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OLD TRUTHS 
 IN MODERN LIGHTS 
 
 a 
 
OLD TRUTHS 
 
 IN 
 
 MODERN LIGHTS 
 
 THE BOYLE LECTURES FOR 1890 
 WITH OTHER SERMONS 
 
 HY 
 
 T. G. BONNEY, D.Sc. 
 
 LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., F.G.S. 
 
 FELLOW OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, HONORARY CANON OF MANCHESTER 
 AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF MANCHESTER 
 
 JAMES POTT AND CO. 
 14 & 16 ASTOR PLACE 
 I89I 
 

 
:£>£.4e- 
 
 TO MY MOTHER, 
 
 WHO, BY HER UNFAILING LOVE, 
 
 HAS ENCOURAGED ME TO LABOUR, 
 
 BY HER PATIENCE IN SUFFERING HAS BEEN A LIVING LESSON 
 IN THE WAY OF THE CROSS, 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE BOOK. 
 
 

 
 
 
 
preface 
 
 Notwithstanding the well-known proverb about 
 making excuses, I must venture to apologize for an 
 obvious defect in the present book. The discourses 
 contained in it were written at different times, with- 
 out any idea that they would emerge from the stage 
 of manuscript. On being requested to publish a 
 volume of sermons, I selected for this purpose those 
 which appeared to me to have more relation than 
 others to questions which at the present day often 
 exercise, and sometimes disturb, the minds of thought- 
 ful Christians. Thus, occasionally, I have had to 
 choose between repeating myself, and destroying the 
 coherence of a sermon by making excisions ; and, on 
 the whole, I have preferred the former course. In one 
 case, indeed, the repetition has been deliberate ; for 
 the final discourse in this volume deals with a subject 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 viii 
 
 which has been more than glanced at in one of the 
 Boyle Lectures. But as I think the matter one of 
 considerable interest, and do not remember to have 
 read any discussion of it from quite the same point of 
 view, I have ventured to hope that a more full treat- 
 ment than was permitted by the limits of those 
 lectures might be of interest to some readers. 
 
 I wish also to state that if any resemblances be 
 observed between passages in this book and the well- 
 known work entitled Lux Mundi , they are for- 
 tuitous. As the dates appended will show, most of 
 these sermons, except the Boyle Lectures, were 
 written before that work was published . 1 As it 
 happened, when I was asked, unavoidably at rather 
 short notice, to undertake to give those lectures, I had 
 been so much engaged as to be unable to find time 
 to read Lux Mundi . Hence, as I was even then 
 greatly pressed by my ordinary duties, I thought it 
 best to follow my usual plan in like circumstances, 
 
 1 Six of them were preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street, in 1889, 
 when the Rev. W. Page Roberts was absent for three months owing 
 to a serious illness. 
 
 Three of the sermons in this volume have been published in the 
 Church of England Pulpit , and I am indebted to the courtesy of the 
 Editor for permission to reprint them. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IX 
 
 namely, to confine my reading to books which would 
 be more likely to impugn than to maintain my own 
 views. 
 
 Lux Mundi marks, in my opinion, an important 
 epoch in the history of religious thought in the 
 present century. It is, in a certain sense, a prognostic 
 of a coming reformation, and can hardly fail to 
 produce effects more far-reaching than perhaps its 
 authors either foresaw or have even yet foreseen. 
 Common report reckons them in the ranks of what 
 is usually called the High Church party. In their 
 book the necessity of applying scientific principles 
 to the treatment of theological questions is virtually 
 admitted. This concession will be found, I think, 
 either to place them in an extremely unstable posi- 
 tion between the conflicting claims of reason and 
 authority, or to force them irresistibly to abandon 
 much which has hitherto been regarded by their own 
 party as of primary importance. They have given 
 up, so to say, a position which was the key of their 
 defence, and its abandonment will render untenable 
 a rather imposing line of outworks. This probably 
 has been perceived by some of the more keen- 
 b 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 sighted among the High Church party, and has been 
 the real cause of the vehement indignation which 
 the book has aroused in certain quarters. 
 
 It is quite true — and on this matter we should be 
 agreed — that no small part of the faith held in 
 common by Christians of various denominations 
 cannot be assailed by methods strictly scientific, and 
 is perfectly compatible with scientific progress. The 
 spiritual order is one thing, the physical order is 
 another ; though there may be occasionally common 
 ground between them, and special difficulties may 
 result as a consequence. 
 
 But there are also certain doctrines which, generally 
 speaking, are characteristic only of particular branches 
 of the Church, or of particular aggregates of Christians, 
 with which Science can make no truce, and to which 
 she will show no quarter. 
 
 Some of these have become exceptionally promi- 
 nent of late years. During the present century two 
 great religious movements have been witnessed, and 
 we are now feeling more than the premonitory 
 tremors of a third. The first of these, indeed, began 
 in the eighteenth century, "but its effects were more 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 xi 
 
 generally conspicuous early in the present one. I 
 refer, of course, to the great “ Evangelical ” move- 
 ment, which produced a stirring in the “ dry bones ” 
 of Hanoverian Churchmanship, the blessings of which 
 can hardly be overrated. It brought into strong 
 relief the principle of “ individualism ” in religion ; but, 
 as is the case in politics, this had its own dangers 
 and defects. Its system of theology was narrow and 
 inexpansive ; it sometimes came dangerously near 
 to being tainted with Manichean error ; it insisted 
 upon regarding nature and the world from a single 
 standpoint, and thus, as a rule, dissociated itself from 
 learning, culture, and many healthful influences. It 
 also overlooked the importance of historic continuity 
 and the value of corporate action, sentiment, and 
 influences. 
 
 These defects brought in a speedy decadence among 
 its leaders ; these, of late years, have caused its many 
 excellences to be overlooked and forgotten. Then 
 came the great “ Catholic ” reaction, which was called 
 at first the Oxford movement. Its upholders were 
 strong exactly where their predecessors were weak. 
 Men found there was a place in religion for learning, 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 xii 
 
 for art, and for poetry ; that the Church of the nine- 
 teenth century claimed to be in organic connection with 
 that not only of the first, but also of all succeeding 
 centuries, and was in possession of a literature which 
 was a rich mine of noble thoughts and devout aspira- 
 tions. The learning, the ability, and the personal 
 holiness of some of its earliest leaders contributed 
 much to the success of this movement, which stood 
 in some respects in the same relation to the former 
 (though obviously the comparison cannot be pressed 
 far) as does socialism to individualism. Doubtless, 
 also, some of its success is due to the attractions 
 which it offers to sundry obvious weaknesses in 
 human nature. What wonder if a young man recently 
 ordained should feel the fascination of “ high views ” 
 as to sacerdotal authority, when he is fully conscious 
 that only a few months since no one cared much 
 about his opinion on any question of importance ! 
 What wonder if those Christians — a rather numerous 
 group — who are afraid, like some young children, to 
 walk without the supporting hand of a nurse, should 
 surrender themselves willingly to the guidance of a 
 “ spiritual director ” ! So this movement has had its 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 xiii 
 
 day of triumph, which has surprised those who had 
 confidence in the sturdy independence and strong 
 common sense of the Englishman. But now a habit 
 is growing up, hitherto not so much within as with- 
 out the clerical order, a habit induced by the vast 
 progress which has been made in scientific investiga- 
 tion and by the consequent methods of thought and 
 reasoning, of looking at every question from the stand- 
 point of an unfettered inquirer. The dominant school 
 is content with authorities, the new one requires facts ; 
 the one is literary, the other scientific in its methods ; 
 the one, like a lawyer, seeks for precedents and for 
 decrees; the other, for reasons and for principles. 
 Tell the former that a certain good man, who died a 
 thousand years ago, held such and such an opinion, 
 and as a rule he is satisfied ; tell the same to the 
 latter, and he remarks that the fact is interesting in 
 its bearing on the history of thought, but inquires 
 whether the people of that age had better means of 
 coming to a decision, or indeed so good, as are pos- 
 sessed by those of the present. 
 
 This new spirit, before long, cannot fail to come into 
 sharp conflict with that which at the present day 
 
XIV 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 commands a large number, possibly, at any rate 
 among the clergy of the Church of England, even a 
 majority, of adherents, who are eagerly contending for 
 and insisting on the primary importance of those 
 doctrines and those methods of worship which arro- 
 gate to themselves the title of Catholic. In regard to 
 those doctrines and practices, especially the latter, 
 many zealous advocates appear to have no clear 
 idea as to their own position. This may be due 
 to the influences to which they have been exposed. 
 But if they fall into scientific habits of thought, the 
 question will be presented to them somewhat in this 
 way : “ We are fighting for vestments, candles, and a 
 certain ritual as keenly as if they were almost neces- 
 sary for salvation. What do we mean by our earnest 
 contention ? Do we want these appendages simply 
 to gratify an antiquarian sentiment, or are they really 
 symbolical of doctrine ? If the former only, let us 
 disarm opposition by proclaiming their unimportance ; 
 and if even then they give serious offence, let us do 
 without them. Surely we are not worse men than our 
 forefathers because we wear a different (and less 
 picturesque) dress ! Besides that, there is some reason 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xv 
 
 in the opposition, for these practices in the past un- 
 doubtedly proved liable to abuse, and were perverted 
 into superstition. If, however, they are significant of 
 doctrine, at what date did they become important ? 
 How far are these things, these ideas, part of the 
 charter of Christianity, as it may be called, or only 
 some of its bye-laws enacted at a time when, as 
 history shows, Christendom was not in a very healthy 
 condition ? ” For instance, in regard to “ eucharistic ” 
 and other “ vestments/’ for which some fight strenu- 
 ously as being symbolical of doctrine ; if these vest- 
 ments prove to be only survivals of the ordinary 
 dress, or of the Sunday clothes (to use a homely 
 phrase), of an epoch three centuries at least after the 
 foundation of Christianity, this symbolism must have 
 been imported into them by a still later age, so that 
 they are only artificially, not really, expressive of 
 doctrine . 1 Again, when we find that some of these 
 
 1 The fact stated above is commonly ignored, and sometimes even 
 denied, by the writers of a certain school, but its truth cannot be dis- 
 puted by any person who studies antiquities and reads history in a 
 scientific spirit. Of such an investigation the general results will be 
 found in the chapter on “ Ecclesiastical Vestments ” in the late Dean 
 Stanley’s Christian Institutions . A more full discussion, with ample 
 materials for study, will be found in the late W. B. Marriott’s Vesti- 
 arium Christianum. He brings forward a mass of evidence, positive 
 
XVI 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 beliefs and claims for perpetual thaumaturgic powers 
 
 on the part either of individuals or of an order not 
 
 and negative, which, as it seems to me, places his conclusions beyond 
 doubt, viz. “ that in the Apostolic age there was no essential differ- 
 ence between the dress worn by Christians in ordinary life and that 
 worn by bishops, priests, or other clerics, when engaged in offices of 
 holy ministration ; but that, after the lapse of three or four centuries, 
 the dress of ordinary life became changed, while that worn in ecclesi- 
 astical offices remained in form unchanged, though ever more and 
 more richly decorated ; that from these causes a marked distinction 
 was gradually brought about between the dress of the clergy and that 
 of the laity (to say nothing of the monastic orders, who were dis- 
 tinguished from both) ; that as time went on the ordinary dress of the 
 clergy themselves came to be distinguished, in form, in colour, and in 
 name, from that in which they ministered, while at length a yet 
 further distinction was introduced between the dress of the more 
 ordinary ministrations and the more splendid vestments reserved for 
 the highest offices of all, and for occasions of especial solemnity ” 
 (Introduction, p. ii.). 
 
 The remarks above are not intended to refer, even obliquely, to the 
 recent judgment of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the case Read 
 and Others v. the Lord Bishop of Lincoln (Nov. 21, 1890). The ques- 
 tion before His Grace was one strictly legal — to decide, not whether 
 certain practices were conducive to edification or the reverse, but 
 whether they were contrary to the law of the land. Of that judgment, 
 if I may be permitted to express an opinion, I can only speak in terms 
 of respectful admiration. Personally, I should have been glad if it 
 had been found that more of the practices of which complaint was 
 made were illegal, because they are liable to be perverted to supersti- 
 tion ; but after reading the judgment, in which a very intricate question 
 is handled with great learning, with a powerful grasp, and in a spirit 
 truly scientific, it seems clear to me that it will be very difficult to 
 dispute His Grace’s decision. The Church, at any rate, gains when it 
 is shown, as in regard to the famous question of the Eastward position, 
 that the practice in dispute has no doctrinal significance at all (pp. 
 42-45). I could wish the judgment in the case had been accepted. It 
 would have practically extinguished many controversies. One party 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XVII 
 
 only cannot be discovered in the charter and title- 
 deeds of the Church, if we read them in a scientific 
 though reverent spirit, but also appear to be repu- 
 diated by the writers of these documents, and can 
 be traced back to ages long anterior to Christianity, 
 when we find them to involve ideas and practices 
 common to many ancient religions, to the priest of 
 the polytheist and to the Shaman of the nature- 
 worshipper, are we not obliged to confess that the 
 like are excrescences on Christianity, parasitic growths 
 of which it had better be rid ? 1 
 
 would have been gratified by permission to indulge a taste for symbol- 
 ism and a love of archaisms — and the more they bad read the judg- 
 ment, the less their real gain would have appeared ; the other would 
 have been able to quote the authority of the chief representative of 
 the Church of England in insisting that the ceremonies in dispute 
 were unimportant, and without doctrinal significance. So long as it 
 is understood that this ritual means no more than the expression of 
 a desire that all things should be done decently and in order, that it 
 only gratifies sentiment, and does not inculcate doctrine other than that 
 of the Church of England, then I wish not to interfere with the 
 liberty of my neighbour, provided I am not compelled to take part in 
 what only distracts my mind and hinders my prayers. 
 
 1 These concluding remarks are not intended to apply to the 
 Church of England as a body, though some of its members, if their 
 assertions and practices are to be taken seriously, cannot be excepted 
 from them. That all things should be done decently and in order is 
 an Apostolic precept which commends itself to all men of religious 
 instinct; but the elaborate and histrionic functions now held in so 
 much favour by a section of the clergy seem to me much more likely 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 xviii 
 
 This is the conclusion to which, I think, many 
 besides myself will be led before long, if they be- 
 lieve that the God of nature and of man is one and 
 the same, and that methods generally identical are 
 to be employed in the search for truth, whether in 
 science or in theology, allowance being made for cer- 
 tain inherent differences ; for in the latter, induction 
 must be founded on indirect experiment or on general 
 observation, while in the former the one may be 
 direct and the other particular. 
 
 But by these scientific methods, as it seems to me, 
 neither the leading historic facts nor the true spiritual 
 element in Christianity will be altered. Science 
 cannot forbid me to prostrate myself before that 
 Almighty Personal Power which underlies all pheno- 
 mena ; it cannot reason me out of my consciousness 
 of the need of a Spiritual Helper, and of the possi- 
 
 to foster superstition than to encourage devotion. For instance, in the 
 Directorium Anglicanum (which, as it has reached a fourth edition, 
 must be regarded with considerable favour among the clergy), we find 
 included among the directions for the celebration of the Eucharist the 
 “ Cautels of the Mass,’’ and stress is laid upon their value. Some of 
 the directions in the said “ cautels ” seem to me much more like 
 extracts from a book of magic than directions for due order in the 
 worship of Him Who is revealed to us in the words of Christ and of 
 His Apostles. 
 
PREFACE . 
 
 xix 
 
 bility of some kind of communion with Him. No 
 doubt it brings before my mind more distinctly the 
 difficulties in accepting certain facts which are in- 
 separable from the Christian creed; but, notwith- 
 standing these difficulties, when I contemplate the 
 whole subject and remember the imperfection of our 
 knowledge even of that order of which our senses 
 can take cognizance, I can accept as literally true 
 the history of the Incarnation and the Resurrection 
 of the Lord Jesus, and can believe in the efficacy of 
 prayer and in the action of forces in the spiritual 
 order, which I can neither define nor comprehend. 
 
 We are, then, I think, witnessing the opening of 
 another epoch of change, which will rid the Reformed 
 Church of sundry narrow ideas and some superstitions, 
 the heritage of older days, which, after a long 
 slumber, have recently awakened to a strangely and 
 lamentably vigorous life. But their hours are num- 
 bered. Touched by the Ithuriel spear of truth, 
 viewed in the clear, if somewhat cold, light of science, 
 their real nature will be revealed. Many a fair 
 form will disclose the ugly visage of latent paganism, 
 and the bright robe of symbolism will be changed into 
 
XX 
 
 PREFACE . 
 
 the rags of idolatry and the talismans of the Shaman. 
 The generation to come will set more store upon 
 the Masters words than upon the interpretation given 
 to them some centuries afterwards, and will possess a 
 creed which is both simpler and more truly Catholic ; 
 for it will think less of legal and ceremonial observ- 
 ances, and more of loving the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 of seeking, be it never so imperfectly, to tread the 
 path which He has pointed out by His Life and His 
 Death. 
 
 T. GL BONNEY. 
 
Content0 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. I.). 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “ But where shall wisdom he found ? and where is the place of under- 
 standing ? ” — Job xxviii. 12, 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. II.). 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “I found an altar with this inscription , To the unknown God”— Acts 
 xvii. 23, 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. III.). 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “ God , Who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto 
 the fathers by the prophets , hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son” 
 
 — Heb. i. 1, 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. IV.). 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “ I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again I leave 
 the world , and go to the Father.”— St. John xvi. 28, 
 
xxu 
 
 CONTENTS . 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. V.). 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “I delight in the Law of God after the inward man : hut I see another law 
 in my members , warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into 
 captivity to the law of sin which is in my members .” — Rom. vii. 22, 23, . 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VI.). 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “ The Lord passed by before him , and proclaimed , The Lord , The Lord God, 
 merciful, and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, 
 keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, 
 and that will by no means clear the guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
 upon the children, and upon the children's children.”— Exod. xxxiy. 6, 7, 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VII.). 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “Re not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a 
 thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack 
 concerning His promise, as some men count slackness.”— 2 Pet. iii. 8, 9, . 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VIII.). 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 
 
 “ Remember how short my time is : wherefore hast Thou made all men in 
 vain ? Ps. lxxxix. 47, 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 
 
 Preaphed before the University of Cambridge. 
 
 “ May your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame, at 
 the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ .” — 1 Thess. v. 23 (R.V.), . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 59 
 
 74 
 
 86 
 
 98 
 
 114 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xxiii 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE (No. I.). 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street. 
 
 “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, 
 for reproof , for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” —2 Tim. hi. 16, . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 135 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE (No. II.). 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street. 
 
 “ Tour fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Ter ah, 
 the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor : and they served other gods.” 
 
 — Josh. xxiv. 2 148 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS (No. I.). 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street. 
 
 “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and 
 man .” — St. Luke h. 52, 162 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS (No. II.). 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street. 
 
 “ And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature , and in favour with God and 
 man ” — St. Luke ii. 52, 175 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Preached in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most 
 pitiable.”— 1 Cor. xv. 19 (R.Y.), 187 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street. 
 
 “ So the devils besought Him, saying. If Thou cast us out, suffer us to go 
 away into the herd of swine .” — St. Matt. yiit. 31, 203 
 
XXIV 
 
 CONTENTS . 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF APOSTOLIC 
 AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES. 
 
 Preached for the Christian Evidence Society. 
 
 “ There shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great 
 signs and wonders , insomuch that , if it were possible , they shall deceive the 
 very elect.*'— St. Matt. xxiv. 24, 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW’S SON. 
 
 Preached at St. Peter’s, Vere Street. 
 
 “ Jesus said , Young man, I say unto thee , Arise. And he that was dead sat 
 up, and began to speak ." — St. Luke vii. 14, 15, 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 Preached at the Ordination in Manchester Cathedral. 
 
 “ Be patient therefore , brethren , unto the coming of the Lord. Behold , the 
 husbandman waitethfor the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience 
 for it, until he receive the early and latter rain." — St. James v. 7, . 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 Preached in Shoreditch Church. 
 
 “ Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they 
 spin : and yet I say unto you. That even Solomon in all his glory was not 
 arrayed like one of these — St. Matt. vi. 28, 29, 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 218 
 
 231 
 
 243 
 
 256 
 
 269 
 
 Lecture at St. Philip’s, Regent Street, founded on a paper read at Sion College. 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. I .). 1 
 
 “ But where shall wisdom be found ? and where is the place 
 of understanding?” — Job xxyiii. 12. 
 
 We are living in anxious times, and who will venture 
 to predict what event the next quarter of a century 
 will bring forth ? Is our nation, is the civilized part 
 of the world, approaching an epoch of convulsion, the 
 birth-throes of a new order, like that which, about 
 a century since, shattered the ancient regime and 
 changed the face of Europe; or will the clouds of 
 discord, war, and revolution roll away harmlessly as 
 the light broadens and brightens to the more perfect 
 day ? Will the faith of Christendom be once more 
 exposed to proscription and persecution, or only saved 
 from this by contemptuous and almost universal 
 abandonment ; or may we reply in the words of the 
 suffering patriarch, and with a trust strengthened 
 by continuous revelation, “God hath said to man, 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on the Sunday after 
 Ascension Day, 1890. 
 
2 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; and 
 to depart from evil is understanding ” ? 
 
 I purpose to speak in these lectures of one of the 
 above-named possibilities, though they are all the 
 outcome of the same causes, and the questions, I 
 believe, will receive an answer in like accents, whether 
 it be for cursing or for blessing. 
 
 The outlook in reference to the future of our re- 
 ligious belief seems to me very fairly expressed in 
 some words which caught my eye a few hours before 
 I was called upon to undertake the responsible duty 
 of addressing this congregation. “ There are,” said the 
 author , 1 “ two movements in our time which are fre- 
 quently confounded, the ‘No Theology’ and the 
 ‘New Theology/ both having the same origin, spring- 
 ing from the same intellectual unrest and discontent 
 with the past. These,” he says, and rightly, I think, 
 in the main, “are the remedies proposed for the 
 present condition of confusion and disorganization, 
 which may be summarized in a popular expression — 
 the conflict of religion and science.” Real or baseless, 
 this conflict indubitably exists; it cannot, then, be 
 wasted time to endeavour to ascertain its causes, to 
 investigate their validity, and to consider the reme- 
 dies which have been proposed. 
 
 1 Lyman Abbott, The Forum, April, 1890. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 3 
 
 This conflict — and its province is not limited to 
 theology — is the outcome of two principles, as we 
 may call them, which at first sight appear to be 
 completely antagonistic — reason and authority. In 
 an ideal condition there would be no real opposition 
 between these; in the actual this is often inevitable, 
 but it is vastly accentuated by the mistakes of man- 
 kind. It would hardly be too much to say that the 
 conflict is as old as civilization, and, in beings such 
 as we are, is an almost necessary concomitant of 
 growth. 
 
 In the field of religion — than which, as the motive- 
 force in our conduct, there is nothing more important 
 — this conflict, though veiled more decorously than 
 heretofore, is still active. We may symbolize the 
 tendencies which actuate the two parties as the 
 scientific and the ecclesiastical. They are now, per- 
 haps, more distinctly antagonistic than was the case 
 a generation since, because the vast progress which, 
 during this interval, has been made by science, using 
 the word in a wide sense, has led to a fresh demand 
 for enlarging the province of reason, and this has 
 been met in some quarters by a revival of eccle- 
 siastical pretensions and a recrudescence of super- 
 stition. 
 
 Of this conflict different solutions have been 
 
4 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 proposed. By one party of extremists it is predicted 
 that reason will dispel the illusions of faith, which will 
 be banished into outer darkness by the light of the 
 no-theology. The opposite party proclaim the coming 
 good time when unsanctified reason will be dragged 
 in chains behind the car of triumphant faith. Some 
 are for a compromise, and for a more accurate de- 
 limitation of the provinces of science and of theology ; 
 while others maintain that no such definite distinc- 
 tion is possible, and that the theology of the future 
 must be based on an admission of their unity of 
 origin, even though a diversity of function may be 
 recognized. 
 
 The notion of antagonistic principles of good and 
 evil is a very old one. It has its attractions for some 
 minds, for it offers an explanation of phenomena which 
 at first sight is so simple. But its philosophic diffi- 
 culties are numerous ; its theological are of the gravest 
 kind. On the present occasion, however, I need not 
 linger to discuss Maniehsean ideas as to the anta- 
 gonism of matter and God. Nevertheless, we shall do 
 well to remember that much popular Christianity and 
 popular belief is unconsciously tainted with Mani- 
 chsean dualism. Language is not seldom heard in 
 relation to nature which, if strictly interpreted, would 
 mean that the world was virtually, if not actually, 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 5 
 
 the work of an Evil One. This, however, I may 
 discuss on a future occasion, and so I pass on to the 
 question of the separability of science and religion. 
 
 But it may be reasonably asked what is meant by 
 the term religion, for it is used in more than one 
 sense. To some, religion means “ cultus,” or the prac- 
 tice of observances ; to others, “ creed,” or a collection 
 of formulated opinions as to the Unseen Being, or 
 what is generally meant by theology; to others, 
 “ reverence or love for the ethical ideal, and the desire 
 to realize that ideal in life.” 1 To myself the word 
 expresses all these, the last-named being the leading 
 conception, though I cannot wholly separate it from 
 the second — that of knowledge — real or supposed, 
 because my ethical ideal is not a mere summary of 
 detached qualities, gathered from observation, but a 
 person, or, at any rate, a power which I can only 
 contemplate as personified, whatever its true nature 
 may be. I would employ the term “ theology,” had not 
 this, in my opinion, become too much specialized, and 
 separated, in practice, though not in theory, from 
 ethics. Many persons would tell us that the methods 
 of science and religion are different, the one being 
 the province of reason, the other of faith; that 
 their ends are different, that of the one being the 
 1 Professor Huxley, Nineteenth Century , February, 1889. 
 
6 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 acquirement of knowledge, that of the other the 
 exercise of the emotions. 
 
 At first sight the distinction seems valid. The 
 conclusions of science, it will be said, are capable of 
 verification ; its foundation is experiment. When it 
 ceases to be the inductive treatment of facts, it is no 
 longer science. Faith is trust in an unseen, and in 
 some sense unknown, Power, Whom by ourselves we 
 could not discover, Who must in some way have made 
 Himself known to us. Thus its basis is revelation. 
 But how is a revelation made ? It must be either 
 direct, by a personal intuition or some kind of vision, 
 or indirect, in the form of a message transmitted 
 through a fellow-man. In either case how am I to 
 know that I am not the victim of some deception ? 
 for the possibility of this is a matter of experience. 
 If I am directed to compare the supposed revelation 
 with beliefs already accepted, this only shifts the 
 difficulty a stage further back, because I must ascer- 
 tain why these were accepted. 
 
 Inquiry on that point would receive some such 
 answer as this: “ They were accepted at first because 
 the teacher appeared to be endowed with exceptional 
 authority of some kind, and because it was felt that 
 his doctrines supplied a want which had been hitherto 
 unsatisfied. Since then experience has shown this 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 7 
 
 satisfaction to have been real, not illusory, and the 
 new creed has proved to be a motive-force of high 
 value.” But all this demands the exercise of reason ; 
 it is a process strictly scientific, for it is a series of 
 inductions founded on ascertained facts. If, then, 
 faith is to be anything more than a mere play of 
 emotion, to which the disciple of the no-theology 
 would restrict it, there cannot be any province from 
 which reason can be absolutely excluded. 
 
 But I may be asked, Do you consider that faith 
 may be subjected to experiment, like the conclusions 
 of science ; that, for instance, we can verify the 
 accuracy of our belief by the results of prayer, a test 
 which has been propounded in all seriousness, and is 
 regarded by some votaries of science as a fair challenge ? 
 Certainly not. Such a challenge, such an idea, results 
 from a common but restricted view of science. There 
 are undoubtedly branches of science where each 
 induction can be tested, as often as desired, by direct 
 experiment. A denial can be met by a demonstration. 
 Such, for instance, is the case in chemistry. Did 
 any one deny that water was produced by the 
 combination of two particular gases, his error could 
 be demonstrated by analysis and synthesis till he was 
 silenced. But even in such a science there are stages 
 where direct demonstration becomes less and less 
 
8 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 possible, while in some sciences it has but a small 
 place. In geology, for instance, the demonstration 
 must be to a large extent indirect. The processes of 
 nature are inferred from observing them in different 
 stages on separate occasions, not from the continuous 
 watching of any one from its beginning to its end. 
 We venture to pronounce upon the past history of the 
 earth, though no man was there to mark its changes 
 or record the results. We people it with living 
 creatures, not because the exact likeness of them can 
 now be discovered, but from the analogies of the fossil 
 remnants to the parts of existing organisms. In 
 this science, the leading principles are already firmly 
 established, and yet they are inductions mainly founded 
 on indirect observations, not on direct experiments. 
 
 But we may be told that science does not admit of 
 authority. It does this, in my opinion, far more than 
 is generally supposed. We accept much on the 
 testimony of others, because no man can begin every- 
 thing de novo for himself. Life is far too short for 
 this. Still it may be said that, if doubt arise, every 
 step of the inquiry may be rigorously tested. To a 
 large extent this is true, but it will still be found 
 that many generalizations can hardly be subjected to 
 this process. A personal element enters into an 
 induction more than is commonly supposed. It 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 9 
 
 results from a mental process which often cannot be 
 formulated, from the accumulated experience and 
 cultivated intellect of the individual. The lightning- 
 flash of scientific genius, as it may be termed — that 
 which makes all the difference between great men 
 and small men in science — has much authority with 
 a student, who defers to it, unless he feels that he 
 possesses facts and an experience which were not at 
 the command of his predecessor. 
 
 This, then, brings us to the special difficulty of the 
 present epoch. It has not arisen from new demands 
 on the part of theologians. Doubtless they are largely 
 to blame for the origin of the conflict ; their efforts to 
 subjugate the reason and tyrannize over the intellect 
 have often deserved the severest censure ; they have 
 sometimes gone near to making Christianity a curse 
 instead of a blessing. By this time, however, most 
 of them have gained wisdom from experience, though 
 the voices of a foolish few can still be heard in noisy 
 objurgation ; but the particular phase of the difficulty 
 at the present time is the outcome, I believe, of a 
 particular phase in the history of science itself. 
 
 During the last thirty or forty years marvellous 
 progress has been made in the mechanical arts. As 
 one result, the instruments and appliances for expert 
 mental research have been greatly improved and 
 
IO 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 augmented. Direct demonstration, direct investiga- 
 tion, have become possible in many matters where 
 formerly only indirect proofs could be obtained. Tests 
 of extreme delicacy, instruments of extreme precision, 
 can be employed, of which our predecessors hardly 
 ventured to dream. As a natural consequence, there 
 is sometimes a disposition to enlarge unduly the 
 province of direct experiment, and to over-estimate 
 the importance of its results. Thus arises a tendency 
 either to believe nothing which cannot be tested 
 by this method, or to suppose that a statement of the 
 sequences of a process is tantamount to a discovery 
 of its cause. To go back to my former illustration. 
 It may be demonstrated to me that oxygen and 
 hydrogen, under certain circumstances, combine to 
 form water, but I am aware that under other circum- 
 stances they might produce something possessing very 
 different properties, and the fact alone brings me no 
 nearer to ascertaining why this or that environment 
 is needful for the result. 
 
