception of vege- 
 table life? We know that meteorites fall from 
 time to time on to the surface of the earth. Where 
 they came from we do not know. They may, or 
 some of them may, have been small fragments 
 which flew off from some habitable globe in con- 
 sequence of collision with another globe. May 
 not one of these fragments have contained some 
 seeds, the spores perhaps of some lowly moss, 
 which thus were transported to the earth and 
 there germinated ? 
 
 I need not dwell on the difficulties attending such 
 a hypothesis, nor point out to you that even if it 
 were true there is far more to explain than merely 
 the first occurrence of life on earth, and that there 
 is no mode of transition that we know anything of 
 
vi i] ORIGIN FOR LIFE ON EARTH. 175 
 
 by merely natural causes from a moss to a man. 
 For as I listened to the address I did not imagine 
 that the distinguished author advanced the sug- 
 gestion as anything of a probable explanation of 
 the way in which life first came to be upon the 
 earth. The intention, as I understood him, and I 
 have grounds for saying that I understood him 
 rightly, was merely to illustrate, as it did in a 
 very clear and graphic manner, the nature of what 
 might be taken as a vera causa in the attempt to 
 explain a phenomenon, in contradistinction to the 
 mere unscientific conjecture that life on earth 
 originated spontaneously from matter not previ- 
 ously endowed with life. 
 
 If we take the body of natural science, such 
 as it has become in modern times, we see that it 
 subdivides itself into a number of different branches. 
 Yet these branches so interlock that there is a 
 mutual dependence of one on another, so that a 
 man who made himself familiar with one only to 
 the total neglect of the others might well fall 
 into error, for want of a more general knowledge, 
 even as regards the branch which he had specially 
 taken up. Of course he would attach great weight 
 to the opinion of some fellow - worker who had 
 taken up a branch bordering on his own; but he 
 would not be satisfied unless he were able to form 
 
176 MUTUAL AID OF VARIOUS MINDS IN [vn 
 
 at least some sort of idea of the evidence on which 
 his fellow-worker relied for the substantiation of the 
 opinions which he maintained. 
 
 Now we might expect something analogous to 
 hold good even as regards moral and theological 
 questions, though there may not be such distinct 
 divisions into different branches, and though the 
 means of investigation are extremely different. 
 Some portions of the whole range may be clearer 
 to the mind of one man, some to the mind of 
 another. One man may fall into some mistake 
 which he does not perceive, another might be 
 able to point it out and set him right. But the 
 investigation is not of that precise definite char- 
 acter that we have to deal with in mathematical 
 investigation, or even in the pursuit of physical 
 science. The conclusions which a man arrives at 
 are the outcome of a variety of considerations, 
 the entirety of which he could perhaps hardly 
 formulate even to himself. One man cannot ap- 
 prehend the views of another in any off-hand way, 
 by any superficial investigation ; still less if he 
 approaches the supposed opinions of another in a 
 spirit of antagonism, for the purpose of objecting 
 to them. In such a case he is pretty sure to 
 misunderstand and, however unintentionally and 
 unwittingly, to misrepresent the views of the other. 
 
 In order to put ourselves in a position to profit 
 
vi i] THE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS. 177 
 
 by whatever there may be of truth in the opinions, 
 taken as a whole, of other men, we must endeavour 
 to throw ourselves as far as possible into their 
 feelings, to see things, so to speak, through their 
 spectacles, to try how far we agree with them rather 
 than how far we differ from them. If earnest- 
 minded men are approached in this spirit, I think 
 that we shall generally find that we have some- 
 thing to learn from them, even when at first sight 
 we might have supposed that we differed from 
 them altogether. And though there may still re- 
 main various things in which we find that we do 
 not agree with them, I think that we shall learn 
 to respect them far more than we should have 
 done if we had held aloof from them. 
 
 The ideas of others on such subjects are best 
 arrived at in the way of friendly conversation when 
 that can be had. In this way misapprehensions are 
 the most easily cleared away, and the benefit ob- 
 tained through the contact of minds of different 
 casts may be mutual. This, however, is a method 
 of only restricted application, since it implies 
 residence, at least temporarily, in the same place, 
 and, usually at least, previous friendship. In de- 
 fault of this, much may be done by reading books 
 written by earnestly- minded men of different ways 
 of thinking. This is no mere speculation ; I can 
 speak from some experience, being rather fond of 
 
 12 
 
i;8 MUTUAL AID OF GROUPS OF MEN. [vn 
 
 this sort of reading; and I seldom, I think, read 
 a book of the kind without rising from the perusal 
 with greater respect for the author and those of 
 his way of thinking, without seeing even in cases 
 in which I still felt that I differed considerably 
 from them that they had much more to say in 
 favour of their views than might at first sight 
 have appeared, or without finding that there was 
 a good deal in which I could sympathise. 
 
 The remarks I have been making with respect 
 to individuals apply equally, it seems to me, to 
 groups of individuals, the groups being formed of 
 persons who are drawn together by a general com- 
 munity in their way of thinking. If the members 
 come to look on their own group as perfection, and 
 regard other groups chiefly with the object of 
 picking holes in their opinions, they are sure to 
 become narrow-minded, and will probably fall 
 themselves into error, or at any rate hold the truth 
 in so distorted a form as almost to amount to 
 error. 
 
 No man or group of men can truly claim 
 infallibility for their opinions. They may be com- 
 pared to squirrels on the diverging branches of a 
 tree of which the stem represents the truth. By 
 attraction to one another they are drawn towards 
 the stem of truth ; by repulsion they are made to 
 recede further from it. 
 
vn] UNIFORMITY OF PHYSICAL LAWS. 179 
 
 In connection with this topic I may remark that 
 I think that Lord Gifford did wisely in prescribing 
 that his Lecturers should he changed from time to 
 time, so that minds of very different casts might 
 be brought to bear on the great subject which so 
 much occupied his thoughts in the closing years 
 of his life. And this thought affords me some 
 consolation for the deficiencies of which I ant 
 keenly sensible in attempting to handle so wide 
 and difficult a subject as that which he pre- 
 scribed ; a subject too lying out of the direction of 
 my ordinary studies. 
 
 In the study of physical science, we have con- 
 stantly presented to our minds the uniformity and 
 universality of the laws which regulate the action 
 of inorganic matter, and of the agencies (such as 
 light, heat, electricity, etc.) by which it is affected. 
 These laws are inexorable, and if we attempt to 
 act in opposition to them we come to grief. When 
 from the study of inorganic nature we pass on to 
 biology, when we study the growth, the nutrition, 
 the conditions of thriving or decay, or of living 
 things, be they plants or animals, we are not able 
 to trace with the same defmiteness and precision 
 the relation between cause and effect. Yet we 
 have abundant evidence of the existence of stated 
 laws, though their operation is modified by so 
 
i8o UNIFORMITY OF MORAL LAWS [vn 
 
 many influencing circumstances with which we are 
 ill acquainted if acquainted at all, that we are far 
 from being able to calculate the result of given 
 conditions. 
 
 If we look on the course of nature as the out- 
 come of the will of a Supreme Being, we are led 
 to conclude that at least as a rule He works by 
 uniform definite laws. 
 
 But when from matter, whether unorganised or 
 belonging to living things, and concerned in their 
 nutrition, growth, etc., we pass on to mind, and 
 consider results depending on the exercise of free 
 will, we enter a region in which at first sight it 
 might seem as if there could be no such thing as 
 laws at all. What can well be more arbitrary, 
 we might at first sight be disposed to say, more 
 exempt from all idea of law as producing definite 
 effects, than the action of the human will ? 
 
 And yet even as regards this we have plain 
 indication of the operation of law. Consider for 
 instance the statistics of crime. In a very large 
 population, living in a given social condition, there 
 is somewhat of a rough uniformity in the criminal 
 percentage one year with another. Yet what can 
 be more purely arbitrary than a criminal exercise of 
 the will ? 
 
 Suppose a person to throw a pair of fairly-made 
 dice a very great number of times in succession. 
 
vn] NOTWITHSTANDING FREE WILL. iSi 
 
 It would be found that a given pair of unequal 
 numbers would turn up on the average somewhere 
 about once in eighteen times. This is the result 
 arrived at by the theory of chances. But the way 
 in which the dice fall depends on the laws of 
 motion, of those of impact, etc. In arriving at 
 the numerical result above stated we start with 
 assuming that any one way in which a pair of 
 dice may turn up is equally probable with another. 
 But what do we mean by equally probable ? Could 
 we have any conception of equal probability if we 
 could imagine the dice to fall exempt from the 
 operation of any law of any kind whatsoever? 
 Similarly in the statistical question mentioned 
 above the approximate uniformity of the results 
 does not militate against the freedom of the wills 
 of the actors. But all the while there are tend- 
 encies to moral acts depending on the constitution 
 of our minds and regulated by definite laws. 
 
 In the physical world every motion, every 
 change, produces an effect which causes the sub- 
 sequent condition to be different from what it 
 would otherwise have been ; though oftentimes that 
 subsequent change is so widespread in the field 
 over which it extends, and so minute at any 
 particular place, that it eludes our powers of ob- 
 servation. Still it is none the less true that the 
 subsequent condition is not exactly the same as if 
 
182 PERMANENCE OF THE CONSEQUENCES [vn 
 
 that initial change had not taken place. For 
 example, when a stone is thrown into a widely 
 extending sheet of water which I will suppose 
 unruffled, a series of annular waves are propagated 
 outwards from the place where the stone fell, 
 which get broader and shallower as they travel 
 along till at last the elevations and depressions 
 become imperceptibly small. Yet the total effect 
 does not go on diminishing, the increasing small- 
 ness of the effect at any one place being made up 
 for by the increasing area over which an effect is 
 produced. In a similar way each exercise of the 
 will, determining whether an action shall be done 
 this way or that way, carries a train of conse- 
 quences of this kind or that kind according as 
 the determination was this way or that way. In 
 many cases, as regards more trivial actions, the 
 difference in the train of consequences may hardly 
 be noticeable. Yet even here the difference of 
 result is oftentimes apparently out of all propor- 
 tion to the apparent importance of the choice. 
 The difference in the train of consequences is 
 usually most obvious in relation to the effect upon 
 others, or to some outward effect upon the man 
 himself. But what I wish to insist upon is the 
 difference it makes on the character of the man 
 himself who is called on to make the choice. 
 Acts, that is to say exercises of the will in acting, 
 
vn] OF THE EXERCISE OF FREE WILL. 183 
 
 produce habits, tending to make the determination 
 of the will on a future occasion more likely to 
 be in the direction in which it had been previ- 
 ously exerted. Thus benevolent acts tend to make 
 the character benevolent ; acts of self-indulgence 
 tend to make a character weak, and so on. 
 
 This is of course very generally admitted. But 
 I doubt if it is usually so much borne in mind 
 when the time comes to make the decision. Per- 
 haps a man is tempted to some act which he feels 
 to be wrong, though as it seems to him only in 
 an extremely trivial degree. Conscious of the 
 freedom of his will, he thinks perhaps, It does 
 not much signify for this once, I can stop when- 
 ever I like. But the very act of yielding weakens 
 his power of resistance. That it should be so is 
 a law of our moral nature, a law as definite as 
 those which regulate the inorganic world, though 
 not so easily traceable, on account of its being 
 mixed up with the freedom of the will. Nor is 
 the existence of such a law disproved by the fact 
 that it does not necessarily lead to final disaster. 
 Perhaps the first yielding to what is felt to be 
 slightly wrong is followed by another not quite so 
 slight, and so on till the man is pulled up by 
 finding that he has done something that he would 
 not have thought of his doing at the time of the 
 first temptation. Perhaps his eyes are opened to 
 
1 84 WRONG-DOING THOUGH ABANDONED [vn 
 
 the seriousness of what he has done by some mis- 
 fortune it has brought upon another ; a misfortune 
 which seemed out of all proportion to the fault 
 as it at first appeared to him. In these or other 
 ways the man may have been led to repent of 
 what he had done and to seek amendment. But 
 it may be also that that first wrong act, that 
 trivial fault as it seemed, proves to be but the 
 first step in a downward course which leads him 
 by degrees deeper and deeper down until he is 
 past recovery. 
 
 But supposing that the downward course was 
 arrested, even at a very early stage, it does not 
 follow that the man's subsequent condition is as 
 high as it might have been if he had never 
 yielded, high absolutely considered though it may 
 become. Good in some respects may have arisen 
 even from his arrested fall; it may make him 
 more humble, more watchful for the future. But 
 it does not follow that his character, taking it all 
 in all, is as high as it otherwise might have been. 
 Moral causes will produce moral effects just as 
 physical causes produce physical effects ; and though 
 evil may be overruled for good, we can hardly 
 imagine but that a higher good would have ac- 
 crued had the evil been avoided. But whereas 
 what did happen under the circumstances which 
 actually took place is open to our examination, 
 
vn] STILL INVOLVES A FORFEITURE. 185 
 
 what would have happened under different circum- 
 stances is beyond us to calculate; and accordingly 
 that theoretical higher good in many if not most 
 cases remains unknown to us. Perhaps it may 
 be well that it should ; perhaps a clear knowledge 
 of all that through our own fault we missed might 
 have too much filled us with regret. 
 
 Still it is well that we should ever bear in mind 
 that by doing wrong, even should we be restored 
 from it, we forfeit some higher condition which we 
 might have reached by having resisted the tempta- 
 tion to do that wrong. And in this respect too, 
 as well as in another to which I have already re- 
 ferred, I cannot help thinking that highly - drawn, 
 exaggerated representations of the disastrous final 
 consequences of sin have an injurious tendency, as 
 leading us to concentrate our attention on a mere 
 negation ; on the avoidance of final disaster ; as 
 keeping in some measure out of sight the very 
 various degrees of advancement to which it is pos- 
 sible to attain in the right way. 
 
 In bringing to a conclusion this second instal- 
 ment of the lectures which the Senatus of the 
 University of Edinburgh did me the honour to 
 entrust to me, but which I now feel as if I had 
 been rash in venturing to undertake, it may not 
 be amiss that I should take a review of the 
 
1 86 RELATION OF LORD GIFFORD'S [vn 
 
 situation, and frankly state the difficulties under 
 which I felt myself labouring. 
 
 The words of the Deed of Foundation show that 
 Lord Gifford was profoundly and devoutly impressed 
 with the supreme importance to man of a true 
 knowledge of God, and felt that to promote it 
 would be the greatest benefit he could render to 
 his fellow-creatures. But how was this knowledge, 
 of so much importance, to be promoted? As I 
 have already remarked, he seemed to think that 
 this was to be accomplished by a systematic exer- 
 cise of the mind in that direction, by depending 
 upon our natural mental powers, by using them 
 in a manner analogous to that by which the 
 natural sciences have been built up. He directs 
 the Lecturers to treat their subject "without 
 reference to or reliance upon any supposed 
 special exceptional or so-called miraculous revela- 
 tion." 
 