 There is also another cause, the outcome of a 
 tendency from which science itself is beginning to 
 suffer. The perfection of our instruments and the 
 wealth of nature, which makes almost the humblest 
 organism a microcosm, have induced many students 
 to undertake minutely elaborated investigations in a 
 
OE SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 ii 
 
 narrow field of research. A single animal or a single 
 limited group of animals, or some similarly restricted 
 question, becomes the labour of a life. Over-concentra- 
 tion of attention on detail leads to the loss of all sense 
 of proportion. The comparative faculty suffers, a 
 breadth of view becomes impossible, so that in modern 
 science we not unfrequently meet with investigators, 
 the value of whose inductive work bears an inverse 
 ratio to its conscientious minuteness. We are 
 beginning to be told, even in scientific circles, that 
 we have plenty of microscopists, but few naturalists, 
 many specialists, but few capable of generalization ; 
 that such a man as Darwin could hardly be produced 
 in the rising generation, for he would be exhausted 
 by the infinity of detail, or smothered under the mass 
 of literature. But a few years since, one, whose 
 authority cannot be disputed , 1 publicly declared that 
 science was now in danger of the fate of Tarpeia, that 
 of perishing beneath the weight of the gifts heaped 
 upon her ; gifts, he might have gone on to say, among 
 which, as in her case, the metal of little worth far 
 outweighed the gold. 
 
 Even the use of the term “ science ” indicates a similar 
 influence. By many it is tacitly restricted to such 
 
 1 Professor Huxley, Presidential Address to the Royal Society 
 (Proceedings of the Royal Society , vol. xxxix. p. 295). 
 
12 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 subjects as can be treated experimentally, in forgetful- 
 ness that all inductive treatment of facts is science. 
 Thus there is not only a science of chemistry or of 
 physics, of biology or of geology, but also a science of 
 language and of history ; nay, there is even a science 
 of theology, so that the hard and fast line which is so 
 often drawn cannot be maintained. 
 
 Hence it has become possible for the theologian to 
 carry the war into the opposite camp ; to demonstrate 
 that, by employing the method of argument which is 
 used against him, it would be possible to discredit 
 most facts of history, throw doubts upon many 
 conclusions of science, and plunge ourselves at last in 
 one vast agnostic slough of despond, in which we 
 should be sure of nothing, except perhaps our own 
 state of discomfort, and even here might be uncertain 
 how far this were not an illusion. 
 
 It is, then, my intention in these lectures to follow 
 up the lines of thought which I have now briefly 
 indicated — to insist that the conflict of theology and 
 science is only man’s putting asunder of what God 
 hath joined ; that the difficulties which are often felt at 
 the present day cannot be solved by the method of 
 the no-theology any more than they can be satisfied, 
 unless we repudiate the use of reason, by blind sub- 
 mission to authority; that we are not compelled by 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 *3 
 
 any logical necessity to follow either the path which 
 leads to a general negation of religious belief, or that 
 which leads to unreasoning credulity ; that here, as 
 so often in human affairs, the via media is the safe, 
 because it is the right way. I will not call it the way 
 of compromise, because I do not hold that the due 
 apportionment of their rights to either party in a 
 dispute can properly receive that name. While I 
 admit that science and religion are now often in con- 
 flict, I hold that the time will come when they will be 
 in alliance, because each is a manifestation of the same 
 Power; each is an aspect, though different, of the 
 same Person ; each reveals to man the same God, Who 
 would otherwise be unknown. 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. II .). 1 
 
 “ I found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown 
 God.” — Acts xyii. 23. 
 
 More than eighteen centuries since, in the focus of 
 culture and intellect, this stone bore to the passer-by 
 its silent testimony. The precise significance of the 
 inscription we do not know, but read in the light, if 
 so we may use the word, of the present age, its words 
 strike a note of unconscious prophecy, utter a sigh of 
 mournful pathos. More than eighteen centuries have 
 passed, and amid all the triumphs of civilization, all 
 the increase of wisdom, we are told, in tones yet more 
 emphatic than those of philosophers of Greece, that 
 God is, and must ever be, unknown. We are only so 
 far wiser than the men of Athens as to deem it an act 
 of superstitious folly to raise an altar to His honour. 
 
 There is, indeed, a sense in which the words must 
 ever be true ; the finite cannot measure the infinite, 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on Whitsunday, 1890. 
 
 14 
 
CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 15 
 
 the less cannot comprehend the incommensurably 
 greater. Mans knowledge of God must be partial, 
 imperfect, relative ; but the main question is, Can he 
 attain even to this stage, or is the pursuit only that 
 of an ignis fatuus ; is the hope which has sustained 
 myriads of the noblest spirits in this dark world only 
 a fond delusion ? Nature and man, science and 
 history, present to us a host of problems which crave 
 an answer from every thoughtful mind. “ Whence 
 comest thou ? whither goest thou ? ” may be asked of 
 everything, of every personality which confronts us. 
 We stand, as it were, in the presence of some vast 
 machine, marvellous in its complication, wondrous 
 in the beauty of its products. Yet is this all ? Is 
 there no meaning in this kaleidoscopic alternation of 
 birth and death, no bourne to which they tend, no 
 Heart to which we may be the hands ; but only an 
 omnipotent energy, without conscious purpose, without 
 all-perfect love ? 
 
 Among the solutions which have been proposed for 
 this problem, two are attractive from their apparent 
 simplicity : the one is named Atheism, the other 
 Pantheism. The former “ repudiates the theological 
 doctrine of a Creator and a Moral Providence. It 
 admits no other existence than matter and force, and 
 of these it offers no explanation. They are, and that 
 
16 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 suffices .” 1 But this solution need not now be dis- 
 cussed, for I believe that the majority of thoughtful 
 men will acquiesce in Comte’s opinion that “ atheism 
 is the most irrational form of metaphysics, because it 
 propounds as the solution of an insoluble enigma the 
 hypothesis least capable of proof, least simple, and 
 least plausible .” 2 Even if they cannot accept the 
 solution which has satisfied the Christian, they will 
 admit that, to quote the words of a well-known leader 
 of their school, “ One truth must grow ever clearer — 
 the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence every- 
 where manifested, to which he [man] can neither find 
 nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the 
 mysteries, which become the more mysterious the 
 more they are thought about, there will remain the 
 one absolute certainty, that he is ever in presence 
 of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all 
 things proceed.” 3 
 
 Pantheism asserts that all is God. This is an 
 hypothesis which at first sight seems far more attrac- 
 tive, but its difficulties increase the more it is scruti- 
 nized. That all is of God we readily admit, but to 
 assert that “ God is everything, and everything is 
 
 1 F. Harrison, in Fortnightly Review , vol. xiv. p. 145. 
 
 2 Idem , p. 146. 
 
 3 Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions , § 660. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 17 
 
 God,” ultimately breaks down all differences between 
 right and wrong, and “ ends,” as it has been justly 
 said, “in identifying the worshipper with the Deity.” 
 The marks of imperfection, the signs of contest of the 
 lower with the higher, are writ too large in nature 
 for us to accept this hypothesis as a permanent solu- 
 tion of the difficulty, though we admit that it is 
 rather an overstatement, or a very partial aspect, of a 
 truth than a proposition inherently false. Neverthe- 
 less, it is the outcome of a confusion of thought, which 
 might find a parallel in science in the failure to dis- 
 tinguish between force and energy, and while it 
 claims to be the esoteric doctrine of polytheism, 
 it leads practically, as experience has shown, to the 
 least mystical forms of this creed. 
 
 But by many who are honestly perplexed at the 
 difficulties of the problem a refuge has been sought, 
 especially at the present day, in what is called 
 Agnosticism. He who adopts this position may be 
 defined as one “who, having honestly sought to know, 
 acquiesces in ignorance, and avows it as the best prac- 
 tical solution of a profound but inscrutable problem/’ 
 He “ protests against any dogma respecting creation at 
 all, and takes his stand deliberately on ignorance .” 1 
 
 It is a position curiously different from that assumed 
 1 F. Harrison, Fortnightly Review, vol. xlv. p. M4, 
 
 C 
 
1 8 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 by a worker in science, and it is expressive of a spirit 
 directly opposite to that by which he is animated. 
 Write over the doors of our laboratories, “ Leave hope 
 behind, ye who enter here ; ” write large upon their 
 walls, “No man can raise the veil of Nature/’ and 
 there would be a speedy end to progress, a paralysis 
 of mind for the most earnest of students. It is hope 
 which is the mainspring of his work ; this nerves him 
 to shun delights and live laborious days, to watch and 
 to wait patiently in the presence of the most tangled 
 web of perplexities and apparent contradictions, confi- 
 dent that some day, by another who has built on his 
 foundation if not by himself, the hidden clue, the 
 long-sought truth, will be discovered. “ I give it up ; 
 it is an inscrutable enigma.” Where would science 
 now be, if its followers had acted on this maxim ? 
 
 But, it will be said, the analogy is misleading, 
 because, in investigations concerning subjects which 
 theology professes to treat, we are debarred by the 
 nature of the case from making use of the methods of 
 science. This objection, however, appears to me due 
 to a misunderstanding. From such investigations — as 
 from all where direct experiment is not applicable — 
 the instruments of research are excluded, but not the 
 inductive treatment of facts, not the science, which is 
 wider than the walls of the laboratory. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 <19 
 
 Agnosticism owes its strength at the present day to 
 the following causes : First — as I have previously said 1 
 — to that misuse of theology which, for want of a 
 better name, may be called ecclesiasticism. It is the 
 result of a protest, in itself right and honest, against 
 such a dictum as this : “ Let us maintain before we have 
 proved ; ” 2 or this, “ Religious error is, in itself, of an 
 immoral nature.” There is, indeed, a sense in which 
 the one statement may be justified, the other reduced 
 to a truism, but this is not the one usually intended 
 or understood. That ecclesiasticism is the real foe 
 is admitted by a living advocate of agnosticism, who 
 speaks as follows : “ With scientific theology agnos- 
 ticism has no quarrel. . . . But, as between agnosticism 
 and ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the 
 Channel call it, clericalism, there can be neither 
 peace nor truce.” 3 Be it so. I have read and even 
 seen too much of the mischief wrought by presump- 
 tuous ignorance and sacerdotal arrogance to desire to 
 hold back the axe from that parasitic growth, for 
 after its destruction the tree of theology and true 
 religion would bear fruit more abundantly than 
 heretofore. 
 
 1 Sermon I., p. 3. 
 
 2 The late Cardinal Newman, quoted by Professor Huxley, 
 Nineteenth Century , vol. xxv. p. 939. 
 
 3 Professor Huxley, ut supra. 
 
20 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 Another cause, for which the same spirit is largely 
 responsible, is an erroneous view of the nature and pro- 
 vince of revelation. It is assumed — not on one side 
 only — that when knowledge is communicated to man 
 concerning something which he is incapable of dis- 
 covering for himself, the fact that this proceeds from 
 the source of Truth compels us to suppose that the 
 human element must be eliminated from the mes- 
 senger, that he must become an infallible authority on 
 every department of human knowledge, and that there 
 must be nothing in the message which is relative to 
 the hearers or appropriate to a progressive system of 
 teaching. Thus, it is assumed, a revelation to men of 
 a different race and a lower civilization than our own 
 must be in terms which would satisfy the present 
 generation. This demand I pass by for the present, 
 contenting myself with remarking that it involves 
 an assumption which appears to me unwarranted, 
 inasmuch as it makes the present century the 
 standard for all ages, and tacitly assumes, in so doing, 
 that man has now attained to his full development, 
 intellectual and spiritual. 
 
 Difficulties as to the evidence for Christianity are, 
 at the present day, another cause of agnosticism. Of 
 these, one class relates to the authenticity or genuine- 
 ness of its records ; the other, to the fundamental idea 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 21 
 
 of Christianity, viz. its so-called miraculous origin. 
 The former has received so much attention of late 
 that on the present occasion I feel justified in refrain- 
 ing from discussing it in detail, and in contenting 
 myself with remarking that the result of scholarly 
 research during the last quarter of a century has been 
 to strengthen rather than to weaken the historic 
 value of the early records of Christianity, and to 
 indicate that, if it be an illusion or a fraud, it was 
 this from the very first. 
 
 I pass on, then, to the latter — the difficulties as to the 
 so-called miraculous origin of Christianity. These I 
 fully appreciate. I admit that they cannot be met by 
 direct methods, by experiment or demonstration; but 
 I believe that they are greatly lessened by indirect 
 treatment, by arguments, negative rather than positive. 
 
 For the present I shall restrict myself to one point 
 in the discussion : the a priori probability or im- 
 probability of a revelation to man. If I assume the 
 universe to be the work of God, I trust that I may 
 also assume that He has not ceded, either of good will 
 or by force of conquest, this particular planet to any 
 hostile power. If so, the book of nature which lies 
 open before us is either a collection of blank pages or 
 a mode of revelation. An alternative, in favour, I be- 
 lieve, with some, that it is a palimpsest writ large by 
 
22 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 the hand of Satan, seems to me beset with such 
 serious difficulties, so derogatory to the honour of God, 
 as hardly to need serious consideration. If the pages 
 are blank, then the study of nature is wasted time. 
 To this, however, those who have tried to read that 
 wondrous volume will hesitate to subscribe. Assum- 
 ing, then, that there be not only an Infinite Energy, 
 but also mind, purpose, love, personality of a kind — 
 the ideas, in short, which to most of us are embodied 
 in the word “ God ”■ — we have in nature the expression 
 of Himself in a form capable of being perceived by 
 us. Suppose, for a moment, this were the only means 
 by which we could acquire knowledge of Him. Spirit 
 is not directly cognizable by man. This word im- 
 plies a mode of existence which cannot be tested by 
 senses fitted to deal only with the material. Hence it 
 is not a subject for direct experiment, but for indirect 
 induction. To use the well-known simile, it is inferred 
 from its operations, as the wind, which we cannot 
 see, can be recognized by its effects. This being so, 
 nature is a mode of revelation, and thus may be 
 made a basis of induction. What, then, do we learn 
 from nature ? First, it discloses a mighty and far- 
 reaching system of education. The present is the 
 offspring of the past — the heir of its opportunities, 
 of its progress, even of its errors. Step by step we see 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 23 
 
 unrolled the ancestral pedigree of the varied forms 
 of life which people this earth, as science bids bone 
 join to bone, and the breath return to the dust, which 
 has been gathered again from the four winds of 
 heaven. We see the same law r of growth and of 
 development which has been concentrated in the brief 
 span of our earlier life, operating through myriads 
 of years, as race after race of higher powers and 
 more perfect organization comes forth, fulfils its time, 
 then passes away or falls into the background, to 
 give place to something yet nearer to perfection. Can 
 we say that the limit has been reached ; that further 
 progress, physical or intellectual, is impossible ? This 
 might, with equal reason, have been asserted at any 
 one stage in the process of evolution ; it would have 
 been repudiated by the teaching of experience and the 
 logic of facts. What more reason have we in denying 
 now the possibility of anything further, as we do if 
 we assert that man’s doom is to seek, but never to 
 find ? 
 
 But in reading the book of nature, we are conscious 
 before long of an incompleteness. Its teaching is 
 one-sided ; it favours the development of the animal 
 propensities rather than of the ethical faculties. This 
 was only to be expected, for life is conditioned by 
 environment. In this world, before we can think, or 
 
24 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 learn, or purpose, we must be kept alive and in a 
 condition to use the faculties which we possess, what- 
 ever may be their cause or their tendency. The child 
 learns first and of necessity the laws of life, because 
 total ignorance of these would mean death ; and then 
 those of thought, without the knowledge of which he 
 cannot be perfectly a man. The race receives from 
 the natural world instruction in physical laws, given 
 with an emphasis more marked than in any other 
 branch of learning. 
 
 But, then, history indicates no less clearly a moral 
 development in the race. That is a fact which demands 
 an explanation, and this is difficult if we insist on no 
 other teaching than that of the physical universe. 
 Moral development and physical development are not 
 always compatible. They are the outcome, as it seems 
 to me, of tendencies which often are distinctly antago- 
 nistic. The law of the former is, sacrifice self for others; 
 the law of the latter is, sacrifice others for self. Yet 
 moral progress is a fact in the world’s history, though 
 certainly the principles to which it is due are not 
 inculcated by the physical order, and can only, at 
 most, be indirectly inferred from it. Hence, it seems 
 an improbable hypothesis to ascribe moral progess to 
 that origin only, and it is simpler to regard this as the 
 operation of a Power which makes for righteousness. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 2 $ 
 
 But if we admit the idea of making for righteousness 
 we imply an Influence, and indirectly the work of a 
 Teacher, to whom mankind stands in a relation 
 different from that of other beings in the physical 
 world. 
 
 We find, also, that in man desires and capacities 
 exist — whatever may be their origin — which can only 
 be satisfied by a sense of relationship with a Power 
 far higher than himself ; a faculty of religiousness, as 
 we might call it; the need of an object of worship, of 
 an ideal Being which is to be like the sun of mans moral 
 system. Which is the more reasonable, to regard this 
 as the outcome of his comparatively rudimentary 
 stage of intellectual development — a mere transient 
 emotion, like that of a child for a toy — or an impulse 
 to seek One Who may be found ? Nature and history, 
 as it seems to me, teach us that demand does not 
 generally exist where there is no possibility of supply. 
 Such existence would be contrary to that economy 
 which in this world’s order seems to regulate the 
 expenditure of energy. If there are physical wants 
 and moral wants which may be satisfied, physical 
 ideals and moral ideals which may be attained, upon 
 what a priori grounds can it be asserted that the 
 religious wants and the religious ideals are all 
 illusions ? 
 
26 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 I venture, then, to put this question to the agnostic. 
 You admit that the world is a place of education for 
 me considered not only as an animal, but also as a 
 being endowed with reason. I believe, indeed, you 
 would go so far as to admit the probability of its 
 being also a place of moral education. What, I ask, 
 is to be the motive-force in the last ? I might put it 
 thus : “ Am I brought up or scrambled up ? ” And, if 
 brought up, is this for a purpose— I speak as a man — 
 or without a purpose ? If you affirm the latter, your 
 position is at least intelligible ; but we must not 
 shrink from its consequences. Then the tale of our lives 
 is quickly told : the hope of a personal immortality is 
 an illusion ; beyond the grave is nothingness. I may 
 regret it, but if I am to be limited to the direct 
 teaching of nature, no other conclusion seems to me 
 possible. Her reply sounds to me clear and distinct : 
 “ Death is the end of life.” If I limit myself to the 
 results of my work in the laboratory or in the field, 
 I find no “hope of pardon or redress behind the veil.” 
 I must admit that my life is “ as futile as frail.” But 
 as a rule you will not go so far as this. Concerning 
 personal immortality, concerning the soul, as we call 
 it, you will make no statement, negative or positive ; 
 you will only say that you know nothing about it. 
 To deny the possibility of its existence would be as 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 27 
 
 unphilosophical as to affirm. Indeed, you would 
 admit, I believe, that our hypothesis solves many of 
 the enigmas presented by the order of this world, 
 and supplements what appear to be defects. 
 
 If that be so, then I contend that my position is 
 the more reasonable, the more in accord with the 
 inductive habit of science. I see in man capacities 
 physical, moral, and religious ; I see provision made, 
 as I may term it, for the education of two of these ; 
 I see also that wants do not normally exist where 
 their gratification is impossible. The longing after 
 God exists ; is it man’s doom in this one respect to 
 stretch in vain lame hands of faith, and grope “ upon 
 the great world’s altar stairs that slope through 
 darkness,” not up to God, but up to the vacancy of 
 unsatisfied desire ? 
 
 Can you offer us no better ideal of God than the 
 choice of this alternative ? Either He is merely an 
 Infinite Energy, the underlying source of every pheno- 
 menon, in some sense, of every aspiration of our being, 
 before which, however, we are nothing more than the 
 most tiny ephemeral insects are to the sunbeam — it 
 causes them to dance, but recks not whether they do 
 it or no — or He is One Who reposes in eternal calm, 
 far away from the world which He has made, smiling 
 perhaps now and then at our blindfold stumbles in a 
 
28 
 
 CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 fruitless search. Truly a hard Master ; truly a Being 
 very remote from every ideal of altruistic excellence 
 and moral perfection, — ideals to which you are as 
 earnest as we in urging on mankind ; truly a centre of 
 repellent rather than of attractive Force. Might we 
 not fairly retort, when you frankly confess that you 
 can offer, in satisfaction of our wants, nothing better 
 than this pitiless Power to guide us through life’s 
 trials and difficulties — 
 
 “ Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
 To war with evil ? Is there any peace 
 In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 
 
 All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 
 In silence ; ripen, fall, and cease : 
 
 Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. ,, 1 
 
 1 Tennyson, The Lotos Eaters. 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. III .). 1 
 
 “ God, Who at sundry times and in divers manners spake 
 in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these 
 last days spoken unto us by His Son.” — Heb. i. 1. 
 
 Revelation, or no revelation ; the guidance towards 
 a far-off light, or the blind groping in a hopeless dark- 
 ness, the whisper of a voice, or the eternal silence 
 which is the portion of our race ? This is the 
 question which it behoves us to answer ; and a 
 negative reply would make it needless to discuss the 
 evidence for or against Christianity. Agnosticism 
 admits, as we have seen, that the end of scientific 
 thought and research is the conviction that we are 
 “ ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
 Energy, from which all things proceed.” It appears 
 also to admit that, as an effect of the environment, 
 or by the discipline of life, higher faculties, clearer 
 conceptions, and more profound insights are de- 
 veloped in the human race, which render it more and 
 1 Preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on Trinity Sunday, 1890. 
 
 29 
 
30 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 more capable of formulating for itself an explanation, 
 if such there be, of the Ultimate Reality. To all this, 
 as Christians, we can heartily assent. We admit that 
 in all the operations of God, as we prefer to call the 
 Infinite Energy, the same principle and similar 
 methods are exhibited ; that in religious ideas and 
 conceptions there is a process of growth which may 
 be termed natural, of evolution which appears to be 
 conditioned by the environment; that, in the spiritual 
 as in the natural order, the law of continuity prevails 
 in those phenomena with which our minds are capable 
 of dealing. But the main difference between us is 
 this : that to the agnostic, revelation, if he permit me 
 to use the term, indicates a process wholly continuous, 
 the result of means which are neither more nor less 
 beyond comprehension than any other in operation on 
 this earth ; while to myself the process, at least in its 
 initiation, exhibits discontinuity. In it the Divine 
 Energy acts, as it were, on a plane different from that 
 to which we are accustomed. Thus it produces different 
 results — just as in nature the introduction of a force 
 hitherto inoperative would modify phenomena ; and it 
 has for its effect the acquirement of knowledge which, 
 without this special influence, would have been un- 
 attainable. If I rightly understand, the agnostic 
 regards the rise and progress of the religious idea or 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 3i 
 
 ideal, like the advance of philosophy or science, as 
 beneficial to the race in proportion to its truth, which, 
 however, can never be more than relative. Its results 
 also, whether for good or evil, must be limited to this 
 life ; for of anything further we neither have, nor can 
 have, any knowledge. But the Christian hopes, nay, 
 believes, that when the Unknown Energy is manifested 
 as a novel Force — which he calls "Spiritual Power ” — 
 and co-operates with the processes which are termed 
 “ natural/’ it produces in men a result which he can 
 only describe as a new birth, even to a life which is 
 eternal. 
 
 This belief, this expectation, is commonly judged 
 unscientific. Obviously it cannot be tested by direct 
 experiment, but we are not thereby justified in 
 rejecting it, until we see whether or not it is dis- 
 cordant with the inductions which may be drawn 
 from facts which are part of human experience. 
 
 The authof from whom I have more than once 
 quoted affirms that “ civilized men have no innate 
 tendency to form religious ideas /’ 1 The proposition 
 appears to me one which can be neither proved nor 
 disproved satisfactorily, but for our present purpose 
 I am content that it be assumed. Well, then, civilized 
 man has formed religious ideas, and these sometimes 
 1 Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions , § 672. 
 
32 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 exhibit very remarkable complexity. How came he 
 by them ? They are, it will be said, an evolution 
 from a group of fancies which have an origin perfectly 
 natural. But if so, it appears to me an anomaly that 
 every marked advance towards the religious ideal 
 should exhibit in its initial stage a kind of discon- 
 tinuity. Even when, by investigation, we succeed in 
 discovering some of its components, these appear, like 
 certain chemical constituents, to have been lying for 
 long, side by side, without action or result, until by 
 some unknown stimulus, like the passage of an electric 
 spark, they are brought into combination and initiate 
 a series of consequences. 
 
 The history also of the new ideal is hardly such as 
 we should expect, if it were the result of processes 
 merely natural. It is one of desperate struggle for 
 existence ; and its foes may w 7 ell be called those of its 
 own household. It meets wdth the most bitter oppo- 
 sition in the very quarters which would have seemed 
 its natural home. It conquers, as it appears, against 
 all odds, by its truth, assuming that there be such a 
 thing, and that you can test it like any other work- 
 ing hypothesis. Granted that there is here a survival 
 of the fittest, yet this is not in accordance with the 
 ordinary law of evolution, where the victory results 
 from the special adaptation of the organism to the 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 33 
 
 environments. Here, if one may so express it, the 
 organism conquers the environment and becomes 
 the master of circumstance. 
 
 It must always be borne in mind that, in referring 
 any result to natural causes, we do not the less regard 
 it as the outcome of the Divine Power. If it be a 
 result of the Infinite and Eternal Energy, as it is 
 admitted to be by the philosopher, it is in the 
 language of the Christian the work of God. In 
 using the word “ natural / 5 we mean no more than that 
 the event, instead of being, as heretofore, an isolated 
 phenomenon, a consequent without an antecedent, 
 now falls into its place in a sequence of phenomena. 
 But even then the discovery does not take us far. We 
 have been able to make an additional step in corre- 
 lation and classification ; we are no nearer to a real 
 discovery of cause. 
 
 Some, however, may say that the Christian cannot 
 shelter himself under a general statement of this 
 kind — that, by adopting the name and accepting the 
 consequences which it entails, namely, a belief in 
 certain alleged historical events, he commits himself 
 to the truth of a story which contains a miraculous 
 element, and so puts himself outside the pale of 
 science. There is a certain amount of truth in the 
 objection. I am prepared to admit that if Christ were 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 nothing more than an ordinary man, if it were only 
 true that He died upon the cross, if He did not rise 
 from the dead, then there would be no essential differ- 
 ence between our creed and other ethical systems. In 
 the life of Christ, I admit, there were incidents which 
 find no parallel in the history of ordinary men, pheno- 
 mena contrary to common experience, inexplicable by 
 known causes — incidents, in short, which we term 
 miraculous. 
 
 This position appears to many to be wholly un- 
 scientific. Let us endeavour to ascertain, so far as 
 time permits, how far their opinion can be justified. 
 Laws and miracle are commonly assumed to be 
 contradictory terms. This assumption is often made 
 by both parties in the controversy. But the difficulty 
 thereby created is gratuitous; it arises from an 
 anthropomorphic conception of the Divine Being and 
 the inevitable imperfections of human language. In 
 referring to Him, we permit, unwisely often, the 
 use of such terms as “ interference,” “ change of 
 purpose/’ and the like, we allow ourselves to think 
 of Him — how inadequately ! — as of a kind of head 
 engineer of this world’s machinery, changing and 
 altering, mending and improving, moving this and 
 stopping that, so as to hinder one result and bring 
 about another. God is not a man, and every anthro- 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, 
 
 35 
 
 pomorphic conception, inevitable though it may be 
 as a symbol of thought, is a misleading conception. 
 Law, of which we sometimes talk as though it were 
 antagonistic to God — law, I say, is but man’s induction 
 from watching the sequence of the phenomena of the 
 Divine Power, the modes of manifestation of the 
 Unknown and Infinite Energy. The laws of nature 
 were not fixed by some necessity, and imposed upon 
 the demiurge of the universe to be now and then 
 eluded, or even, under specially favourable circum- 
 stances, overruled by him ; they are nothing more than 
 our statement of a chain of sequences. Cause and effect 
 must always stand in a fixed relation — to say this is 
 a mere truism — but it is an unwarrantable assumption 
 to assert that our view of any sequence is always the 
 correct one. Regarded in its relation to the physical 
 order, miracle is only a relative term. In one sense 
 nothing is miraculous, for everything is an outcome 
 of the same Energy, of which law is the expression, 
 not the restraint ; in another sense everything is 
 miraculous, because we can never arrive at the 
 Principle of Causation. 
 
 Physical miracles are not rare — phenomena which 
 no doubt have a cause, but it is one which we have 
 hitherto failed to discover. For instance, if there be 
 one thing which on a priori grounds we might have 
 
36 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 reasonably expected, it is that any chemical element 
 should be constant in its physical characters. Yet 
 carbon, which is one of the commonest constituents 
 in the substances known to us, assumes at least three 
 distinct forms, each characterized by markedly different 
 physical properties. It is now opaque and soft, now 
 pellucid and the hardest of minerals; sometimes it 
 exhibits the opacity and almost retains the softness of 
 the one, while it assumes the distinct and separate 
 crystal form of the other. 
 
 Take another case, where the result is produced 
 by a cause apparently inadequate. Drop into a 
 crucible of molten gold a pellet of lead, only one- 
 thousandth part by weight, and the metal when cooled 
 loses its usual properties and becomes brittle. Into 
 a crucible of melting iron drop the same proportion of 
 aluminium, and “ the pasty mass will become as fluid 
 as water.” 1 These results are miraculous to me, for 
 I can find no real explanation of them . 2 For this I 
 
 1 W. Anderson, Presidential address to Section G., British Associa- 
 tion, 1889. See also the important researches of Professor Roberts- 
 Austen and others referred to by Sir F. Abel in his Presidential address 
 to the same body at Leeds, 1890. 
 
 2 I am, of course, aware that the researches of Professor Roberts- 
 Austen and others tend to establish a connection between these results 
 and the atomic volumes of the elements, in accordance with MendeljefFs 
 law, but I cannot say that, to my mind, important and interesting as 
 this induction is, it amounts to an explanation. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 37 
 
 must assume properties in the constituent molecules 
 or ultimate atoms which I cannot comprehend. But 
 it will be said these are not miraculous, because they 
 can be repeated as often as we please. Quite true : 
 they are not so in our rough and ready classification ; 
 they cease to be miracles when we know how to do 
 them — that is to say, the test of the miraculous is in 
 the intellectual standpoint of the particular age. Its 
 sphere contracts, or perhaps I should say recedes, 
 with the advance of education. 
 
 This argument, however, need not be carried further, 
 for some of our critics frankly admit that “ physical 
 science has had nothing directly to do with the criti- 
 cism of the gospels ; it is wholly incompetent to furnish 
 demonstrative evidence that any statement made in 
 these histories is untrue. Indeed, modern physiology 
 can find parallels in nature for events of apparently 
 the most supernatural kind recounted in some of 
 those histories.” 1 
 
 Our difficulties, then, by this last concession, are 
 narrowed down to these : (1) the validity of the historic 
 evidence, and (2) an a priori suspicion caused by the 
 connection of the miracles with a reputed revelation. 
 As I have already said, 2 the former of these difficulties 
 
 1 Professor Huxley, Nineteenth Century , xxv., p. 189. 
 
 2 Second Lecture, page 20. 
 
38 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 has been so fully discussed of late years that it need 
 not detain us. Suffice it to say that the investiga- 
 tions of the most competent scholars have led to this 
 result, that the story of the Christ whom Paul preached 
 corresponded in its main outlines with that which we 
 have received. Thus, if the belief in the divinity and 
 resurrection of Christ were an illusion, it arose in the 
 earliest days of the evolution of the creed, at which 
 time, we may remark, the indirect historic evidence 
 does not indicate the existence of an environment very 
 favourable to its development. 
 
 We pass on, then, to the second difficulty : “ The 
 connection of occurrences called miraculous with an 
 alleged revelation of itself awakens our suspicions.” 
 Undoubtedly we do well to scrutinize carefully the 
 evidence in all such cases. A sceptical attitude is 
 justifiable because testimony is undeniably fallible; 
 the more picturesque aspect of a story is always 
 developed in the telling, and men as a rule not only 
 are credulous, but also have a love of the marvellous. 
 But to refuse belief on no other grounds is as un- 
 scientific as to believe simply because the statement 
 is incredible. Suppose we say that we reject the 
 story of Christ’s resurrection because men are prone 
 to exaggerate. If we resist too stoutly on this ground, 
 there are passages in the history of science which will 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 39 
 
 not stand a very close scrutiny, and her credit may be 
 found to have suffered from having kept company 
 with astrologers, alchemists, and quacks of various 
 kinds. Suppose we reject the story because there 
 are discrepancies in the minor historic details. If 
 we are going to act on this principle in ordinary 
 history, not very much will survive the trial. On 
 such grounds we should have serious doubts as to the 
 most remarkable events with which this building is 
 connected. The details of the death-scene of Charles I. 
 are even now a subject of dispute ; 1 the accounts of 
 his funeral vary so strangely that the burial-place, 
 until the discovery of his body early in the present 
 century, was at least doubtful ; 2 but this does not shake 
 our belief in the main facts. 
 
 But some say we must disbelieve the Christian 
 story, because alleged miracles are so common in 
 ecclesiastical history. That is to say, we must either 
 reject all or accept all. I might to this make the old 
 retort that the existence of a forgery assumes that of 
 a genuine original, but without pressing this argument, 
 
 1 ^Referring to a controversy then being carried on in the Times 
 newspaper, as to whether the block on which the king laid his head 
 were only a few inches in height, or like that which was used at the 
 execution of the Jacobite noblemen on Tower Hill. 
 
 2 The discrepancies of competent historians make this an excellent 
 subject for “ Historic Doubts ” (see Halford , Essays, p. 157). 
 
40 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 which I think has a certain weight, I decline to accept 
 the alternative. In science 1 am frequently called 
 upon to receive, on the authority of others, statements 
 which appear to me very like assertions of the 
 occurrence of miracles; that is, they affirm as facts 
 things which are not in accordance with the laws of 
 nature, so far as I know them. If I refuse credence 
 to some one of these statements, because in this 
 particular case my special knowledge indicates to me 
 that it is more probable testimony should be false 
 than that the miracle should be true, I am not thereby 
 precluded from accepting some other statement — 
 though to me it is equally surprising — which seems 
 to be better substantiated, and more in harmony 
 with analogies already established. 
 
 In dealing with an alleged miracle we must not, as 
 I have said, regard the event alone, but also take into 
 consideration the ethical or theological system with 
 which it is connected. Is there no such connection, so 
 that the event is a mere thaumaturgic display, then 
 we may reasonably doubt whether it is in accordance 
 with the mode in which God appears to work. Is the 
 system repugnant to our moral sense, then we are 
 justified in withholding belief. Does the system regard 
 truth as all-important, then fraud is improbable. Is it 
 sober and restrained in statement, then illusion is un- 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 41 
 
 likely. Is the event itself fraught with meaning, essen- 
 tially didactic, then it is the more likely to have hap- 
 pened, unless revelation be a process in itself incredible. 
 
 If, however, it be the Will of God to reveal Himself 
 to man — that is, to disclose to him something more of 
 the ultimate realities than he is able to learn from his 
 environment, which can only lead him to an apprehen- 
 sion of the conditioned; to teach, as does a wise 
 preceptor, sometimes by word of mouth instead of 
 leaving the pupil wholly to lesson-books; — then it 
 seems to me that, as the former is a process different 
 from the latter, the ordinary routine must be varied. 
 Revelation without miracle — using the common phrase 
 — as it seems to me, is no revelation at all. The word 
 “ revelation ” presupposes that an unusual and unpre- 
 cedented force comes into play in the world’s order ; 
 what marvel that novel results should follow in that 
 part which is visible to and appreciable by our 
 ordinary senses ? The electric current by which we 
 communicate our thoughts to distant places produces, 
 as it works, physical effects which, to him who is 
 ignorant, are violations and suspensions of the laws of 
 nature. Twice in the world's history, as it has often 
 been pointed out, events have happened which are 
 miraculous to us. These are the beginning of the 
 universe, the creation, as it is called, of matter ; and the 
 
42 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 beginning of life, which, in whatever relation it may 
 stand to the physical forces, cannot be explained as a 
 mere combination of them. 
 
 Again, if once we admit the possibility of a reve- 
 lation, that is, of the disclosure of truths not attain- 
 able by our senses, which can only deal with natural 
 objects, are we unreasonable in demanding some sign, 
 some authentication of the message; in expecting some 
 visible indication of the invisible energy, just as the 
 light which glows in the carbon loop of the electric 
 lamp denotes that the invisible current from the un- 
 seen battery is passing through it ? We cannot accept 
 the terms of the message, taken by itself, as a suffi- 
 cient proof of its authority. It may be attractive, 
 specious, but after all an ignis fatuus to lead me 
 astray into the sloughs of delusion and error. Ex- 
 perience shows that the way of truth is not always 
 the most attractive. I need, therefore, some credentials 
 of another kind, unless I am to remain for long in a 
 condition of great hesitancy and sore perplexity. 
 
 These credentials, it seems to me, we have in Chris- 
 tianity, when stripped of the parasitic growth of 
 ecclesiasticism, when reduced to the simple story and 
 simple theology of its earliest age as indicated in the 
 pages of the New Testament. This discloses to us an 
 epoch in the world’s history when a force, which we 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 43 
 
 can only view as creative, for a brief period operated 
 with exceptional activity. Granted that each new 
 individual endowed with consciousness of personality 
 is in some sense a creation, there was here a new 
 birth of deeper significance, of more permanent result. 
 Granted that each forerunner in whom the Divine 
 Energy was specially manifested was in some sense 
 an incarnation, here was one in the highest and 
 completest. The birth of Christ and the resurrection 
 of Christ figured and fulfilled the ultimate destiny 
 of man, gave the long-sought answer to the dark 
 enigma of his life, and replaced uncertainty by hope. 
 They enforced the lesson of self-sacrifice, and at the 
 same time demonstrated that the imitation of Christ 
 was not a futile effort; that the way of the Cross, hard 
 and thorny though it is, undoubtedly leads at last to 
 a better land and unclouded happiness. “I am the 
 Resurrection and the Life/’ said One in Palestine 
 more than eighteen centuries since. If He were only 
 a dreamer or a dream; if the central article of the 
 Christian creed have no other authority than that 
 which can be obtained from the inductive treatment 
 of the objects of sense; — then I tell you frankly that 
 your hope of a future life is indeed a pleasant and a 
 poetic fancy, but it will vanish before the cold logic 
 of physical facts as the glow of the evening sky fades 
 before the darkness of the coming nmht. 
 
 o o 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. IV .). 1 
 
 “ I came forth from the Father, and am come into the 
 world: again I leave the world, and go to the Father.” 
 
 St. John xvi. 28. 
 
 Attempts have been made, more especially of late 
 years, to prove that the section of St. John’s Gospel 
 from which these words are quoted is not a record 
 of the actual teaching of Jesus, but a series of imagi- 
 nary discourses, ascribed to Him by a theologian of a 
 later age. Controversy, as it appears to me, has estab- 
 lished at least these results — that the book was already 
 in existence very early in the second century ; that its 
 theology is in accord with that of the Apostolic age, 
 though certain points have been treated with unusual 
 fulness ; that if we regard its statements, not as the 
 words of Jesus, but only as the metaphysical specula- 
 tions of some one of His disciples, no trace can be 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Koyal, Whitehall, on the First Sunday 
 after Trinity, 1890. 
 
 44 
 
C0NFLIC7 OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 45 
 
 found, within the century which followed His death, 
 of the existence of any one who was a thinker at once 
 so profound and so audacious ; for surely at that 
 time it would have been deemed audacity — nay, pro- 
 fanity — to fabricate such discourses and make such 
 claims as they involve. Christian literature, if we 
 speak as ordinary critics, begins at an early period 
 to exhibit a marked decadence, as any one may see 
 who will take the trouble to compare the best speci- 
 mens of the post-Apostolic age with the Scriptures of 
 the New Testament. 
 
 It is, then, my present purpose to carry somewhat 
 further the line of argument which I adopted on the 
 last occasion, by pointing out that, as it seems to me, 
 we find, in the history of Christianity and its fore- 
 runner Judaism, indications of a revelation. By this 
 I mean, as already explained, a step in the education 
 of man which does not seem to result from the ordi- 
 nary processes of evolution — which, when regarded 
 from our point of view, appears as a discontinuity, 
 and thus an exception to the general law of continuous 
 operation. 
 
 I will only remind you — for it is often forgotten 
 alike by friends and by foes — that in making the 
 following admissions, in conceding very much, as some 
 would say, to the latter, I am very far from granting 
 
4 6 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 the conclusions which, in their opinion, are necessary 
 consequences. 
 
 1. Continuity of sequence, evolution, development 
 through processes which we call natural (this being 
 only our way of saying that they are familiar), ap- 
 pears to me the rule in this world ; the law of nature 
 as it is commonly called. This, however, does not to 
 my mind make it the less the work of God. Our 
 most rigid scientific thinkers enjoin me to recognize 
 in it the operation of an Infinite Energy. So far, then, 
 we are perfectly in accord, only I go further than 
 they, and as I ascribe to this certain characteristics 
 (speaking as a man), I prefer to call it God. 
 
 2. I admit that continuity is also the general rule 
 in what we may call the religious education of the 
 world. But I must add that here also, as in nature, 
 the observation of a series of sequences is not equiva- 
 lent to a discovery of cause. We must not forget the 
 old difference between How and Why} 
 
 3. I admit that a relative element is present in 
 all revelation, because, humanly speaking, I do not 
 see how absolute truth could in any case be imparted 
 to a being conditioned as man, or how even relative 
 
 1 Madam How and Lady Why , by my late friend Charles Kingsley, 
 is a book for children, but is full of lessons for older folk, as is the case 
 with other like works from the same pen. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 47 
 
 truth could germinate and fructify if the seed were 
 dropped on a soil wholly unsuitable. If I may say 
 it without profanity, there is not for God one law in 
 nature and another in revelation. When He would 
 telegraph to man, the message is transmitted along 
 the best conductor that may be found, though a new 
 substance is not created for the occasion. 
 
 I make all these admissions, and yet feel justified in 
 declining to accept the conclusions to which they are 
 thought to lead, or the alternatives to which I am 
 supposed to be forced. These, perhaps, I should briefly 
 notice in passing. One of them amounts to this ; I 
 must conclude that the Unlimited Cause “took the 
 disguise of a man for the purpose of covenanting with 
 a shepherd chief in Syria.” 1 I do not, indeed, admit 
 that this sentence accurately expresses the fact ; but, 
 letting that pass, I feel entitled to compliment the 
 critic on his capacity for prescribing to the Infinite 
 His modes of operation. The saying is thoroughly 
 man-like. It is the outcome of a spirit like that 
 which makes small people arrogant with those whom 
 they consider to be socially their inferiors, and leads 
 men to regard with contempt all else that lives on 
 this our globe. “ What God hath cleansed, that call 
 not thou common,” we might justly retort. 
 
 1 Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions , § 588. 
 
4 8 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 Another conclusion to which I am supposed to be 
 forced, is this : That the Infinite Energy, when re- 
 vealed under the human form, ascribed to Himself 
 limited knowledge, and exhibited a defective moral 
 sense. As already said, I do not expect that the 
 personality — or supposed personality of the mes- 
 senger — would be lost by absorption ; nor can I be- 
 lieve that the message would have been of much use 
 if it had been made to conform to the intellectual 
 requirements and moral status (which may be a 
 fallible standard) of the nineteenth century after 
 Christ. 
 
 The third conclusion is this : That if the Christian 
 religion is not of like origin and development with 
 others, it must follow that “ a complete simulation of 
 the natural by the supernatural has been deliberately 
 devised to deceive those who examine critically what 
 they are taught ; appearances have been arranged for 
 the purpose of misleading sincere inquirers, that they 
 may be eternally damned for seeking the truth.” 1 I 
 am aware that the words of many Christians and of 
 certain Churches give some colour to the assumption 
 which this statement involves ; but, as I find no valid 
 foundation for it in the authorized formulas of my 
 own Church, and still less in its charter, the sayings of 
 1 Idem, § 588, conclusion. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 49 
 
 Christ and His Apostles, the noose, into which I am 
 supposed to be inveigled, appears to me no better 
 than a phantom. 
 
 We have, then, to inquire whether, admitting the 
 existence in both the Hebrew and the Christian 
 religion, of a process of development in accordance 
 with the laws of continuity and the methods of evolu- 
 tion, we can discover in their histories indications of 
 discontinuities which justify us in recognizing them 
 as revelations. 
 
 The most elementary condition of the religious idea 
 appears to be some form of animism, exhibited in 
 shamanism or in fetish-worship. By extension from 
 this — possibly through the idea of the existence of 
 ghosts or through some form of ancestor-worship — 
 we arrive at polytheism, and from this two lines of 
 development seem possible, either to an esoteric 
 pantheism or to henotheism ; the latter being the 
 acknowledgment of one divinity, whose status is 
 essentially higher than that of all the rest — the 
 monarchical idea, as we may call it, in theology. 
 
 But this is distinct from monotheism, for that 
 repudiates the existence of any other gods, however 
 subordinate in rank.) Monotheism, indeed, has a closer 
 affinity with pantheism, though from this it differs 
 essentially in distinguishing cause from effect, and in 
 E 
 
5o 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 ascribing to the First Cause certain qualities which, 
 for want of a better term, we designate personal. 
 
 Now, what phenomena are presented to us by the 
 more ancient Hebrew writings ? For this inquiry, 
 it is not necessary to enter upon questions as to the 
 possible composite origin or later recensions of the 
 older books of the Bible. It is, I believe, generally 
 admitted that the portions to which I shall refer are 
 of great antiquity. The first of these narrates the 
 early history of the earth and of the human race. 
 In very ancient Chaldean records we find accounts 
 so similar that we can hardly doubt that they are 
 derived from the same original . 1 But between the 
 two versions there is one remarkable difference. The 
 Chaldean legends, as it has been happily expressed, 
 “ are saturated with polytheism /’ 2 From the Hebrew 
 this element has been so thoroughly expurgated that 
 it can only be traced — if, indeed, the recognition be 
 more than fanciful — in the plural word which in 
 certain cases designates God . 3 By whom was this 
 change made ? There are but two persons to whom 
 
 1 For a convenient account of these, we may refer to the volume 
 on the history of Chaldea, by A. Kagozin, in The Story of the 
 Nations. 
 
 2 I heard the phrase used a short time since in an address by the 
 present Bishop of Manchester. 
 
 3 Elohim. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 51 
 
 we can reasonably attribute it ; these are Moses and 
 Abraham. But the relationships of the former were 
 with Egypt, not with Chaldea; so that, apart from 
 other considerations, we conclude that Abraham 
 formed the link between Chaldean and Hebrew 
 tradition; that he expurgated the familiar stories, 
 and illuminated them with a new light. But what 
 enabled him to make this mighty advance in theo- 
 logy, the greatest stride of which we can find any 
 trace in the ancient world ? He was surrounded, 
 admittedly, by opposite influences. We are distinctly 
 told — and there is no ground for doubting the state- 
 ment — that he was the companion and the descendant 
 of polytheists . 1 So far as I know, not a particle of 
 evidence exists that the human race had advanced at 
 that time even so far as henotheism, and from this 
 to monotheism is a long step. Hence, in accordance 
 with the ordinary laws of evolution, the appearance 
 of a monotheist at that epoch of the world’s history 
 is an event as improbable as the discovery of the 
 remains of man in a deposit of Miocene age would 
 be in geology. As an evolutionist, I am unable to 
 credit, without the strongest evidence, the alleged 
 occurrence of either the one or the other. 
 
 Further, as monotheists, the patriarchs were so far 
 
 1 Josh. xxiv. 2 . 
 
52 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 in advance of their age that the idea fell on an almost 
 fruitless soil. Their descendants relapsed into heno- 
 theism at best, into polytheism at worst. The faith 
 of Abraham must have become almost extinct during 
 the period of bondage in Egypt. Then arose Moses. 
 Brought up at the court of Egypt, he was learned 
 in the wisdom of the Egyptians. After a long exile 
 in the desert, cut off from communication with philo- 
 sophers or students, associated with nomad tribes, 
 among whom we can hardly deem it possible that a 
 pure monotheism could have survived — if, indeed, it 
 had ever obtained a footing — he makes his mark as 
 a religious reformer not less than as a political leader. 
 Can we regard him, in the former character, as a 
 result of evolutionary processes ? Was the idea of 
 which he was the apostle — to use a modern phrase — 
 already in the air ? Certainly it was not so in Egypt ; 
 there is not a particle of evidence that it was so in 
 Chaldea. Granted that, in another such phrase, he 
 had been already anticipated by Abraham and the 
 fathers of Israel, had not their doctrine been almost 
 overpowered in the struggle for existence by the 
 conceptions then dominant in the national mind ? 
 Moses, too, was a man in advance of his age — “ born 
 out of due time.” For the sake of argument, let us 
 admit the presence of a legendary element in the 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 53 
 
 history of the settlement of the Hebrew race in 
 Palestine ; let us concede that, in its present form, it 
 may be somewhat later than the age of Moses ; then, 
 I ask, what do I learn, by inductive treatment even 
 of these materials, as to the state of thought among 
 the Hebrews up to — let us say — the days of David ? 
 It is this : that monotheism at that period practically 
 had no firm hold upon the nation. The Hebrews at 
 heart were polytheists, only better than the neigh- 
 bouring tribes in that a vague recollection of primeval 
 tradition at times resulted in a kind of monotheism. 
 
 The position occupied by the Hebrew prophets 
 seems to me to have an important significance in this 
 connection. They are not depicted as philosophers, 
 persuading their countrymen to monotheism by argu- 
 ments. They are not men of culture, representatives 
 of the esoteric thought of a priestly caste ; but they 
 come, whence one hardly knows, as critics, and often 
 as opponents, of the very men by whom we should 
 have expected them to have been educated and 
 produced. They proclaim monotheism as a message ; 
 they teach it as a system. They are like missionaries 
 of an organization, of which, however, there is no 
 trace ; men with a commission, but by whom granted 
 we cannot discover. They have generally small in- 
 fluence, are often persecuted; their doctrine makes 
 
54 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 little way until Samaria falls before the Assyrian, 
 and Jerusalem before the Chaldean. But if Jewish 
 monotheism were the result simply of an evolutionary 
 process, it ought not to have waged this unequal 
 struggle for existence. It should have been supported 
 throughout, not by the almost spasmodic efforts of 
 rare individual champions, but by the gradually in- 
 creasing strength of public opinion. Its battle, like 
 a Homeric victory, has been won by the prowess of 
 a hero; Nature’s battles are democratic, won by the 
 rank-and-file. Not one of the men who gave the 
 great impulses to Jewish thought can be called a 
 normal product of his age, if we depend solely upon 
 evolutionary processes. These might have produced 
 a Joshua, not a Moses; a Solomon, not a David; a 
 Hezekiah, not an Isaiah. 
 
 But it might be argued, of these early days our 
 records are few, our conceptions necessarily vague. 
 Let us turn, then, to an epoch of which we have a 
 fuller knowledge — the beginning of Christianity. 
 Efforts have been made to represent the history of 
 the life of Jesus as little better than a cloud of legend. 
 This attempt is necessary if we start with a disbelief, 
 on a priori grounds, in every occurrence which we 
 call miraculous. But the method employed only 
 succeeds in dissipating certain theories as to the 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 55 
 
 nature of revelation, which prove, on examination, to 
 have no valid basis, or in compelling us, if we are 
 consistent, to take up a position of universal scep- 
 ticism as regards history. 
 
 Putting aside for a moment the alleged miracles, 
 how are we to explain the genesis of the doctrine 
 taught by Christ ? That there was a preparation for 
 it, that — to use modem phrases — in this or that He 
 had been anticipated, that some ideas were already in 
 the air, I am not concerned to deny ; for, as I have 
 said, I believe, as a consistent theist, all development 
 to be by the power of God, and evolution His ordinary 
 mode of working. But I cannot thus explain the 
 phenomena. What are the facts ? Jesus was the 
 reputed son of a carpenter in humble circumstances. 
 He had received but little education. He owed 
 nothing to the philosophers of Greece or Rome. He 
 was distinctly hostile, not only to the modes of 
 thought and of instruction which were then dominant 
 in Judaism, but also to its general tendency for at least 
 two centuries previously. There is no evidence that He 
 was influenced by the teaching of Philo. This, indeed, 
 on chronological grounds alone, is highly improbable. 
 Neither can we make that assertion of His disciples, 
 because between their doctrine and this peculiar com- 
 bination of Hellenistic and rabbinic schools of thought 
 
56 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 there is at most only an occasional correspondence in 
 terminology, while there is an essential difference in 
 fundamental conceptions . 1 
 
 Jesus also took up a position very different from 
 that of the ordinary reformer. It has little in common 
 with that of such men as Wycliffe or Luther. They 
 confuted the errors of the present by an appeal to the 
 past; Christ, by the enunciation of a new principle 
 of action, though He pointed out that the Law was 
 being obeyed in the letter, but broken in its spirit. 
 They, in short, looked backward ; He, forward. 
 
 What influences were in His favour ? So long as 
 His teaching seemed to foster the national sentiment, 
 it was popular with the people, who chafed under the 
 Roman yoke. But when it became clear that His aim 
 was not political, the multitude left Him to the 
 ecclesiastics, who naturally had been His enemies from 
 the first. He was crucified — He died the death of a 
 detected impostor. His followers admit that they 
 deserted Him. They despaired. Yet, in a short time, 
 these timid fugitives become the brave heralds of a 
 message for the terms of which we look in vain into 
 the speculations of the rabbi or of the philosopher. 
 
 The whole history of Christianity is not that of 
 
 1 See Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah , bk. i., 
 especially chap. iv. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 57 
 
 natural growth alone. Its origin is inexplicable as 
 an evolutionary process. It stands to earlier creeds, 
 even Judaism itself, in a relation resembling that of 
 life to the physical forces in this world’s order. It co- 
 operates with, in a sense it absorbs them ; yet it is not 
 identical with them. Between the history of Christian 
 and scientific progress there is little in common. In 
 the latter, though advance may be slow, backsliding 
 is rare. Error, once pierced by the spear of truth, is 
 abandoned to the fostering care of the crotchet-monger 
 and the puzzle-head. But Christianity, like Judaism 
 formerly, has to wage a struggle for existence. It 
 seems hardly possible to keep it in its original purity. 
 Dare we say that, even in this nineteenth century, no 
 trace of fetish-worship lingers, no taint of polytheism 
 still infects ? Might not Christian Churches even now 
 move St. Paul, could he return to earth, to that plain- 
 ness of speech which he used to his Galatian converts ? 
 It is hardly too much to say that science has 
 developed in accordance with the natural tendencies 
 of the human race, but Christianity — in so far as it 
 has developed — in opposition to them. 
 
 Thus while in all progress, in all evolution of 
 religious thought and ethical principles, I discern the 
 guidance of God ; while through all the ages past I 
 recognize a light broadening and brightening towards 
 
58 CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 the more perfect day, I find, both in Judaism and in 
 Christianity, processes which may rightly be termed 
 creative, and the very errors of the disciples of the 
 one or the other strengthen the claim of each to an 
 origin not of this world’s order. 
 
 More than eighteen centuries are past and gone — 
 eighteen centuries, with all their mistakes and all 
 their advances in knowledge — yet the life of Jesus 
 has lost none of its magnetic force, the words of Jesus 
 none of their quickening power. Strange illusion 
 this, if such it be, to have so much vitality that even 
 now each one of us, as life’s perplexities increase, 
 as its sad lessons are enforced by sorrowful experience, 
 as the evening shadows begin to lengthen and the 
 sands run low in his appointed measure of time, 
 feels that he can only re-echo the question of Christ’s 
 first disciples, “ Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou 
 hast the words of eternal life.” 
 
THE PRESENT CONP'LICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. V .). 1 
 
 “ I delight in the Law of God after the inward man : but I 
 see another law in my members, warring against the law of 
 my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin 
 which is in my members.” — Rom. vh. 22, 23. 
 
 I have endeavoured, in previous lectures, to show 
 that there is no necessary conflict between the con- 
 clusions of science and the belief in a revelation ; that 
 we must look to the latter for all knowledge of God 
 which is other than relative ; but that we find nothing 
 in the former to make an expectation of His guidance 
 unreasonable ; that, in short, the conflict of theology 
 and science arises from partial and one-sided views 
 on the part of their advocates. 
 
 If, then, we are fully persuaded that the Author of 
 Nature and of Revelation is One and the same, we are 
 more than justified in the hope that the hieroglyphs 
 which we seek to decipher on the pages of the one 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on the Second Sunday 
 after Trinity, 1890. 
 
 59 
 
6o 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 volume may throw light on the interpretations of 
 sayings which, in the other, are often beyond our 
 present comprehension. I purpose, then, in the remain- 
 ing lectures of this course, to inquire whether these 
 imaginary adversaries may not be sometimes mutually 
 helpful, and especially whether some explanation of 
 difficulties, which undoubtedly exist in theology, may 
 not be found in science, that is, in the inductive treat- 
 ment of the phenomena of Nature. To cover so wide 
 a field is obviously impossible, so that I shall restrict 
 myself to certain instances. One of these, perhaps the 
 most saddening, is indicated by the words which I 
 have read. They speak of a conflict which all of us 
 know too well. They represent the individual man 
 as a battle-field of two opposing forces. The passage 
 from which they come, as all admit, is hard to inter- 
 pret; but this is due rather to the nature of the 
 subject than to the fault of the writer. Do the words, 
 let us ask, become more easy to comprehend when 
 regarded from the standpoint to which we are led by 
 scientific induction ? 
 
 There is a dark shadow in Christianity, there is a 
 grave difficulty in every ethical system, there is a 
 discord in the harmony of Nature, which has per- 
 plexed alike philosopher and saint. This is the 
 existence of evil. Whence did it arise ? how did it 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 61 
 
 come ? Can science help us in solving the problem ? 1 
 Two modes of eluding the difficulty should, perhaps, 
 be mentioned in order to avoid misapprehension, 
 though they need not be discussed, because it is 
 generally admitted that neither can be regarded as 
 satisfactory. These are : To assert that evil is only 
 good in another form, which practically is a denial of 
 its existence ; or that there is an eternal principle of 
 evil antagonistic to that of good — the well-known 
 dualism of some Eastern philosophers. 
 
 The position adopted by most theists, and all or 
 almost all Christians, may be concisely — if rather 
 baldly — stated as follows : “ God is perfect goodness. 
 God is Creator and Author of all things. Evil is 
 present among them, at any rate in this world.” If 
 this be so, one conclusion only seems possible, from 
 which, however, we naturally shrink. Even if we 
 ascribe, as is generally done, the presence of evil in 
 this world to the action of a particular person, this 
 obviously affords no explanation of its origin ; and, 
 however true the opinion may be, it leaves a number 
 of difficult questions quite untouched. 
 
 Let us turn to the book of Nature, and see what light 
 
 1 The treatment of the question is necessarily brief. A fuller 
 discussion will be found in a discourse, earlier in date, but printed at 
 the end of the present volume. 
 
62 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 it can throw on this dark place in theology. We must 
 be careful, at the outset, to avoid a common confusion 
 of thought. This arises from the double sense in which 
 the word “ evil ” is ordinarily employed, and the con- 
 sequent failure to distinguish between the physical 
 and the moral. Doubtless it is not always easy, 
 owing to the continuity which reigns in Nature, to 
 draw a sharp line between the two provinces. Moral 
 evil may sometimes stand in close connection with 
 physical environment, and thus give rise to difficulties 
 in practice, but in thought they not only are perfectly 
 separable, but also must be separated. 
 
 To physical evil, as we sometimes call it — to pain, 
 disease, death — I make no reference. They were not 
 imported into the world, as has been sometimes 
 imagined, at a late epoch in its history. They are 
 practically as old as sensation ; all but as old as life. 
 I do not say that a world free from them is a thing 
 inconceivable, but it would not be this world. So 
 long as matter retains the properties which it now 
 possesses ; so long as the physical forces continue ; so 
 long as the relation of life, whatever it be, to organism 
 be the same; — so long must living beings, in their 
 season, sicken, suffer, and die. We may wish this 
 otherwise, but it is inevitable, and we must con- 
 sole ourselves by remembering that pain, a mode of 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 63 
 
 sensation in all organized beings, has obviously been 
 the stimulus which has been a great factor — if it has 
 been nothing more — in their evolution. 
 
 But moral evil seems to stand in a different relation 
 to living beings. It is less difficult to imagine a 
 system like the present into which it did not enter. 
 But in inquiring its origin, we may find our way 
 rendered easier by endeavouring to ascertain what is 
 the true nature of evil. How shall we define it ? 
 There is a general idea that evil is a positive ; more 
 careful consideration will, I think, show that this is 
 erroneous. Its relation to good may be compared 
 with that of darkness to light. The latter is a 
 positive, for it is a mode of motion ; the former 
 is a negative — no-motion, and so a relative to light. 
 All evil presupposes goodness, from which it is a 
 deviation ; all wrong presupposes right. We call an 
 action right or wrong because we try it by a standard. 
 Obviously, if there were no such standard, the com- 
 parison could not be made. It follows, therefore, that 
 the moral significance of the action is relative to the 
 standard. Hence if the latter be changed, the former 
 also changes, and that which would be right under 
 one condition of things, might become wrong under 
 another. We may illustrate this by the analogy 
 which I have just employed. If we were to step 
 
6 4 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 from the full sunlight into a shaded room, this to us 
 would be dark, while to those who had been there for 
 long, the light would suffice for their purposes. Yet 
 that which we had been enjoying, that, which made 
 their light to us relatively darkness, to them for a 
 time would be blinding by its excess. 
 