 It must not for a moment be inferred from these 
 words that he rejected revelation himself ; but 
 merely that he was desirous of founding a complete 
 system of natural theology and ethics which should 
 be independent of any supernatural revelation. Of 
 course it would be lawful to make use of any hint, 
 if I may so express myself, that may have been 
 derived from what is believed to be revelation, but 
 any proposition that might have been thus suggested 
 
vn] FOUNDATION TO REVELATION. 187 
 
 is ultimately, according to a strict interpretation of 
 the deed, to be based on natural reason. 
 
 I confess I found the task, as thus restricted, 
 one of great difficulty, or to speak more frankly 
 one lying beyond my powers. It is true I have 
 thought a good deal about various theological 
 questions ; but believing as I do that a revelation 
 has been made by God to man, I naturally leaned 
 upon that, examining of course what was supposed 
 to have been taught by revelation by the exercise 
 of natural reason, but not rejecting a proposition 
 which appeared to be contained in what was held 
 to have been revealed merely because it could not 
 be established by reason alone, that is without 
 borrowing from revelation more than the suggestion 
 of its possible truth. 
 
 It seems hardly fair to revelation freely to make 
 use of suggestions coming from that source, and 
 then give to reason, in case the suggested pro- 
 positions should be established thereby, all the 
 credit for the establishment. If this, however, 
 were all it would not much matter ; for truth 
 should be our object however it might be arrived 
 at, and the source of the suggestion would com- 
 monly be well known even if not explicitly stated. 
 But a far more serious hindrance to success 
 attends the proposal as thus strictly interpreted. 
 If we suppose that the knowledge of certain truths 
 
1 88 USE OF A RATIONAL EXAMINATION [vn 
 
 has been communicated in a supernatural manner 
 from God to man, we might expect them to be 
 of such a nature as to fit on to his capacities 
 as well as to his wants. This adaptation would 
 afford confirmatory evidence of what was asserted 
 on other grounds, and increase the confidence with 
 which that was accepted. Nevertheless the evidence 
 derived from reason alone I mean as applied 
 directly to the propositions, and not merely in- 
 directly, as used in scrutinising the evidence for 
 the acceptance of a revelation this evidence, I 
 say, by itself alone, may be wholly insufficient for 
 the establishment of the asserted propositions. 
 Hence a strict exclusion of revelation from the 
 evidence in favour of the propositions, from any- 
 thing beyond the office of suggesting them as 
 possibly true, would often have the effect of making 
 propositions which are most important, if true, appear 
 to rest on extremely slender evidence. 
 
 Nevertheless, the bringing forward of confirma- 
 tory evidence, which seems quite fairly to lie within 
 the limits of what the Gifford Lecturers are directed 
 to confine themselves to, may be useful as far as it 
 goes, and I have allowed myself to introduce the 
 subject. I have, however, done so with reserve, and 
 I could not help oftentimes feeling as if I were 
 called on to work in a strait waistcoat. 
 
 Among those who alike believe that a revelation 
 
vi i] OF WHAT IS TAKEN AS REVEALED. 189 
 
 has been made from God to man, there is much 
 difference of opinion as to the precise extent of 
 that revelation, and as to the meaning of what is 
 indicated. Some are disposed to take what would 
 be called a broader view, in which a larger share is 
 left to the exercise of human reason ; some, on the 
 other hand, pin their faith more narrowly to what, 
 rightly or wrongly, they imagine to have been 
 revealed, and fear that a freer exercise of the 
 reason would involve presumption, and might lead 
 to error. The importance which properly belongs to 
 the subject matter of what is revealed is not unfre- 
 quently transferred to one's own conception of what 
 is supposed to be revealed ; and as there is a good 
 deal of difference of opinion as to the outlying parts, 
 the effect of this over-self-confidence is to split men 
 into parties, those of one party, in their attitude 
 towards those of another, setting themselves mainly 
 to object to what they disagree with. 
 
 Now, I think that a rational examination of pro- 
 positions which are accepted, in the first instance, as 
 having been, as it is supposed, revealed, has a tend- 
 ency to counteract the narrowness to which I have 
 referred. Truth cannot be self -contradictory, and 
 the wider the basis on which the evidence for truth 
 is examined, the more firmly is that which is really 
 true likely to be established, and the more likely is 
 it that specious fallacies will be detected, fallacies 
 
190 SUCH AN EXAMINATION ALLOWABLE [vn 
 
 the mistaking of which for truth is calculated to do 
 harm, as in other ways so especially in this, that it 
 tends to produce dissension between those who hold 
 fallacies of different kinds, and to encourage a mutual 
 opposition whereby they are led away from the con- 
 templation of the truth which they hold in common. 
 
 Of course one who depends in great measure on 
 reason for the theological propositions which he 
 accepts may be narrow-minded just as well as one 
 who dares not to apply his reason to them at all. 
 The evidence that there may be for revelation itself, 
 and for such or such a proposition having been 
 revealed, is not to be put out of court any more 
 than the exercise of reason. The evidence is to be 
 taken as a complete whole, and the conclusion to be 
 drawn accordingly, to the best of the man's ability. 
 
 Now, in examining theological propositions which 
 are accepted mainly on the ground of their being, as 
 it is supposed, taught as belonging to and forming a 
 part of what a body of doctrine which is believed 
 to have been revealed, with a view to ascertaining 
 whether they can receive any support, or otherwise, 
 from what we are led to by the exercise of reason, 
 it would seem to be unnatural to avoid all reference 
 to revelation, or even to refuse frankly to admit that 
 it is to revelation mainly that we must look for evi- 
 dence of their truth. It would seem almost necessary 
 to adopt one or other of two alternatives ; either to 
 
vn] UNDER LORD GIFFORD'S WILL. 191 
 
 avoid such propositions altogether, or to depart from, 
 at least, the letter of the Deed of Foundation of these 
 Lectureships. The former course would, I think, 
 detract from the usefulness of the lectures ; but, if 
 the latter were adopted, it would be requisite to 
 exercise a sound judgment, so as to avoid entering 
 a region of theological controversy, from which it 
 was evidently the intention of Lord Gifford that his 
 Lecturers should hold aloof. I have hardly ventured 
 at all on this latter alternative, for fear of transgress- 
 ing the conditions of the deed. Perhaps I have been 
 over-scrupulous in this respect. For, after all, in the 
 cases I have been supposing, the arguments for or 
 against a proposition which are derivable from reason 
 form by hypothesis only a minor part of the total 
 evidence ; they are only to be taken for what they 
 are worth ; it is not pretended by any means that 
 they settle the question. If they should be confirm- 
 atory of what was previously accepted on other 
 grounds, they lead to its being held more firmly. If, 
 on the other hand, they should appear to be in oppo- 
 sition, they afford material for thought. They incite 
 to a fuller examination of the question as a whole ; 
 and, if this be carried on in a humble, truth-loving 
 spirit, it may quite possibly lead to a larger insight 
 into the question as a whole, which may have the 
 effect of clearing away some unperceived error, and in- 
 troducing harmony into the whole body of evidence. 
 
192 CONCLUSION OF THE SECOND [vir 
 
 In the pursuit of physical science it has often 
 been found that the study of some apparent anomaly 
 has led to a fresh discovery, whereby the boundary 
 of ascertained truth has been enlarged. And there 
 seems no reason why something of the same kind 
 should not occur in the pursuit of any other depart- 
 ments of truth, even truths belonging to the domain 
 of theology. And if the result of the investigation 
 should be that the difficulty remains, and we do not 
 see our way out of it, even this may have a beneficial 
 effect if it makes us more tolerant towards those who 
 differ from us. 
 
 If the system of nature be regarded as the work 
 of God, we may from its study learn something of 
 His attributes. I might have dwelt upon some of 
 the wonders that science, with its great extension in 
 modern times, has brought to light ; and here and 
 there we might find ideas thus brought before us 
 which bear on the attributes of God. As my own 
 studies have lain chiefly in a scientific direction, 
 I could thus more easily have given lectures which 
 might have been of interest, and at the same time 
 have borne upon the subject prescribed. I have, 
 however, refrained hitherto from following such a 
 course, fearing that the bearing was hardly suffi- 
 ciently direct. 
 
 In further lectures I propose to allow myself 
 greater freedom in either of these directions ; that 
 
vi i] INSTALMENT OF THESE LECTURES. 193 
 
 is to say, in referring in a more direct manner to 
 what is usually accepted as being, as it is supposed, 
 revealed, or in referring to the system of nature as 
 investigated by the labours of scientific men. And 
 now I will take my leave, hoping to resume my 
 lectures before long. 
 
 13 
 
LECTUEE VIII 
 
 Fuller conception of the Divine Being possible through the veil 
 of humanity Advantage of a perfect example Resurrection 
 demands, like creation, a Divine Power But the supposition 
 of resurrection removes certain grave difficulties It is not 
 to be encumbered by adventitious additions Evidence of 
 design from beauty in nature Two theories of the perception 
 of colour Discussion of propriety of prayer for material advan- 
 tages, such as favourable weather. 
 
 AT the conclusion of my last lecture, delivered, I 
 regret to say, a full month ago, I mentioned the 
 difficulty which I experienced in consequence of 
 one of the provisions of Lord Gilford's Will, that 
 namely which forbids the Lecturers to refer to or 
 rely on any supposed special exceptional or so- 
 called miraculous revelation. In consequence of 
 this restriction I felt hardly at liberty to introduce 
 the mention of peculiarly Christian doctrines. I 
 believe, however, I was needlessly strict in this 
 respect; and I expressed the intention of allowing 
 myself somewhat greater liberty in future. One 
 can hardly suppose that by "reference" Lord 
 Gifford meant mere mention ; what he wanted 
 
vm] EXAMINATION OF SUGGESTIONS. 195 
 
 was apparently that the Lecturers should not 
 make revelation in any way the foundation of 
 what they taught. This restriction seems quite 
 compatible with an examination of the reasonable- 
 ness or otherwise, if examined merely as hypotheses, 
 of propositions affirmed on the strength of what 
 is believed to be a revelation. I expressed the 
 intention of allowing myself greater latitude in 
 this respect than I had previously done. With 
 this explanation I will venture to bring for- 
 ward a very few points of strictly Christian 
 teaching. 
 
 In the second instalment of these lectures, I 
 have already touched very briefly on the three- 
 fold aspect in which the idea of God is presented 
 to us in the Christian religion, and have en- 
 deavoured to point out how it seems to supply 
 certain desiderata which we seem to be conscious 
 of when we endeavour to frame a system of 
 religion merely through the exercise of our own 
 reason. To-day I would enter more fully into the 
 conception which we are enabled to form of the 
 Divine Being if we accept what Christians hold to 
 be true that we are enabled to study the character 
 and attributes of God through One in whom the 
 Divine and human natures are united. 
 
 The progress of science has made us familiar 
 with the vastness of the universe, the community 
 
196 MANIFESTATION OF THE CHARACTER [vni 
 
 of the physical laws extending over the whole, 
 the community, as a rule at least, of the laws 
 which regulate it from age to age. This might 
 seem perhaps at first sight to banish from the 
 mind the idea of personality as belonging to the 
 First Cause ; to lead us to think of an assemblage 
 of mindless laws. Yet, on the other hand, we 
 meet with such overwhelming evidence of design, 
 of purpose, especially in the study of living things, 
 that we are compelled to think of mind as being 
 involved in the constitution of the universe. But 
 now we seem to be landed in perplexity ; we can 
 hardly grasp the idea of personality (in the sense 
 in which we apply that term to the Supreme 
 Being) in conjunction with those attributes of in- 
 finity to which reference has just been made. We 
 seem perhaps to hesitate to think of character as 
 applicable to so vast a Being. We might be dis- 
 posed to think that at least as regards anything 
 of the nature of character He must be unknow- 
 able. And yet it must be of the greatest interest 
 to us as a part of the universe which He governs, 
 to know if possible something of what may be 
 called for want of a better mode of expression His 
 disposition towards us. 
 
 We learn something of the dispositions of our 
 fellow -creatures towards ourselves in the common 
 intercourse of daily life. The disposition also comes 
 
vin] OF GOD THROUGH HUMAN NATURE. 197 
 
 out in the writings or recorded sayings of others. 
 But how could it be possible that there could be 
 anything of the same kind between ourselves and 
 an Infinite Being ? 
 
 Here is a desideratum which Natural Theology 
 might lead us to feel, but which it is unable to 
 supply. Nevertheless it may prepare us for the 
 satisfaction of the want which is offered by the 
 Christian religion, according to which through the 
 study of One in whom the Divine and human 
 natures were united we may through the human, 
 which as human is intelligible to us, gain an idea 
 of the character of the invisible God. This is a 
 subject which I would fain follow out at consider- 
 able length, but as it would be entering on a field 
 of possible controversy, and is connected with 
 Natural Theology only in so far as it may be 
 deemed to belong to that science, to point out the 
 reasonableness of what Natural Theology by itself 
 could never have discovered, and which we are 
 led to only through evidence involving the super- 
 natural, it seems to me hardly consistent with the 
 terms of the Gifford Foundation to pursue the 
 subject further. 
 
 But there is yet another desideratum which we 
 feel, the satisfaction of which is thus offered to us. 
 
 We are much influenced by the example of those 
 among whom we live. If they are persons of a low 
 
198 A PERFECT PATTERN. [vm 
 
 tone of mind, we run great risk of being deteriorated 
 by them ; we require to be specially on our guard to 
 avoid such a danger. If, on the other hand, they are 
 morally above us, they exert an elevating influence 
 upon us. We see little traits of character indicating 
 an internal goodness which silently reproves our 
 own shortcomings, and leads us on to imitate them. 
 And failing personal acquaintance something of the 
 same effect is produced by their writings or bio- 
 graphies. But now comes the drawback. Even the 
 best of our fellow -creatures, much as he may be 
 above us, is yet but imperfect. We cannot take him 
 as our pattern unreservedly without running the risk 
 of imitating his failings as well as his virtues. But 
 what if we have One to imitate who as human is in- 
 telligible to us and imitable, but who as being at the 
 same time Divine is exempt from all the fallibility 
 and all the shortcomings belonging to even the best 
 of our fellow -creatures? Yet no less than this is 
 held out to us by the Christian religion. 
 
 In that religion, there are various statements 
 made as to things which we never could have 
 arrived at merely by the light of reason, and which, 
 from the very nature of the case, we cannot demon- 
 strate by reason alone, even when they have been 
 told us, but which, nevertheless, fit in with what we 
 know from the light of reason, or, it may be, from 
 
vm] A FUTURE RESURRECTION. 199 
 
 common experience, in such a manner as might be 
 expected of the different parts of a compound body 
 of truth. This adaptation may not be sufficient, or 
 anything like sufficient, to establish the truth of 
 what is thus asserted (if it were, what would be the 
 use of a revelation merely to tell us what we might 
 have found out for ourselves, at least if the sug- 
 gestion were once made?), but yet the adaptation 
 is a matter the consideration of which is not foreign 
 to the province of natural theology, provided that 
 what is asserted as revealed be treated merely as a 
 hypothesis which we are at liberty to examine. I 
 propose to consider from this point of view the 
 assertion of a future resurrection. I have already 
 referred to it briefly and incidentally in connection 
 with the subject of personal identity. 
 