 Now, what can we learn from the analogy of 
 Nature ? Its great stone-book exhibits a gradual 
 progress in development among living beings : forms 
 more specialized, that is, more perfectly in adaptation 
 to their environment, replacing those which are more 
 generalized. Whatever may be the precise explana- 
 tion of the phenomena, we cannot deny that even 
 the animal world has been subjected to a process 
 which may be termed, in a large sense of the word, 
 an education, and the increase of our knowledge only 
 deepens the conviction that this process, as a rule, is 
 continuous, even if there be exceptional discontinuities. 
 
 Another point is no less certain, namely, that, what- 
 ever be the explanation, man, considered simply as 
 an organized being, is indistinguishable from other 
 animals. That he may be something more than an 
 animal I have no intention of denying, but I affirm 
 that, if we restrict ourselves to the methods of investi- 
 gation which are commonly regarded as scientific, we 
 cannot draw a hard-and-fast line between him and 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 65 
 
 the rest of the animal world. Every attempt to do 
 this has been a failure, and we must admit — whatever 
 difficulties may seem to threaten — that any differences 
 which can be discovered are in degree, not in kind. 
 Our sensations are similar, our emotions are due to 
 like causes. It does not, however, follow that the 
 actions in which these result are identical in moral 
 value, simply because they have the same physical 
 cause. If an animal acts in accordance with its natural 
 impulses, we do not consider it to have done wrong, 
 even though this leads us to kill it as hurtful or ob- 
 noxious to us. We may sometimes apply to an animal 
 such terms as “ malicious; ” “murderous,” “lustful;” 
 yet we are fully aware that these epithets, with all 
 others imputing moral qualities, are only used in a 
 figurative sense. But in a man, a certain course of action 
 becomes wrong because something — what this may be 
 is immaterial for our present purpose ; call it, if you 
 will, an inherited instinct — has told him that in such 
 cases he must resist his natural impulses. When, for 
 instance, I am hungry, the ' sensation has a history 
 altogether similar in myself and in a wild animal ; its 
 purpose, if I may so call it, is the development and 
 preservation of the body. The animal takes the first 
 suitable food it finds, and thereby does right, because 
 it knows no other duty than the maintenance of its 
 F 
 
66 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 life and strength ; but, in adopting the same course, 
 I may do wrong, because I have learnt that, under 
 certain circumstances, it is my duty to suffer rather 
 than to gratify my desires. 
 
 Do we not, even in ourselves, recognize that the 
 moral value of actions changes with circumstances ? 
 To take an obvious example : Something which is 
 the property of another attracts the eye of a little 
 child. The hand is instinctively stretched out to 
 take it. The action itself is not regarded as wrong, 
 though, for purposes of education, it may be checked, 
 even in an infant ; but as time goes on, and ideas 
 of property are acquired, the “ taking ” becomes “ steal- 
 ing” or “ robbing,” and the action a sin. Yet then it 
 is condemned by the moralist more severely in pro- 
 portion to the clearness with which these ideas have 
 been impressed upon and presumably recognized by the 
 offender. But it might be said this does away with 
 any absolute standard, and makes the individual the 
 measure of the moral value of his actions. Certainly it 
 does ; but that does not lighten individual responsi- 
 bility. For if a man has lost all sense of this by 
 continuous and deliberate wrong-doing, he must bear 
 the burden of having subjected himself to the process. 
 Nor does it interfere with the administration of law, 
 because that necessarily adopts rough-and-ready 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 67 
 
 methods of classification, and yet it now recognizes 
 extenuating circumstances. We even go so far as to 
 admit that some persons are not responsible for their 
 actions; but this does not give rise to any serious 
 difficulty. In such a case the onus of proving non- 
 responsibility is thrown on the individual, and into 
 minor distinctions the law in many cases cannot 
 enter, because its, penalties are measured, not so much 
 by absolute justice to the individual, as by the require- 
 ments of justice for the society. 
 
 But on this point it is needless, to enlarge further, 
 because I think few persons, after a little consideration, 
 will refuse to admit that the moral value of an action 
 depends upon the ethical position of the doer — that, in 
 the Apostle’s words, where there is no law there can 
 be no sin . 1 
 
 Goodness, then, in any race of beings, would consist 
 in perfect conformity with their environment, using 
 the term in a very wide sense. Let us suppose this 
 to be in some way or other modified — restricting our- 
 selves to its ethical side. Let us suppose that by 
 some means an impulse is received towards a higher 
 stage of existence ; that, for purposes of education, 
 something which before was perfectly legitimate is 
 forbidden, or some course of conduct is enjoined which 
 
 1 See Rom. v.-vii. 
 
68 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 was previously without precedent ; that, in fact, a new 
 ideal of duty is originated — a new standard is set up. 
 Conflict thus arises between the old habit and the 
 new impulse. The former — the principle of heredity, 
 as we may call it — urges to inaction or to one course 
 of conduct ; the latter, the new motive force, to 
 another. We must assume the existence of a power 
 of selection, of choice, of free-will .; for without this, 
 moral responsibility cannot exist. At once that which 
 we call evil becomes possible — potentially it comes 
 into existence. To follow the new course is right; to 
 abide in the old, though formerly it was right, has 
 become wrong. Hence evil is inseparable in thought 
 from every system of progressive moral development, 
 provided that the individuals be capable of exercising 
 choice. If one of them, instead of obeying the onward 
 and upward impulse, elects to continue in his former 
 condition, the preference for the status quo , as we 
 may call it, though it formerly constituted good, has 
 now become evil. 
 
 Suppose, as an illustration, that the ethical state 
 of a group of living creatures is represented by 
 the movements of a number of points, and that 
 goodness is signified by these taking place in a 
 particular plane. Suppose also that — owing to some 
 previous influence, the nature of which is immaterial — 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 69 
 
 they take place in this plane : we have thus a perma- 
 nent goodness. But now suppose the plane to become 
 a surface curving upwards (which introduces the idea 
 of a discontinuity), while at the same time the points 
 are influenced by a force which of itself would cause 
 them to move in a new direction. At once there is a 
 conflict between this and the tendency of movement 
 already acquired. Some modification must result. It 
 may be that the new attraction will retain the points 
 in the new surface, but it may be that the acquired 
 tendency will cause them to deviate from it. By so 
 doing, even by remaining in the original plane, they 
 assume a position which is relatively evil, though, of 
 course, to make it really this, as we interpret the 
 word, we must conceive the points endowed with a 
 power of choice, whether they will or will not yield 
 to the new influence. 
 
 It follows, then, that evil has its origin, not in a 
 departure from an ideal perfection, but in a refusal to 
 obey the impulses tending towards an ideal perfection. 
 While we cannot deny the possibility of its existence 
 in beings other than ourselves, we can only — so long 
 as we restrict ourselves to this world, of which alone 
 our perceptions can take cognizance — affirm its exist- 
 ence in our own race, because we cannot prove that 
 a sense of moral responsibility exists in any other. 
 
70 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 Still analogous conditions may be found elsewhere 
 among living creatures.; for obviously evil is incon- 
 ceivable in the inorganic world. In the great stone- 
 book of Nature we read the history of many a race 
 which has proved incapable of adapting itself to a 
 changed environment, and has paid the penalty by 
 deterioration, suffering, and ultimate extinction; but 
 we alone, so far as we know, can deliberately resist 
 the great evolutionary purpose, can be as Gods, know- 
 ing good and evil, and choose the latter— that is to say, 
 with a power of recognizing the upward tendency, can 
 deliberately prefer to continue in the lower condition. 
 
 Can we advance any further in our inquiry? We 
 learn from science that, structurally, man cannot be 
 differentiated from the rest of the animal world. An 
 inductive treatment of the whole body of facts which 
 can be collected in relation to his history, socially as 
 well as physiologically, may indeed justify the sus- 
 picion that he is something more; but it can go no 
 further, and for any actual knowledge we must be 
 indebted to revelation. This tells us that in mans com- 
 posite nature there is a spiritual factor, but gives us no 
 definite information — why should it ? — as to the bodily 
 factor. It soon becomes evident that the statements 
 in Scripture concerning the latter cannot be pressed 
 in a sense strictly literal, but must be regarded as 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 7i 
 
 figurative or expressive of relative rather than actual 
 knowledge. If we refuse to admit this, we have no 
 other choice than to repudiate the evidence of our 
 senses and the use of our reason, and blindly to sub- 
 mit to some authority; though without these I do not 
 see how we can test its claims to be obeyed. 
 
 As I suppose we should be unwilling to adopt the 
 latter course, we may legitimately seek information 
 from the results of scientific study. These, in the 
 opinion of some well qualified to speak, lead to the 
 conclusion that, whatever discontinuity there may be 
 in the history of man as a living soul, to use the 
 ordinary phrase, he also is an example of the great 
 law of continuity, and that his bodily part is strictly 
 animal in its origin; that just as there is in the 
 embryonic individual a process of development from 
 the lowest to the highest type of organism, so it was 
 in the embryonic race. Thus the “ body of this death/’ 
 as the Apostle so truly calls it, is our inheritance from 
 the animal world ; our passions are the survival of 
 instincts transmitted from an animal ancestry, which 
 the Spirit now calls upon us to check and to mortify. 
 It is this new birth of the race, this impulse to 
 
 “ Move upward, working out the beast, 
 
 And let the ape and tiger die,” 1 
 
 Tennyson, In Memoricim , cxviii. 
 
72 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 which lias made these instincts evil, has made evil 
 possible — has been, in a sense, the beginning of sin. 
 
 This idea as to the descent of the bodily part of 
 man from an animal ancestry cannot, it is true, be 
 reckoned among the conclusions of science, but it is 
 an hypothesis, the evidence for which has certainly 
 become stronger with the progress of knowledge. It 
 is one which, I am well aware, has greatly startled 
 and shocked many earnest Christians. It has been 
 supposed to involve a denial of moral responsibility 
 and of the existence of a spiritual constituent in 
 human nature. What I have said has, I hope, made 
 it evident that this opinion as to the origin of the 
 human race is perfectly consistent with the admission 
 of both the one and the other. To deny the former, 
 indeed, would, as it appears to me, be difficult for a 
 scientific man; for it seems to meet with general 
 acceptation as the result of an inductive treatment of 
 facts, quite apart from any statements of a supposed 
 revelation. To denj^ the latter would obviously be as 
 impossible as to affirm it, as a result of scientific 
 processes, because these could not take us beyond a 
 probability for it or against it. 
 
 But some difficulties, which admittedly exist, seem to 
 be explained by this idea, while those which it is sup- 
 posed to create have no existence if once we recognize 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 73 
 
 the facts — as they appear to me — that revelation is 
 progressive and in certain cases relative ; that its end 
 is not to tell us the solution of problems which we 
 may discover for ourselves, sooner or later, by patient 
 labour, but to raise a veil which our hands could not 
 have moved or even touched, to lead us onwards and 
 upwards through this world’s drifting clouds and per- 
 plexing mists towards that eternal light on which 
 mortal eyes cannot gaze, to that boundless love 
 which has deemed our frail and faulty natures worth 
 lifting upwards and preserving for some work, in aeons 
 yet to come, in spheres to us as yet unknown, where 
 sin cannot enter, because the “body of this death” 
 will have crumbled to its harmless elements of in- 
 organic and consequently innocent matter, because 
 the will of the redeemed soul will be in perfect con- 
 formity with the will of God, and the body which 
 then shall be, if one with this in its vital principle, 
 will be free from the law of heredity, for there will 
 be no continuity of corporeal organism. Such “ is the 
 resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; 
 it is raised in incorruption : it is sown in dishonour ; 
 it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is 
 raised in power : it is sown a natural body ; it is 
 raised a spiritual body.” 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VI .). 1 
 
 “The Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The 
 Lord, The Lord God, merciful, and gracious, long-suffering, 
 and abundant in goodness -and truth, keeping mercy for 
 thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and 
 that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity 
 of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s 
 children.” — Exod. xxxiv. 6 , 7. 
 
 Are the clauses of this remarkable passage con- 
 tradictoiy ? Do they ascribe to God attributes which 
 cannot be reconciled ? That is not an uncommon 
 opinion. Perhaps, however, they may be softened or 
 explained away in the fuller light of the Gospel dis- 
 pensation. But Christianity is often supposed to be 
 yet more uncompromising. It teaches, in the opinion 
 of one of its critics, “ the visiting on Adam’s descend- 
 ants, through hundreds of generations, dreadful 
 penalties for a small transgression which they did not 
 commit; the damning of all men who do not avail 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on the Fourth Sunday 
 after Trinity, 1890. 
 
 74 
 
CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 75 
 
 themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining forgive- 
 ness, which most men have never heard of ; and the 
 effecting a reconciliation by sacrificing a Son who was 
 perfectly innocent, to satisfy the assumed necessity 
 for a propitiatory victim.” 1 This, I say, is considered 
 to be a fair statement of its doctrine. To myself it 
 appears to be a caricature, but I must sorrowfully 
 admit that, if we accept the dogmas of some Churches 
 and the opinions of not a few individuals as a fair 
 statement of the teaching of the New Testament, this 
 picture can hardly be called exaggerated. 
 
 Under these circumstances, let us endeavour to 
 ascertain whether the Book of Nature throws any 
 light on this dark place in the Book of Eevelation, 
 when it states that God will by no means clear the 
 guilty, but will visit iniquity even upon their 
 descendants. For my present purpose, I must exclude 
 one topic — that of the Atonement — mentioned in the 
 passage which I have just quoted, because it would 
 require a much fuller consideration than it could 
 possibly receive within my present limits, and because 
 I do not hesitate to assert that the clause relating to 
 it is a parody, not, indeed, without some justification, 
 but still a parody of the Christian doctrine as it 
 may be inferred from Scripture. 
 
 1 Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions , § 658. 
 
76 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 What, then, are we taught there in regard to the 
 remainder of these questions ? If we lay aside a 
 theological terminology, and any discussion of the 
 modes, if one may so call them, in which Divine grace 
 — as it appears to the Christian — operates upon the 
 soul of man, it amounts, I think, to this, that our 
 life here on earth is a state of trial ; that its issues are 
 eternal, — the goals are life and death; that sin or 
 error brings its punishment, the effects of which reach 
 further than the original wrong-doer. We are told, in 
 &hort, that life is a conflict, sometimes apparently 
 against heavy odds, where success is uncertain and 
 failure more than possible. 
 
 This is held to be hard measure. Be it so or not, 
 let us see how far it accords with the analogy of 
 Nature. What do we learn from this ? It discloses 
 four great laws by which all life is governed. These 
 are : first, the law of trial — the conflict with the 
 environment, the struggle for existence against the 
 forces of Nature and the other forms of life, in which, 
 as the conditions of the warfare change, so must the 
 tactics of the combatant be correspondingly altered. 
 The second is the law of inheritance — the principle 
 of heredity, as it is often called. Each generation 
 receives from its ancestry both good and ill, adapta- 
 bilities and opponencies to its environment; it is heir 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY . 
 
 77 
 
 to the characteristics, physical and mental, of its 
 progenitors, alike to their strength and their weakness. 
 The third is the law of reward — we call it in science 
 “ the survival of the fittest.” “ To him that over- 
 cometh,” if we may venture to use the words in a 
 lower sense, “ I will give a crown of life,” is the law 
 of Nature as well as of grace. The fourth is the law 
 of doom. “ Woe to the conquered ! ” is the inscription 
 graven deep on the crags of the earth. Nature is 
 inexorable; she condones no failure, remits no penalty. 
 The rocks are full of the records of long- vanished 
 races, which have lived their day, fought their fight, 
 and perished in the struggle, to give place to higher 
 and more capable organizations. Here, again, a phrase 
 from revelation may be applied to Nature, though in 
 a lower sense ; her doom is this : “ The soul that 
 sinneth, it shall die.” 
 
 Such are the lessons of Nature. Is the teaching 
 of Christianity — -divested of technicalities — so very 
 different ? It amounts to this : Cause and consequence 
 stand in their invariable and unalterable relation. 
 Before you — it seems to tell us — are two paths, the 
 one straight and narrow, on which the Spirit is guide, 
 of which the goal is life ; the other, broad and easy, 
 on which the animal nature leads, of which the goal 
 is destruction. Surely, though the circumstances be 
 
78 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 different, the principle is the same, and we cannot 
 affirm that there is one rule in Nature, another in Grace. 
 
 But, you may reply, “ The words which* have been 
 read offend us most in this respect, that they proclaim 
 unhesitatingly that the innocent shall suffer for the 
 guilty, and this is repugnant to our sense of justice.” 
 
 But, I may ask, is there anything in this rule 
 exceptional, abnormal, unprecedented ? The innocent 
 suffer for the guilty ! How can it be otherwise ? When 
 do they not suffer? Can a man squander his property, 
 whether through sin or through unwisdom, without 
 consequential injury to those who are dependent on 
 him ? Can he ruin his health by vicious living, with- 
 out giving cause to every child born of his body 
 to curse his father s sins ? Have you never heard of 
 congenital diseases, of ancestral taints of blood, of 
 hereditary phthisis, scrofula, insanity, and the like ? 
 Not a day passes but thousands of children are born 
 into this world, doomed by parental vice to a crippled 
 existence or to a premature grave . 1 
 
 Again, consider the case of a nation. This is a true 
 saying, though it be not of Christian origin : “ The 
 princes play the fool ; the people pay the penalty.” 2 
 
 1 If proof of this statement be needed,. I may refer to such a work as 
 that on Syphilis and the Nervous System ( Lettsomian Lectures), by Dr. 
 W. R. Gowers, F.R.S. See Lancet , 1889, vol. i. p. 68, etc. 
 
 2 “ Quiccpiid delirant reges,. plectuntur Achivi,” Hor., 1 Ep. 2. 14. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 79 
 
 It may be altered for a democracy without loss of 
 accuracy : for “ princes/’ read “ majority ; ” for 
 “ people/’ read " minority.” This law is writ large 
 on the pages of history. Greek, Jew, Roman, all in 
 their turn have suffered for national crime, national 
 vice, and national folly. The history of modern 
 Europe repeats the same lesson ; it proclaims the 
 operation of the eternal and inevitable laws of God, 
 that words, if they do not proceed from His mouth, 
 fail to sustain the life of man; that self-indulgence, 
 whatever form it takes, cannot be substituted for duty 
 as a guiding principle, nor molluscous sentimentality 
 for the plain rule of the Decalogue ; that the vices of 
 an aristocracy work a heavy retribution, and the 
 “ fool-fury ” of democracy brings a yet worse ruin. 
 Many a time has this proverb come true in the past, 
 many a time will it come true in the future, let 
 England be sure of that : “ The fathers have eaten 
 sour grapes ”■ — no doubt to their own sorrow — “ and 
 the children’s teeth are set on edge.” 1 
 
 It might be possible to imagine an order of things 
 in which each individual bore only his own burden ; 
 but this Utopia would not present the slightest 
 resemblance to the present world, for from it we must 
 abstract every idea of parentage, relationship, and 
 
 1 Ezek, xviii. 2. 
 
8o 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 mutuality. Each individual in it must be self-com- 
 plete, self-centred, and independently originated. But 
 the interdependence of the human race, and of all 
 others that we know, is a fact as essential to the world’s 
 order as gravitation itself, and is no more capable of 
 being excluded from it. After all, viewing the ques- 
 tion broadly, is it so unjust that we should be heirs 
 to our forefathers’ losses as well as to their gains ? 
 If a man leaves you his property, you cannot repudi- 
 ate his liabilities ! 
 
 “ But ” — I think I can hear our critic urge — “ do 
 you admit that men will be damned to eternity for 
 not availing themselves of a mode of obtaining for- 
 giveness of which they have never heard ? ” I admit 
 no more than this truism, that if I have never heard 
 of Christ, I cannot be saved by the knowledge of 
 Him, and that consequences must follow causes ; but 
 beyond this I decline to go ; for to express an opinion 
 upon a case, the circumstances of which I have no 
 means of ascertaining, would be an unscientific pro- 
 ceeding. But inasmuch as even man recognizes 
 readily the difference between a deed done with full 
 knowledge of its wrongfulness, and the same done in 
 ignorance, and punishes, if he does it in the latter case, 
 in the hope of educating either the individual or the 
 society, I find no difficulty in believing that the all- 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 81 
 
 knowing Lord of earth and heaven will not be fettered 
 by the imperfect legal forms of human procedure, but 
 will emphatically do what is right. I trust Him, in 
 Whom justice and love are alike perfect ; and should 
 I presume to ask, “Lord, and how shall this man 
 fare?” I seem to hear Him answer, “What is that 
 to thee ? Follow thou Me.” 
 
 An objection, however, may be made to the analogy 
 for which I have sought in Nature. This analogy, it 
 is urged, is misleading ; for the consequences in the 
 natural order are temporal, while in the spiritual 
 order they are eternal. The objection is less valid 
 than it seems. What consequences are not eternal ? 
 Can I, can you, undo that which has been done ? No ; 
 that — I say it with all reverence — is beyond the 
 power of God Himself. I may remedy, He may 
 remedy, the mistake. The hurt, the fall, through 
 His loving-kindness, may be made to work with all 
 things together for good. The battle lost, by the 
 help of the great Commander may be turned into a 
 battle won ; 1 but not seldom the defeat is in the 
 temporal order, the victory in the spiritual. There 
 are many things in this life — failures, losses, sorrows, 
 sin3, which, however they may be softened by lapse 
 
 1 The allusion, of course, is to the remark of Desaix to Napoleon 
 at Marengo. 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 of time, repaired or alleviated by future gains or 
 joys, can never be set right. 
 
 Consider an instance, trite though it be. The 
 “ desire of our eyes may be taken from us with a 
 stroke ” — be this friend, or child, or partner of life. 
 God may by this grief draw us nearer to Him ; but 
 henceforth a shadow darkens our path in life where 
 once there was unclouded brightness; there is an 
 aching void where once there was helpful com 
 panionship. 
 
 To take another instance. Suppose that health has 
 been lost — say from vicious living. Can this be re- 
 stored by any repentance ? God may so dispose the 
 allotted path of inevitable suffering as to find a use 
 even for the consequences of our evil deeds ; man may 
 so learn the bitter lesson from the wages of sin as to 
 rise on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher 
 things ; but even if, in a certain sense, the crooked 
 may be made straight, that which the cankerworm 
 hath eaten cannot be recovered — the lost limb, so to 
 say, cannot be restored. 
 
 But on this topic I need not enlarge. Unless we 
 suppose that a miracle be wrought, the consequences 
 of our actions are eternal. Happy the man whose 
 memory is not haunted by more than one golden 
 cloud-palace of the “ might have been ” .! 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 83 
 
 But I may still be charged with eluding the issue. 
 I declare, it may be urged, eternal suffering to be the 
 penalty of sin. As this is a subject on which by my 
 own powers I can know nothing, I restrict myself to 
 the words of revelation. But these I accept in what 
 appears to be their plain natural sense, into which I 
 decline to read meanings, however popular and preva- 
 lent they may be, when I can discover for them no 
 authority which is more than human. In revelation 
 I am told that eternal life is the gift of God to man, 
 and consists in the knowledge of Him and of Jesus 
 Christ, Whom He sent into the world ; that the punish- 
 ment of sin is sure, and can only be averted, if indeed 
 it can wholly be averted, by repentance ; and that the 
 ways of the sinner conduct him, not to eternal life, but 
 to eternal death. This I fully believe ; this appears 
 to me in harmony with the analogy of nature. The 
 consideration of how far it corresponds with our 
 critic’s assumption, or accords with popular ideas, is 
 an inquiry too long for the present occasion, and 
 immaterial for our immediate purpose. Enough that 
 I believe in retribution, since I believe in justice . 1 
 
 To conclude. Suppose we grant that the Gospel 
 proclaims a hard message when it says, “ Sin, and you 
 
 1 This subject is noticed, rather more fully, in another sermon in 
 this volume (No. IX.). 
 
8 4 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 shall suffer ; sin, and you will find you have hatched 
 a brood of ugly facts, which no smooth words will 
 deprive of vitality. Like young snakes, they slip 
 away among the herbage, and you cannot allure them 
 back to be killed, charm you never so wisely ! ‘ Many 
 
 are called, but few chosen ; ’ ‘ The wages of sin is 
 death/ ” Is that so hard a message ? Are you 
 offended that this is in the Gospel, which the God of 
 love Himself proclaimed ? Nature’s message is in 
 identical terms, and differs only in this, that its tones 
 are a thousandfold more hopeless. She knows neither 
 ruth nor pity. On her course she goes. Her path is 
 like that of some vast machine, beneath whose wheels, 
 as they roll onwards, myriad, myriad sufferers are 
 crushed, from whose walls the darts of death fly forth, 
 at random as it seems, to smite their helpless victims 
 in the terror-stricken crowd. Nature merciful ! Why, 
 in comparison with her, the granite rock is soft, the 
 tiger is an emblem of tenderness. 
 
 She points to no Utopia; she offers neither pardon 
 nor redress behind the veil ; she declares not only the 
 inevitable supremacy of law, but also, it would seem, 
 the wantonness of cruel chance. This is all the 
 comfort she can give — if I have understood her voice 
 aright : “ After that you have suffered, I promise you 
 extinction. I can no more. Do you say you had 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 85 
 
 better never have been born ? Perhaps so ; I cannot 
 help that.” 
 
 Suppose, then, we grant that the path which revela- 
 tion indicates may seem sometimes dark with gloomy 
 shadows, this at least we may claim, that it is bright 
 as with the perfect day in comparison with that 
 which Nature shows. Each may be beset with sorrow 
 and suffering, but the “ way of the Cross ” leads at 
 length to the peace of heaven and the undimmed 
 gladness of eternal life ; the way of Nature can offer 
 no better reward than extinction, no other peace than 
 that of annihilation. 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VII .). 1 
 
 “ Be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with 
 the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one 
 day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some 
 men count slackness.” — 2 Pet. iii. 8, 9. 
 
 “ All things come alike to all : there is one event 
 to the righteous and to the wicked.” This, many 
 would tell us, is the sole inference which can be 
 drawn from facts, whether they be those of Nature or 
 of history ; it is the one conclusion to which scientific 
 methods of thought must lead. ‘Your dream of 
 immortality/ men say ; ‘ your hopes of a continued 
 personal life are founded upon a series of alleged 
 events which have no warrant in history, other than 
 the illusions of some excitable and credulous disciples. 
 We see, in the evolution of the earth and of its 
 tenants, power, but not purpose; energy, but not God.’ 
 
 “ The life of man is as the flowers of the field.” 
 
 1 Preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on the Fifth Sunday 
 after Trinity, 1890. 
 
 86 
 
CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 87 
 
 These, in their season, put forth bud and blossom. 
 They dapple the meadows, they spangle the forest, 
 they kindle the moorland into a glow of colour, but, 
 like the sunset flush, they fade away, less transient 
 than it in this alone, that they have helped in 
 perpetuating the race. “ You think,” men say, “ that 
 the Gospel of Christ brings you a message of hope ; but 
 how far is that substantiated by facts ? ” Very little, if 
 we may trust appearances. “ It is nineteen centuries,” 
 they continue, “ since that Gospel was preached, and 
 what real influence has it obtained in the world ? That 
 is enough to show what a futility your prayer, ‘ Thy 
 kingdom come/ has proved. The failure of Chris- 
 tianity is its condemnation ; for it does not satisfy the 
 most convincing of all tests, that of experiment.” 
 
 “ The time is long ; the work is without a purpose.” 
 Let us, then, see whether the analogy of Nature can 
 give us any help in this perplexity ; whether the 
 same criticism, the same complaint, might not have 
 been made by overhasty onlookers full often in the 
 past, and what answer it has received from the logic 
 of facts in the process of the ages. If we grant that 
 change is slow, does Nature justify us in adding, “ but 
 it is also sure ” ? In our investigation of her ways, we 
 must not expect to discover any message of hope for 
 the individual ; for him, as it seems to me, she has 
 
88 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 ever but cold comfort. Something, however, would be 
 gained if we succeeded in obtaining only thus much 
 for our encouragement, that our labour in this world 
 is not a mere making of ropes of sand, so that, whether 
 we have our wages or not, it is better to work than to 
 sit still with folded hands. 
 
 It is, indeed, possible that occasionally in the past 
 teleological arguments may have been pressed too far ; 
 but we are in danger of undervaluing them at the 
 present time. Nature and History alike bear witness, 
 as it seems to me, to “an increasing purpose.” The 
 phenomena of this earth’s evolution can hardly be 
 understood except as a manifestation of Mind; and 
 their evidence, positive and negative alike, appear to 
 warrant the inference that, besides purpose, there may 
 be love. 
 
 They teach also, it seems to me, another lesson — it 
 is that of patience ; they utter a warning — it is 
 against a hasty judgment. “Why,” we are tempted 
 to ask, “ if Christianity is from God, has it not 
 triumphed ? Why does He delay so long to reveal 
 Himself and to help His servants ? ” 
 
 This question we cannot pretend to answer. But 
 we can at least reply that it is what the analogy of 
 Nature would lead us to expect. For that lesson we 
 have to thank science. Once we thought that this 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, 
 
 89 
 
 world, but a very few thousand years ago, came into 
 sudden existence, as at the waving of an enchanters 
 wand. Now we have learnt that through millions of 
 years it has been slowly changing from nebula to 
 solid, from incandescent orb to the fit abode of living 
 creatures. Glance at epochs in its history, if it be but 
 for a moment, to convince yourselves that this is 
 true. Millions of years ago — how many we cannot tell 
 — long after the earth’s glowing crust had cooled, and 
 the water had gathered in the ocean-depths, the 
 scene differed strangely from that which our eyes 
 now behold. Let us imagine ourselves led, by some 
 immortal guide, as in a vision of poet or prophet, 
 along the “ corridors of time/’ What pictures do we 
 see ? There is the earth, warmed by the sun, 
 moistened by the rain; the surf beats on the rock- 
 bound coast ; the streams leap down the mountain- 
 side ; the rhythmic processes of the physical forces are 
 the same as now. But except from these, there is no 
 other sound. The silence is unbroken by the cry of 
 beast or note of bird. The world is a waste, one vast 
 desert of herbless land and lifeless sea. To what 
 profit is this globe, this monstrous orb of rock, which 
 whirls its useless way through space ? So we might 
 well have asked. But wait and see. Let millions of 
 years pass, and again regard the earth. Herbage clothes 
 
9 o 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 the soil, trees rise on high, the waters teem with life, 
 the land has its creatures. Yet how strange are all 
 these! “ Plants and animals,” the voice of science 
 might say, “are alike lowly in organization. The 
 trees are little better than overgrown reeds and club- 
 mosses ; the animals at best do not rise above magnified 
 toads.” Look also at those miasmatic swamps, so 
 dismal to our eyes. Is this all that the Divine Energy 
 can effect ? “ Well,” our guide might reply, “ but for this 
 rank vegetation, these swamps which you despise, a 
 certain coming race, about which you do know a very 
 little, would find itself without its coal-fields, and 
 thus be deprived of a potent factor in its course of 
 progress.” 
 
 Years roll on in their countless thousands as you 
 watch the changeful vision of life displayed upon the 
 surface of the globe, and at every and any epoch you 
 might ask the same question: Why? For what 
 purpose ? Wherefore this delay ? Millions of years 
 were spent in making the world ; millions of years in 
 preparation for a being who, whatever his destiny, 
 can at any rate appreciate the marvels by which he is 
 surrounded, can rise above the things of sense, and, 
 by the use of reason, search after the unknown and 
 even grope after the unknowable. 
 
 Of all these countless years, of all these endless 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 9i 
 
 changes, man — we ourselves, we, the lords of creation, 
 have been the outcome. Life’s first germ on this earth’s 
 surface, whenever and whatever it may have been, in 
 the dim distance of those unnumbered years, was in 
 a sense the first germ of ourselves ; its varied history 
 does but record the phases in that long period of 
 gestation which has ended in the birth of the human 
 race. “ How slow ! ” we might have exclaimed again 
 and again. Yes, but how sure ! “ How fruitless ! ” 
 
 This might have been again and again our verdict. 
 Yes ; everything seems useless till time teaches you its 
 utility. 
 
 I claim, then, that for the race — I do not speak of 
 the individual — the earth’s history tells its tale of 
 purpose, not of the blind working of physical forces ; 
 of purpose, which, if you will not call it beneficent, has, 
 at any rate, had progress for its result so uniformly 
 as to justify us in regarding it as tending to that 
 end. 
 
 Once more. Look back on the history of the human 
 race ; for man also is a unit in the great and complex 
 scheme of Nature. Again I say that this deprives us, 
 more completely than heretofore, of any ground for 
 expecting rapid change or precipitate action. Once 
 we supposed that man’s history began some six 
 thousand years ago. Nay, that practically it could not 
 
92 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 be dated so far back; for the race, not much more 
 than four thousand years since, was reduced to a 
 single family — by whom, as we believed, “ the whole 
 earth was overspread.” What has science declared to 
 us ? We can now perceive the dawn of history in 
 ages which once seemed hopelessly dark. Our horizon 
 has been widened, the date of the genesis of the 
 human race — be that what it may — recedes into a 
 dim and distant past. For we know not how -many 
 thousand years, races of men have come and gone on 
 the face of this earth. Even in our own island— then 
 a part of the continent — savage tribes, like those 
 which linger on the Greenland coasts, once shaped 
 the rough flints into rude tools, and hunted, upon 
 its ice-bound shores, wild beasts which have since 
 vanished from the face of the globe. 
 
 So creations story runs; so the tale of man’s 
 earlier days is told. We now measure its progress 
 by millenniums rather than by centuries ; his history 
 by centuries rather than by years. “ The time is long ; 
 the work is slow.” True ; but something seems to come 
 of it which justifies us in doubting whether there is 
 not That behind phenomena which is more than mere 
 Force, more than undirected Energy. This, at least, 
 I think, our knowledge of the history of the earth and 
 of man now warrants us in asserting — that at every 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 93 
 
 epoch in the past, the present has been occupied in 
 preparing what has proved to be a legacy for the 
 future. There fell long since in the depths of oceans 
 now vanished from sight, as there falls still into like 
 depths , 1 one ceaseless shower of the dead shells of tiny 
 organisms which float like a living cloud beneath the 
 waves, and by that shower were built up the white 
 masses of the chalk which lies buried deep beneath our 
 feet, and forms the hills to north and south of this 
 river- valley. These and many another organism lived 
 and died to sow the dust of continents to be. Such has 
 been the law which has reigned on this our earth. 
 What wonder, then, if we find the like in the develop- 
 ment of man ? Take history — take its facts apart 
 from any connection with religious ideas, and what 
 do they tell us ? That there has been a slow change 
 from barbarism to civilization, a slow growth of the 
 moral faculties. If we disbelieve a revelation, we 
 cannot deny an evolution ; if we believe in revelation, 
 we must admit an increase in mans capacity for 
 receiving it. 
 
 1 Referring to the Foraminifera, especially the genus Globigerina , 
 which is as abundant in parts of the Atlantic as it must have been in 
 the waters under which the chalk of England and North-Western 
 France was deposited. There has been some controversy as to the 
 depth at which it ceases to live, but the evidence seems in favour of 
 its habitat being in a zone from the surface down to a depth of a very 
 few hundred fathoms. 
 
94 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 Progress, it is true, has not always been continuous. 
 There has been ebb and flow, like that seen in the ocean- 
 waters when the tide is rising upon the beach. If we 
 fix our eyes too exclusively upon any single epoch, we 
 might often deem that its lesson was of deterioration, 
 not of progress; of decay, not of growth. Now and 
 again darkness seems closing over the earth, and truth 
 flickers above the wild waste like some solitary beacon- 
 light, which the winds threaten to extinguish. Now 
 the last days seem to be at hand, as a civilized race 
 becomes effete, and is swept away by the inroads of 
 more vigorous barbarians. The work of centuries is 
 in danger of being undone in a single generation. 
 The Jew, with all his faults, saw spiritual truths more 
 clearly than the Chaldean, yet Jerusalem goes down 
 before the might of Babylon ; the vast and highly 
 organized fabric of the Roman empire totters and 
 falls, even when it has been conquered by the Cross of 
 Christ, before the irresistible flood of barbarian and 
 heathen invaders. Again and again the inevitable 
 rule is exemplified that all things alike wax old, and 
 in their turn decay. But still each nation, as it 
 perishes, leaves to the future some legacy of good. 
 The Greek bequeathed his philosophy ; the Roman, his 
 system of law and his example of voluntary discipline ; 
 the Jew, his spiritual insight and the all-absorbing 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 95 
 
 intensity of his faith, for which he would even dare to 
 die. The Teuton has set forth the lesson of chastity. 
 The “very perfect knight” of the Middle Ages has 
 made himself a mirror of chivalry. Each, and all, 
 in their turn, have left to us the example of their 
 virtues, the warning of their failures. They have 
 laboured and passed away, and we have entered into 
 their labours. Do we now complain that the time is 
 long ; that no purpose can be discovered in the seem- 
 ing confusion of our life on earth ? There is not an 
 impatient word which we can utter, which might not 
 have been said a thousand times over in the past — 
 which probably has been said ; for every age is prone 
 to consider itself as the last epoch in the world’s 
 history. That after it will come the deluge, in one 
 sense or another of the .phrase, is the illusion common 
 to every generation. We who are now living are not 
 exempt from it ; tacitly we assume that these are the 
 last times. Those who incline to optimism boast of 
 the triumphs of civilization ; they bid us admire this 
 great Babylon, that man has builded, as if material 
 progress were the sole end of his existence, and there 
 could be nothing more to fear than present ills, to 
 hope than present success. Those who incline to 
 pessimism dwell on the dark side of the picture — on 
 the symptoms of senile decay or the signs of coming 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 9 6 > 
 
 storm. These I would not undervalue. The present 
 are anxious days for the nations, at least of Europe, 
 and most of all for ourselves. They are as dark and 
 threatening — nay, for us more threatening — than those 
 in the past century, while the clouds were slowly 
 gathering for the great and prolonged storm of revolu- 
 tion and war. But whatever is the result to this or 
 that nation, we may be sure of one thing — that the 
 storm-cloud will at last roll away, and the sun come 
 forth to shine ; that the earth will once more be clothed 
 with flowers, though it has been watered by a rain 
 of tears and blood. 
 
 I need not pursue further this inquiry into the 
 analogy of nature, as bearing on the alleged slowness 
 and seeming want of purpose in the order of the 
 world. For the individual, I admit, we can discover 
 little ground for comfort or for hope. The most 
 cheering message which Nature can bring to bear is 
 that life and work are not wholly in vain. To this 
 aspect of the case and to his position I purpose to 
 refer in my concluding lecture. In the present one I 
 have endeavoured to indicate that the broadening and 
 deepening of our knowledge during the last half- 
 century, instead of justifying any impatience and 
 disbelief from the apparent slowness of God’s work 
 of redemption, has proved it to be in accordance with 
 the analogies which Nature affords. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 97 
 
 Ephemeral creatures that we are, we fancy that 
 God leaves us to ourselves, and cares not to guide our 
 steps, because we do not reap, so quickly as we expect, 
 the fruit of our labours. Petulant as children in our 
 impatience, we lay down as a condition on which our 
 belief is to depend, that the Eternal and Omniscient 
 God should conform to our requirements as to times 
 and seasons and results, as though we, in our pre- 
 sumptuous ignorance, undertook to regulate the clock 
 of time and the mechanism of the universe ! This, at 
 least, is the lesson taught in that great volume which 
 ever lies open before our eyes — the only volume which 
 some of us will condescend to read — that the 'growth 
 of man to his present stage has been by almost imper- 
 ceptible change, and has occupied thousands of years ; 
 the preparation of this earth for us, its masters, has 
 been carried out, by changes yet more imperceptible, 
 through years more by a thousandfold. 
 
 Oh the pity of it, when this tiny creature, man, this 
 mere speck in God’s vast universe, arrogates to himself 
 the brain of Omniscience and the throne of Omni- 
 potence ! Oh the love of it, when its Maker thinks 
 even this feeble fleeting creature worth lifting up from 
 earth to heaven, from time to eternity ! 
 
 H 
 
THE PRESENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 
 AND THEOLOGY (Boyle Lectures, No. VIII .). 1 
 
 “ Remember how short my time is : wherefore hast Thou 
 made all men in vain ? ” — Ps. lxxxix. 47. 
 
 If this life be all ; if “ to die ” be “ to sleep/' and we 
 must not even add, “ perchance to dream ” — a con- 
 clusion which, if restricted to inductions dependent 
 on the ordinary processes of observation, we seem 
 justified in adopting; if after death, to use the old 
 Greek poet's words, “we sleep a long, very long, 
 boundless, wakeless sleep ; " 2 — how should we most 
 profitably to ourselves spend this life ? This is a 
 question which, in the present day, not a few persons, 
 who regard any belief in revelation as an illusion, 
 seem indisposed to face. At this I do not wonder ; 
 for the question is an inconvenient one, since the 
 answers which seem most obvious do not commend 
 themselves to the better sense of mankind. 
 
 1 Preached in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on the Seventh Sunday 
 after Trinity, 1890. 
 
 2 E vdo/u€S ev /xaAa fxa.Kp'bv aTspfiova. yrjyperou vttvov. Moschus, Epitaph. 
 Bion.j 111. 
 
 98 
 
CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 99 
 
 But it must be faced, and on this subject I wish to 
 make a few remarks in bringing these lectures to an 
 end. Practically, as I have been endeavouring to point 
 out, I have found myself in this difficulty — that Nature 
 is an excellent mistress so long as everything goes 
 well, but that she leaves me in my misery as soon 
 as anything goes wrong. Another difficulty soon 
 suggests itself. I suspect that by obeying her, that 
 is, by ordering my life in strict accordance with the 
 principles which she seems to inculcate, my actions 
 sometimes would not harmonize with the ethics of 
 the most highly civilized portions of the human race. 
 Grant me a belief in a future life, which in some way 
 will be influenced by conduct in this, and the difficulty 
 created by this discordancy disappears. Insist that 
 on this subject I neither know nor can know any- 
 thing, except that any such expectation is most 
 unreasonable, and we ought to face the difficulty and 
 act accordingly. People, I think, are sometimes — it is 
 fortunate that they are — a little inconsistent. They 
 take their theology from Nature, and their morality 
 from sources which, if examined, will be found 
 dependent on revelation ; and they reason as if both 
 rested on the same foundation, and the former were to 
 be credited with the results of the latter. 
 
 In the preceding lectures I have indicated that all 
 
ICO 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 the hope, all the encouragement, which we obtain 
 from Nature is for the race. Her care, if she has any, 
 is for “ the type/' not for the “ single life.” Suppose 
 the lot has fallen to me in a fair ground ; suppose that 
 I live to a good old age, in vigorous health, untroubled 
 by anxieties, cares, accidents, sorrows ; that my career 
 runs smoothly, peacefully, happily, to its end. Then 
 when this comes I may say contentedly, I have had 
 my fair share of pleasure, and it is time to go to sleep. 
 I am glad to have lived, but now submit without 
 murmuring to the general law, and over my tomb you 
 may write as epitaph, “ I am not, and I grieve not.” 1 
 But suppose a different lot has fallen to me. Suppose 
 my days have been few and evil ; suppose I am the 
 victim of hereditary disease ; suppose I love but to 
 lose ; suppose that, through no fault of my own — and 
 this is often the case, — life to me, though brief, has 
 been one monotonous record of trial and calamity: 
 what shall I say then ? This is no imaginary case. 
 Do Siloam towers never fall on the innocent as well 
 as on the sinners ? When the Homan empire was 
 tottering to its ruin, did the sword of Goth or lance of 
 
 1 Part of the epitaph on the tomb of the late Professor W. K. Clifford, 
 which, if I remember rightly, runs as follows : — 
 
 “ I was not, and I was conceived ; 
 
 I lived, and did a little work ; 
 
 I am not, and I grieve not.” 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 IOI 
 
 Hun smite only the corrupt and the effete, and spare 
 the saints ? In the wild revolutionary outbreaks of 
 France — to pass at once to modern times — were no 
 men or women of noble lives murdered after insult, 
 shame, and outrage, for the wrong-doing of others — 
 wrong-doing of which they were wholly guiltless ? If 
 all ended with the fatal stroke of sword or axe, or the 
 last pang either of agonizing disease or torture devised 
 by man, what answer is to be given, should the 
 victim ask this question, make this complaint : “ Why 
 has this befallen me ? I have done no wrong ! My 
 birth, my life, is a monstrous injustice ! ” Nature can 
 reason with the fortunate, but she has no answer for 
 the unlucky. It is not my business to find an answer. 
 I am glad of it ; for I could not. 
 
 Let us now consider for a few moments the other 
 difficulty which I mentioned. Would a scientific 
 morality — as we might call one founded simply on in- 
 ductive principles — agree in all points with the ideals 
 to which the most civilized races have attained, pre- 
 sumably by the aid of revelation ? Critics of Chris- 
 tianity would admit, I believe, as its friends would 
 assert, that its moral ideal is the highest known ; 
 that man can desire no more, can aim at no more, 
 than to live the life of the Christ. Such a life be- 
 comes intelligible if we regard the present one as 
 
102 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 forming a part of a life much more extended, as only 
 one act in a drama ; but if not, the self-sacrifice which 
 the Christ-like life involves cannot, as it seems to me, 
 be reconciled with our ideas of individual justice. It 
 may be said that society, and especially civilized 
 society, would be impossible unless individuals were 
 actuated by an altruistic spirit, and gave up their own 
 good for the benefit of their fellows. Undoubtedly, 
 the principle is true, but to what degree ? with what 
 limitations ? Here the divergence will take place. 
 The answer, with a rational man, will depend on the 
 probabilities of the case. To defend myself, my family, 
 even my state, I may endure the hardships of warfare 
 and go so far, under very exceptional circumstances, 
 as to sacrifice my life ; counting the latter as a piece 
 of the ill fortune to which I have already referred, 
 because in this case I can see a direct and obvious 
 benefit as the result. Indeed, it might even happen 
 that, if I refused to run the risk, I might yet be 
 killed, or only spared to find that life had become not 
 worth the living. But in most cases, when we are con- 
 sidering the vague, shadowy, and extremely uncertain 
 results which are associated with efforts to regenerate 
 society, where we are sure of nothing but the personal 
 inconvenience, we might with good reason decline to 
 take more than a fair individual share of the toil. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 103 
 
 So it will perhaps be said, “ Your only motive for 
 altruistic actions is the hope of reward.” This is a 
 possible, though an unfair, statement of my position. 
 Beward, in the ordinary sense of the term, does not 
 enter into the question at all. Assuming that this 
 little troublous scene with which we are most familiar 
 forms only a very small part of life, and that there 
 is a God in Whom justice and love are perfect, then 
 the statement that I shall be happier for trying to do 
 my duty becomes a truism ; it expresses an unques- 
 tionable and inevitable fact. It is, so to say, the 
 result of a law of Nature, and to call it, or think of 
 it, as a reward, is as much a confusion in thought 
 and words as to say that when I am inconvenienced 
 by cold I am rewarded by approaching a fire. 
 
 But positive as well as negative results would 
 follow if we adopted a new basis for morality. One 
 founded on induction from Nature would vary con- 
 siderably from the law of Christ. Indeed, sometimes 
 the two systems, if we may judge by results, seem to 
 come into collision. 
 
 The most obvious discrepancy, as it appears to me, 
 is difficult to discuss, but we must not on that 
 account pass over it in silence. W T e may be bold to 
 claim that in Judaism first, in Christianity afterwards, 
 man is urged to war against the lusts of the flesh, 
 
104 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 more than in any other creed which rests on a 
 rational basis. We may add that this teaching has 
 been approved by the verdict of mankind— at least of 
 that part generally admitted to be the best. “ Blessed 
 are the pure in heart : for they shall see God/' is a 
 statement which I believe few thoughtful men, how- 
 ever they might explain it, would desire to dispute. 
 But would the teaching of Nature lead us to an 
 identical result ? Certainly not, if we judge by 
 experiment, as witnessed in the case of Rome, Greece, 
 and other heathen nations. But without pressing 
 these instances, should we, on general principles, come 
 to the same result ? There are obvious difficulties, 
 owing to the nature of the subject, in dealing with it 
 in public ; so I content myself with stating the con- 
 clusions which seem to me to follow, if we restrict our- 
 selves to the teaching of Nature. They are these : that 
 the body is likely to be more healthy when the organs 
 duly perform their various functions ; that, so far as we 
 can see, Nature is always in favour of temperance in 
 use rather than of total abstinence ; that chastity then 
 becomes a question, not of general obligation, but of 
 individual temperament ; and that a state of society 
 could easily be imagined so regulated that vice, as we 
 now call it, would be compatible with refinement and 
 a high civilization. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 105 
 
 But further, Christian altruism and Nature some- 
 times, as it seems to me, come into direct collision, by 
 impelling us towards opposite courses of conduct. The 
 aim of Nature, if we may so call it, the apparent 
 tendency of her operations, is the “ survival of the 
 fittest,” the development of the race to its highest 
 standard of physical excellence (in which I include 
 mental qualities) and to the most perfect harmony 
 with its environment. Christian altruism has a 
 different aim, and tends to results in some respect 
 incompatible. It holds life to be a sacred thing, which 
 it uses every effort to save, sometimes at no small risk 
 and sacrifice. “ Protect,” it says//' the weakling infant, 
 the helpless cripple, the consumptive, the scrofulous, the 
 epileptic, the mentally infirm, the lunatic — in a word, 
 all Nature’s failures; keep them all alive, nurse them 
 tenderly, give them a larger portion of time and skill 
 and help than you bestow on the others, who, as you 
 say, can take care of themselves.” Now, what is the 
 result of this ? That you raise many of them up to 
 become fathers and mothers, propagators and trans- 
 mitters of disease ; you multiply their representatives 
 generation after generation, you deteriorate the race, 
 and fill the world with maladies, which might have 
 been stamped out at first by a little judicious hard- 
 ness of heart. The savage who kills weakly infants, 
 
106 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 and knocks on the head the aged and infirm, is a 
 much more logical disciple of Nature than the 
 philosopher who, believing only in an Energy, is a 
 subscriber to asylums and dispensaries, and busies 
 himself in saving lives useless to the community. I 
 do not reproach him for his inconsistency ; on the 
 contrary, I honour him for it; but that does not 
 alter the difficulty into which I feel myse]f forced. 
 
 God and Nature do seem to me here to be at strife. 
 Our efforts for moral improvement result in physical 
 deterioration. I speak of the race rather than of 
 individuals. I can only escape from the difficulty 
 either by being logical and following the guidance of 
 Nature — in which case I must expatriate myself to 
 some place, if it can be found, which combines the 
 morality of ancient Eome with the customs of Fiji, 
 lest I come into collision with the law of civilized 
 lands ; or by adopting the hypothesis, as some would 
 call it, that in this present life we can only see one 
 chapter of a long and connected history. 
 
 Yet more. Let us assume that, by a certain course 
 of conduct, a man becomes a benefactor to his fellows ; 
 that is to say, he gives up his life to labour for them ; 
 to helping in sorrow, sickness, and calamity ; depriv- 
 ing himself of pleasure for their sake, and encounter- 
 ing noisome odours, revolting sights, possibly even 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, 
 
 107 
 
 personal harm. This conduct does not, of itself, conduce 
 to his happiness. I grant, indeed, that a satisfaction 
 is felt in the performance of what is called duty, a 
 pleasurable emotion in the exercise of the altruistic 
 faculties ; but I am sure that, with the majority 
 of mankind, this sensation would not outweigh the 
 discomfort, depression, and sadness which are inevi- 
 tably produced by the contact with pain and suffering. 
 
 A logically minded man, who believed that this life 
 was all, would be forced, it seems to me, to come to 
 this resolve : “ I will take my fair share of altruistic 
 effort, just as I am prepared to do in the case of other 
 social duties; but it is too much to expect me to 
 sacrifice myself for that indeterminable and uncertain 
 end which you call ‘ the benefit of the race/ Indeed, 
 our views in regard to this matter are so wanting in 
 precision, that I am not at all sure whether these 
 efforts are really conducive to this end, and whether 
 it is not better to obey the law of Nature, and let the 
 weaker go to the wall/' 
 
 This, I believe, is the answer which most men 
 would return. Depend upon it, the basis of the 
 highest efforts of self-sacrifice is the hope, not of reward, 
 but of immortality. Did we believe that we were 
 day-labourers only on this earth, a paralysis, slow but 
 sure, would creep over all our efforts to regenerate 
 
io8 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 ourselves and society; our conclusion as to the best 
 rule of life would be, “ Let us eat and drink; for 
 to-morrow we die/’ interpreting the maxim, not as the 
 sensualist, but as the philosopher. 
 
 This, I believe, would be the conclusion of common 
 sense. It will be particularly unwelcome to those 
 who combine the exaltation of altruism with the 
 negation of God — a combination, by the way, which, 
 so far as it has been experimentally tested, has not 
 worked well. The conclusion has been attacked, but 
 the assaults upon it, and they are vehement, appear to 
 me but so much smoke and wind — fine phrases, which 
 will feed nobody. This epicurean conclusion, whether 
 we like it or not, seems to me the only one which is 
 justified by the inductive treatment of those facts 
 which are cognizable by our bodily senses alone. It 
 may even startle Christians; but, after all, did not St. 
 Paul state almost the same conclusion in other words 
 when he said, “ If in this life only we have hope in 
 Christ, we are of all men most pitiable ” ? 
 
 I am prepared to accept his statement ; nay, I will 
 go even further, and say that if Christianity be an 
 illusion, it has been a doubtful gain to mankind. I 
 am not speaking of the distorted conceptions of it 
 which have been commonly prevalent in the world. 
 These, at certain epochs, have made it almost a curse. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 109 
 
 But even if the doctrine be that of Christ, I still doubt 
 whether, so far as this life is concerned, it has added, 
 on the whole, to our happiness. Gains undoubtedly 
 there have been, but are not these counterbalanced by 
 the drawbacks? His teaching has set before me an 
 ideal which I feel to be unattainable ; it has told me 
 that the way in which I must walk is strait and 
 narrow; that it is found only by the few, and missed 
 by the many ; that success, which alone means happi- 
 ness, is rare. Hence, according to the ordinary law of 
 probabilities, I am more likely to fail than succeed, 
 and so, instead of being able to live my little day (the 
 only one, as it may prove) quietly and easily, I am kept 
 — to use a homely illustration — in a perpetual condition 
 of strain, worry, and fever, like one who is preparing 
 for a competitive examination. I am bidden to take 
 up my cross daily. Yes ; but I do not like it. The 
 weight is heavy, it bruises and hurts my flesh, and no 
 fine phrases can alter the fact of the pain. I could 
 have lived as a philosopher — not, indeed, very happily ; 
 but if I should have hoped nothing, I should have 
 feared nothing. This illusion has spoiled my present 
 life, and swindled me out of my only chance of 
 pleasure. 
 
 Denounce these conclusions, if you please, as coarse, 
 realistic, selfish. I admit they are, when regarded 
 
no 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 from the position which I actually occupy ; but if you 
 forbid me to take this, because it rests on an illusion, 
 then I am driven to the other, when I try to look the 
 questions connected with my life in the face, fully 
 and fairly, as I am accustomed to do in dealing with 
 difficulties in science. If you forbid me to believe in 
 a Personal God, and a possibility of immortality, then 
 the world seems indeed to be “out of joint, 1 ” and our 
 existence to be a thing as incomplete as the design of 
 a watch with the mainspring omitted. 
 
 Let me, then, conclude by briefly recapitulating 
 the position which I have been led to occupy by 
 my method of study. When I turn to the Book of 
 Nature, its language seems to me to proclaim not only 
 the operation of an Infinite Energy, but also of Mind 
 and Purpose, in the main beneficent; for, though 
 individuals ofttimes suffer sorely, yet the general 
 result appears to be in favour of happiness, and the 
 outcome of the struggle is the improvement of the 
 race. I find nothing in Nature which forbids me to 
 hope for a revelation, or compels me to deny that 
 there can be any truths other than those which may 
 be tested by my bodily senses. I find much in man 
 and in his history which appears inexplicable if I 
 regard revelation as an illusion, and his knowledge of 
 God as a mere cloud-palace of his own imagination. 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 ill 
 
 If, indeed, I do so regard it, then I am compelled to 
 conclude that I am wearying myself in vain, that in 
 striving to enter in at the strait gate, I have not only 
 lost many opportunities for present enjoyment, but 
 also have added needlessly to the anxieties of life. 
 
 So the end is this : Science does not forbid me to 
 believe; nay, seems to go so far as to say, "Not im- 
 probable.” History appears to go yet further, and to 
 say, “ Most probable.” While the witness of my own 
 heart declares that in Christ it finds the ideal which 
 it needs, the sympathy of the human, the perfection 
 of the Divine, nature. 
 
 If you tell me that I may not believe the story of 
 His life because it contains incidents which are in- 
 explicable by our present knowledge, and even con- 
 trary to our experience, I reply that to me the 
 world is full of miracles ; for it abounds with things 
 which I cannot comprehend, and results which I 
 should not have expected. Do you retort that this 
 commits me to belief in every extravagant tale that 
 wears a pietistic dress? Not at all. I claim the 
 right of treating those as I treat startling assertions 
 in science, by making the best use of my own 
 judgment and knowledge, and demanding very 
 strong evidence for what seems to them highly im- 
 probable. In so doing I am not inconsistent, for 
 
1 12 
 
 THE PRESENT CONFLICT 
 
 every search for truth must he conducted on the same 
 principles. 
 
 What effect, then, will be produced on Christianity 
 by scientific progress ? In some respects, none. 
 That which has happened has happened. If Christ 
 lived, died, and rose from the dead, this has become 
 part and parcel of the irrevocable past, which nothing 
 can alter. What He said also belongs to the province 
 of fact, and so cannot be changed ; but our understand- 
 ing of His teaching may be liable to modification. 
 Christianity in the past has been well-nigh smothered 
 under a parasitic growth of ecclesiasticism : to the 
 root of this, science will apply the axe. It has been 
 almost concealed beneath a superstructure of sacer- 
 dotalism : this fabric science will shatter. Vain pre- 
 tensions of ignorant upstarts in priestly garb, to lord 
 it over their better-instructed fellows ; vain attempts 
 to deter by anathemas from any honest search for 
 truth ; fruitless efforts to petrify in an elaborate 
 system of dogma the living spirit of Christ’s teaching, 
 to stem the tide of increasing knowledge and growing 
 thought : these science will destroy. The emancipa- 
 tion of Christianity from the fetters forged in ancient 
 days is not yet wholly complete. In this great work, 
 when the present misunderstandings are overpast, 
 science will co-operate. Thus aided, thus enlightened, 
 
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 113 
 
 Christianity will be able to assume a position stronger 
 and surer than ever in the past, and those who come 
 after us will reap the fruit of our present trials and 
 labours in an untroubled assurance of faith, and a 
 clearer knowledge of the Son of God than has been 
 allotted to us in this anxious epoch of the earth's 
 history. 
 
 1 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN . 1 
 
 “ May your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, 
 without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” — 
 
 1 Thess. v. 23 (R. V.). 
 
 In reading histories, particularly those which tell 
 us what individuals thought and said rather than 
 what nations did, we cannot forbear occasionally 
 wondering what would be the feelings of some of 
 our forefathers could they return for a while to this 
 world. How often they would find their vaticinations 
 falsified ! Sometimes the event has shown that their 
 Utopian dreams have been baseless; that the world 
 has only been made a very little better by the triumph 
 of a cause to which every effort of their lives was 
 devoted ; that the seed nurtured by a martyr s blood 
 has brought forth but a scanty fruit ; but more often 
 that predictions of evil to come have been unfulfilled ; 
 nay, not seldom that the measures which seemed to 
 them only pregnant with calamity have proved among 
 
 1 Preached before the University of Cambridge, in St. Mary’s 
 Church, on Sunday, March 19, 1882. 
 
 114 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 115 
 
 the greatest of national boons. We, in the present 
 age, who have reached the period of middle life, 
 cannot help wishing sometimes that this return might 
 be permitted to us. We have lived and are living 
 through an epoch of change and progress unequalled, 
 perhaps, by any through which the world has passed. 
 Whatever verdict future generations may deliver upon 
 the nineteenth century, they cannot deny that it has 
 been signalized by an unprecedented progress in the 
 mechanical arts and in scientific knowledge ; the 
 powers of Nature are being pressed into our service, 
 the secrets of Nature are being investigated with a 
 success hitherto unexampled : what then, we cannot 
 but long to know, will be the effect of these conquests 
 upon the world at large ? what will be the manhood 
 of the race, whose adolescence we are witnessing ? 
 Great, whether for good or for evil, the effect must 
 be; for, as in the organic world, physical acts upon 
 vital, and the race, at any rate to a great extent, is 
 the result of its environment, so must it be also in the 
 world of thought and belief. We have lived long 
 enough to see many landmarks, once regarded as ever- 
 lasting, removed; many beliefs, once deemed sacred, 
 abandoned ; many illusions, once thought substantial, 
 dissipated : what changes further, we cannot help 
 asking, are in store ? If we could return to life a 
 
1 16 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 century hence, should we find the old story of Bethle- 
 hem and of Calvary, of the first Easter morn and the 
 first Ascension-tide, counted as among the childish 
 things, which the adult race of men had put away, 
 or should we find that race standing fast in a firmer 
 though manlier faith than ours, and “ the Christ 
 That is to be ” resembling yet more closely the Christ 
 Who was in Palestine, and Who now is in the unseen 
 world ? \ 
 
 For myself, though I dare not say what the more 
 immediate future may be, or whether the discipline 
 of suffering, perplexity, and defeat may not be among 
 the influences necessary to continue the evolution of 
 our race, I cannot doubt of the ultimate result. Truth 
 is great, and will prevail. But I venture to predict 
 that religious beliefs are destined, like our social re- 
 lations and scientific opinions, to considerable change, 
 and that before long we shall see a process in the 
 former similar in kind to that which we are witness- 
 ing in the latter. Still, as in the natural world, so 
 in that domain which for want of a better term we 
 call the moral and the spiritual, I believe that the 
 ultimate result will be one of development, not of 
 discontinuity; that there is in religious beliefs a 
 process of evolution analogous to that which there 
 is (though here also it may be within limits) in the 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 117 
 
 organic world. So that (to take the old simile) how- 
 ever the superstructure of the Church may change, it 
 will be built still on the same rock— Christ crucified 
 and Christ risen. 
 