 The doctrine of a future resurrection is not to be 
 confounded with that of a future life, to which it is 
 related as a species to a genus. A more or less 
 assured belief in a future life in a life, that is, after 
 death has been pretty widely entertained among 
 nations who had not Christianity to guide them, 
 but in most cases it took the form of a survival of 
 the soul in some tenuous unsubstantial form as a 
 ghost or shade. And the description of the condi- 
 tion which has been given by some of the ancient 
 poets is anything but inviting. 
 
 We as individuals occupy each of us at any 
 
200 REMOVAL OF CERTAIN [vin 
 
 definite time some definite locality. Our senses 
 give us cognisance of much that is going on at a 
 distance in the world around us ; but the seat of 
 our senses is in our bodies, which are confined as 
 to locality. Our senses continually furnish us with 
 fresh materials for. thought, as well as enable us to 
 hold direct intercourse with our fellow-creatures, but 
 in the act of thinking, of reflecting as distinguished 
 from perceiving, we are not conscious of any inter- 
 vention of our senses. So far as our own conscious- 
 ness or sensations go, the body does not seem to be 
 concerned in thought. When from mere conscious 
 sensation, or rather consciousness of absence of 
 sensation, we pass on to physiological investigation, 
 the intimate connection between thinking and the 
 condition of the brain seems to indicate that even 
 in thinking the body intervenes in some way of 
 which we are not conscious. But, even were it not 
 so, still it is only through the senses, and therefore 
 through the body, that we are affected by the world 
 outside us, or even are able to hold intercourse with 
 our nearest relations. 
 
 Accordingly, though we may conceive of thought, 
 reflection, as going on independently of our body (I 
 do not say that it can or that it cannot), yet, at any 
 rate, as regards any cognisance of the world around 
 us, or any interchange of ideas with our fellow- 
 creatures, if it do not take place through a body of 
 
vm] DIFFICULTIES BY RESURRECTION. 201 
 
 some kind, it must be by means of which we cannot 
 well form any conception. I imagine that, if we 
 attempt to conceive the thing, we forthwith think 
 of seeing, or hearing, or something of the kind. But 
 how are we to see or hear without an organ of vision 
 or hearing, and how can we have such organs with- 
 out a body of some kind ? 
 
 Accordingly, we are not condemned to the diffi- 
 culties of conception and the vague indefiniteness of 
 a state of being so utterly different from our present 
 as that which we have been considering. The 
 Christian religion holds before us the promise of 
 a future body. It is true that the nature of that 
 body is at present unknown. Still, as being a body, 
 we gain a defmiteness of conception of a future state 
 which is wanting in the more vague idea of a soul 
 surviving the death of the present body. There is a 
 gain in definiteness of conception, and consequently 
 in influence on the life. 
 
 But, in adopting the Christian doctrine of a 
 future body, we are not to encumber it, as some 
 have done, with purely adventitious additions, intro- 
 ducing thereby difficulties of belief which are per- 
 fectly gratuitous. All we are told is, that there is 
 to be a body, a body of some very different kind 
 from the present, a body, of course, which we should 
 recognise as our own, just as we do our present 
 bodies, notwithstanding the state of continual flux 
 
202 NEEDLESS ADDITIONS. [vm 
 
 that they are in as regards the actual particles of 
 which they are composed. We are not in the 
 slightest degree committed to the supposition that 
 they will be composed of the actual materials of the 
 body laid in the grave, brought together again no 
 matter how much dissipated. We are not even 
 informed whether they will be composed of what 
 we call material particles at all. So far as I can 
 see, there is nothing to lead us to think that we are 
 any more concerned with the body that was laid in 
 the grave than is the butterfly with the skin which 
 it cast off in passing from a caterpillar into a chry- 
 salis. And what becomes of the body when done 
 with, whether it be buried or cremated or otherwise 
 disposed of, is not a matter with which religion is 
 concerned, but one to be decided by considerations 
 of feeling and of sanitation. 
 
 I have already in these lectures referred to the 
 evidences of design manifested especially in the 
 world of living things, evidences derived from the 
 structure of animals as adapted to their wants, 
 from the elaborate apparatus involved in their 
 organs of sensation, those for instance on which 
 vision depends, and so forth. I have alluded to 
 the endeavour which has been made to account 
 for all this on a purely evolutionary theory, and 
 have indicated what to me appear to be the extreme 
 
viu] EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN BEAUTY. 203 
 
 difficulties under which it labours. I think the 
 first idea of any man of common sense on being 
 made acquainted with these things would naturally 
 be that the organs were intended for the purpose 
 which we find them actually fulfilling. Of course 
 first impressions may be wrong, and we should 
 always be ready to give a patient hearing to a 
 theory which professes to account for the results 
 on purely scientific principles. But for my own 
 part I fail to see any such mode of accounting for 
 them, anything to lead us to think that the first 
 conclusion of our supposed man of common sense 
 was other than what we must come to in the end, 
 or that the idea of design is capable of being eli- 
 minated. This, however, leaves the widest latitude 
 as to the mode in which the final result was brought 
 about ; it does not commit us in any way to the 
 assumption of a direct creation in the final form ; 
 it leaves that a perfectly open question. 
 
 To-day I wish to mention an instance of what 
 would naturally be regarded as designed, but 
 what does not appear to contribute, as in the 
 instances previously mentioned, to the wellbeing 
 of the living thing in which it is found. And it 
 is for this very reason that I refer to it, because 
 it seems to give us further suggestions concerning 
 the attributes of the Divine Being. 
 
 There is much that is beautiful in nature. The 
 
204 EVIDENCE OF DESIGN AFFORDED [vin 
 
 varied landscape, the colours of the rainbow, the 
 evening lights and sunset skies, the forms of plants 
 and animals strike us as objects of beauty. This 
 of course involves the co-operation of two different 
 classes of things, the objects external to us and 
 our own powers of sensation. With regard to 
 some of the objects, beautiful though they be, it 
 is possible to regard the beauty as something in- 
 cidental. Take for instance the rainbow. Given 
 the laws of reflection and refraction, the dispersion 
 of light which accompanies refraction, and the ex- 
 istence of falling drops of rain illuminated by the 
 sun, the form and colours of the rainbow follow of 
 necessity. But wexan see no reason in the sense in 
 which we here speak of a reason, that is, as a neces- 
 sary result of the operation of general laws, why the 
 beautifully painted wings of the butterfly should 
 be what they are. We are strongly led to regard 
 these exquisite markings as designed for some end. 
 But what end ? Is it to the wellbeing of the 
 animals, apart from the pleasure which the sight 
 may possibly afford to them ? It is not easy to see 
 how it conduces to this end, though possibly to 
 some extent it might, by making them more at- 
 tractive to each other. What sort of sensations 
 the sight may afford them it is very difficult for 
 us to imagine, for the eyes of insects are constructed 
 on a totally different plan from those of mammals, 
 
vin] BY BEAUTY IN NATURE. 205 
 
 birds, reptiles, and fishes ; in other words, from those 
 of vertebrate animals. At any rate, whatever it may 
 be to them, we know that we can observe and enjoy 
 the beauty. 
 
 But pass from butterflies to flowers. Here we 
 have beauties of colour, of form, of pencilling and 
 variegation, for which it is hard to find a motive 
 in utility to the plant itself; and as nothing in- 
 dicates that vegetables have a mind, so as to be 
 capable of enjoying their own beauty, we are led 
 to the conception of a beauty designed for the 
 enjoyment of a being or beings external altogether 
 to the living thing on which that beauty is shed. 
 This provision for the simple enjoyment of the 
 creature, apart altogether from what is conducive 
 to his material welfare, this supply of what is 
 "pleasant to the eye" as well as what is "good 
 for food," seems to me to raise our ideas of the 
 beneficence of the Creator. Moreover it seems to 
 indicate it to us as a duty to make reasonable for 
 the enjoyment of our fellow - creatures, and not 
 merely for their sustentation and material comfort. 
 
 The mention of the pleasure which we derive 
 from beautifully coloured objects leads me to speak 
 of the perception of colours. It may not be unin- 
 teresting to my audience if I go into this matter 
 somewhat more fully than my proper task demands. 
 
206 TWO THEORIES OF THE [vm 
 
 The subject of colour naturally divides itself into 
 two parts, which we may call the objective and the 
 subjective. In the first place, what is the difference 
 between different lights by virtue of which they 
 appear to us of different colours? In the second 
 place, what is the nature of the subjective sensation 
 according to which light appears to be of such or 
 such a colour ; or failing our ability to answer that, 
 according to what laws is the sensation related to 
 the character of the incident light ? 
 
 As regards the first question you are doubtless 
 familiarly acquainted with Newton's discovery of 
 the compound nature of white light, and with the 
 consequences which immediately follow from it. 
 White light is a mixture of different kinds of 
 light, namely, of lights of different refrangibilities. 
 Light of any one refrangibility affects us with a 
 sensation of colour, the colour differing from one 
 refrangibility to another. Two or more lights of 
 different refrangibilities when mixed together in 
 general produce a sensation of colour, which ac- 
 cording to circumstances may be paler (as if diluted 
 with white light) or more saturated ; and by mixture 
 a colour (purple) may be produced which is not 
 found in the spectrum, or in other words which is 
 not produced by homogeneous light of any kind. 
 Such is the answer to the first of the above questions. 
 
 A difference of colour necessarily implies a dif- 
 
vm] PERCEPTION OF COLOUR. 207 
 
 ference of composition, but the converse is not true, 
 for two lights differing altogether in their composi- 
 tion, objectively, therefore, altogether different, may 
 yet produce the same sensation of colour. 
 
 It has long been recognised that there appears to 
 be a sort of triplicity about colour, that, apparently, 
 three kinds of coloured light would suffice, by them- 
 selves or their mixtures, to produce the various 
 colours that we see. This triplicity might conceiv- 
 ably be either objective or subjective. We might 
 imagine that there were three kinds of light mixed 
 together in the various lights which we see, even in 
 any given part of a pure spectrum ; that these, if 
 they could be presented to us separately, would 
 excite in us three different sensations of colour, 
 the same for any one of the kinds whatever were 
 the refrangibility, or mixed refrangibilities, of the 
 light from which it was taken, supposing it could 
 have been isolated ; that the difference of colour of 
 different lights depends on the difference of propor- 
 tion in which the three primary colours are mixed 
 together in it. We might even suppose it possible 
 that the light of a given part of the spectrum might 
 be decomposed, though not by refraction yet by some 
 other means, into the three primary lights of the same 
 refrangibility, but of the three colours which, on this 
 hypothesis, by their mixture make it up. 
 
 On the other hand, we might adopt the subjective 
 
208 TR1PLICITY IN THE [vm 
 
 hypothesis. We might suppose that we have, as it 
 were, three colour senses ; that any one of these, 
 could it be excited alone, would give the sensation 
 or a colour always the same, but probably more 
 saturated than human eye ever saw ; that any light 
 presented to us, even the homogeneous light of a 
 given part of the spectrum, excites simultaneously 
 all three sensations, but in proportions differing with 
 the nature of the incident light, that is, with its 
 refrangibility, or, in the case of mixed lights, with the 
 refrangibilities and the proportions of its components. 
 This latter theory was that of Dr. Young, who took 
 for the three primary colours red, green, and violet. 
 The former theory was adopted by Brewster, who 
 took red, yellow, and blue for the primary colours. 
 Brewster even supposed that he had succeeded in 
 effecting an alteration in the proportions of the 
 three supposed constituents of a homogeneous ray 
 of definite refrangibility by means of absorbing 
 media. It has, however, been shown that the pheno- 
 mena on which Brewster relied were the effect of 
 illusions of contrast, so that the theory remains 
 unsupported by a single valid experiment ; and the 
 overwhelming evidence in favour of the truth of the 
 theory of undulations, a theory which leaves no room 
 for such an objective triplicity as that supposed by 
 Brewster, is a powerful additional argument against 
 it. Moreover, the curious phenomena of so -called 
 
vi n] SENSATION OF COLOUR. 209 
 
 colour-blindness are far easier to account for on the 
 subjective theory. 
 
 Maxwell has demonstrated by actual quantitative 
 experiments that (to use, for shortness, somewhat 
 technical language) any proposed colour may be 
 represented as a linear function of three standard 
 colours, thus placing the supposed triplicity of the 
 perception on a sound quantitative basis. Putting 
 this along with the strong arguments in favour of 
 the subjective theory, we have to seek for a triplicity 
 of sensation in our own organisation. 
 
 Microscopical examination has not hitherto found 
 anything in the eyes of mammals to indicate such a 
 triplicity. It is remarkable, however, that in the eyes 
 of birds and reptiles the rods and cones which form 
 a sort of mosaic work paving the retina on the side 
 remote from the centre of the eyeball, and which 
 appear to be the percipient organs, are armed on the 
 side towards the centre with coloured globules, which 
 stand like porters at the gate, and are mainly of three 
 colours, those of any one of the colours being pretty 
 equably distributed over the mosaic, though the three 
 are not all equally numerous. The precise office of 
 these is not known for certain, but it undoubtedly 
 seems as if they had relation to the stimulation of 
 three kinds of nerves, in proportions differing accord- 
 ing to the nature of the incident light. 
 
 It may pretty safely be assumed as an axiom that, 
 14 
 
210 COLOURED GLOBULES IN THE [vm 
 
 when light stimulates a nerve, it is itself absorbed in 
 the process. We have, indeed, in the retina abundant 
 indication of the passage of light across nerves of 
 vision without stimulating them. For the nerve 
 fibres which end in the rods or cones lie on their 
 inner side, that is, the side towards the centre of the 
 eyeball, where they form a plexus of filaments lead- 
 ing away to the optic nerve, the bundle in which 
 they are collected before running into the brain. 
 Accordingly, before getting to the rods or cones, the 
 light has to pass across the plexus of nerves. But 
 these, being transparent, do not affect the light nor 
 the light them, and so the nerves which are thus 
 traversed remain unstimulated. And that as a 
 matter of fact they are not stimulated is shown 
 by the very condition of distinct vision, namely, 
 that an image shall be formed on the retina. For, 
 if the light from a point in the object which is 
 brought to a point on the retina stimulated the 
 nerves of the plexus in passing across them, as well 
 as the nerves ending in the rods or cones where the 
 image is formed, it is not alone the nerves belonging 
 to that point, but also the nerves belonging to certain 
 points at a distance, that would have been stimu- 
 lated, and the perception would be that of a confused 
 image. 
 
 Assuming, then, that it is only in or at the rods 
 and cones in which the nerve fibres end that the 
 
vm] RETINAS OF SOME ANIMALS. 211 
 
 nerves are stimulated, we seem to see in those 
 coloured globules a provision for stimulating differ- 
 ent classes of nerves in proportions differing accord- 
 ing to the nature of the incident light. It is not 
 unreasonable to suppose that the nerve fibres which 
 are associated with globules of the same colour are 
 also alike in the kind of colour-sensation which they 
 give rise to when stimulated, while those which are 
 associated with globules of some other colour form 
 another class, the stimulation of which gives rise 
 to a sensation of some other colour, and so for a 
 third. 
 
 It still remains an open question in which of two 
 opposite ways the coloured globules may be supposed 
 to act. For facility of explanation, take the globules 
 of some one colour, say red. We may suppose, in 
 the first place, that the globules stand as porters in 
 front of the percipient organ. On this supposition, 
 they would allow only the red rays to pass on to the 
 percipient organ, and therefore the colour perceived 
 would be that the sensation of which is produced by 
 the red rays, and would therefore be red. But we 
 might also suppose that the globules are themselves 
 the percipient organ, in which case the red rays are 
 those which are allowed to escape without exciting 
 the nerve, and therefore the sensation produced by 
 the excitement of the nerves associated with the red 
 globules would be that due to white light with the 
 
 :^:RA. 
 
 OP THE 
 
 r UJU7BRSITtf 
 
212 EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN THE [vm 
 
 red strained out of it, and therefore would be the 
 complementary to red. 
 
 Such coloured globules have not been observed in 
 the retinas of mammals, man included. But if we 
 have evidence of a classification of the visual nerve 
 fibres corresponding to a classification of colour in 
 the eyes of birds and reptiles, it is not improbable 
 that there may be a similar classification in the eyes 
 of mammals, though microscopic examination has 
 not at present revealed a visible distinction between 
 fibres of one class and those of another, and no in- 
 dication is at present known of a difference in the 
 mode of excitement corresponding to a difference in 
 the nature of the incident light. 
 
 What I have been saying is rather of the nature 
 of a digression from my proper subject. Yet I do 
 not think it is quite foreign to it. For when the 
 construction and minute anatomy of the eye are 
 studied in relation to its office, and to its adaptation 
 to something altogether external to itself, namely, 
 light proceeding in all directions from objects of all 
 kinds, the evidence of design seems altogether over- 
 whelming. It seems impossible to regard it as the 
 mere outcome of casual variations taking place in a 
 vast series of generations, combined with a selective 
 preservation of the more advantageous. 
 
 To return for a moment to the point from which I 
 diverged. We have seen what an elaborate provision 
 
vin] PERCEPTION OF COLOUR. 213 
 
 there appears to be for the perception of different 
 colours. I say " there appears to be," for at present 
 we are far from having been able to follow it so as 
 to understand it; we can only judge by some indica- 
 tions. If we knew more about it ; if we knew as 
 much about it as we do of the office of the eye in 
 relation to the perception of form, it seems probable 
 that the evidence of design in relation to the per- 
 ception of colour would strike us still more strikingly 
 than it does. In our present condition of ignorance, 
 unable as we are to get more than some glimmering 
 indication of the means employed, we have chiefly 
 to depend on the end accomplished. If we imagine 
 ourselves seeing everything in monochrome, like a 
 photograph, we shall readily understand of how 
 much pleasure we should be deprived by the loss 
 of colour. Our present convenience too would be 
 much interfered with. There could be no such 
 thing then as signals depending on colour, or as 
 picking out objects by their colour from among 
 other things that they lie among. As regards such 
 a thing as signals, doubtless others could be devised 
 to take the place of those that we actually employ, 
 and on the whole it seems that our loss would be far 
 more in the deprivation of the pleasure we enjoy 
 from the beauty and variety of colours, than from 
 the inconvenience of being debarred from the use of 
 certain means of discrimination which we at present 
 
214 MAY PRAYER FOR MATERIAL [vin 
 
 freely employ. And this leads me again to my point 
 of departure, namely to the recognition of the bounty 
 of the Creator in providing for the enjoyment of his 
 creatures. 
 
 I have already in former lectures dwelt on the 
 way in which we are led by the study of nature to 
 recognise the necessity of something more than the 
 mere laws of nature as they are called to account for 
 the existing state of things; something demanding 
 will, capable of design, something accordingly which 
 leads us up to a personal Being, personal however in 
 that sense, not as involving the limitations to which 
 personality as we know it in ourselves is subject. 
 But if the existence of such a Being is admitted, we 
 cannot well imagine Him to have merely called into 
 existence countless ages ago the system of things 
 that we see going on, and then, if such an expression 
 may be used without irreverence, withdrawn Him- 
 self from it ; we are bound to think of Him as the 
 Governor and Sustainer of His own creation. We 
 find that the processes going on in that material 
 world which is external to us are conducted accord- 
 ing to general, uniform laws. Science stops in the 
 discovery of these laws, and the tracing out of the 
 results which flow from them. But from the higher 
 standpoint from which we .regard the system of 
 nature, when we think of it as originating in a 
 
vm] ADVANTAGE BE PROPERLY OFFERED? 215 
 
 Supreme Personal Cause, we are led to look on 
 these laws as His mode of working. I need not 
 repeat what I have already said on a former oc- 
 casion, that such a view forbids us to reject the 
 possibility of what we picture to our minds as a 
 more direct Divine intervention, representing it thus 
 to ourselves as being out of the usual course. But 
 this is a point which my more immediate subject 
 does not lead me now to dwell further upon. I 
 have also referred to the idea of God as a Spirit 
 holding communion with our spirits, and to the 
 subject of prayer. I would just observe in passing 
 that such communion may be just as much a law of 
 our spiritual being as the laws which science investi- 
 gates are of the material world. 
 
 The question which I propose at present to dis- 
 cuss is, Whether and in what sense we are at liberty 
 to pray for material advantage, or what we suppose 
 to be advantage, such as recovery from sickness, fair 
 weather for harvest, and things of that nature ? It 
 might be said, These are all regulated by perfectly 
 definite laws ; of what use can it be, nay, is it even 
 lawful, to pray for such things as these ? 
 
 Prayer involves the earnest expression as before 
 God of a desire of something as from Him, which we 
 hope, subject to its being in accordance with His 
 will, that He may grant us. Let us take an imagi- 
 nary case. Suppose that in bygone times, before men 
 
216 THE PROPRIETY MAY DEPEND ON THE [vm 
 
 knew anything of astronomy, the commander of an 
 army engaged in a righteous and necessary war 
 deemed it of the utmost importance to make a night 
 attack upon the enemy under cover of darkness. 
 Unfortunately the moon is near the full, and the 
 attack could not fail to be discovered. He knows 
 nothing of the causes of eclipses or of the times when 
 they may occur ; he merely has noticed that some- 
 times when the moon is near the full her light for 
 some reason or other fails for a time, long enough 
 to allow him to move his troops without being 
 perceived by the enemy. He considers the con- 
 templated attack as of vital consequence to him, 
 and he prays that one of those failures of the 
 moon's light, which he has occasionally seen, may 
 take place. Is that a prayer which he might law- 
 fully make? If the eclipse happens (as an astro- 
 nomer might have foretold that it would happen), is 
 the supposed commander wrong or foolish in looking 
 on it as an answer to his prayer ? 
 
 Now, in the case supposed, all the essential ele- 
 ments of prayer are present, an earnest desire, a 
 looking up to God to grant, if it might be so, the 
 fulfilment of the wish, and then, perhaps, the thing 
 wished for has happened. The commander was not 
 concerned in the way in which the thing was brought 
 about. All he wanted was that the eclipse should 
 take place. It is no business of his to inquire what 
 
vm] KNOWLEDGE OF THE PETITIONER. 217 
 
 would have occurred if he had not prayed as he 
 did. 
 
 But suppose a modern commander with an al- 
 manac in his baggage were in exactly the same 
 condition. He knows whether or no the eclipse 
 is predicted to take place. Supposing there is no 
 eclipse predicted, he might feel that it would have 
 been immensely important to him if an eclipse were 
 going to take place, but he may put that out of his 
 head. He has no expectation that the whole course 
 of nature will be altered, and the predictions in the 
 nautical almanac falsified, in order to suit his plans. 
 To him, therefore, to pray for an eclipse would be 
 impossible. For him to utter a prayer for one would 
 be wrong ; it would only be a profane mockery. 
 
 If we look on the order of nature as carried on in 
 accordance with the will of God, then, according as 
 we know more or less of the laws of nature, we may 
 regard it that we know, in a certain department, 
 more or less of His will. According, therefore, to 
 the state of knowledge of the possible supplicant, it 
 may be that the very same thing is by one man 
 confidently regarded as a thing that is not to happen, 
 by another as a thing that, for aught he knows, might 
 be granted in accordance with his request. 
 
 This imaginary example may prepare the way for 
 the consideration of a question to which, very likely, 
 there would not be a unanimous answer. Is it lawful, 
 
218 QUESTION OF PRAYER FOR [vm 
 
 or possible, to pray for fine weather, with a view, 
 suppose, to a plentiful harvest ? 
 
 Those who are disposed to give a negative answer 
 to this question might urge such considerations as 
 the following : The weather is determined by solar 
 radiation taken in conjunction with the warming of 
 the earth's surface by the absorption of radiant heat, 
 the emission of heat by warmed bodies, evaporation, 
 the precipitation of vapour in the form of cloud, rain, 
 etc., and the rotation of the earth, which, besides 
 causing the alternations of day and night, with the 
 corresponding thermal changes, has, for dynamical 
 reasons, such a powerful influence in causing the 
 winds. All these are carried on in accordance with 
 perfectly definite physical laws, as regular as those 
 which determine the places of the planets in their 
 orbits, places which, from our knowledge of the laws, 
 can be calculated years beforehand. It is true that 
 we cannot calculate in a similar manner the weather 
 beforehand ; the various causes at work are combined 
 in too complicated a manner to permit of that! But 
 what difference does that make ? Is not the weather 
 fixed beforehand just as much as an eclipse? What 
 right have we to pray for fine weather any more 
 than that an eclipse should happen out of the regu- 
 lar course ? 
 
 Now, admitting for the moment that the weather 
 is thus fixed (a point which I shall return to almost 
 
vm] FAVOURABLE WEATHER. 219 
 
 immediately), is it clear that that circumstance makes 
 such a difference as to render such a prayer as we 
 have been contemplating improper? Contingency 
 depends upon the imperfection of knowledge. Abso- 
 lute knowledge excludes contingency, but because 
 our own knowledge is necessarily limited, therefore 
 to us there must be such a thing as contingency ; we 
 cannot get rid of the idea. With the exception of 
 such probable forecasts as may be made for a time 
 not far off, the future of the weather is as much 
 unknown to us as something which depends on the 
 will of an unknown human being. Nothing pre- 
 vents us from hoping that it may be of such or such 
 a character, and why may we not express a hope 
 which we may feel, even express it in words of 
 prayer ? But, if we do so, our motive for the wish 
 must be such as we can bear to think that the 
 Searcher of hearts regards, and not merely some 
 selfish end. It would be a very different thing, for 
 instance, according as we had in view the preserva- 
 tion of the food of a nation and the comfort of the 
 poor belonging to it, or merely the pleasure of some 
 private excursion. 
 
 I grant, however, that if our thoughts were steadily 
 fixed on the idea of the invariability of the laws on 
 which the weather depends, it would be calculated, 
 if not to prevent, at least to damp, the offering of 
 prayer for favourable weather. But does our physical 
 
220 CONDITION OF THE ATMOSPHERE [vm 
 
 knowledge authorise us in saying that the course of 
 the weather is as much fixed as that of the planets 
 in their orbits ? I doubt it. There is much tending 
 to show that the state of the atmosphere depends a 
 good deal upon a condition of unstable equilibrium. 
 The phenomena of ordinary thunderstorms seem to 
 show that they are brought about by the rapid 
 ascent of columns of heated air highly charged with 
 the vapour of water; that we had, in the first 
 instance, a stratum of air contiguous to the earth 
 warmer and more highly charged with the vapour 
 of water than the air above, and that these conditions 
 of the lower stratum went on increasing till the equi- 
 librium became unstable, like that of water resting 
 on olive oil, till at last a chimney or chimneys were 
 formed consisting of air rushing upwards. This is 
 not the only phenomenon indicating an instability 
 of equilibrium, but it will suffice for my purpose. 
 Now, the character of unstable equilibrium is, that 
 it is a condition in which the very slightest disturb- 
 ing cause will suffice to start a movement which 
 goes on accumulating till it produces a complete 
 alteration of position. It is perfectly conceivable 
 that a child, by lighting a bonfire, might produce 
 an ascending current of air which in peculiar cases 
 might suffice to initiate a movement which went on 
 accumulating till it causes the condition of the atmo- 
 sphere to be widely different from what it would 
 
vm] IN RELATION TO WEATHER. 221 
 
 have been had the child not acted as I have sup- 
 posed. It is not, therefore, by any means certain 
 that the condition of the weather is solely deter- 
 mined by physical conditions the effect of which 
 could even conceivably be calculated beforehand. 
 Hence it is conceivable that a change in the future 
 of the weather might be made without any inter- 
 ference with the physical laws actually in operation. 
 
 If the object of our desire be the recovery of a 
 friend from sickness, it is obvious that far more 
 enters into his progress than merely the operation 
 of physical or physiological laws. The soundness 
 of judgment of the physician, the carefulness of the 
 nurse, may have a great deal to do with his recovery 
 or the reverse. There is not, therefore, in this case, 
 as in the case of the weather, the preliminary diffi- 
 culty leading to a questioning of the propriety of 
 praying for the accomplishment of the object of 
 desire. 
 
 Yet, even in this case, the utility of any such 
 prayers has been called in question. Some years 
 ago, a proposal was made to test the thing by 
 experiment; to take two hospitals, as nearly alike 
 as might be, to pray for the patients in the one but 
 not for those in the other, and to observe the result. 
 But it is obvious that the conditions of the proposed 
 experiment are such as to render prayer in such a 
 case absolutely impossible. It would be impossible 
 
222 A PROPOSED EXPERIMENT. [vin 
 
 for a man with such an object in view to raise his 
 heart to God, conscious as he must be that his 
 motive is one which he dare not express. The 
 suggestion, in fact, involves a confusion between 
 two totally different things, praying and saying 
 prayers. 
 
LECTUEE IX 
 
 Man's liability, without assistance, to err even as to the knowledge 
 of duty Theories as to the foundation of duty The Utili- 
 tarian System The system of Innate Ideas Advantages of 
 the latter Classification of moral virtues Duty of Truthful- 
 ness Examination of various doubtful cases Application to 
 commerce To the treatment of polygamy in non-Christian 
 countries. 
 
 I HAVE referred more than once to the desire ex- 
 pressed by Lord Gifford that his Lecturers should 
 treat their subject strictly as a science, without 
 referring to or depending upon a supernatural re- 
 velation, and have expressed the difficulty I felt 
 in consequence of this restriction. Yet something 
 may be done, and has been done by various writers, 
 in the way of what may be called a scientific treat- 
 ment of the subject. In fact what the Christian 
 revelation (assumed to be true) is calculated to 
 supply is not so much information as to what duty 
 consists in, as motives calculated to lead us towards 
 the fulfilment of it, and strength to oppose those 
 inclinations which would urge us in a contrary 
 direction. The question what we ought to do may 
 
224 MAN'S LIABILITY TO ERR EVEN [ix 
 
 be considered apart from that of the fulfilment of 
 our duties, and lies within the domain of man's 
 moral faculties. Even a heathen poet could say, 
 Video meliora prologue, deteriora sequor, "I see 
 the better and approve, the worse I follow," words 
 curiously analogous to those in which St. Paul 
 describes the condition of a conscientious man 
 who seeks to attain justification by obedience to 
 the moral law. The knowledge of good and evil 
 belongs to our moral nature, and may accordingly 
 be treated of by the aid of our natural faculties. 
 Of course the kind of faculties called into play in 
 such a treatment are quite different from those 
 exerted in the study of geometry or physics, but 
 it does not therefore follow that they are other 
 than natural powers of the mind. 
 