 I venture also to think— and it is this idea which 
 I wish to bring more especially before you on the 
 present occasion, though in so short a time I can only 
 indicate one or two aspects of it — that some of the 
 more immediate influences in what I may term the 
 evolution of religious opinions are to come from a side 
 commonly supposed hostile to all theology, namely, 
 from science ; and I believe that we should gain by 
 introducing into the former more of the method (with 
 the necessary modifications) which is habitual in the 
 latter. Is the fact that the Eastern Magi were among 
 the earliest to visit, and the first to bring gifts to, the 
 newly born Christ never to be among the “ things 
 which are an allegory ” ? Certainly the guardians of 
 His Church have hitherto not shown much favour 
 to what they term “ unsanctified learning,” and I doubt 
 that not a few of them would have resolutely held the 
 door against the pilgrim strangers, notwithstanding 
 their gold, until some satisfactory test of orthodoxy 
 had been duly subscribed. To the elucidation of the 
 great problem — the nature and the destiny of man — 
 every department of study can bring its contribution. 
 
nS THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 The various sciences are capable of being helpful to 
 Theology, not, indeed, ministering to her with hand on 
 mouth, like servants before an imperious mistress — a 
 view, I may remark, not seldom favoured by ecclesi- 
 astics — but as fellow-labourers in a great cause, whose 
 provinces, indeed, are distinct, yet who nevertheless 
 are capable of rendering much help one to another. 
 
 To prevent misconception, to which I know from ex- 
 perience one is always liable, I shall venture to indicate 
 a little more fully the general nature of the changes 
 which, as it seems to me, we may expect. The 
 Christian creed (to use a popular term) consists partly 
 of historical statements — a record of what are held to 
 be facts — the doings and sayings of certain persons, 
 especially of One, Who is, of course, Christ Jesus; 
 partly of the interpretations which men have put upon 
 these deeds and words. Now, the former obviously can 
 only be altered by the removal of misstatements on 
 points of detail. An historical narrative (subject to 
 such correction) is either true or false. The basis of 
 Christianity is the life and teaching of Christ, recorded 
 in the Books of the New Testament. To regard this 
 as legend in which there may be some substratum of 
 fact, is for all practical purposes, as it seems to me, to 
 reject it. We may admit the possibility of inaccuracy 
 in isolated and unimportant details, as we are in the 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 119 
 
 habit of doing in all matters of history ; but after due 
 allowance made for this, and for the idiosyncrasies of 
 the recorders, we must either reject the Gospel story 
 of Christ Jesus, or must accept it as we now do and 
 as the world, I believe, will continue to accept it. 
 But a considerable part of the creed of most Christians 
 — the major part, I fancy, with many and the most 
 prominent part in theology, as the term is commonly 
 understood — consists of inferences more or less elabo- 
 rately constructed from the words and deeds of the 
 historical Christ. From the conclusions of Councils, 
 and sometimes from the efforts of individual thinkers, 
 has originated Christian dogma as distinguished from 
 Christian doctrine. Now, many earnest Christians 
 appear to regard the former as something almost 
 Divine — nay, some are ready to say in all sincerity, of 
 their own particular opinions, “ This is the Catholic 
 faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot 
 be saved.” To deny, indeed, that in the “ process of 
 the suns 55 there is accretion to the sum of our know- 
 ledge, to deny that there is a development in belief as in 
 everything connected with vitality, would be contrary 
 to all analogy ; but the important question is — How is 
 our knowledge to be increased ? Is theology to grow 
 by processes of creation or by processes of evolution ; 
 by direct revelation through the instrumentality of 
 
120 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 Councils of the Church or some other definite channel 
 of inspiration (using the word in the popular, limited 
 sense), or, as all other knowledge grows, by successive 
 approximation — development now on this side, now 
 on that — by the correction of over-hasty guesses and 
 erroneous conjectures, and by the frank admission that, 
 after certain first principles are determined, a very 
 large field must be regarded as open to inquiry and to 
 debate ? This is what I mean by the application of 
 scientific methods and a scientific spirit to theology. 
 When we attempt this reformation, two principles will 
 have to be boldly admitted ; one, that the defenders 
 of the Faith in the past (as probably ourselves in the 
 present) have often made, even with the best intentions, 
 most unfortunate mistakes, so as to be numbered justly 
 among the opponents to the real progress and ameliora- 
 tion of the world ; the other, that we cannot hope fully 
 to grasp the mysteries of God’s working, that our 
 words and conceptions and methods of thought are all 
 founded on the finite, and are only capable of dealing 
 completely (if they do that) with the finite, so that we 
 can but approximate to, not perfectly understand, 
 those mysteries which lie beyond the veil. Hence 
 we must be content sometimes not only to “ believe 
 where we cannot prove,” but also to admit that there 
 may be many rays of the Divine effulgence which have 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 121 
 
 not yet illuminated our own particular mental horizon, 
 Christians therefore in general, and the clergy in . par- 
 ticular, must abandon that tone of arrogant dogmatism, 
 and those vituperative habits which have too often 
 characterized and, judging from the so-called religious 
 newspapers, still too often characterize them, and must 
 be content to admit the possibility of much divergence 
 of opinion with regard to many points which are dis- 
 tinctive of Churches rather than of Christians. Perhaps 
 a day may come when not a few so-called defenders of 
 the faith may be regarded as among its real enemies, 
 and charity be restored to its place as the crowning 
 Christian virtue. 
 
 On a former occasion 1 1 laid before this congregation 
 some thoughts relating to a scientific hypothesis, con- 
 cerning the genesis of plants and animals, and possibly 
 of the human race, which is rapidly growing in favour 
 among those most competent to form an opinion, and I 
 endeavoured to show that, although this hypothesis 
 would conflict with opinions commonly held, it touched 
 no cardinal doctrine of Christianity, and left unex- 
 plained (as we should expect from the nature of the 
 case) those mysteries which belong to the province 
 of revelation. I purpose now to glance briefly at 
 
 1 The sermons are printed in a volume entitled Sermons on some 
 Questions of the Day. 
 
122 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 what appears to me a Scripture theory of the nature 
 of man, since it may, I think, help us in many of the 
 difficulties which are beginning to present themselves 
 to thoughtful persons. In so doing, I ask that we 
 should as far as possible free ourselves from precon- 
 ceived ideas in matters of interpretation. I mean 
 that, while assuming the author of a particular Book 
 of the New Testament to have the power of telling us 
 something which neither we nor indeed he, under 
 ordinary circumstances, could have found out for our- 
 selves, we should treat his words exactly as we should 
 do those of any other author, and try to make out 
 (without being fettered by previous interpretations, 
 however venerable) what meaning appears most 
 natural to them. 
 
 The question, then, often suggests itself — What is the 
 nature of man ? Does he differ, and if so, how does he 
 differ, from the rest of the animal kingdom ? As our 
 knowledge stands at present, a marked distinction 
 seems to exist (notwithstanding some cases of apparent 
 difficulty) between the inorganic and the organic 
 world ; it is much more dubious whether we can 
 establish one between the vegetable and the animal. 
 In both the latter, however, there is a common presence 
 of organisms influenced by that mystery (call it force 
 or what you will — the term will only be a cloak for 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 123 
 
 ignorance) to which we give the name of life. Wherein, 
 then, does man differ from one of the more highly 
 organized animals ? Regarded from the standpoint of 
 science, we must, I think, admit that he differs only in 
 degree, not in kind ; for I suppose that no one now 
 would attempt to maintain that animals possess only 
 instinct, and not reason. As the structure and capa- 
 cities of the future plant or animal are potentially 
 present in its germ, so the intellectual powers of man 
 may be seen nascent in members of the animal world. 
 If, then (regarded solely from this standpoint), they 
 are not immortal, neither is he; if he is, so are 
 they. For myself, looking thus at the matter, I can 
 see no other conclusion possible. If we would con- 
 struct a complete psychology, we cannot obtain and 
 we should not expect to obtain the information from 
 science, however successful it may be in furnishing us 
 with tests and illustrations. We cannot prove the 
 existence of a soul by experiment, or even infer it by 
 logical processes from observation. We must look for 
 our information to another quarter. Revelation tells 
 us that man is, or at any rate can be, something more 
 than an animal, in the possession of a soul. This word, 
 however, it is almost needless to remark, has been used 
 with so much vagueness, that beyond the mere asser- 
 tion of an immortality at any rate possible — doubtless 
 
124 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 
 
 a great point — it conveys to us little significance. 
 But we may, I think, find in Scripture, especially in 
 the writings of St. Paul, a far clearer statement than 
 this word conveys — one which, carefully considered, 
 will explain many perplexities in our complicated 
 nature. He asserts almost explicitly, the existence in 
 man of a tripartite nature. Body (( iwpa ), life (ipvxv)> 
 and spirit ( Trvtv/ua ). The word “ soul,” which I shall 
 endeavour to avoid, is employed sometimes as equiva- 
 lent to the third ; sometimes (for instance, in my text) 
 as a translation of the second ; and sometimes loosely 
 for both combined, or perhaps all three. For the first 
 term, especially when its animal and more ignoble 
 nature is insisted on, the word Gap% (“ flesh ”) is often 
 substituted. This is the obviously perishable part ; 
 but gw pa is possessed by the most etlierealized natures. 
 There are gw para t7rov pavia (“ bodies celestial”). Indeed, 
 it is impossible to conceive of personality, except as 
 God, apart from Gwpa. If there be an ego — I speak 
 as a man — there must be a limitation, a difference 
 between the within and the without, the consciousness 
 of which constitutes personality, and renders the 
 former the aw pa of that which is conscious. In this 
 way only can I differentiate on the one hand between 
 a mere force and life, and on the other between life, as 
 exhibited in the world, and God. Thus, even as for 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 125 
 
 life there must be a material basis, though that in 
 itself does not constitute life, so for spirit, if it is to be 
 individualized and exhibited in a mode in which it can 
 be apprehended by our consciousness, there must also 
 be a material basis of some kind. Perhaps to some 
 this may appear downright materialism; on second 
 thoughts it will be seen to be a mere truism that a 
 conscious unit is no more conceivable by us, apart 
 from a material basis of some kind, than is light, or 
 heat, or electricity, or any one of what we call the 
 forces of Nature. I fully admit the possibility of the 
 existence of spirit not so limited, but that belongs to 
 an order of things, strictly speaking, beyond the con- 
 ceptions of finite beings. 
 
 The union of life (which implies some kind of con- 
 sciousness) with body makes up the animal (probably 
 also the plant) ; the unity of consciousness constitutes 
 the individual. There is a continuity of consciousness 
 in the individual, there is also a certain continuity in 
 the race ; but in the latter — and this is true in every 
 variation of it which may be evolved under the in- 
 fluence of changing environments from age to age — 
 there is also a certain discontinuity due to the begin- 
 ning of a separate consciousness for each individual. 
 This obviously occurs whenever there are three indi- 
 viduals in the world where a short time before there 
 
126 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 
 
 were but two. In connection with this subject, I may 
 add the remark, that we observe in Nature instances 
 where an individual, a variety, or a species, apparently 
 from failing in some way or other to comply with the 
 conditions of its environment, becomes extinct. A 
 branch on the tree of life, not always with premonitory 
 withering, sometimes after exuberant efflorescence, 
 comes to an abrupt stop; and thus so far as it is 
 concerned, another discontinuity is introduced. In 
 the history of life we seem to be led by insensible 
 gradations from the simplest cell to the most highly 
 organized animals, and I do not see that from the side 
 of natural science we can argue for anything more. 
 Of whatever perfection of bodily structure, of whatever 
 perfection of reasoning powers, the animal has been or 
 even may yet be capable, there remains, it seems to 
 me, but one end — at last the limbs drop nerveless 
 down, at last the busy brain is still ; and what then ? 
 Dissipation of the constituent atoms ; return of the 
 localized force to the totality of the world s energy ? 
 Perhaps. Continued existence under greatly modified 
 conditions ? Hardly likely. Nothingness ? Most 
 probably. 
 
 But on the darkness of that bourne, whither sooner 
 or later our steps must tend, revelation sheds a ray of 
 light. It tells us of another element in our nature' — a 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 127 
 
 gift to man and to man alone — -the spirit, the breath 
 of God ; for only by some such symbolical phrase can 
 we appreciate what it is. This is the key-note struck 
 in that story of its first beginning which was told 
 to the race in its childhood, when man is said to have 
 become a living soul ; this is unfolded more clearly in 
 another greater revelation, when it was declared to the 
 astonished doctor in Israel “ that which is bom of the 
 flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is 
 spirit ; ” and this tripartite nature — this trinity, if I 
 may be permitted the term — in man is yet more 
 distinctly described in the psychology of St. Paul. 
 What the spirit is we cannot attempt to define. We 
 talk glibly of spirit, but we attach only little definite 
 meaning to the foreign term. Perhaps to the early 
 Christian, to whom the word was associated with the 
 movement of the passing air — mysterious in that he 
 knew not whence it came and whither it went, con- 
 nected with all that was instinct with health and life 
 — the term had a suggestiveness which, to us, it has 
 almost lost. Still, though we can no more define it 
 than life, though we can far less completely and surely 
 indicate its phenomena, it may be very real, very true, 
 a matter of the most assured belief. By this it is that 
 we are made sons of God and heirs of immortality. 
 
 No passage, if I may be allowed to digress a little, 
 
128 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 brings this out more clearly than the well-known 
 seventh chapter in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. 
 You know how difficult this is to understand; but to 
 myself, at any rate, it has been greatly simplified by 
 being looked at in this light. The argument seems 
 to run thus : Man, regarded simply as an animal, a 
 combination of body and life, a living organism, is 
 subject naturally to a number of impulses and desires. 
 These are not in themselves sinful ; they are common 
 to him with the rest of the animal world, and must be 
 
 * 
 
 judged by the same standard. But the Law, embodied 
 most completely in the Mosaic dispensation (a 
 preparation, viewed in its effect on the race, for this 
 new birth in Christ) made many of these sin by 
 saying, “ Thou shalt not.” What is not directly or 
 implicitly forbidden cannot be considered wrong. Sin 
 is the transgression of the Law. The Law, however, 
 being merely negative, had no power of quickening ; 
 it could only condemn. Its sentence was, “ In thus 
 doing as the animals, thou dost not fulfil thy destiny ; 
 thy end therefore is death like unto theirs.” As the 
 Apostle says, “ I was alive without the Law once, but 
 when the commandment came, sin became quick ” (the 
 translation “ revived ” appears to me liable to mislead, 
 for the Apostle clearly does not contemplate a prior 
 existence of sin in his own person), “and I died.” 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 129 
 
 Thus even the gift of the Spirit does not deliver man 
 from conflict. There is still the flesh, the animal 
 nature, which ever tends one way, which, although it 
 may be subjected to the spirit, is not changed by the 
 spirit, and is literally, even to the end, a “ body of 
 death ; ” but there is also the spirit, no longer appeal- 
 ing only to the prohibitions of the Law, but ever 
 pointing onwards and upwards to its Parent in 
 heaven, ever directing the weary to the Cross of 
 Calvary and the risen Saviour. 
 
 Revealed truth thus takes a middle ground between 
 two erroneous extremes — an optimist pantheism and a 
 Manichean dualism. Sin is the following of the lower 
 instead of the higher nature, is electing to be an 
 animal rather than a man. As the misuse of the 
 vital powers results in a practical suicide, in the 
 destruction of the living organism, so the neglect of 
 the spiritual powers, the “ living after the flesh / 5 
 results in the death of the more perfected individual. 
 The analogy between the natural and the spiritual life 
 seems to hold in all respects. Each is in its beginning 
 inexplicable, we may rightly say miraculous ; each is 
 mysterious, incapable of exact definition ; each has a 
 beginning; but who can say in either case at what 
 moment the vital principle is individualized? In each, 
 too, the law of the survival of the fittest operates ; 
 
 K 
 
130 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN, 
 
 and who can define the precise mode and the precise 
 moment of death ? Thus, as in all the variety of 
 matter there seems to be an underlying unity of 
 substance, as in all the variety of organism there 
 seems a unity of vital force, so in all creation, from 
 the lowest which we can behold to the highest which 
 we can conceive, there is a unity through Him in 
 Whom in the strictest sense of the words we, yet more 
 fully than other creatures, “ live and move and have 
 our being.’’ 
 
 This view of the nature of man seems to me to 
 have an important bearing on one or two questions 
 which are of no little importance, though perhaps 
 their full gravity is not yet appreciated. 
 
 If scientific inquiry should result in establishing 
 as a fact the descent of man by processes of evolution 
 from some members of what is commonly called the 
 animal kingdom, we may view this result with calm- 
 ness, because we can claim for him the possession of a 
 gift which they had not received. As the Christian 
 believes that in Christ J esus the perfect manhood was 
 united to the Godhead in a Person Who, to the sons of 
 men, seemed but as one of themselves, so in his own 
 case the perfect animal has been united to the Spirit 
 of God. If, then, we shrink from a conclusion to which 
 a rigid theology would force us as to the fate of the 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 131 
 
 myriads of human beings who lived their little day in 
 the countless centuries of the unrecorded past, or if 
 we find the phrase, “ left to God’s uncovenanted 
 mercies,” unsatisfyingly vague, we may answer, taking 
 such a view of human nature as we have indicated, 
 that we have no reason to suppose that they had 
 yet been quickened by the Spirit. Or again, if another 
 chain of reasoning drives us to conclusions as to 
 the future of many in later times, which to us seem 
 hard to reconcile with the idea of a God of love as 
 revealed in the Bible, we are allowed, in that case, to 
 ask whether this union of Spirit with living organism 
 can never be broken, and are bidden to search the 
 Scriptures to see what they really declare on this 
 point. Perhaps we may find that their words, under- 
 stood in their natural sense, though they most clearly 
 declare that sin shall never go unpunished, do not 
 necessarily establish a doctrine commonly held, and 
 that it is doubtful whether they warrant us in 
 interpreting death to mean eternal, but agonized, life. 
 
 On another question also such a view of Nature 
 as I have indicated will, I think, be found helpful ; 
 namely, as to the due relation of the several members 
 of this tripartite nature. To bring the body into 
 subjection, to conquer the lower self, is, I think, 
 that part of morality, whether Christian or not, which 
 
1 3 2 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAH. 
 
 is of origin truly Divine ; for I believe that a morality 
 strictly psychic, not spiritual in origin, would allow 
 whatever could be shown to be conducive to the 
 health of the individual, so long as this did not 
 conflict with the general well-being of the community. 
 Spiritual religion declares that there are some animal 
 impulses which must at all cost be subdued. But in 
 so doing it does not favour the Manichean view, which 
 some seem to have adopted, that every natural 
 appetite is of itself sinful. The body has its rights as 
 well as the spirit; it is the spirit’s home, and I think 
 we are justified in inferring that it is our duty to 
 keep that home in the best repair possible. However 
 we may admire the fixity of purpose and endurance 
 of those men who lived the life of fakeers to conquer 
 their lower natures, we must admit that they com- 
 mitted suicide, however unconscious of it they might 
 be. They too often destroyed the better as well as the 
 worse side of themselves ; they suffered from stunted 
 sympathies, warped affections, unbalanced judgments, 
 and many forms of mental disturbance, to say nothing 
 of the mischief which they did by setting before their 
 fellow-men standards of conduct which were impracti- 
 cable and erroneous. Special forms of self-denial, 
 special acts of self-sacrifice, may be the duty of this 
 or that individual, exactly as in the ordinary relations 
 
THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN 
 
 133 
 
 of life we may have to imperil and even to sacrifice 
 it on some exceptional emergency. But the aim of 
 the Christian should be simply to do his duty, that is, 
 as I understand it, to accept the order of things into 
 which he is born, and to make the very best he can of 
 them as regards himself and as regards others. 
 
 We are living, as I have said, in times of change. 
 No man dare predict what may await himself, still 
 less what trials may lie before the younger among his 
 hearers. As in each mans history there are periods 
 of special anxiety, either from trials without or trials 
 within, from adverse circumstances or from the 
 rebellion of his lower nature, so is it at present with 
 our own nation, I may say with the civilized world. 
 Of the ultimate outcome I have no doubt ; truth will 
 triumph in the future as it has triumphed in the past ; 
 but I confess to melancholy forebodings when I see 
 the powers of evil gathering for the conflict, and the 
 religion, if I may so call it, of the carnal man once 
 more attempting to replace the revelation of God, 
 while the clergy, nay, earnest Christians in general, 
 are too often occupied in reviving doctrines which are 
 of dubious validity, and in claiming an authority 
 which experience has shown that they do not possess. 
 Still, these things may be but as the darkness that 
 heralds the dawn ; this dimness but that of the 
 
134 
 
 THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 
 
 morning mists which distort and magnify every 
 obstacle ; through the breaks in these it is even now 
 possible to discern the amber light beginning to glow 
 in the eastern sky. Meanwhile it is our duty to labour 
 on in patience and in trust, in the hope of doing, ere 
 we die, some little for Christ, some little to render the 
 world wiser and better than we found it. Our task 
 may seem but humble, our lot in life but lowly, our 
 contribution to the rock on which future generations 
 shall build may seem but as the tiny cell which each 
 single polyp adds to the great coral reef ; we may find 
 ourselves misunderstood, misrepresented, even dis- 
 liked ; but if we have brought some few, be they only 
 children or humble folk, nearer to their Father in 
 heaven ; if we have shown some young men or women 
 that the Christ Who cries, “ Conquer thy lower nature 
 and come unto Me,” is worthier of love than the dis- 
 torted image which his own mind or that of his earlier 
 teachers has unwittingly fashioned ; then while our 
 epitaph may be, “ I was not, and I was conceived ; I 
 lived, and did a little work,” we may claim for it a 
 brighter ending : “ I am not, and yet I am ; I grieve 
 not, for I rejoice.” 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE (No. I .). 1 
 
 “ All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profit- 
 able for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in 
 righteousness.” — 2 Tim. hi. 16. 
 
 Inspiration — the inspiration of the Bible. How 
 often is this word, this phrase, used in sermons, in 
 arguments, in controversies ! yet how perplexed many 
 of us would be if called upon to give them a meaning ! 
 This is not without excuse, because it is always diffi- 
 cult to formulate satisfactorily our conceptions of 
 things and relationships which transcend our powers. 
 A general idea is present in our minds with sufficient 
 distinctness to be a principle of action, yet it eludes 
 exact definition, and refuses to be fettered by rigid 
 statements. 
 
 But, granting the difficulty, it is unfortunate that 
 many persons make no effort in this direction, and are 
 content to use, in matters of the gravest moment, 
 words, the meaning of which they do not attempt to 
 ascertain. 
 
 1 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street, Septuagesima Sunday, 1889. 
 
 135 
 
136 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 At the present day it is of the utmost importance 
 
 ♦ 
 
 to make this effort. What inspiration means, what 
 the inspiration of the Bible implies, has a bearing on 
 most of the controversies of the day; and I do not 
 hesitate to say that many a man, owing to miscon- 
 ceptions about these points, has been led to consider 
 Christianity incredible, and to adopt as his creed, if we 
 may so call it, the maxim, “ We know not anything.” 
 
 Many people seem to imagine that the Church of 
 England — for with the practice or formularies of other 
 Churches I am not concerned— has approved a par- 
 ticular theory of inspiration, and by it is committed 
 to stand or to fall. This is assumed, tacitly rather 
 than explicitly, in most of the attacks to which, at the 
 present day, Christianity is exposed. The assailant 
 puts to us this dilemma : “ You appeal to the Bible as 
 an inspired book. Here is a mistake in history or in 
 science. Either deny facts or repudiate your autho- 
 rity.” A formidable alternative. But is this really 
 the only choice which remains to us ? 
 
 Where is this definition of inspiration to be found ? 
 We search the authoritative statements of our Church, 
 and we search them in vain. The Church of England, 
 while assuming that there is such a thing as inspira- 
 tion, while using phrases in regard to it which enable 
 any moderately thoughtful person to obtain a general 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 137 
 
 idea of her mind (if the phrase be permissible) on this 
 point — an idea sufficient for all ordinary purposes — 
 never commits herself to a precise and rigid definition. 
 Look at the Sixth Article, where we should naturally 
 expect to find it, and where we have the nearest 
 approach. It runs thus : “ Holy Scripture containeth 
 all things necessary to salvation : so that whatsoever 
 is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not 
 to be required of any man, that it should be believed 
 as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or 
 necessary to salvation/' The Article then enumerates 
 the books included in the canon of Scripture, and 
 those which are only read “ for example of life and 
 instruction of manners," but not applied “ to establish 
 any doctrine." 
 
 This cautious, guarded language stands in marked 
 contrast with the rash statements of many would-be 
 “ defenders of the faith ; ” so unpalatable, indeed, is it, 
 that by many it has been quietly ignored, by some 
 an effort to alter it has been made. The last of these 
 attempts, a quarter of a century since, was due to persons 
 who, I have no hesitation in saying, ought to have 
 known better . 1 Fortunately, it had no other result 
 than that many men signed a document in haste of 
 
 1 The reference is to the so-called Oxford Declaration, circulated for 
 signature in the year 1864. 
 
138 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 which I think not a few must afterwards have repented 
 at leisure. 
 
 Let me quote a very extreme view of the inspira- 
 tion of Scripture, and we shall see the dilemma in 
 which it would place us. “ The Bible is none other 
 than the Voice of Him that sitteth upon the throne. 
 Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, 
 every word of it, every syllable of it (where are we to 
 stop ?), every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the 
 Most High .” 1 Obviously, the author must be speaking 
 of an ideal Bible and an ideal translation, for that 
 doubts exist as to the exact text in the original docu- 
 ments, and as to the renderings of many expressions in 
 every text, is known to every educated person. If the 
 author meant no more than this, then his apparently 
 very precise statement has no substantial value, be- 
 cause it relates to a non-existent condition of things ; 
 probably — though I do not suppose he had yet 
 passed from the stage of ornate rhetoric to that of 
 careful thought — he did mean much more, and intended 
 to intimate that no historical discovery or scientific 
 induction can contravene any statement found in a 
 Scripture where the text is undisputed and not of 
 doubtful meaning. 
 
 1 Burgon, Inspiration and Interpretation , serm. iii. p. 89 ; cf. serm. 
 iv. pp. 93, 94. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 139 
 
 Lay down such a canon, and what is the inevitable 
 result ? You make the authority of Scripture like 
 that glass toy called a Rupert’s drop; break off the 
 smallest piece (and, remember, one end is very thin 
 and brittle), and even the strong ball shivers into 
 dust. You call upon mankind to abstain from the 
 use of faculties which you assert God has given, and, 
 in effect, ultimately leave them only this choice — 
 either to submit to any guide who can persuade 
 them of his infallibility, or to rest content with some 
 vague form of Deism, and the hope that, if there be 
 any future life at all, which is a very doubtful matter, 
 they may then be comforted by some solution of the 
 enigmas of the present one. 
 
 In what, then, may we reasonably expect that in- 
 spiration should consist ? Should it anticipate the 
 researches of the traveller, the historian, or the man 
 of science ? In the province of the discoverable, should 
 it transfer mankind at a single step from the starting- 
 point to the goal, and act indeed as a royal road to 
 learning ? Would there be any advantage to the race 
 in this ? Speaking for myself, I should very much 
 like to know what was the history of the earth in 
 the era which intervened between the first consolida- 
 tion of its crust and the appearance thereon of life. 
 To ascertain this would save me a great amount of 
 
140 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 trouble/ but I am not aware that it would do any 
 very direct good to my moral and spiritual nature ; 
 and if this had been revealed to me in the past, I 
 should have lost the education both of faculties of 
 observation and of powers of inductive reasoning. 
 The moral gain would have been but slight, the 
 intellectual loss considerable. It seems, then, to me 
 unreasonable to expect that the author of any part 
 of Holy Writ should have been enabled to discern 
 what future ages would discover. The most that we 
 can expect would be that, in using the language of 
 his day, he should be enabled to sift out that which 
 was hurtful in its tendency, as, for example, to excise 
 expressions or repudiate traditions favourable to 
 idolatry or polytheism, however strongly the tide of 
 opinion, in his era, might set towards these. 
 
 We adopt a similar position in regard to historical 
 inaccuracies. Suppose Stephen, owing to a lapse of 
 memory, or the author who reports his speech, did 
 make a mistake as to the burial-place of Jacob, would 
 that have any serious bearing on the effective value of 
 the speake2’’s conviction of the nature and mission of 
 Jesus, and of the reality of the call which enabled him 
 
 1 As it happens, much of the time which the writer has spent in 
 scientific work has been occupied by the study of the crystalline rocks, 
 in the hope of ascertaining some information as to the circumstances 
 under which certain of these were formed. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. [41 
 
 to face death boldly, and to perceive, beyond the things 
 of sense, the vision of the Crucified One in triumph ? 
 If we must adopt rules of this kind in the receipt of 
 evidence, I will undertake to leave you with very 
 little history at all. Have you ever tried to write 
 a description of some incident which you have 
 witnessed, or scene which you have visited ? I can 
 speak from experience, and know how difficult it is to 
 avoid some mistakes. Nay, I would undertake to 
 say that if, when I had written the best account in 
 my power, eleven other men of equal ability and care 
 had been doing the same, our accounts would not 
 correspond in every minute detail. 
 
 But it may be said, “You are ordinary men, not 
 inspired.” I reply that, notwithstanding our admitted 
 fallibility and the discrepancies in our stories, you 
 Avould believe the main facts to which we testified, 
 and that you have no right, simply in obedience to 
 some unauthorized conception of inspiration, to set 
 up another standard for the ordinary history of Scrip- 
 ture. Suppose I consulted a friend of proved holiness 
 and ripe wisdom in some case of conscience, would my 
 opinion of the value of his advice be affected by his 
 making a mistake in some historical allusion or 
 illustration ? We are justified, then, in attributing to 
 historical difficulties in Scripture neither more nor less 
 
142 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 weight than we should assign to them in other ancient 
 records. 
 