 But though this be so it does not therefore follow 
 but that we may be immensely assisted even in the 
 mere knowledge of duty by a supernatural revelation 
 if such there be. The duties I have here under con- 
 sideration are what may be called moral duties as 
 distinguished from positive institutions. It has been 
 said that some things are right because they have 
 been commanded, and some things have been com- 
 manded because they are right, and it is the latter 
 class of duties with which alone I am here concerned. 
 But even as regards these, though they lie, as I have 
 said, within the domain of our natural powers, there 
 
ix] AS TO KNOWLEDGE OF DUTY. 225 
 
 is great liability to error in several cases as to what 
 ought to be done. In the first place, there may be a 
 variety of considerations, some tending to show that 
 the right course is in one direction, and some that it 
 is in the opposite direction ; and even with good in- 
 tentions it may happen that some of the considerations 
 are forgotten, or the balance not properly taken. I 
 will not repeat what I said in a former lecture as to 
 the sort of responsibility that lies on a man who acts 
 as he ought not but mistakenly supposes that he 
 ought. But there is a far more serious source of 
 error even than this. Our judgment as to what is 
 right is liable to be warped by what we wish to be at 
 liberty to do. The common proverb, " The wish was 
 father to the thought," indicates the common recogni- 
 tion of such a tendency. The yielding to what is felt 
 to be wrong, though deemed perhaps to be only very 
 slightly wrong, helps to blunt our perception of the 
 wrongness of it ; and if such warnings are disregarded, 
 then our whole moral tone gets gradually lowered, 
 and perhaps we do wrong without thinking that it is 
 wrong, in fact, perhaps, without thinking about it at 
 all. And as man is a social being, he is greatly in- 
 fluenced by the tone of the society in which he moves, 
 and so men encourage one another in disregarding 
 little sins till they cease to be looked on as sins at 
 all. It is then easily intelligible how much the 
 moral tone of mankind might be raised could they 
 
 15 
 
226 THE FOUNDATION OF DUTY. [ix 
 
 have the advantage of a teacher exempt from the 
 imperfections to which even good men are subject, 
 even were nothing taught beyond what man might 
 conceivably learn of duty by the exercise of his 
 natural powers. 
 
 But having said thus much, lest I should seem to 
 ignore the great advantage which might accrue to 
 man from a direct revelation from God, I return to 
 the point from which I diverged. What is the 
 foundation of duty ? What is it which constitutes 
 the rectitude of such or such a course, and how is a 
 man to ascertain what course is right ? 
 
 Perhaps at first sight we might be disposed to 
 answer, That course is right which is in accordance 
 with the will of God. Now true though this answer 
 may be, it leaves us just where we were, for the 
 question immediately arises, How are we to know 
 what is in accordance with the will of God? Of 
 course I am not now referring to revelation, for the 
 question is, What can man attain to by the exercise 
 of his natural faculties ? 
 
 The utilitarian school of moralists would have us 
 look to the consequences to which our actions tend. 
 As we believe that God wills the happiness of His 
 creatures, we must suppose that that course which 
 tends to happiness, to the general wellbeing in the 
 widest sense, is in accordance with his will, and 
 is right. And doubtless there are many cases in 
 
ix] THE UTILITARIAN SYSTEM. 227 
 
 which the beneficial or injurious consequences of an 
 action are so manifest that this consideration seems 
 to offer a sufficient guidance. Yet it can, I think, 
 be of only very limited application, for this reason. 
 In order that the principle may be true, the word 
 happiness must be taken in its very widest signi- 
 fication, as including all the consequences, to our- 
 selves and to all other men, that may in any way 
 be affected by the action, consequences too that are 
 not merely confined to material wellbeing, but ex- 
 tend to what is inward and mental, to the formation 
 of character, and all that follows therefrom, conse- 
 quences remote as well as immediate, and which 
 influence an ever- widening circle. But when taken 
 in this extended sense the consequences form a 
 whole which it surpasses the power of man to 
 estimate. Hence this rule, if we attempt to use 
 it as a general guide, leaves us very much in the 
 same condition as that first mentioned. 
 
 Nor is this all. An undue dependence on the 
 supposed consequences of our actions tends to bring 
 into undue prominence those consequences which 
 are outward and material, to the neglect of those 
 which are inward and mental, which may often be by 
 far the more important, though at the same time by far 
 the more recondite. Hence there appears to be some 
 danger that this system may have a tendency to lower 
 the tone of our minds in relation to moral problems. 
 
228 INNATE CONSCIOUSNESS [ix 
 
 Another school of moralists hold that we have an 
 innate consciousness of right and wrong; that our 
 consciences approve or condemn certain actions prior 
 to and apart from a consideration of their conse- 
 quences. I think that such is the conclusion we 
 should naturally come to from our own feelings. 
 Of course first impressions may be wrong, and a 
 scientific investigation of the whole question may 
 prove them to be so. But they are at any rate 
 worthy of most serious attention, though we should 
 be prepared to consider any objections which might 
 be urged against them. In geometry we have our 
 first principles, or axioms, the truth of which strikes 
 the mind with irresistible force, and behind which 
 we cannot go, though from them we may deduce a 
 great system of geometrical truths. Why should 
 there not in morals, too, be first principles of right 
 and wrong which are admitted as self-evident, and 
 which form, or ought to form, the rule of our 
 actions ? 
 
 But it may be said by an objector that we cannot 
 judge by our own feelings, for we have been edu- 
 cated, and early taught some particular form of 
 religion ; how do we know but that those feelings 
 are merely the result of education; we should go 
 to man in his very rudest state to find what would 
 naturally be accepted by him as self-evident. But 
 apply the same to, we will say, geometry. If we 
 
ix] OF RIGHT AND WRONG. 229 
 
 were suddenly to lay before an uninstructed savage 
 the axioms of geometry, a thing altogether new to 
 him, and on which he had never exerted his reason, 
 he would probably, at first, not be able to take the 
 thing in. But a little exercise of thought, under the 
 guidance, suppose, of some one who would just start 
 him, would suffice to enable him to perceive the 
 necessary truth of these fundamental principles. 
 And it is just so as regards axiomatic moral 
 truths ; the cogency of their truth may not be per- 
 ceived till the mind has been a little exercised about 
 them. But even among uninstructed tribes there 
 may be more perception of moral truths than we 
 should have been disposed a priori to give them 
 credit for. I recollect reading in Livingstone's 
 Journal that some of the native Africans told him 
 that everything that he had told them was wrong 
 they had themselves previously known to be wrong, 
 except only the having more than one wife. For my 
 own part, I think that those moralists who hold the 
 second of the views which I have mentioned have 
 the best of it, and that there are feelings of right and 
 wrong implanted in the mind, and felt to be true, 
 though requiring, it may be, the exercise of some 
 thought to bring them to the surface. Nor is it in 
 the least opposed to such a view that those who 
 have received religious training, provided it be on 
 the whole of a correct kind, should be better able to 
 
230 INNATE CONSCIOUSNESS [ix 
 
 perceive the force of what I have been regarding as 
 first principles of morality than those who have been 
 left to themselves and have not had the benefit of 
 such instruction. Again, there is nothing in the 
 system opposed to the assertion that that is right 
 which is in accordance with the will of God, or to 
 the assertion that that is right which, in the widest 
 sense of the expression, tends to happiness; only, 
 instead of referring us to that which is intangible 
 (of course I am putting out of view the possibility 
 of a revelation made by supernatural means), or to a 
 test which in very many cases it is quite beyond our 
 power to apply, it refers us to that which is within 
 us, to a foundation on which a superstructure may 
 be raised, though it may require some attention to 
 find the foundation, and, in the case of previous 
 education in a false religious system, the clearing 
 away of some rubbish before the foundation is 
 reached. 
 
 Doubtless, extreme evolutionists would not be 
 content with such a view as this. Holding that 
 man, with all his powers, gradually came to be what 
 he is through purely natural causes, by a slow con- 
 tinuous alteration of some form of life utterly and 
 completely different, they are bound, for the main- 
 tenance of their system, to regard his moral feelings 
 as the outcome of some system of evolution. Now, 
 I have no claim to be a biologist, but I am not pre- 
 
ix] OF RIGHT AND WRONG. 231 
 
 pared blindly to surrender my judgment in such 
 matters to those who are, and I must say I fail to 
 see any sufficient scientific evidence, or any evidence 
 approaching to sufficient, that man's bodily frame 
 originated in the manner supposed ; and if there be 
 no sufficient evidence that his material body origin- 
 ated in such a manner, it would hardly be contended 
 that his mental powers, moral as well as intellectual, 
 did originate in an analogous way. To me it seems 
 to be the simplest to suppose that man's mental 
 powers, as well as his bodily frame, were designed 
 to be what they are. How that design was carried 
 out we have no means of knowing, and it does not 
 concern us to inquire ; but, assuming that it was so, 
 I see no difficulty in supposing that man's innate 
 sense of right and wrong was as much .impressed 
 upon him, as little the creation of his own will, as 
 his bodily frame. If that be so, we may even look 
 on this innate sense of right and wrong as the will 
 of God written upon the heart, and some rules of 
 guidance may be obtained even -without having 
 recourse to a supernatural revelation. I say " rules 
 of guidance" as distinguished from motives leading 
 us to the following of those rules, motives surpassing 
 in efficacy what can be supplied by mere natural 
 reason. 
 
 If we may look on the moral sense of man as 
 
232 DEDUCTION FROM THIS THEORY. [ix 
 
 man, stunted though it may be for want of culture, 
 and enfeebled by the effects of acting in a manner 
 opposed to what is felt to be right, as the will of 
 God written upon the heart, that establishes a bond 
 of union between man and man, even between the 
 highly civilised man, who may have had the advan- 
 tage of training in an elevated religious system, and 
 the uncivilised man who has had little or no training 
 at all. And it further teaches us that if we would 
 instruct the uncivilised man in what we believe to 
 be a true and advanced religious system, we should 
 not ignore what we find of good in him, but use 
 that as a foundation on which what is better may 
 be built. 
 
 There was a time, not so long ago, when this 
 principle was rejected or ignored, and the mind of 
 the untutored man was looked upon as utterly desti- 
 tute of good, which had to be supplied from the very 
 beginning. But our missionaries have now learned 
 to respect what they find of truth and uprightness in 
 the mind of man, even though he belong to a savage 
 tribe, and to build upon it. And the reaction at 
 present set in seems rather to tend, in some quarters, 
 towards an idea of the sufficiency of natural religion 
 for the supply of all our wants in that respect, and 
 a rejection or disregard of the vast assistance to be 
 derived from a source above that of man's natural 
 powers. 
 
ix] CLASSES OF MORAL VIRTUES. 233 
 
 I propose to devote this and the next lecture to a 
 consideration of certain duties which are naturally 
 felt to be such, at least when the mind has been 
 instructed, with more particular reference to cases in 
 which the application of fundamental principles is 
 more or less obscure, or has been disputed. 
 
 With a view to a more systematic treatment of 
 the subject, moralists have divided moral virtues into 
 classes, which different writers have taken differently. 
 Whewell makes a division into five classes, those of 
 Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity, and Order. 
 Whatever classification we make, there must, I sup- 
 pose, be numerous cases in which two or more of 
 these virtues are jointly concerned. I will not 
 attempt to make any exhaustive or even strictly 
 methodical treatment of the subject, a task for 
 which my own studies do not qualify me, and 
 respecting which formal treatises have been written, 
 which those may consult who wish to go thoroughly 
 into the matter. I propose to devote the remainder 
 of this day's lecture to a consideration of the recti- 
 tude, or the reverse, of some courses of conduct which 
 come mainly under the head of truth, though some- 
 times, it may be, trenching also on other classes. 
 
 The duty of truthfulness, in many of its commonest 
 aspects, borders on that of benevolence. Suppose I 
 
234 DUTY OF TRUTHFULNESS. [ix 
 
 am asked a question by a friend, or even by a stranger. 
 The inquirer wishes for information on some subject, 
 with which I am able to supply him. The fact of 
 his asking me implies a trust which he imposes in 
 me. To give him a false answer involves a breach of 
 that trust, and such breaches, if they became at all 
 common, would loosen the whole framework of society, 
 would go far to destroy all confidence between man 
 and man. Of course the person asked may decline 
 to answer, unless the question be put in court, or by 
 a person to whom it is, for whatever reason, a duty 
 to return an answer. 
 
 The sin of the untruthfulness depends on the inten- 
 tion to deceive. A statement may be made in words 
 which, taken literally, are untrue, but which have 
 become so well understood in a conventional sense 
 that nobody concerned is deceived. For instance, 
 to say that a person is not at home, when the inten- 
 tion is merely to express that, at home or not at 
 home, he or she is not accessible to visitors, provided 
 the convention is commonly understood, and the use 
 of the expression does not disturb the conscientious 
 feelings of the person called on to make it, can hardly 
 be deemed an untruth. At the same time, I think 
 that such a convention could hardly have become 
 established if there had not been an undue laxity 
 as to truthfulness. 
 
 On the other hand, words may be uttered which, 
 
ix] EXAMINATION OF CASES. 235 
 
 taken by themselves, are not untrue, but which yet, 
 being spoken with the deliberate intention of deceiv- 
 ing, must be held to be virtually equivalent to a lie. 
 For example, a person may make a garbled quotation 
 of something written or spoken by another, omitting 
 something important, not for the sake of shortness 
 (though that, of course, would be involved), but with 
 the deliberate intention of misrepresenting what was 
 said or written. Such conduct really involves untruth- 
 fulness, with the additional element of meanness, be- 
 cause the person's intentions are hid in his own breast, 
 so that, whatever may be suspected, the charge of 
 untruthfulness cannot be brought home to him. 
 
 To take another case. Suppose a man intended 
 to commit some great crime, say murder, and that 
 he was going after his intended victim. Suppose 
 another man knew him to be a man of excessively 
 bad character, and had the strongest evidence, short 
 of legal proof, that he meant to commit the murder. 
 Suppose the intended victim (N) passed by the 
 second man on a road, and presently the first man 
 comes up to the second, and asks him which way X 
 had gone. Would the second man be justified in 
 misdirecting the first, telling him that N had gone 
 by a road by which he did not go, in order to save 
 N's life ? 
 
 In order to arrive at a solution of this moral 
 problem, we must, I think, go back to first prin- 
 
236 DISCUSSION OF CASES AS [ix 
 
 ciples, and inquire, On what is it that the obligation 
 to tell the truth rests ? Now, according to what was 
 advanced above, it rests upon mutual confidence, 
 mutual wish to assist each other, without which the 
 bonds of society would be loosened. And it is note- 
 worthy that the reason which St. Paul gives why we 
 should speak truth each man with his neighbour is 
 that "we are members one of another." But if a 
 man is practically known to have deliberately 
 formed the intention of taking away the life of 
 another man, he constitutes himself thereby vir- 
 tually an outlaw to society; he cannot claim the 
 services of his fellows, or to be treated as if he 
 were a member of society. It seems to me, accord- 
 ingly, that in the case supposed the second man 
 would be justified in intentionally deceiving the first 
 in order to save the life of N". 
 
 Let us take another case. I am not going to dis- 
 cuss the question of the morality, or the reverse, of 
 war ; I merely take it as a thing which does exist 
 from time to time. Suppose, now, two opposed 
 armies are in the field, and a battle appears likely 
 to be imminent. Suppose the general of one army 
 marches his troops in such a manner as to lead the 
 general on the other side to suppose, and with the 
 very object of leading him to suppose, that he was 
 going to deliver the attack in some particular manner, 
 though all the while he had made up his mind to 
 
ix] TO DUTY OF TRUTHFULNESS. 237 
 
 make it in a totally different manner. Is this deceit 
 condemned by the law of truthfulness ? 
 
 Perhaps it might be said, Is not this simply to act 
 a lie, and what is the difference between acting a lie 
 and speaking it ? Is not the intention in both cases 
 alike simply to deceive ? Suppose the commander of 
 one army sent a message to the commander of the 
 other pointing out the great advantage there would 
 be to both armies of a little rest, more especially to 
 that led by the second commander, and saying that 
 he would abstain from offensive action for twenty- 
 four hours if the second commander would in like 
 manner refrain, as he would assume that he would ; 
 and suppose that when the second commander was 
 thus lulled into a false security the first took advan- 
 tage of it to deliver his attack ; would you say that 
 such a lie was lawful as there was no formal truce ? 
 And what is the difference between the two cases ? 
 There is, however, a difference which is easy to see. 
 War is bad enough in any case, but its horrors would 
 be heightened if there were no such thing as good 
 faith on the two sides, unless indeed in the face of 
 an agreement drawn up with all legal formality. A 
 message implies a more or less confident expectation 
 on the part of the receiver of it that the party send- 
 ing it means what he says ; otherwise there would 
 be no use in sending it; and the fact of the two 
 armies being engaged in a struggle, even one of life 
 
238 DECEPTIVE ADVERTISEMENTS. [ix 
 
 and death, does not justify them in regarding, or 
 even lead them to regard, each other as if they were 
 not moral beings. But the mere marching of troops 
 as if the attack were going to be made in such or 
 such a manner does not in any sense whatsoever 
 involve the reposing of confidence on the part of one 
 commander in the other ; they both know perfectly 
 well that they would outwit each other if they could. 
 The artifice resorted to does not, therefore, involve 
 any violation of the law of truth. 
 
 There is one form of untruthfulness which is 
 so very common that it hardly attracts attention. 
 I allude to advertisements which claim all sorts 
 of merits for the article advertised. Of course it 
 is perfectly fair to set forth to the utmost its real 
 advantages ; but one constantly sees advertisements 
 which have a most suspicious look of going far 
 beyond that. Perhaps this is especially the case 
 with regard to quack medicines. Of course a man 
 may have discovered some really valuable remedy 
 which he keeps to himself for the sake of gain 
 (though in the regular profession it would, I believe, 
 be considered a point of honour to make it known, 
 for the sake of humanity) ; and even if there be 
 nothing special about what he offers, it is for his 
 pecuniary interest so to compound it as to make 
 it as generally useful as he can. But one can 
 hardly imagine that one and the same remedy is 
 
ix] COMMERCIAL MORALITY. 239 
 
 available for pretty nearly every disease under 
 the sun. Apart from questions of morality, it is 
 politic not to make the statement too glaringly 
 untrue; but in so far as the advertisement may 
 contain anything distinctly false, which is put in 
 merely for the sake of a puff, the framer of it 
 cannot be exempted from the charge of untruth- 
 fulness. For what does he do but wilfully deceive 
 others for the sake of improving his own income ? 
 
 In the eager pursuit of gain which takes place in 
 a commercial nation, there is a constant temptation 
 to steer as close as possible to the wind in the matter 
 of truthfulness ; and if the limit be transgressed there 
 is danger that its transgression by one man may 
 encourage another, who perhaps will excuse himself 
 by saying that it is only a recognised convention. If 
 it were universally recognised as a convention, there 
 would be no use in making it; it is only through 
 being but partially recognised that it becomes .a 
 source of gain. It is true that in the long run every- 
 one may come to know it, and then it ceases to be 
 gainful, while anyone who went back to a strictly 
 truthful statement would without special precautions 
 run the risk of putting himself at an unfair dis- 
 advantage. But much that is objectionable must 
 have been passed through before matters could come 
 to such a state as this ; and even in that final state 
 the thing does harm by accustoming the mind of 
 
2 4 o COMMERCIAL MORALITY. [ix 
 
 the public to regard leniently such breaches of 
 truth. 
 
 Many years ago a case came before the law-courts 
 which was nearly the same thing as a false advertise- 
 ment, and was commented on by the presiding judge 
 with deserved severity. It was that of a manufacturer 
 who turned out spools of thread which were labelled 
 as containing so many yards, though the real length 
 was considerably short of that stated on the label. 
 If it be said in excuse that the customers, the whole- 
 sale purchasers, were well aware of this, the answer 
 is that if the wholesale purchasers were aware of it, 
 the ultimate consumers, the retail purchasers, would 
 not be, so that there was cheating in the end, and the 
 only doubt would be on whose shoulders the guilt 
 of it lay, or how it was to be apportioned between 
 them. 
 
 We should probably be ready to condemn at once 
 the practice to which I have just referred. But I 
 cannot see that it differs in principle from the com- 
 moner case of a false advertisement, or one so ex- 
 aggerated as to be virtually false. The difference is 
 that in the one case the false statement is perfectly 
 definite, and the falsehood of it is perfectly easy to 
 prove, which usually is not the case in the other. 
 But this is a distinction which has reference rather 
 to the facility of detection of a fraud than to the 
 morality of the transaction. 
 
ix] INSINCERITY. 241 
 
 There is one form of departure from perfect sin- 
 cerity which is hardly thought of as involving 
 untruthfulness, and is very insidious and very 
 common with us ; I allude to the doing of some- 
 thing for the sake of appearance, with the very 
 design of leading others to think we are different 
 from what we are. Now, I do not say we are bound 
 to proclaim all our faults before the world ; it would 
 not be advisable that we should, even if we looked 
 solely to the effect upon others, and disregarded 
 altogether the pain it might be to ourselves. What 
 I have in view is the doing of something that it 
 would be better we should not do, in order to lead 
 others to think that we are different from what we 
 are ; or even the doing of something which would be 
 right if it were done from a right motive, when right 
 motives are wholly absent, and it is done merely for 
 the sake of appearance. We hardly perhaps think of 
 it as wrong, and yet it seems to me that evil comes 
 of it. In worldly things it leads to extravagance, 
 from a desire to appear to be above our proper 
 station. In matters relating to religion it leads to 
 hypocrisy, to the pretence to be better than we are ; 
 and besides the injury to ourselves, this is calculated 
 to be injurious to our neighbours, by leading them to 
 overestimate us, and thereby to palliate in themselves 
 faults, the like to which they see in us. 
 
 From very ancient times the practice has existed 
 16 
 
242 OATHS AND PROMISES. [ix 
 
 of using an oath for greater security of the truthful- 
 ness of an asseveration, or the fulfilment of a promise. 
 It is assertions only, not promises, that for the moment 
 I am concerned with. False swearing has always been 
 considered as a more serious offence than making a 
 false assertion not supported by the solemnity of an 
 oath. It has been disputed whether the form of 
 oath in use with us involves an actual imprecation, 
 or only a solemn reference to the Divine Being as 
 before whom the assertion is made or the promise 
 taken. On either supposition it is a solemn thing, 
 and should be treated as such. We know that wilful 
 perjury is severely punishable by our laws. It is, 
 however, in many cases difficult to prove, and it is to 
 be feared that in our courts it is far from rare. 
 
 The fulfilment of promises is another branch of 
 truthfulness, differing from the former in that it relates 
 to the future instead of the past. I assume that at 
 the time of making the promise the promiser intends 
 to keep it. If he does not, it involves a lie at the 
 time, as well as a subsequent breach of an engage- 
 ment, unless indeed the latter be removed by a 
 subsequent repentance, and the person keeps to his 
 engagement though he had not intended to do so 
 when the promise was made. Of course I do not 
 mean that that wipes out the guilt he incurred by 
 making a promise which he did not mean to keep ; 
 only that it involves a departure from the sort of 
 
ix] RELEASE FROM PROMISES. 243 
 
 chronic guilt which the person lies under for a con- 
 tinual disregard of his promise. 
 
 I have been tacitly supposing that the promise is 
 of something which it is lawful for the promiser to 
 do. As the promise is of the nature of an informal 
 covenant (I say informal, because if it were formal 
 the law would step in) entered into between the 
 promiser and the person (or, as it might be, the 
 body of persons) to whom the promise is made, it 
 stands to reason that the person to whom it was 
 made may, if he likes, release the promiser from the 
 fulfilment ; and in such a case the mere fact that 
 the past words used by the promiser are not going 
 to be made true, though he has the power of so 
 making them, does not bring him under the charge 
 of untruthfulness. It need hardly be said that if 
 the second person (the one who received the promise) 
 should have made some stipulation with a third party 
 the carrying out of which is impossible unless the first 
 person keeps his engagement, the second person is 
 not at liberty to release the first from his engage- 
 ment without the assent of the third. 
 
 It has been discussed by moralists whether a 
 promise to do something unlawful should be kept. 
 It may be argued that the promise should be broken 
 because the act promised was unlawful. It has been 
 said that if the promiser repents of having made the 
 promise, on account of its unlawfulness, he should 
 
244 PROMISES UNLAWFUL IN [ix 
 
 go back to where lie was when he went wrong, that 
 is, to where he stood when he made the promise 
 which he ought not to have made ; that the promise, 
 being of something unlawful, has no validity. 
 
 I think that this decision is sound as a general 
 rule, but that is not without exception. There is 
 a common maxim that such or such a thing ought 
 not to have been done, but, having been done, should 
 stand good. If the circumstances remain as they 
 were when the promise was made, then I think, the 
 thing promised being unlawful, the promise should 
 be deemed invalid. But it may be that on the 
 strength of the promise something has been done 
 which changes the circumstances of the case ; that 
 in consequence of the change the execution of the 
 promise has become the less evil of the only two 
 possible alternatives. It then becomes right irre- 
 spective of the promise, and the promiser is not 
 released from his promise. 
 
 A broad distinction must be drawn between a 
 promise of doing that which is unlawful and an 
 unlawfully extorted promise of doing that which is 
 lawful. The unlawfulness of the exaction does not 
 release the man from the performance of the promise. 
 Suppose, for instance, a man was seized by banditti, 
 who gave him his choice of being put to death or, 
 through his friends, undertaking to pay a certain 
 ransom. He has his choice ; and if he prefers the 
 
ix] PERFORMANCE OR EXACTION. 245 
 
 latter, he enters thereby into a covenant with the 
 banditti for securing a certain favour, namely, the 
 sparing of his life, which they had the power, how- 
 ever unlawful its exercise, to take away. 
 
 The engagements which I have had in view in 
 what I was saying just now are such as are of an 
 informal character. As regards the fulfilment of 
 contracts of a more formal character, questions of 
 morality hardly come in, since they are commonly 
 made in legal form and the law provides for their 
 execution. But there is one contract of the highest 
 importance witli relation to the whole state of 
 society, regulated in part by the law of the land, 
 but in part also by a still higher law, regarding 
 which it may be desirable to make a few remarks ; 
 I allude to the contract involved in the married 
 state. The whole stability of the fabric of society, 
 the whole of family life and the orderly bringing up 
 of families of children, depends upon its being kept 
 inviolate. Doubtless, the tone of feeling on this sub- 
 ject in the country generally is not so high as we 
 might desire, but happily we have not at present 
 sunk so low as to regard incompatibility of temper 
 or of tastes as a ground for divorce. 
 
 But I have only introduced this subject, about 
 which there is no great difference of opinion, in 
 order to pave the way for the discussion of a more 
 knotty question about which opinions are much 
 
246 TREA TMENT OF POL YGAMY IN [ix 
 
 divided ; and that which appears to find the greater 
 favour seems to me opposed to the first principles of 
 morality. 
 
 In all Christian countries monogamy is the law ; 
 and that such it ought to be is shown, even without 
 going further, by the physical fact of the approxi- 
 mate equality of the numbers of the two sexes in a 
 large population. But in non- Christian countries 
 the law, or recognised custom having practically the 
 force of law, very commonly allows of polygamy ; 
 and the system of family life, such as it is, is built 
 up in accordance therewith. Suppose now that 
 Christian teachers go forth, and as a result the 
 people, or some of them, are led to believe in the 
 Christian religion, and are desirous of sharing in 
 Christian privileges. Are they to be admitted in 
 spite of polygamy; or is a polygamist to be told that 
 as a condition of admission he must put away all his 
 wives but one ; or is he to be told that he must be 
 faithful to his wives and keep them, but he cannot 
 be admitted to Christian privileges till all of them 
 but one are dead, when, should he still be alive, he 
 might be admitted ? 
 
 It seems to me that this is pre-eminently a case 
 for the application of the maxim already referred to ; 
 that as regards the polygamy entered into in a state 
 of ignorance, it ought not to have been done, but 
 having been done, it ought to stand The system 
 
ix] NON-CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES. 247 
 
 of family life already established, imperfect though 
 it was, is surely better than the result of a wholesale 
 system of divorce. I fail to see anything to justify 
 the repudiation of the marriage-contract which had 
 been already entered into. Such, it seems to me, is 
 the plain indication of natural religion. I may not 
 discuss the question on Scriptural grounds, as it 
 would be foreign to the object of these lectures, but 
 there can, I think, be no harm in mentioning my own 
 opinion, and for my own part I feel a deep conviction 
 that such is also the teaching of Scripture. I would, 
 therefore, absolutely reject the second of the alterna- 
 tives mentioned above, though this seems to be the 
 one most favoured, at least by those who sit on 
 committees at home, and have not had personal 
 experience of the state of things on the spot. As 
 to the choice between the first and third, that is a 
 question hardly belonging to Natural Theology, inas- 
 much as it has to do with Christian privileges ; but 
 for my own part I think the first is the right course, 
 as I have elsewhere explained. 
 