 Let us now look at the words of the text which I 
 have chosen as being one of the few which make any 
 direct statement on the subject of inspiration. People 
 often quote this text as if there was no doubt as to 
 its significance. There is really very much. The 
 meaning of the most important word cannot be deter- 
 mined with absolute precision ; the translation of the 
 passage as a whole is very uncertain. As regards the 
 former point, the phrase, “ given by inspiration of 
 God,” represents one word in the original Greek. 
 This is a compound of two words — one signifying 
 “ God,” the other derived from that used for “ breath ” 
 or “ spirit.” Thus it means that in which God may 
 be said to breathe, that in which either His Voice, in 
 a figurative sense, may be said to sound, or His in- 
 fluence becomes a motive force ; it expresses, in short, 
 by a single word, the idea conveyed in English by the 
 phrase which obviously has a certain amount of pre- 
 cision and a certain kind of vagueness. But the real 
 difficulty, as probably many of you know, is to decide 
 upon its connection with the other words in the 
 passage. Two renderings are possible — one, that 
 adopted in the Authorized Version, “ All Scripture is 
 given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 143 
 
 doctrine ; ” the other, which you will find in the 
 Revised Version, “ Every Scripture inspired of God is 
 also profitable for teaching.” As a question of scholar- 
 ship, it is not clear which rendering is right. Each 
 has its difficulties, for the sentence, as it stands in the 
 Greek, is defective, not having a verb. Each has been 
 supported by weighty authority, but, as intimated by 
 the change in the Revised Version, the best scholars 
 of this age incline to the second rendering. 
 
 If this be adopted, the passage states no more than 
 all would readily admit, and does not bring us any 
 nearer to a definition of “ inspiration.” 
 
 The rendering, however, adopted in the Authorized 
 Version is less conclusive than at first sight it seems 
 to be. “ All Scripture” cannot mean the Bible as 
 we have it, unless we can show that the writer is 
 speaking prophetically. At the date usually assigned 
 to this Epistle, some of the most important documents 
 now included in the New Testament did not exist, 
 while few, if any of them, had obtained a wide 
 circulation or had been formally authorized by the 
 Church. The only canon then known was the Hebrew 
 one — or the Old Testament, as we call it. Hence, even 
 if we adopt the rendering of the Authorized Version, 
 the passage is very far from being conclusive as to 
 what inspiration is and to what results it leads. 
 
i 4 4 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 We seem, then, justified in concluding that there is 
 no real ground for the expectation — which, indeed, 
 is sometimes formulated as an assertion — that the 
 writers of the Scriptures and the first preachers of the 
 Gospel should he infallible on matters of science or of 
 history — that, in short, a revelation would be made to 
 them in any field which was the legitimate province 
 of human discovery. 
 
 In what, then, does their inspiration consist ? We 
 may answer this question, so far as it can be 
 answered, by considering what we ought to expect 
 on the supposition — and before a Christian audience 
 I may venture to assume the truth of this — that there 
 is a God, and that it is His will to reveal Himself to 
 man; that the influence of spirit on matter, of the 
 Divine on the human, is a thing not incredible and 
 impossible, but to be anticipated as a necessary, 
 indeed a leading, factor in the process of the education 
 of the race. 
 
 In matters of ordinary knowledge we expect no 
 more than we should do of other writers and wit- 
 nesses, namely, that they should take reasonable care 
 in ascertaining facts, and be thoroughly honest in 
 recording them; we expect to find them using the 
 language and expressing the opinions as to scientific 
 phenomena which were current among the men of 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 145 
 
 their age. We do not expect them to know the 
 geography of lands which they had never seen; to 
 test, by appliances yet undiscovered, the traditional 
 history of their epoch ; or to anticipate the researches 
 in physical and natural science for thousands of years 
 to come. But if the conceptions of their age should 
 embody ideas distinctly false or strongly tending to 
 produce moral deterioration, these ought to be expur- 
 gated and replaced by others which were true, and 
 more ennobling. We expect that as time went on they 
 would tell us more and more clearly of God, and of our 
 place and work in the Divine economy, for we know 
 of no process of science, no method of discovery, by 
 means of which man, obtaining all his ideas from the 
 concrete and the finite, can attain, of himself, to a 
 knowledge of the unconditioned and the infinite. 
 
 By what searching can I find out God ? From the 
 phenomena of this world I may infer His existence as 
 the simpler solution of a dilemma of difficulties, but 
 I cannot prove it. Demonstration is impossible. 
 What I or others have regarded as the influence of 
 the Spirit of God upon our natures, thrilling through 
 them like an electric current — which, hasting through 
 the wire from an unseen and inaccessible source, is 
 manifested at the nearer end in almost dazzling light 
 — this influence may be no more than the vibration 
 L 
 
146 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 of the nerves, the clashing of the molecules of this 
 bodily frame, self- begotten, self-produced, — a mere 
 tiny storm in the tiny tea-cup of individual humanity. 
 
 If, then, there be a God, if man is to know Him 
 and of Him, He must reveal Himself to man and 
 through man. You who regard the Christians creed 
 as “not proven,” you believe that there is a Great 
 First Cause, you believe in the education of the 
 world, in the progress of humanity. Surely, then, there 
 is an a priori reasonableness in our position when we 
 regard this education as Gods work, and believe that, 
 by processes which we can only imperfectly compre- 
 hend and by methods which we cannot precisely define, 
 He manifests Himself through man to men, and thus 
 is leading us onward from the corruptible to the 
 incorruptible, from the mortal to the immortal, from 
 the temporal to the eternal. 
 
 We believe, then, in a revelation; we believe in an 
 inspiration, while we decline to extend it to matters 
 with which it has no proper concern. Its function 
 is to tell us of that which we cannot discover for 
 ourselves — to tell us of a Father in heaven, and how 
 we children can best draw nigh unto Him. We judge 
 of the validity of any claim to inspiration by the 
 evidence of the mans life, by his relationship to 
 circumstances, by the tendency and effect of his 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 147 
 
 words. We make use in his case, with the need- 
 ful modifications, of the rules which we apply to all 
 testimony and all authority, whether in history, in 
 science, or in ethics ; and in so doing we need not, I 
 believe, be afraid to claim an inspiration for the 
 Scriptures or to listen to the voice of God as it is 
 breathed through the lips of men of olden time. 
 
 Some will call this a low view of inspiration. I 
 believe that, however imperfectly expressed, it is a 
 true view, that it will stand the test of experience, and 
 that it harmonizes with the analogy of the Divine 
 order in Nature. Its application to the oldest Book 
 of the Bible is indicated in the next sermon. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE (No. II .). 1 
 
 “ Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old 
 time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of 
 Nachor : and they served other gods.” — Josh. xxiv. 2. 
 
 In my last sermon I endeavoured to give a brief 
 outline of the idea which the word “ inspiration,” as it 
 seemed to me, should convey to our minds, and of the 
 information which was to be expected from an 
 inspired writer. It is my present intention to make 
 some remarks on the application of these principles 
 to the earlier Books of the Bible. In what sense, if 
 any, are they inspired ? Are they an infallible history 
 of the making of the world, and the infancy of the 
 human race ? or are they a mere collection of legends, 
 highly interesting on account of their antiquity, but 
 with no more moral value than the folklore of any 
 other ancient nation ? In short, are they mere guesses 
 at truth ? or are they steps towards the truth, which 
 seem to indicate a guidance higher than that of man ? 
 
 These are questions of great interest and of no 
 
 1 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street, Sexagesima Sunday, 1889. 
 
 148 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 149 
 
 small importance. Less than a quarter of a century 
 since they were considered vital by not a few persons 
 who would have made the authorship and authority 
 of the Pentateuch a question on which a Church 
 should stand or fall. Happily, they are now regarded 
 with calmer eyes. They are still far from settled, 
 but it is seen that the investigations of physical and 
 historic science leave untouched the vital principles, 
 and only modify or destroy conceptions which are of 
 human origin or of temporary importance. We still 
 recognize the voice and the guidance of God, though 
 speaking in a tongue and leading by a way different 
 from those which we had formerly supposed. 
 
 Eestricting our inquiry on the present occasion to 
 the few earliest Books of the Bible, called collectively 
 the Pentateuch, the first question for consideration 
 is obviously that of their date and authorship. In 
 regard to these many different opinions are enter- 
 tained, which, however, will be found to lie between 
 two extremes— the one, which is supported by the 
 later synagogue and by traditional Church opinion, 
 that Moses was the composer of the entire Pentateuch, 
 from its first letter to its last ; the other, that the 
 whole work was composed after the return from the 
 Babylonian Captivity, though it doubtless embodies a 
 considerable amount of earlier tradition. Those who 
 
150 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 support the latter view consider the historical value 
 of the Pentateuch to be hardly greater than that of 
 a collection of folklore and an epitome of opinion 
 among the most educated and spiritually minded J e ws 
 four or five centuries before the birth of Christ. Be- 
 tween these extremes the truth, I believe, will be 
 found. 
 
 To answer the question proposed above, we must 
 glance at the history of the Hebrew canon. There 
 can be no doubt that the Old Testament, to all intents 
 and purposes in its present form, has existed for at 
 least two thousand two hundred years. The date of 
 its latest Book may be fixed, with no risk of serious 
 error, as B.c. 420. This, then, gives one limit to our 
 inquiry. The century succeeding the return from 
 Captivity after the decree of Cyrus is the latest date 
 to which any part of the Old Testament can be 
 assigned, and before long, among the scribes of 
 Palestine, great precautions were taken to prevent 
 even a variation of the text. 
 
 But how much belongs to this era ? Obviously 
 certain Books, or portions of Books — such as the 
 writings of Daniel, Ezekiel, and the later minor 
 prophets, some of the Psalms, the conclusions of the 
 Books of Kings and Chronicles, with the whole of the 
 subsequent history — are later than the destruction of 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 151 
 
 Jerusalem by the army of Nebuchadnezzar. Did all 
 the older sacred Books perish in the conflagration of 
 the Temple, and were they reproduced from memory 
 by those who had been their guardians ? or were the 
 records themselves preserved, and were they only 
 revised and edited — to use a modern phrase — by Ezra 
 and his fellow-scribes ? 
 
 The former alternative seems to me very improbable ; 
 but that a certain freedom of treatment in regard to 
 the sacred Books was permissible in the era ante- 
 cedent to the completion of the canon may be safely 
 assumed ; for even those who consider themselves the 
 most orthodox defenders of the authority of Scripture 
 are compelled to admit the occasional interpolation of 
 new matter into the sacred text. Indeed, one of the 
 best and most conservative of the Old Testament 
 critics now living in Germany 1 assures us that the 
 equivalency of the Thorah (or the Law) and the Pen- 
 tateuch is a comparatively late idea, not more ancient 
 than the completion of the Old Testament canon. 
 
 Further, the great majority of modern scholars, 
 including many who are earnest Christians, while they 
 differ, as may be expected, on many points of detail, 
 are agreed in considering the Pentateuch to be a 
 composite work, containing at least three or four 
 
 1 Dr. F. Delitzsch, A New Commentary on Genesis : Introduction. 
 
152 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 distinct documents of different ages, and brought into 
 its present form by the addition of fresh material from 
 more than one hand. Sometimes the editor, as we 
 may call him, has only quoted or pieced together older 
 records, but sometimes he has acted as an author, 
 though, no doubt, digesting ancient material or fol- 
 lowing established tradition. Thus in the Book 
 Genesis three fundamental documents are recognized. 
 In two of these the Almighty is designated by the 
 word Elohim , rendered “ God ” in our version ; in the 
 third by the word Javeh (or Jehovah ), commonly 
 rendered “ the Lord.” To one of the Elohists (as they 
 are called) — and the one now regarded as the later of 
 the two — belongs the opening section of Genesis, as 
 far as the end of the third verse of the second chapter ; 
 to the other Elohist belong mainly the twentieth and 
 remaining chapters. The section between these two 
 passages is in great part the work of the Jehovist. 
 
 Again, without entering upon further details, both 
 Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as Books, and in a form 
 resembling at all closely the present one, are regarded 
 as the work of later and separate hands, though con- 
 taining much very ancient material, directly or in- 
 directly from the above sources. 
 
 To what period, then, are we to assign the various 
 components and the completed work ? Space will 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 153 
 
 not permit me to give more than the barest outline. 
 Perhaps I shall put the matter before you most 
 clearly in a series of statements, every one of which 
 appears to me to rest, according to the ordinary rules 
 of scientific criticism, upon very strong foundations. 
 
 1. At the date of the Exodus the art of writing 
 had been in existence for several centuries, both in 
 Egypt and in Chaldea, so that there is nothing im- 
 possible in the supposition that Moses was the author 
 of the Pentateuch, or of a part of it; for “he was 
 learned,” as we are told, “ in all the wisdom of the 
 Egyptians.” ' 
 
 2. Many points of detail in the Pentateuchal legis- 
 lation indicate an Egyptian influence, and so may be 
 naturally assigned to an epoch while the memory of 
 the nation’s stay in that country was still very fresh. 
 
 3. The greater part of the Pentateuch is older than 
 the Babylonian Captivity, though the last recension, 
 including a considerable part of Leviticus, may date 
 from immediately after that period. 
 
 4. The Book of Deuteronomy is probably next in 
 order of age, though it incorporates a considerable 
 amount of older material. A not improbable date for 
 its completion would be about seven centuries before 
 the birth of Christ. 
 
 5 . To the greater part of the remainder a much 
 
154 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE, 
 
 more ancient date must be assigned. There seem no 
 valid reasons against supposing considerable portions 
 to be documents contemporaneous with the events 
 which they describe, though there may have been 
 some alterations made in later recensions. Hence we 
 need not hesitate to claim a Mosaic basis for the 
 Pentateuch. It is no legendary tale, shaped into some 
 kind of consistency during the later days of Judaism, 
 but is a record, in many parts actually contempo- 
 raneous, of the nation’s youth. Though it may not 
 be possible in all cases to distinguish between original 
 material and later accretions, the Book (speaking of it 
 for the moment scientifically, and apart from theo- 
 logical questions) is an old historical work, possessing 
 a value similar to that of the ancient records of Egypt 
 and Chaldea. 
 
 I pass on now to the earlier chapters of Genesis, 
 which belong, as I have said, to one or other of the 
 oldest group of Pentateuchal documents. In order to 
 appreciate their place in history, it will be necessary 
 to turn away for a moment from the account of the 
 chosen people. 
 
 When Abraham descended into the valley of the 
 Nile, he found settled there a nation which had 
 attained to a high state of civilization. It was even 
 then far from young, as we count time ; some of 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 155 
 
 those vast monuments, which still endure, were even 
 then comparatively ancient — as venerable, at least, 
 as many an English cathedral. Yet more, when 
 Abraham went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, he left 
 behind a nation hardly less civilized — a nation whose 
 beginnings stretch back to a past, not less, perhaps 
 even more, remote than that of Egypt. 
 
 Let us glance for a moment at this region, the cradle 
 of the Hebrew race, the birthplace of that Faith which 
 is the guiding principle of our lives. 
 
 The two great rivers of Mesopotamia pass onward 
 to the sea through a vast alluvial plain, almost as long 
 as the British Isles, three or four hundred miles wide, 
 and of extraordinary natural fertility. This “ land of 
 Shinar ” soon became a cradle of civilization. It was 
 occupied, perhaps six thousand years ago, by a people 
 concerning whose aspect, language, and religion much 
 has been discovered of late years. The Accadian nation 
 (for so it is commonly called) was a member of the same 
 great division of the human race as the Tartars ; their 
 religious conceptions belonged to the childhood of 
 humanity. Each natural object was believed to have 
 its own spirit. Their priests were sorcerers, their 
 prayers mainly incantations. This race, in process of 
 time, was dominated and ultimately absorbed by a 
 branch of the great Semitic family- — perhaps partly by 
 
r 5 6 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 conquest, partly by peaceful immigration. Be this as 
 it may, the population, the language, the religion, 
 gradually became Semitic, modified, however, by the 
 influences of the older race. This fusion of the two 
 nations had been accomplished long before the days 
 of Abraham. There is reason to think that the rise 
 of the Semitic power in the valley of the two rivers 
 dates from several centuries before his time; indeed, 
 the best authorities assign to Sargon, the Semite King 
 of Accad, a date so remote as b.c. 3700. 1 The language, 
 which was not very different from Hebrew, and the 
 religion of this people, are now well known. In 
 the later days of Biblical history, they figure as the 
 Assyrians and the Chaldeans, devastators and de- 
 stroyers of Israel and of Judah. Thus the Hebrew is 
 only one tribe of the great family which in ancient 
 days overspread so large a portion of the East. In 
 the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we find 
 the history of their migrations in a traditional form, 
 nations being represented as men. When we examine 
 the records of the religion of these ancient Chal- 
 deans, we are astonished to find therein narratives 
 of the -Creation, of a Paradise — perhaps also of the 
 Temptation and Fall of man — of a great Flood, and 
 
 1 See, for example, Professor Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and 
 Growth of Religion (Hibbert Lectures, 1887), p. 21, etc. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OP SCRIPTURE. 
 
 157 
 
 of a subsequent Dispersion of mankind, which not 
 only present such a strong general resemblance to, 
 but also exhibit so many minute coincidences with, 
 the earlier chapters of Genesis, that we cannot doubt 
 that both have a common origin. 
 
 This may be explained by one of the following 
 hypotheses : (1) The Jews became acquainted with 
 and adopted the Chaldean legends during the Baby- 
 lonian Captivity. This is hardly probable : for, apart 
 from the antagonistic feeling due to circumstances, 
 there is no doubt that, as I have already said, these 
 parts of the Hebrew records are much older than the 
 days of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar. (2) The Chal- 
 deans borrowed them from the Jews. But this is 
 impossible, because the Chaldean version of the stories 
 is much older than the age of the Exodus. Hence 
 it seems more probable that (3) the Hebrew account 
 was derived, at a very early period, from Chaldean 
 sources, for the close correspondence between the two 
 forbids us to suppose that the form of the history was 
 any part of a revelation made to Moses. If it was 
 derived, to what period may be assigned its trans- 
 mission? Now, it is remarkable that the Hebrew story 
 of the world’s earliest days does not closely correspond 
 with the Egyptian legends ; nor does it, like the legis- 
 lative part of Exodus, indicate any Egyptian influences. 
 
158 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 After the migration of Jacob, there is no evidence 
 that his descendants were ever in touch with the 
 peoples of the Euphrates valley, except by way of 
 occasional hostility, until a late period in the history 
 of his nation. It seems, then, highly probable that 
 these traditions were brought by the family of Abra- 
 ham, when he went out from Ur of the Chaldees on 
 his journey to Palestine. 
 
 “ So,” it may be said, “ you reduce the first eleven 
 chapters of Genesis to a mere collection of folklore, 
 and deny to them the character of an inspired work ? ” 
 On the contrary, I now proceed to show that, if this 
 hypothesis be correct, they are, in the truest sense of 
 the word, inspired. Hitherto I have referred only to 
 correspondences in the Chaldean and Hebrew narra- 
 tives ; I will now briefly indicate their differences. 
 Every one of these stories in the Chaldean version is, 
 so to say, saturated with polytheism, for the Chaldean 
 religion was a polytheism, and this had been further 
 degraded by the old Accadian influences. One 
 example will suffice. When Hasisadra, the Chaldean 
 Noah, goes forth from the ark, he offers a sacrifice, 
 and to it, we are told, “ the gods swarmed like flies.” 
 The Hebrew account of the early history of the 
 world has been purged from every trace of polytheism, 
 and it proclaims that the God of Israel is one God, 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 159 
 
 Creator and Maker of the heaven and the earth, of all 
 that is and all that lives. By what process of mental 
 evolution, at that era of the world's history, could a 
 stride so gigantic have been taken ? All the influences 
 of the age were opposed to it. The stately buildings, 
 the graven images, the polytheistic worship, the 
 elaborate ritual of the more educated — the lingering 
 shamanistic superstitions of the common people — all 
 tended in an opposite direction. At such a time, 
 under such influences, the sudden rise of a pure 
 monotheism without a revelation is a thing, it seems 
 to me, as incredible as Christianity without a Christ. 
 
 We claim, then, for this, the oldest part of the Book 
 of Genesis, an inspiration in the fullest sense of the 
 word, because it reveals to man what he has not dis- 
 covered and could not discover for himself. Perhaps 
 it may be asserted that monotheism, like polytheism, 
 is merely a stage in the evolution of human thought. 
 I cannot now discuss this, but will only say that I 
 believe all the evidence which we possess points to 
 a very different conclusion. Shamanism and poly- 
 theism seem natural to man — so natural that they 
 often blend with Christianity and lurk under its garb. 
 We claim an inspiration, not for the outward form, 
 but for the moral and religious truths which the Book 
 conveys. No man of science in the present day can 
 
160 THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE . 
 
 regard the earlier chapters of Genesis as history in 
 the sense in which that word is now used, but they 
 contain important fragments of ancient tradition and 
 relate in an allegorical form the deepest spiritual 
 truths. The Creation of the world by the will of 
 God is a reality, though the account in Genesis be 
 but a poetic conception ; the Fall of man is a terrible 
 moral truth, though the tale of the apple be but an 
 allegory; God’s judgment of sin is a fact which the 
 world will have to remember — for it is inevitable — 
 though there was never an occasion when the waters 
 swept away all mankind save eight persons. Some 
 consider this view of inspiration a virtual denial of it. 
 I retort that it is a flat denial of a theory long preva- 
 lent ; but I ask on what authority that theory rests. 
 And I know the answer which every honest man 
 must give me. But I also affirm that this view is 
 in analogy with all that we can learn of God’s deal- 
 ing with mankind ; leading them, as we lead children, 
 from truth to truth, declaring things as they are able 
 to bear them, passing from allegory to fact, from 
 symbol to idea, from the less to the more perfect 
 truth. Thus we see that “ through the ages an in- 
 creasing purpose runs,” and we watch the dawning of 
 the light from its first faint eastern flush in a far-off 
 time, till the Sun of Righteousness arose, in Whose 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 161 
 
 light we walk. He it was Who said, “I have yet 
 many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
 them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth, 
 is come, He will guide you into all truth.” 
 
 Note on page 156. — The words, “perhaps also of the Temptation, 
 etc.,” were as strong as I felt justified in using when this sermon was 
 written ; but a paper, published by Mr. W. St. Chad Boscawen while 
 this volume is passing through the press, would warrant me now in 
 saying “almost certainly.” The paper, for a copy of which I am 
 indebted to his kindness, is entitled “ The Babylonian Legend of the 
 Serpent Tempter” ( The Babylonian and Oriental Record , vol. iv. 
 No. 11 ; 1890). 
 
 M 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS (No. I .). 1 
 
 “ And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour 
 with God and man.” — St. Luke ii. 52. 
 
 Whether we are all eager to see ourselves as others 
 see us may be doubted. That we like to see others 
 with our own eyes can hardly be denied. Hence the 
 almost universal interest felt in biographical details — 
 an interest which may arise from motives either con- 
 temptible or commendable. The former foster a love 
 of gossip, as it is called — that fondness for knowing 
 all about our neighbours’ business, not that we may 
 be more able to help them, but that we may have the 
 better chance of making depreciatory comments and 
 indulging in self-righteous censure. This is the 
 delight of empty brains and paltry souls, the espe- 
 cial fault of little or idle communities. To know 
 how the baser sort of our fellow-creatures live cannot 
 elevate us ; to know how commonplace people live 
 
 1 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street, on the Third Sunday after 
 Epiphany, 1889. 
 
 162 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 163 
 
 can be of little use ; but to know how the great and 
 good have done their work in life, to hear of diffi- 
 culties overcome and temptations resisted, to read of 
 noble thoughts, of high aspirations and of unselfish 
 deeds, may encourage us in hours of trial or provoke 
 us to a worthy emulation. This desire springs from 
 a right motive, and may lawfully be gratified. 
 
 In so reading a biography, I suspect that many 
 people, if they have the habit of casting their eye over 
 a book before studying it, glance first at the begin- 
 ning and the end — at the history of the man s boyhood 
 and of his later years. By this means they ascertain 
 and compare the raw material, as we may call it, and 
 the finished work — what the man received by inherit- 
 ance as a kind of patrimony, and what this produced 
 when disciplined by his own efforts and modified by his 
 environment. Thus any one who might set himself to 
 write a systematic biography would carefully collect 
 amd arrange every scrap of information which was to 
 be obtained concerning the early years of his subject, 
 and, if this was scanty, would, in effect, apologize to 
 the reader for the inevitable deficiency. 
 
 I have dwelt a little on this topic because I wish 
 to call your attention to the fact that the authors 
 of the Four Gospels fail to satisfy this want, and pay 
 no attention to an ordinary rule of biographical 
 
164 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 writers. Two of them do not say a word about the 
 earlier days of the Lord Jesus. They begin their 
 story with His public ministry, that is, when He was 
 about thirty years old. St. Matthew and St. Luke 
 give us only a few particulars. In the one Gospel 
 these occupy rather more than thirty verses, and 
 relate only to the days of the infancy. Between the 
 return from Egypt and the beginning of the ministry 
 there is a complete blank. In the other Gospel there 
 is a little more information, occupying, perhaps, four 
 times the space of the former. This supplies certain 
 particulars to the history of the infancy, it tells us of 
 a single but important incident of the boyhood, and 
 then two verses sum up the eighteen years between 
 the visit to the Temple at J erusalem and the begin- 
 ning of the mission work. Of these verses I have 
 chosen one, and propose to draw your attention, in 
 this and in the following sermon, to two points therein. 
 
 First, however, I must dwell a little longer on this 
 artlessness or unskilfulness of the historians, because 
 I think that in the present day it is a matter of con- 
 siderable importance. Christianity is something more 
 than a system of philosophy or of ethics. It differs 
 from the teaching of any school of Athens, from the 
 mysticism of Sakya-Muni, or the maxims of Confucius. 
 It is the history of a Life, the incidents of which, to 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 165 
 
 no small extent, are the doctrine and the philosophy. 
 Far more than these other masters, Jesus taught by 
 means of a drama in which He was the principal, 
 almost the sole, Actor. 
 
 But, at the present day, a sort of hazy esoteric 
 Christianity has become rather fashionable, and we 
 are informed by its apostles that the Christ of 
 Christendom owes more to illusion than to history. 
 The writers, then, of the Four Gospels must be put out 
 of court as witnesses unworthy of credit. This is 
 often done in a very summary fashion, which may be 
 epitomized as follows : “ They must be romancing, 
 because miracles do not happen.” Well, that opens a 
 wide question, as to the extent of the self-confident 
 critic’s knowledge (though, perhaps, here we may soon 
 reach a limit), and as to what we mean by the word 
 “ miracle ” — so wide a question that I must at present 
 pass it by. 
 
 Assuming, then, that the occurrence of what we call 
 miracles is not impossible, we come to this question — 
 Are the Gospels and their authors worthy of credit ? 
 To these documents a comparatively late date has 
 been assigned by some, who assert that they do not 
 tell the unadorned tale of the life and death of Jesus 
 of Palestine, but weave into it a tissue of legends 
 which were evolved from the fervid imaginations and 
 
i66 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 ardent zeal of more than one generation of excitable 
 disciples. In respect to these allegations, we cannot, 
 indeed, place it beyond all question that the four 
 documents were written either by companions of the 
 Saviour or by the men to whom they had told their 
 story ; but we can prove that, if they are not of the 
 Apostolic age, they are but little later in date ; we 
 can prove that the narrative, in its main outlines, is 
 that which was believed and taught by the Apostles, 
 and that there is no valid reason (apart from the 
 miraculous character) for doubting its genuineness. 
 
 Now, the authors of the Gospels do not write as 
 ordinary biographers. They tell a story which is 
 obviously incomplete. In two only of the writings 
 do we find any sign of definite purpose. St. Luke, 
 in the prefatory verses of his Gospel, indicates an 
 intent of putting on record certain events which it 
 was especially important for his friend to know, and 
 seems to intimate that untrustworthy stories were 
 already becoming current; and St. John obviously 
 writes in order to bring out in stronger relief the 
 fact that Christ was, in the fullest sense of the words, 
 “ Son of God.” But, notwithstanding this, the result 
 in every case is a series of anecdotes or reminiscences, 
 and not a biography in any sense of the word. We 
 can understand the gaps in the story on the assumption 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 167 
 
 that the Apostles were artless and. truthful writers — 
 men of perfect honesty, but, as is said to have been 
 the case, of little or no literary culture. But if the 
 Gospels were in any sense the outcome of fraud or 
 deliberate forgery, as is sometimes broadly hinted, is 
 it probable that they would have resembled these 
 rather disjointed and fragmentary collections of 
 episodes ? If the workman were cunning enough to 
 frame and fashion a story so effective as that of the 
 life of Christ, depend upon it the master-hand would 
 have been betrayed by the more perfect finish of the 
 work. 
 
 Thus the very defects, as I may call them, of the 
 Gospels are a strong testimony, though indirect and 
 unconscious, to the sincerity and truthfulness of their 
 authors. They tell us so little about the early days 
 of Jesus. Books, however, there are which profess 
 to satisfy the want — books which, in a negative aspect 
 (as I may term it), are well worth study. These are the 
 so-called Apocryphal Gospels. Four, at least, of them 
 relate many incidents connected with the Saviour’s 
 birth or concerning His childhood. It is difficult to 
 fix the dates of these documents with any precision, 
 because it is often doubtful whether the present are 
 the original forms, and what modifications they have 
 undergone at the hands of their editors ; still, there is 
 
1 68 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 no doubt that many of the traditions which they have 
 preserved are of great antiquity, and one of these 
 Gospels, which bears the name of Thomas, is gene- 
 rally held to date from the latter part of the second 
 century. The numerous anecdotes related in these 
 books lead us to make two inferences — one, that the 
 miracles performed by the Lord Jesus in His child- 
 hood were of a more astounding nature than those 
 wrought during His ministry*; the other, that, as He 
 increased in stature, He did not increase in favour 
 with man. The books tell us that He was disliked and 
 dreaded, as One Whom it was dangerous to irritate. 
 They represent the Child Jesus — to put the matter in 
 plain English — as working miracles just as a clever 
 lad might show off conjuring tricks. He does a bit of 
 mischief, and then sets it right by working a miracle . 1 
 Sometimes also the miracle can be called by no other 
 name than vindictive, as when He smites with para- 
 lysis or death a boy who had tormented, or a master 
 who had impatiently chastised Him . 2 In short, these 
 documents, even though they may possibly include 
 some fragments of true tradition, are little better 
 than a collection of idle tales, of which the chief value 
 
 1 Gospel of the Infancy , ch. xxxvi., xxxvii., xl. 
 
 2 lhid. ch. xlvi., xlix. ; Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew , ch. xxxviii. See 
 also Gospel of Thomas. 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 169 
 
 is to bring into stronger relief the temperate self- 
 restraint of the writers of the New Testament. 
 
 Further, if the last-named were separated by more 
 than a full century from the lifetime of Christ, they 
 must have known of these stories, and have put 
 them aside, of deliberate purpose, as unworthy of 
 credit; that is to say, they must have been, not 
 credulous enthusiasts, but men of sufficient critical 
 power to run counter to the dominant appetite for 
 the marvellous, and to select from the mass of current 
 stories such as seemed to them worthy of credit ; other- 
 wise they must have lived before these legends had 
 obtained any currency, that is, many years before the 
 middle of the second century. From this dilemma I 
 do not see any escape, and commend it to the con- 
 sideration of those who insist on a late date for the 
 Gospels. 
 