 However, the condition of different non-Christian 
 countries is doubtless very different, and where 
 polygamy prevails there are probably all varieties 
 between a regulated system of family life, imperfect 
 though at the best it be, and a condition which hardly 
 deserves the name of marriage at all ; and those who 
 have worked on the spot in this or that country have 
 
248 REGARD FOR WHAT EXISTS. [ix 
 
 materials for forming a judgment which are not pos- 
 sessed by those at home. But the experience gained 
 from one country may not at all indicate what is best 
 for another, so that local experience needs to be con- 
 trolled by the application of general principles. All 
 I contend for is that the established order of things 
 has primd facie a claim to be respected ; a claim, as 
 I believe, not alone based on natural rights, but also 
 on the teaching of Scripture ; a claim which it would 
 be wrong to set aside without very grave reason. But 
 I do not deny that in particular cases the state of 
 things may be such that it may be necessary to have 
 recourse to what I should myself regard as the heroic 
 remedy of repudiation. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length on examples of cases, 
 falling most properly under the head of truth, in 
 which the path of duty seemed to be more or less 
 indistinct, doubtful, or disputed. I propose to dis- 
 cuss some other instances, which would fall more 
 properly under other heads ; but this I will leave to 
 my next lecture. 
 
LECTUEE X 
 
 Duty of Benevolence Its relation to bargains Discussion of the 
 lawfulness of trade in articles which may be abused Alcoholic 
 beverages and opium Aid to the poor Kindness to animals 
 Duty of obedience to the law Questions arising if the law 
 enacts what is morally wrong, or forbids what is allowable 
 Question as to the moral lawfulness of certain marriages 
 Changing views as to the relations between science and religion 
 Influence of extreme adoption of evolution Conclusion. 
 
 OF all our duties, one of the most clearly written on 
 the heart, and at the same time one of the most 
 widely extending, is that of benevolence; in other 
 words, that of wishing well to our fellow- creatures. 
 The precept to do to our fellow- creatures as we 
 would that they should do to us has been called the 
 golden rule, and covers a very large part of our duty. 
 What we ought to do in accordance with this rule is 
 in very many cases so obvious that it need not be 
 dwelt upon. But there are cases again in which the 
 proper application of the rule is not so evident, and 
 cases even in which a slavishly literal interpretation 
 of it might be actually injurious. 
 
 For example. We may ask the question, In what 
 way, if at all, does the rule apply to the making of a 
 
250 RELATION OF THE DUTY OF [x 
 
 bargain ? Suppose A has something to sell, and B is 
 desirous of having it. B would naturally like to get 
 it cheap. If A were in B's place, the purchaser instead 
 of the seller, he would naturally like to get it for a 
 small sum ; does that circumstance constitute it the 
 duty of A to sell the thing for some small sum ? This 
 is a case in which a direct application of the principle 
 on the part of A in the most literal manner is checked 
 by the consideration of the reciprocity of the obliga- 
 tion. I assume that both parties are free to make or 
 not to make the bargain, so that if made it will be 
 an advantage to both. In this case, there does not 
 appear to be any reason why the advantage should 
 be divided just equally between the parties, or that 
 it would be obligatory so to divide it if it were pos- 
 siblewhich in most cases it would not be to assign 
 a numerical measure to the advantage on both sides ; 
 for, of course, in the term " advantage " I include all 
 considerations of convenience, etc., which it is impos- 
 sible to estimate quantitatively. 
 
 The duty of benevolence, of wishing well to our 
 neighbour, does not involve an utter disregard of our 
 own interests. The duty of justice towards others is 
 one which is well recognised, but surely it is per- 
 missible to be just towards ourselves. I say " per- 
 missible " ; I do not say that it is a duty, for we 
 may do what we will with our own. If in the term 
 " ourselves " we include our families, then indeed it 
 
x] BENEVOLENCE TO BARGAINS. 251 
 
 may even be a duty to be just to ourselves. But 
 this is because we have unduly extended the mean- 
 ing we attach to the term " ourselves," and what we 
 are really called on for is to be just as between those 
 depending on us on the one hand and a stranger on 
 the other. 
 
 And yet there is a higher sense in which we may 
 regard it as not merely permissible but even a duty 
 to be fair to ourselves as well as to our neighbour in 
 such a transaction. If we regard our property as in 
 a certain sense not our own, looking on ourselves as 
 stewards having the management of it, and bound 
 to use it in a manner not merely just according to 
 human laws, not merely reputable according to the 
 notions of society, but so as to turn it to useful 
 account towards our fellow-creatures, it becomes our 
 duty not to disregard our own interest in such a 
 transaction as I have been supposing. In fact the 
 present case differs from that last considered merely 
 in this, that whereas in the former case the excess of 
 what A might require from B as a fair value over 
 what B if he had his own way might like to give, if 
 indeed he liked to give anything, is designated to a 
 purpose known beforehand, and which I will assume 
 to be good, in the latter case the purpose to which it 
 is likely to be applied is at present unknown, and is 
 merely assumed by A to be good because it is his 
 intention that it shall be. 
 
252 RELATION OF THE DUTY OF [x 
 
 And in this point of view A's knowledge of the 
 character of B may quite reasonably affect the re- 
 muneration which he is willing to receive. What- 
 ever A receives short of an ideal sum which may be 
 looked on as a fair equivalent, is to be regarded as so 
 much transferred from the custody of A into that of 
 B. Now if B be an upright man, of high character, 
 A may feel that the excess is quite as safe, for being 
 made a good use of, in B's keeping as in his own. 
 In such a case he may gratify his kindly feelings 
 towards B by letting him have the thing on easy 
 terms. But if B be a bad man, A's surrender to B 
 of what he might fairly expect, in order to gratify 
 B, so far from being a duty under the golden rule, 
 is rather of the nature of the dereliction of a trust. 
 
 In any bargain either party may of course make 
 a mistake as to what is really for his advantage, but 
 in ordinary cases each may fairly be assumed to be 
 the best judge of what is to his own interest, and 
 the bargain may be made with a safe conscience on 
 both sides. But this general rule is not without 
 exception. Suppose, for example, one of the parties 
 were a child not competent to judge, or an imbecile, 
 and suppose for some reason or other he were not 
 under the protection of the law, does this fact give a 
 carte, blanche to the other party to get what he can 
 out of him ? I think there would be a very general 
 agreement of opinion that it does not. The require- 
 
x] BENEVOLENCE TO BARGAINS. 253 
 
 ments of morality, of conscience, go beyond those of 
 mere law, and not everything which the latter per- 
 mits is allowable under the former, even as regards 
 matters, such as commercial transactions, which are 
 in great measure regulated by the law. In a well- 
 ordered State the law should, as far as may be, be 
 in accordance with that which is intrinsically just 
 and right, but no human laws can cover every case. 
 In proportion as the law is just and right and far- 
 reaching, so as to cover as many cases as possible, in 
 the same proportion does the temptation arise to 
 substitute law for morality ; to think that one may 
 go to the full tether of what the law allows. I do 
 not think that this mode of viewing the matter can 
 be adopted without some degree of blunting of the 
 conscience ; without exalting what may be called 
 commercial legality into the place which rightfully 
 belongs to commercial morality. 
 
 Take another instance in which considerations of 
 morality limit the freedom of interchange which the 
 law allows. There are cases in which some article 
 is consumed the moderate use of which is harmless, 
 or it may be even beneficial, but which is capable 
 of terrible abuse when taken in excess. The in- 
 stance which will probably first occur to all of us 
 is that of alcoholic beverages. The terrible evils 
 arising from drink are too well known to require to 
 be dwelt upon. So great are they that some would 
 
254 JS TRADE LAWFUL IN ARTICLES [x 
 
 even be in favour of banishing the thing altogether, 
 except for strictly medical use. But the possibility 
 of abuse is no valid reason for the suppression of the 
 use, for so interfering with the liberty of the subject 
 as to prohibit the sale. Take the case of tobacco- 
 smoking. Injurious consequences may, and some- 
 times do, arise from excessive indulgence in it. In 
 some cases in due moderation it is positively bene- 
 ficial. But these cases at the two extreme ends are, 
 I imagine, comparatively rare ; the great bulk of the 
 smoking is carried on as a harmless gratification. 
 
 In this case the evils of excess are so moderate 
 and so rare that nobody proposes to prohibit tobacco. 
 It is on account of the grave and far more common 
 evils arising from alcoholic excess that the pro- 
 hibition is demanded by some. But the cases it 
 seems to me differ only in degree, not in kind, 
 and the freedom of use which the law allows for 
 tobacco is rightly extended to alcoholic liquors, with, 
 however, safeguards to prevent, as far as may be, the 
 indulgence in such beverages to excess. 
 
 But it is quite possible, without breaking the law, 
 so to stimulate the use as really to lead to the abuse. 
 To whatever extent any one concerned in the trade 
 stimulates the abuse, at least if he knows that such 
 will or will probably be the result of his measures, 
 for the sake of improving the profits of the trade, to 
 that extent he is chargeable with a breach of the 
 
x] WHICH ARE OFTEN ABUSED ? 255 
 
 rules of morality though he may not bring himself 
 within the clutches of the law. 
 
 Akin to this is another burning question, as 
 regards which it is the morality of the state rather 
 than the individual that is called in question. I 
 allude to the Indian opium traffic. This is not, like 
 the former, a thing lying under our own eyes, and 
 information respecting some of the most important 
 facts connected with it must be obtained as best 
 may be from those who have direct opportunities of 
 knowing. Of course in a question on which feelings 
 run so strong it is desirable to seek information from 
 different quarters. 
 
 The quantity wanted for regular medical use 
 forms such an insignificant fraction of the quantity 
 produced that we may disregard it altogether. No- 
 body proposes that the production of the small 
 quantity required for that purpose should be pro- 
 hibited. As regards the morality of the trade, a 
 question of first importance is, Is there a legitimate 
 employment for the drug, or is it used only or 
 mainly for the purpose of a vicious and baneful 
 indulgence ? To constitute the employment legiti- 
 mate it is not, I think, essential that its use should 
 be positively beneficial ; if its use in moderation 
 merely affords gratification, and be not followed by 
 injurious results, it stands in that respect on a level 
 with the smoking of tobacco. 
 
256 THE OPIUM TRADE. [x 
 
 As regards the answer to this question, I cannot 
 of course pretend to be an authority. I can only say 
 that on putting together what I have heard from 
 good authorities, it seems to me that the moderate 
 use of it in hot countries is not injurious, perhaps 
 rather beneficial than otherwise. We know, of course, 
 that the use in excess is extremely injurious, and 
 further it would seem that the liking for it is rather 
 insidious, so that there is danger lest a person using 
 it in moderation may be led on to use it in excess. 
 The instances of marked excess, bad as they are, are 
 said not to be common. On the whole the trade 
 seems to stand very much on the same level as the 
 trade in alcoholic beverages, both having a legitimate 
 field, both admitting of terrible abuse. On account 
 of the liability to abuse, it seems to me that artificial 
 stimulation is to be deprecated, and it is highly 
 culpable in either case to stimulate the use in excess 
 for the sake of gain. If I may judge by a paper 
 which has recently come into my hands, I am afraid 
 that our authorities are hardly to be exonerated from 
 the charge of undue stimulation; but without an 
 impartial and searching inquiry it is not easy to get 
 at the exact truth. 
 
 In many cases, what another person might wish 
 that we should do to him might not be for his good, 
 but the very reverse. In such a case it is obvious 
 that, so far from gratifying him, we ought to refuse. 
 
x] AID TO THE POOR. 257 
 
 The first impulse of benevolence might lead us to do 
 what he wished, but its exercise should be kept in 
 check by a firm consideration of what was for his 
 real welfare. Thus, for example, it is not judicious 
 to give a child everything he may ask for. It goes 
 without saying that we should refuse what would be 
 directly injurious ; but, even as regards things which 
 are not of that character, if we give him everything 
 he may fancy we shall probably make a spoiled child 
 of him. 
 
 Closely akin to the question of the treatment of 
 children is that of the bestowing of charity on the 
 poor. Doubtless their lot is in many cases a hard 
 one, and it is quite right that we should be ready to 
 help them, and not merely be ready, but should carry 
 that readiness into execution. But the mode of doing 
 so requires consideration. Experience shows that the 
 indiscriminate bestowing of alms merely on the ground 
 of poverty has a tendency to demoralise a population ; 
 to take away from them habits of industry, thrift, and 
 manly independence. It is right that aid should be 
 forthcoming in case of sickness or accident or infir- 
 mity ; but in ordinary cases it is found more expedient 
 to help them to help themselves. 
 
 There appears to be a close connection, perhaps 
 even an identity in kind though not in degree, 
 between the feelings which lead us towards kind- 
 
 17 
 
258 BENEVOLENCE TO ANIMALS. [x 
 
 ness to our fellow-creatures, and avoidance of giving 
 them pain or inflicting injury upon them, and those 
 which prompt us to a like consideration of the lower 
 animals, especially those domesticated animals with 
 which we are most closely associated, such as the 
 dog, which shows such a strange attachment to the 
 human race, or the horse, which renders us such 
 constant and important service. A man can hardly 
 be guilty of wanton cruelty to the lower animals 
 without incurring a deterioration of his moral char- 
 acter, and blunting his feelings of kindness even 
 towards his fellow- men. So well understood is it 
 that this is opposed to morality, that though the 
 moral law written upon the heart goes far beyond 
 any human laws which it is practically possible to 
 enact, a man by cruelty to animals may even bring 
 himself within the grasp of the law of the land. 
 Thus the cruel sport of cock-fighting is prohibited, 
 and a man may incur punishment at the hands of 
 the law for ill-treating his horse. But, as I said, our 
 moral duties are not to be measured by the coarse 
 standard of the law ; there are many things which 
 we are bound to do, or abstain from doing, as regards 
 which the law of the land would not touch us. We 
 may lawfully inflict pain on animals, for our own 
 advantage, as in the destruction of vermin or the 
 slaughtering of animals for food, but we should avoid 
 needless cruelty in doing so. The great benefits 
 
x] OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW. 259 
 
 which may result to man, nay, even the increase of 
 knowledge, pursued in the first instance for its own 
 sake, which may result from properly conducted 
 physiological experiments, justify in my opinion the 
 carrying on of such experiments when necessary, 
 even on living animals, as I mentioned in a former 
 lecture in another connection, but do not, I think, 
 justify their needless repetition, or the neglect of 
 such means as are available for minimising the 
 pain. The law, indeed, provides for this, but much 
 must in any case be left to the conscience of the 
 operator. 
 
 The general duty of obedience to the laws of the 
 land is one which requires some consideration, both 
 as to the grounds on which it rests and as to its 
 extent. 
 
 It is obvious that man cannot live in a state of 
 complete isolation. There must at the very least 
 be families, but if the union were to stop there, there 
 could be nothing of all the great industries which are 
 to be found in a civilised community, which require 
 the division of labour, and the co-operation of large 
 numbers of men. For these and other reasons men 
 have always formed themselves into communities 
 more or less extensive; and obviously there could 
 be no concord or orderly co-operation in a com- 
 munity if each man were free to do exactly what 
 
260 CASE OF HUMAN ENACTMENTS [x 
 
 was right in his own eyes, to do just what he liked 
 himself irrespective of others. There must be a 
 certain amount of surrender of the individual will 
 to the will of the community as a whole. It is 
 conducive to the general happiness that the will of 
 the individual should not be more curtailed than is 
 required for the general good. The curtailment of 
 the individual will is the price each man pays for 
 the advantage he derives from living in the com- 
 munity, and therefore it is but just that he should 
 be content to submit to it. 
 
 I have spoken as if the foundation of the compact 
 were the general will of the community. So it is, 
 but then as the will of the individual should be 
 subordinated to the general will of the community, 
 so the latter should be subject to the intrinsic laws 
 of justice and right in all other respects. As the 
 law is subject to the imperfection of all that is 
 human, this may not always be the case, and differ- 
 ent conditions may arise according to circumstances. 
 First, what is commanded to be done, or abstained 
 from, by the law of the land may be what it is already 
 right should be done or abstained from. In this case, 
 what the law orders had already a sanction higher 
 than that of any human law. In this case, there can 
 be no question as to the duty of obedience. 
 
 Secondly, the law of a country might conceivably 
 order something that is contrary to the laws of God, 
 
x] OPPOSED TO WHAT IS RIGHT. 261 
 
 or forbid something that, according to the law of 
 God, ought to be done. If it be plain that such is 
 the case, the law of duty is also plain, and may be 
 expressed by the words, " We ought to obey God 
 rather than men." The suffering which may result 
 in such a case from violating the law of the country 
 is to be borne. This is the case of martyrdom, and 
 of suffering for conscience sake, at least when the 
 suffering, be it death or less, is inflicted in course of 
 law, and is not the result of a mere lawless outbreak 
 of the populace, of which I am not speaking. Of 
 course, in such a case, it is the duty of citizens 
 to take all lawful means of getting the law 
 altered. 
 
 But the question remains, Who is to be the judge 
 as to whether the law of God is violated or not by 
 the human enactment ? Now, I think the ultimate 
 decision on which a man is to act must rest with the 
 man himself. If he finds that the general opinion is 
 the other way, namely, against the supposition that 
 what he supposed contrary to the law of God really 
 was so, that is a reason for leading him to weigh well 
 the arguments which led him to the conclusion at 
 which he arrived. He may even estimate as best he 
 can the chance that the general opinion may be right 
 and his own wrong. But if, after this, his opinion 
 still remains steadfast, he is bound to act according 
 to it. It may, of course, be that after all the man is 
 
262 QUESTION OF LAWFULNESS [x 
 
 mistaken, and the more general opinion is right ; the 
 man may be sincere but fanatical. He is bound all 
 the same to act according to his convictions, but his 
 sincerity is a reason why those who have to admini- 
 ster the law should make the punishment he incurs 
 by breaking it as light as possible. 
 
 Thirdly, and this is a very common case, the law 
 may enact something which in itself is neither right 
 nor wrong, but a matter of convention or of indiffer- 
 ence. In this case, it is the part of a good citizen 
 to surrender his own wishes so as not to disturb 
 established order, and weaken thereby the bonds of 
 law which hold society peacefully together. For if 
 one man might break the law without dereliction of 
 duty, so might another, and so might a third, and so 
 on ; and then what becomes of the law ? This would 
 tend to reduce society to a state of chaos in which 
 every man does that which is" right in his own eyes. 
 Of course the man is at liberty to try to get the law 
 altered in a regular way, but it is not his duty so to 
 do if he has the opportunity, as it would be in the 
 second class of cases. 
 
 Let me refer in illustration to a matter which is 
 somewhat of a burning question at the present day. 
 There has for many years been an agitation for an 
 alteration in the law prohibiting marriage with a 
 deceased wife's sister. I am not going to argue the 
 question whether there ought, or ought not, to be an 
 
x] OF CERTAIN MARRIAGES. 263 
 
 alteration of the law, for my subject relates not to 
 law making, but to law keeping or breaking. 
 
 Some persons believe that such unions are forbid- 
 den by the law of God ; some believe that they are 
 not, but only by the law of the State in those countries 
 (such as our own) in which they are forbidden. With 
 those who are of the first opinion the question is, of 
 course, closed ; the existing law in our own country 
 ought to be maintained, and those who have con- 
 tracted such unions, even in countries in which they 
 are allowed by law, have contracted guilt in so doing. 
 It is only in the case of persons of the second opinion 
 that a question of Tightness or wrongness can arise. 
 And here again the field of inquiry may be narrowed ; 
 for obviously, if there be no law either of God or of 
 the State against it, there is nothing to object to in 
 the union the union cannot be condemned. Hence, 
 we may restrict the inquiry to the case of those 
 persons who believe that there is nothing in the 
 union which is forbidden by the law of God, but 
 who live in a country in which it is forbidden by the 
 law of the land. Is it lawful in foro conscientiae for 
 such persons to travel to a country where the union 
 is allowed, get married there, and then live as married 
 in their own country ? If not, in what does the wrong- 
 ness consist ? 
 
 In the minds of those who are of the second opinion 
 it seems to me that the wrongness must be deemed 
 
264 CHANGE OF VIEWS AS TO RELATIONS [x 
 
 to consist simply in the refusal to subordinate the 
 will of the individual to the rule of the community 
 as expressed by the law, a proceeding calculated to 
 introduce disorder. Such an act of insubordination 
 is specially objectionable in the present case, because 
 as regards the lawfulness or otherwise in the minds 
 of the community of a possible marriage it is most 
 desirable that everything should be perfectly clear 
 and definite. 
 
 Those who are of the first opinion would further 
 hold that persons who had so acted are responsible 
 for whatever may have been amiss in the unknown 
 steps which led up to the formation of an erroneous 
 opinion as to a point of duty. 
 
 In drawing to an end my present course of lec- 
 tures, it may not be amiss to say a few words as to 
 the change which has taken, and is taking, place in 
 respect to the relations between science and religion. 
 This change has reference to men's views both as to 
 natural theology and revealed (or at least what is 
 supposed to be revealed) religion, and in an indirect 
 manner as to the relative provinces of the two latter. 
 There was a time, within the lifetime of several of 
 us, when a man was almost thought to be an infidel 
 if he questioned the literal interpretation of the six 
 days of Genesis. But the evidence which geology 
 brings to bear on the proposition that the present 
 
x] BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 265 
 
 condition of our eartli as to its various strata, etc., 
 came about gradually, through the operation of 
 natural causes during many ages, from a previous 
 condition that was very different this evidence, I 
 say, was so overwhelming that it gradually won for 
 itself almost universal acceptance, and very few now- 
 adays regard the acceptance of a freer interpretation 
 as in any way opposed to religion, or even as incon- 
 sistent with a belief in revelation. The controversies 
 which took place on that subject may now be looked 
 on as a thing of the past. 
 
 Again, to go a little farther back, there was a time 
 when the adoption of the nebular hypothesis of La- 
 place was looked on with suspicion, as indicating at 
 least a tendency towards atheism. But now, the 
 discovery of the gaseous nature of the nebulae, or at 
 least of the matter belonging to them from which the 
 light comes, the scrutiny of the stars and heavenly 
 bodies generally by means of the telescope and spec- 
 troscope, and the comparison of the results obtained 
 with information derived from experiments which 
 can be made in the laboratory, seem to indicate a 
 sort of relationship, combined with differences, among 
 the various stars, etc., a sort of order of sequence, which 
 lead us strongly to regard the stars as formed by an 
 evolutionary process from some anterior condition of 
 matter. This, however, merely indicates that the 
 regular operation of ordinary natural causes, such as 
 
266 TO WHAT EXTENT MAY WE ADOPT [x 
 
 we see at work around us and can study, may have 
 extended backwards far beyond what at first sight 
 we might have been disposed to imagine. 
 
 I need not repeat what I have already said in a 
 former lecture, that, however far backwards we may 
 trace the sequence of cause and effect, we are at last 
 brought up, and do not see our way to go any farther. 
 We still require a cause of the cause. And if there 
 should seem to be no indication of the existence of 
 such a further link in the chain of causation, of the 
 nature of those which we have been investigating, we 
 have no right to assume that such a link exists, even 
 though it may be probable that it may ; to assume 
 that, we may not simply have to refer our furthest 
 step to the First Cause of all. 
 
 But there is all the difference in the world between 
 referring an observed phenomenon to an evolutionary 
 process when there seems to be some indication that 
 it came about in some such way, and in spite of 
 the absence of any such indication, refusing to refer 
 it directly, or even hypothetically, to a creative 
 act. 
 
 Bearing this distinction in mind, let us now con- 
 sider another phenomenon. Besides the upheavals, 
 the eruptions, the deposition of strata, etc., which 
 geology reveals to us as having taken place in 
 bygone ages, fossil remains indicate the existence 
 of living things, vegetable and animal, in past ages. 
 
x] THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ? 267 
 
 Forms of life seem to have come and gone as time 
 rolled on. Are we, or are we not, to refer this to a 
 process of evolution ; and if we are, to what extent 
 may we suppose it to have operated, and dispense 
 with anything else ? 
 
 These are questions which are seriously enter- 
 tained at the present day. Darwin's famous work, 
 the Origin of Species, has caused them to come 
 prominently forward, in men's minds at any rate if 
 not in their open discussions. Few, I suppose, would 
 go so far as to refuse to admit the possibility of such 
 a permanent, or at least sub-permanent, modification 
 of a form of plant or animal that the original and the 
 modified forms, if we knew nothing of their history, 
 would naturally be regarded as distinct species. 
 Few, I suppose, on the other hand, having in view 
 the results of recent carefully conducted experiments, 
 would attribute the origin of life upon the earth to 
 an evolutionary process taking place on lifeless 
 matter ; and, perhaps, not many would suppose that 
 all the forms of living things, widely different as 
 they are, were derived from one common germ. 
 But between these extreme limits there is a wide 
 margin, in regard to what we may suppose to have 
 taken place, for a greater or smaller application of 
 evolution. It is not so much the extent to which as 
 the animus with which we adopt it that bears on 
 religious ideas. It may very well be that in the 
 
268 INFLUENCE OF THE ADOPTION OF [x 
 
 ardour of discovering that some phenomena are 
 fairly referable to evolution which previously had 
 been supposed to lie altogether outside it, a man is 
 led away by his enthusiasm to think that that will 
 do everything for him, that he wants no more. In 
 such a frame of mind, it may very well be that he is 
 disposed to reject the supernatural altogether; to 
 extract, for instance, from Christianity the high 
 morality which belongs to it, and then think that 
 that is all he has got to do with it. In this indirect 
 way even natural religion is liable to be affected, by 
 claiming for it a province which lies outside it. 
 Natural religion may point out to us our duty, and 
 in doing so may receive great assistance from the 
 high moral teaching of Christianity. But it is one 
 thing to know our duty, and another thing to do it ; 
 and if we are led to think that in order to do our 
 duty as best may be we need no more than what 
 natural religion, if fully cultivated, can supply us 
 with, then in the opinion of those who hold Christian- 
 ity to be true we are thereby deprived of the greatest 
 assistance that we could have towards enabling us to 
 do what we ought. 
 
 As I have said, the influence of the adoption of 
 the theory of evolution on our religious beliefs 
 depends on the animus with which it is adopted. 
 Its influence in this respect on two different men 
 might be very different, even though it were applied 
 
x] AN EXTREME FORM OF EVOLUTION. 269 
 
 to the very same phenomena. For the scientific 
 knowledge of one of the men might be such as to 
 show him that the phenomena were very probably 
 referable to an evolutionary process, whereas the 
 other might know absolutely nothing indicating 
 even obscurely any evolutionary origin. 
 
 The adoption of an extreme form of the evolu- 
 tionary theory might be adverse to some of the 
 fundamental principles of Natural Theology in a 
 more direct way, namely, by tending to weaken the 
 cogency of the argument from design, an argument 
 which seems to appeal so strongly to common-sense. 
 But I merely mention this here for the sake of com- 
 pleteness ; I will not dwell further upon it, having 
 done so in a former lecture. 
 
 There is a conflict of opinion and a restlessness of 
 men's minds at the present day about these subjects. 
 But we may confidently hope that if men will in a 
 straightforward manner seek after what is true, and 
 that in a humble spirit, without arrogating to them- 
 selves the monopoly of truth and contemning others 
 whose opinions may be different, the present conflict 
 of opinion will in time settle down as did those 
 former ones to which I have already alluded. 
 
 In concluding this course of lectures, I may per- 
 haps be permitted to make a personal explanation by 
 way of apology for the very imperfect way in which 
 
270 CONCLUSION. [x 
 
 I feel that I have discharged the duties of the 
 office. 
 
 I knew nothing of it till I was informed that the 
 Senatus of the University had done me the honour 
 of electing me Gifford Lecturer, subject, of course, to 
 my acceptance of the office. I may, I suppose, take 
 their act as some indication of what was expected 
 of me. What I have previously written has been 
 mainly scientific memoirs ; as to theology, I have 
 merely written a few short articles, and in those, 
 though I did not scruple to employ natural reason, 
 I have gone on the basis of accepting a supernatural 
 revelation, more especially on that of accepting 'the 
 resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as a supernatural 
 historical fact. I have never written on, and I may 
 add I have never specially studied, natural theology 
 or moral philosophy. My age is now too far advanced 
 to make it desirable that I should set about the study 
 of a, to me, new science, and indeed the attempt to 
 do so would be hardly compatible with my other 
 duties. Perhaps I may not be altogether wrong if 
 I assume that the Patrons contemplated that I 
 should draw the subject of my lectures in great 
 measure from the thoughts of my own mind in 
 the subjects to which I had given more especial 
 attention, in so far as those thoughts fell in with 
 the main object of Lord GirYord's Foundation. 
 This is what I have attempted, and the result is 
 
x] CONCLUSION. 271 
 
 a desultoriness and want of system of which I am 
 keenly sensible. 
 
 Should it fall to me to address you for a second 
 year, it is my intention to deal more directly with 
 those subjects to which I have given more special 
 attention ; I mean, to make my lectures more directly 
 scientific than those of the present year. If we believe 
 that what are called the natural sciences spring from 
 the same supreme source as those which are con- 
 cerned with morals and Natural Theology in general, 
 we may expect to find broad lines of analogy between 
 the two ; and thus it may conceivably happen that 
 the investigations which belong to natural science 
 may here and there afford us hints with respect even 
 to the moral sciences, with which at first sight they 
 might appear to have no connection. And if such 
 are to be found, perhaps they are more likely to be 
 indicated by one whose studies have lain mainly in 
 the direction of those natural sciences than by one 
 whose primary attention has been devoted to moral 
 subjects ; or, as perhaps it might be more true to say, 
 that a different sort of analogies might be suggested 
 by one who had attended mainly to natural science, 
 and but slightly to the moral sciences, from those 
 which would naturally occur to one who, on the con- 
 trary, had attended mainly to the moral sciences and 
 but slightly to the natural. But I contemplate also 
 leaving myself greater freedom as regards the state- 
 
272 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 [x 
 
 ment and examination of distinctively Christian doc- 
 trines, not deducing them from what is held to be 
 a supernatural revelation (for that would be contrary 
 to the terms of the Gifford Foundation), but pointing 
 out what it is that is really held, and inquiring into 
 its adaptation to meet our wants. 
 
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