 I pass on now to say a few words on one clause 
 of my text : “ Jesus increased in wisdom and 
 
 stature.” The latter, of course, does not require com- 
 ment. It is the statement of an indisputable and 
 self-evident fact ; but the former may seem to present 
 some difficulty. If He were God, how could He 
 increase in wisdom ? Does not this intimate that, in 
 the writers opinion, He was only Son of God in a 
 more or less figurative sense ? Not a few persons, 
 
170 THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 from time to time, have urged almost passionately 
 that, if any saying of our Lord’s can he quoted as 
 to an ancient historical event, the authorship of a 
 book, or a matter of science, the question is thereby 
 ended, and that any hesitation to accept this settle- 
 ment is virtually a denial of His Divinity. It appears 
 to me that those who thus reason lay themselves 
 open to the charge of denying the reality of His 
 humanity. This dilemma appears to be presented 
 thus : The idea of God implies knowledge without 
 limit ; that of man no less necessarily involves, not 
 only limited knowledge, but also that which is gradu- 
 ally gained by effort and experience. If, then, Jesus 
 knew, as by an innate consciousness, the facts of past 
 history or the conclusions of science for all centuries to 
 come, the Godhead had absorbed the manhood. The 
 assumption of human nature involves a conditioning 
 of the Divine nature — a temporary laying aside of 
 some of its attributes, and, in a certain sense, a 
 diminution of its perfections. “ How can this be ? ” 
 you may ask. Obviously, that is one of the mysteries 
 beyond human comprehension; but I think that the 
 order of Nature affords analogies which may throw 
 some light upon it. To take a very rough illustration : 
 there may be unity of substance with great diversity 
 of accidents, and this diversity may be due to 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 171 
 
 differences in the environment. For example, carbonic 
 anhydride under ordinary circumstances is a gas. At 
 a certain low temperature and high pressure it is a 
 solid. Yet its chemical composition is unaltered. 
 
 Again, without going into a long discussion con- 
 cerning human nature, I may assume that, as Chris- 
 tians, you will admit that it is something more than 
 a merely dynamical condition of a particular group 
 of organisms — the thinking, feeling, conscious self is 
 something more than the sum-total of living brain, 
 heart, and other organs. I am conscious of myself; — 
 that, I suppose, constitutes my personality. But there 
 are many things relating to myself which I have 
 forgotten ; yet I am none the less myself. Still more, 
 certain faculties may be lost permanently, if there be 
 definite injury to the brain ; or temporarily, if it be 
 suffering from overstrain or from the consequences of 
 physical exhaustion. But if, as the result of over- 
 work, I should ever be in such a condition that I 
 could not express myself clearly, or could not re- 
 member my own name or whither I was going, it 
 would not be said that I had lost that which consti- 
 tuted my nature and personality (whatever it be), but 
 only that its operation had been temporarily or per- 
 manently impeded by the defective condition of certain 
 organisms. If, then, thought, memory, and the like, 
 
172 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 in an ordinary man, cannot be exercised unless the 
 brain is in a certain condition of health, is it un- 
 reasonable to suppose that this organ would be 
 incapable of discharging the functions which would 
 be demanded of it, were it made the instrument of 
 omniscience ? In many things we require not only a 
 mode of energy, but also a certain condition of 
 matter to bring about a particular result. You can- 
 not transmit electricity with a wire made of a non- 
 conducting material. Moreover, there is such a thing 
 as the destruction of the material owing to its very 
 defects. Yet more, our perceptions, and thus our 
 knowledge and powers of thought, are conditioned by 
 our organisms. There is light which we cannot see, 
 because its waves awaken in us no responsive 
 thrills ; there are sounds which we cannot hear, be- 
 cause our organs of hearing do not vibrate in reply. 
 Is it, then, too much to assert that there are exist- 
 ences and knowledge to which the mind, conditioned 
 by the limits of time and space, must be, as it 
 were, blind and deaf? Nay, inasmuch as in certain 
 cases the actions of the nerved and the brain in man 
 are temporarily intensified, but this condition is 
 ordinarily followed by exhaustion and prostration, 
 might not the full consciousness of and communion 
 with the Unseen be fatal to any man, perfect as his 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 x 73 
 
 nature might be ? There is a deep truth in the old 
 belief, that no man can see God and live. 
 
 Such considerations, then, as it appears to me, 
 indicate that we may hold that, as the Scripture 
 itself states, our Lord Jesus Christ, during the period 
 of His life on earth, was not omniscient. Doubtless 
 in Him dwelt all the wisdom which would coexist 
 with a nature free from sin and in harmonious per- 
 fection ; but all matters of ordinary human learning 
 had, I doubt not, to be acquired by Him as by any 
 other child of man. Hence we do not dispute His 
 Divinity when we say that, in a matter where 
 accuracy was of no moral or spiritual importance, 
 His knowledge may have only represented that 
 current at the time, and so sometimes may have been 
 defective or even erroneous. 
 
 In concluding this stage of my subject, I will only 
 make one remark of a practical nature. The Lord 
 Jesus, by His life, inculcated the duty of striving to 
 advance in wisdom instead of being contented in 
 ignorance. Obviously, it has an especial lesson for 
 those who are young ; but it must not be forgotten by 
 any of us, for life is but one continuous discipline 
 and schooling. The development of the body ceases 
 at a comparatively early age, but that of the mind con- 
 tinues for many more years, and even when strength 
 
174 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 fails and memory is somewhat weakened there are 
 lessons yet to be learnt of patience in trial and of 
 spiritual insight. Many a man progresses in the 
 highest wisdom and in heavenly knowledge until that 
 solemn hour when “ the night cometh when no man 
 can work/’ There is no doubt a learning which may 
 be useless, and a study which may be only weariness 
 of the flesh — such were many of those subtleties of 
 the rabbinical teachers which our Lord, during the 
 days of His ministration, put aside almost with 
 contempt ; but the way of wisdom is the path of duty, 
 and there is nothing sacred, nothing sanctified, in 
 ignorance. Two Books there are whereby God reveals 
 Himself to man, and prepares the way for the direct 
 influence of Spirit on soul. Neither of these, as we 
 see from the record of His life, did Jesus despise. He 
 learnt a lesson from the lilies of the field and the 
 birds of the air, as well as from the deeds and the 
 sayings of olden time. What, then, God hath joined 
 together, let not man put asunder. 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS (No. II .). 1 
 
 “ And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour 
 with God and man.” — -St. Luke ii. 52. 
 
 In the last sermon I called your attention to the 
 scanty information afforded by the four Evangelists 
 concerning the early days of the Lord Jesus, and 
 pointed out that the very defects of the record were an 
 indirect proof of the good faith of the writers. I also 
 made some remarks upon the first clause in the text : 
 “ Jesus increased in wisdom and stature/’ It is my 
 present purpose to consider the second : “ He increased 
 in favour with God and man.” This clause, like the 
 former one, deals with two relationships, and the 
 members exhibit a certain parallelism. Jesus in- 
 creased in the sight of man, and as He grew He found 
 favour in the eyes of man— He increased in wisdom, 
 that is, in the sphere where only the All-seeing and 
 All-knowing can judge aright, and in the sight of 
 Him also He was well-pleasing. 
 
 1 Preached at St. Peter’s, Yere Street, on the Fourth Sunday after 
 Epiphany, 1889. 
 
 175 
 
1 76 THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 “ J esus increased in favour with God and man/' 
 Let us consider the latter part first, for it offers the 
 fewer difficulties. As I have already pointed out, 
 the Evangelist, in this statement, contradicts the 
 authors of the Apocryphal Gospels. The former also 
 leads us to infer, and St. John, who passes over the 
 earlier history of Christ in silence, virtually affirms, 
 that He did no miracle before the beginning of His 
 public ministry. But according to the Apocryphal 
 Gospels, even during His infancy, His swaddling-clothes 
 and bath-water possessed miraculous powers, and as a 
 Child He was constantly working wonders — killing and 
 recalling to life, changing the colour of clothes, making 
 misfits in carpentry come right, and turning images 
 of clay into living birds. From these authorities also 
 we learn that He by no means increased in favour 
 with man. We read, for example, in the Gospel of 
 Thomas , “ [The people] went and reproached Joseph, 
 saying, ‘It is impossible for thee to live with us in 
 this city, but if thou wishest so to do, teach thy Child 
 to bless and not to curse, for He is killing our children, 
 and whatsoever He says is certainly accomplished ; ’ ” 
 and in another place, “ Joseph said unto the Lady Mary, 
 From this time we shall not let Him go out of the 
 house, since every one who opposes Him is struck dead /” 1 
 1 Gospel of Tliomas (second Greek form), ch. iy. 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 177 
 
 But enough of these worse than silly legends. It is 
 not difficult to suggest a reason for the silence of the 
 Evangelists — that it was because, from their point of 
 view, these eighteen years afforded nothing which 
 called for record. To outward sight, Jesus, for all this 
 time, was a Child among children, a Youth among 
 youths, a Man among men. That in which He differed 
 from others would only be perceived by those who 
 knew Him well. It might be summed up thus : that 
 He always appeared to think, say, and do exactly 
 what was right, and never what was wrong. 
 
 The few words which I have quoted may have been 
 put on record to intimate the perfection of the human 
 nature of Christ. Coming in such close connection 
 with the return to Nazareth, they seem to indicate 
 that the years immediately following that of the 
 visit to the Temple were present to the writer’s mind 
 more distinctly than others, namely, those years in 
 ordinary human life, which not only are fraught with 
 special dangers, but also are exactly those in which 
 the majority of youths do not increase in favour with 
 man. Jesus, when He went up to Jerusalem, was 
 twelve years of age, that is probably about as 
 near manhood as an English boy a couple of years 
 older. Now, we all know that, as a rule, boys from 
 about fourteen or fifteen to seventeen or eighteen 
 N 
 
I7S 
 
 THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 are not easy to manage. It is proverbially “the 
 difficult age ” — rightly called “ difficult/’ because it 
 does not necessarily imply that it is always the boy 
 who is in fault. He is in a state of transition, changing 
 rapidly both in body and in mind, and the corporeal 
 development is commonly well ahead of the mental ; 
 indeed, the rapidity of the former sometimes disturbs 
 the equilibrium of the latter. Such difficulty is espe- 
 cially likely to arise in any case where the boy possesses 
 strong individuality of character, and is due to the very 
 qualities which will ultimately be his distinction. It 
 may even result from the soundness of his instincts 
 and the honesty of his disposition, because he has 
 not yet learnt that it is easy to make mistakes, and 
 that caution and reticence may sometimes be counted 
 among Christian virtues. Hence, at this epoch, as 
 we all know, friction is apt to arise occasionally 
 between teachers and pupils, between parent and 
 child — with the best intentions on either side. Yet 
 at this one also J esus increased in favour with man. 
 
 Compared with the history of the ministerial life 
 of Christ, this statement is suggestive, though its 
 lessons, if common, are melancholy. 
 
 His goodness at first won Him favour with man. 
 It is a mistake to suppose that the majority of man- 
 kind, in a fairly civilized community, have any 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 179 
 
 aversion to those who are really good. It is those 
 who are conceitedly or aggressively righteous — those 
 in whom the existence of defects produces a want 
 of harmony in the character, who incur dislike. To 
 “ approve the better and the worse pursue ” expresses 
 with fair accuracy the general position assumed by 
 the multitude. So long, indeed, as goodness may be 
 called passive rather than active — that is, when it 
 finds expression in a narrow rather than a wide 
 sphere, in domestic life rather than in a public career, 
 a man is respected and liked the better for it. Even 
 a knave, I believe, prefers to do business with a 
 thoroughly honest man, and for that very reason will 
 sometimes abstain from cheating him. But when a 
 sense of duty and right compels a man to oppose a 
 dominant current of feeling or strike a blow at some 
 popular idol, then unpopularity must be risked, and 
 it often cannot be avoided, though the wisdom of the 
 serpent be combined with the harmlessness of the 
 dove. It would be no wonder if Jesus increased in 
 favour with men so long as He was living quietly in 
 the home at Nazareth. Think of One Who added to 
 the indefinable charm and attractiveness of youth, 
 perfect unselfishness and universal benevolence ; Who 
 to the tenderness and gentleness of a woman united 
 the best strength and vigour of a man ; Who was 
 
i So THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 tolerant of weakness and forgiving of injury, and 
 yet capable of righteous indignation; who, in a word, 
 was the embodied ideal of human nature; — such a 
 One must have been loved, except, perhaps, by some 
 scribe or Pharisee, whose petty notions of arbitrary 
 proprieties he had outraged; for these men — and 
 they did not perish with the downfall of the Temple — 
 are most prone to call good, evil, and are most bitter 
 against that spirit of truth and right which will not 
 be measured with their tiny rule or fettered by their 
 fantastic regulations. 
 
 But when Jesus began His mission work, when He 
 came forth as a Leader of men, then He became un- 
 popular. At first only with the legalists — with the so- 
 called religious world. He proclaimed a reformation, 
 and met with a reformers fate. We know what those 
 must expect who refuse to bow before time-honoured 
 superstitions, and will not spare “ the hoary head of 
 inveterate abuse/’ This fate Jesus risked; this fate 
 Jesus met. 
 
 His popularity with the people at large lasted 
 longer. When faith is dying, and creeds are becoming 
 outworn, the champions of orthodoxy are not always 
 in high favour with the multitudes, who know too 
 well their foibles and their faults, who have worked 
 themselves near enough to the image, carefully though 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. i8i 
 
 it be guarded, to see that it is not made of gold, but 
 of clay, and that the gilding is falling off. It was not 
 till Jesus offended the national sentiment, by pro- 
 claiming that His kingdom was not of this world, that 
 He could find no place for a policy of revolt, and in- 
 dulged no dreams of restoring an empire like to, but 
 yet grander than, that of Solomon, that the people 
 turned against Him, and the mob of Jerusalem joined 
 the satellites of the Temple in the cry, “ Crucify Him ! 
 Crucify Him ! ” 
 
 But we are also told that “ Jesus increased in favour 
 with God.” This statement, like the one that “ He 
 increased in wisdom,” appears to present a difficulty, 
 and that a graver one. To increase in favour with 
 God appears to assume an increase in goodness, and, 
 if so, how could J esus be truly Son of God ? Moral 
 perfection, at first sight, does not appear to admit of 
 degree, but the phrase just quoted seems to imply a 
 progress from imperfection towards perfection. I 
 know well that I am dealing with relationships which 
 are incomprehensible by man. Any expression re- 
 lating to them must, on that account, be regarded 
 from the human standpoint, and not pressed further 
 than it will bear. But I think that, on consideration, 
 we may perceive how it may legitimately be employed 
 without any diminution of the true Godhead of Christ. 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 182 
 
 The key-note to the line of thought which I would 
 suggest — -for I do not propose to do more, lest I weary 
 you — is struck in one of the earlier verses in the first 
 Book of the Hebrew Scriptures, “ Ye shall be as gods, 
 knowing good and evil/’ Perhaps you will remark that 
 the authority for the statement is the worst possible ; 
 but the devil may speak truth when he wishes to 
 deceive. In other words, we may say that the good- 
 ness which is the result of innocence is to a consider- 
 able extent of a negative character, while that which 
 is the result of choice is positive. To give a homely 
 illustration, it implies no moral excellence if a man 
 who cannot write has never committed the sin of 
 forgery. Where there is no temptation, either because 
 of the period of life or other circumstance, then there 
 is no victory and no progress. By becoming Man, 
 Jesus took upon Himself to tread a certain path, 
 every step of which was in an onward direction. He 
 was tempted, we are told, like as we are, though not 
 by an innate corruption — that is to say, there was at 
 every juncture a perfectly free and unbiassed choice 
 between the one and the other course, which is not 
 the case with those born after the manner of men. 
 Sin may be defined in general terms as following the 
 merely animal instinct when it is in conflict with a 
 prompting which comes from a higher source. It is 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 • 183 
 
 not, as a rule, in the act itself, but in the motive or 
 the occasion, that the sin resides. An act — such as 
 killing a man — is with one motive permissible or 
 even laudable, with another a great crime. If an 
 infant, when hungry, takes up and eats food belong- 
 ing to another, this being done in innocence is not 
 sinful ; but it will be in a few years, when the laws 
 of property are understood. Then it is known to be 
 better to endure hunger for a while .than to appease 
 it unlawfully. Thus so soon as ever the call to re- 
 sist the lower nature and to obey the higher is heard, 
 however faintly, so soon as a person is able to see 
 that the path before him is no longer a single one, 
 but is parted into two ways, — then there can be the 
 beginning of sin. To ourselves, as we all know, 
 these opportunities for choice are afforded through- 
 out life. At what epoch they begin, we are unable to 
 say, but they are presented with exceptional frequency 
 during the years when childhood is ending and the 
 transition into manhood is taking place, because then 
 both the faculties of the body and the circumstances 
 of life are most rapidly changing. In some cases 
 the choice between the right and the wrong path is 
 not even offered until the person to a considerable ex- 
 tent is conscious of its nature and of personal respon- 
 sibility. But with each victory won the moral nature 
 
1 84 < THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 is strengthened ; so that, like a metal which has been 
 hardened and tempered in the fire, it can be safely 
 employed, and can be trusted in God's service. 
 Another master has tried to lure the soul away, and 
 it has deliberately replied, “ Get thee hence, Satan ! ” 
 
 Thus, then, it must have been with Jesus. He 
 passed without a blemish from the sinless Child to the 
 sinless Man ; and in so growing He progressed from 
 mere innocency to actual and active holiness. In so 
 doing, in so fulfilling the purpose of His mission and 
 the ideal, hitherto unattained, of humanity, there was 
 a perfectness at every stage ; but there was also an 
 upward progress in the stages themselves, so that we 
 cannot refuse to say — nay, if we understand what 
 goodness really is, we are compelled as men to say — 
 that Jesus increased in favour with God. 
 
 Such was the development of Christ. Step by step 
 He won His way, gathering from each age that which 
 it afforded of good, to form the crown of perfect man- 
 hood which was to be offered on the Cross as His last 
 and greatest gift to the race, which He did not disdain 
 to call brothers. Of which of them, of which of us, 
 can the same be said ? Whose life is not full of vain 
 regrets for lost opportunities and evil actions, for sins 
 of omission and of commission ? How often are we 
 obliged to confess that our righteousness is only 
 
THE GROWTH OF JESUS. 
 
 185 
 
 negative ? We have not sinned, because from circum- 
 stance or constitution we have not felt the temptation. 
 How often must we admit that, even if we cannot be 
 charged with doing that which we ought not to have 
 done, we have left undone that which we ought to 
 have done ! 
 
 We, indeed, forgetful of our defects, are too often 
 tempted to echo the thanksgiving of the Pharisee, 
 “ God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men 
 are — thieves, fraudulent, drunkards, adulterers ! I 
 have kept the commandments, and, as regards the 
 letter of the Law, am blameless/’ But how far is this 
 due to yourself, and how far to circumstances ? You 
 were shielded from temptation when young ; you 
 have never known poverty or want ; you have always 
 had little to gain and much to lose by committing a 
 crime. If you are free from great sins, thank God’s 
 grace, not yourself. Nay, if you have kept the letter 
 of the Law, are you so sure you have kept the spirit ? 
 If you have not robbed your neighbour of money, 
 have you never by skilful misrepresentation or in- 
 nuendo taken away his good name ? Have you never 
 contrived to slip before him, or even gracefully to 
 trip him up in the race of life ? Have you always 
 cared more for truth than for your own advantage ? 
 Have you always replied, “ Yade retro, Satanas ! ” when 
 
1 86 THE GROWTH OF JESUS . 
 
 he has said of this world’s advantages, “All these 
 will I give thee if thou wilt do homage to me ” ? Nay, 
 when you contemplate yourself, your successes and 
 your prosperity, do you never yield to the temptation 
 of exclaiming, with the Chaldean king, “ Is not this 
 great Babylon, that I have built ? ” Take care, O self- 
 confident one, lest God lay thee low, even as that king 
 who was brought to grovel among the beasts of the 
 field. Yet, better that our Father should so deal with 
 us than that we should go to the grave in a fool’s 
 paradise. But if we would desire a gentler awaken- 
 ing from vain illusions, we shall find none more 
 effective than by keeping ever before our eyes the 
 one Ideal of perfect manhood, Who, and Who alone, 
 from the cradle to the Cross, so lived as to increase in 
 wisdom and in favour with God. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL . 1 
 
 “ If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all 
 men most pitiable.” — 1 Cor. xy. 19 (R. V.). 
 
 Some critics assert that St. Paul is an obscure writer; 
 but his meaning here is plain enough. In brief 
 emphatic phrases, clause by clause, he leads to this 
 conclusion, “ If Christ hath not been raised, your faith 
 is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” Some eighteen 
 centuries since, in the infancy of the Christian Church, 
 the Resurrection of Christ was a difficulty to the 
 Greek, wdiether trained in the philosophy of Athens 
 or engrossed in the commerce of Corinth, no less than 
 His Cross was a stumbling block to the Jew. What 
 Paul had taught as historical facts, some converts 
 sought to explain away as misconceptions or allegories. 
 
 In this age, in this land, above all in this 
 metropolis, where the culture of Athens combines 
 with the luxury of Corinth, the same difficulty is felt, 
 the same disposition exists. 
 
 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey on the third Sunday after 
 Trinity, 1888. 
 
 187 
 
1 88 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST PAUL. 
 
 It is not surprising ; scientific progress has dispelled 
 many an error, has increased and deepened our know- 
 ledge of the order of Nature, and has thus rendered 
 men suspicious of what they call the miraculous 
 element in a story. It is no marvel ; the Church has 
 fostered credulity ; she has now to struggle with un- 
 belief. Reaction is the penalty of excess; this is a 
 law of Nature, which even now Christians would do 
 well to remember. 
 
 Thus not a few, at the present time, are offended 
 by the Christ in Whom Paul believed. They 
 dwell upon the improbability of the story, the 
 fallibility of testimony, the proneness to illusion 
 among a band of enthusiasts ; they insist that neither 
 the great fact of the love of God nor the moral beauty 
 of Christianity are dependent upon the Pauline 
 version of the Gospel story. Had that ended with 
 the Cross of Calvary, the lesson of self-sacrifice, the 
 example of boundless charity, would be not less, 
 perhaps even more, impressive, and the love of Christ 
 have been no less attractive had it been shown by a 
 man to men. Love, righteousness, goodness, we are 
 reminded, do not depend upon the attributes with 
 which some excitable Galileans invested a leader of 
 exceptional moral qualities. The outward form of 
 Christianity is a mere husk, which, if it has sometimes 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 189 
 
 protected, has more often concealed the spiritual 
 kernel. 
 
 With this form of teaching St. Paul would have no 
 compromise. He tells his disciples in so many words, 
 “ If I am deceived, and have deceived you, ours is 
 indeed a pitiful lot.” Persecuted by the heathen, 
 excommunicate by the Jews, we have become like 
 outcast dogs, at whom any one may cast a stone, and 
 all for an illusion. We have chosen — poor fools that 
 we are — a life of misery, which will be followed 
 by an awakening, if there be one at all, of dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 As I said, we are once more face to face with the 
 old difficulties. We have to choose between a Christ 
 purely human, and a Christ Who is much more than 
 man. Which is to be our guide through the breakers 
 ahead ? For breakers there are. If, indeed, we live in 
 an age when knowledge “ grows from more to more,” 
 when each height attained by the toiler in science 
 does but open a wider prospect, a grander panorama 
 of new lands to conquer, it is also one full of dark 
 and saddening problems — at once an age of advance- 
 ment and an age of degeneration. Our land, and not 
 our land only, is like a seething pot, wherein bubble 
 up all that is noble and all that is base; wherein 
 wisdom and folly, good and evil, virtue and sin, seem 
 
i go 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 to leap and eddy in such bewildering confusion that 
 no man can foretell the end, and it must be left to 
 our grandchildren to write the verdict on this 
 generation. 
 
 In creeds and teachers a like antithesis is found. 
 These bid us take refuge with an infallible leader, 
 or at least submit to directors who claim, whether 
 officially or personally, some supernatural powers. 
 Those declare that the order of Nature is the only fact, 
 that the intuitions of the soul are the only safe guide. 
 At the one extreme man claims the power of God ; 
 at the other, man almost asserts there is no God. 
 
 It is not likely that any here are prepared to go to 
 the latter extreme, but many doubt at the present 
 day whether Christianity, for all the centuries past, 
 has not been resting upon an invalid foundation, and 
 whether it be not the imperative duty of all thought- 
 ful men in this nineteenth century “ to reconceive the 
 Christ/' “ To reconceive the Christ ! ” 1 Yes, I grant 
 that in some sense this is necessary. The Christ of 
 dogmatic anathemas, the Christ of hatred and variance, 
 the Christ of cruel persecutions, the Christ too often 
 of Churches, — He, it is true, was not the Christ of 
 
 1 This sermon was written after reading the well-known novel 
 Robert Elsmere , and the above phrase, with some others, is quoted from 
 its pages. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 19 1 
 
 Calvary. Of that Christ our conceptions, even at best, 
 are too often grievously inadequate, warped by the 
 imperfections of our nature and the influences of our 
 education ; but “ to reconceive the Christ,” so as to 
 transform Him from the Incarnate Lord and the Risen 
 Saviour to a mere man, though the noblest, purest, 
 best, of the race, — is that the duty which is before us ? 
 We may well undertake the investigation with no 
 light heart. 
 
 Now, as a preliminary to the few remarks which 
 I wish to make on this topic, let me call attention to 
 one or two points which, as it seems to me, are often 
 left in considerable ambiguity by advocates of the 
 new gospel. 
 
 First, there is no reasonable ground for doubting 
 that this Epistle, with that to the Romans and one or 
 two more, were written by St. Paul. Personally, I 
 think others were, but as their authenticity has been 
 disputed I will not claim them. Here, then, is a 
 letter, dating from about twenty-seven years after the 
 supposed Resurrection of Christ, and written by the 
 man who did more than any other to spread the story 
 of the Gospel. On its truth he stakes his hopes and 
 his credit. 
 
 Again, this story in its main outlines corresponds 
 with that which we read in the other books of the 
 
192 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 New Testament. I am not going to assert — because 
 that could not be placed beyond dispute — that the 
 Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are really 
 the works of their reputed authors ; but I do say that 
 they either are documents of the Apostolic age, or 
 relate a history which in its main outlines is iden- 
 tical with that believed by the Church of the first 
 century. 
 
 Apart from collateral proofs, the latter assertion is 
 really incontestable, if we allow that Paul wrote the 
 Epistles which I have named, because in them the 
 Divine nature and the Resurrection, to mention no 
 other important incidents, are insisted on with 
 much detail. It has been insinuated, I know, that 
 the Christ of Christendom is largely a creature of 
 Paul’s fervid imagination, and that the testimony 
 of James of Jerusalem, could we only recover it, 
 would be something very different from that of 
 Paul of Tarsus. But the latter tells us, in one of 
 these accepted Epistles, that both preached the same 
 Gospel . 2 This rests, no doubt, only on St. Paul’s 
 authority; but, judging from the facts of his life and 
 the internal evidence of his writings, I should say 
 that he was an honest and truthful man ; indeed, I 
 may even venture to assert that he would have 
 1 Gal. ii. 2-10; cf. i. 8, 9. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 193 
 
 regarded a pious fraud or a lie to serve a policy with 
 much more scorn and loathing than some people 
 appear to do at the present time. 
 
 But we are now sometimes informed that Paul was 
 “ so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in 
 moral passion,” that he is useless as a witness. If, 
 however, others corroborate his testimony, his personal 
 disqualifications are of less moment, for certainly 
 some of his fellow-workers were men of a very 
 different temperament. But of them, I may be told, 
 we know nothing, for it is denied that the Gospels are 
 contemporary documents or give us a true picture of 
 the birth of Christianity. Well, if they are religious 
 romances, they belong, as I have just said, to a very 
 early period. We are now sometimes advised to read 
 them in a scientific spirit. I wish that men would 
 read them in a more scientific spirit — that is, would 
 take the trouble to compare them with some samples 
 of the mass of literature, whether biographical or 
 romantic, whether allegorical or devotional, which 
 still exists and dates from the centuries immediately 
 preceding or succeeding the birth of Christ. At what 
 time or place will you find other men ennobled by 
 such soul-piercing thoughts or possessed of such 
 dramatic skill as authors of religious fiction ? Victims 
 of a strange delusion the first disciples may have 
 
 o 
 
194 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST PAUL. 
 
 been, but what gave these comparatively uneducated 
 men the power to rise so high above the general level 
 of the religious ideas of their time, or to fabricate 
 a story which, if you once admit the possibility of the 
 events, is so marvellously self-consistent and so truth- 
 ful in appearance ? 
 
 Further, is there any real ground for this censure 
 so glibly passed upon St. Paul ? I grant that his 
 method of thought was influenced by his personality. 
 He was a native of the East, not of the west ; he lived 
 in the first, not in the nineteenth, century. I grant 
 that he was somewhat discursive, and prone, probably 
 as a result of his education, to dwell more on verbal 
 subtleties and coincidences than harmonizes with the 
 modes of thought to which we are accustomed. I 
 grant, in short, that he was a man of another age and 
 another land than this. But, then, I ask, Was he 
 nothing more ? Certainly he was neither mob orator 
 nor revival preacher, in the derogatory sense of these 
 words. He was very different, with all his enthusiasm, 
 from the founders of the Jesuit or Franciscan Orders. 
 He has sketched out in his Epistle to the Romans 
 a philosophy of human nature, which to many has 
 seemed at least worthy of careful consideration. I 
 will even venture to say that if ever that hypothesis 
 as to the descent of man, which is now in favour with 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL . 
 
 195 
 
 some scientific workers, should be demonstrated, we 
 shall find in St. Paul's writings a solution of the 
 difficulties which obviously would arise, and a means 
 of harmonizing the results of scientific discovery 
 with the truths of Christianity. Poet and orator Paul 
 may have been, but he was something more. A 
 thinker far more profound than most of his censors. 
 
 But when we have thus cleared the ground — when 
 we have placed it beyond question that the Gospel 
 story expresses the deliberate belief of a number of 
 men, who certainly were not knaves and do not 
 appear to have been fools — then we are told that we 
 must put Paul, we must put the companions of Jesus, 
 out of court as witnesses, because “ miracles do not 
 happen/’ 
 
 Perhaps, in a certain sense, they do not — of that we 
 will presently speak ; but, in the ordinary sense of 
 the phrase, is the position thus assumed free from 
 difficulties — I might almost say, from inconsistency ? 
 Those who occupy it accept the main outlines of the 
 Gospel story, after eliminating or softening down the 
 miraculous incidents, which, as they conceive, have 
 been imported into the simple and pathetic tale by 
 the fervid imagination and credulous superstition of 
 the age. But, if that be so, how are we to explain the 
 Christ, Who towers in unique pre-eminence, as all 
 
195 THE GOSPEL OF ST PAUL . 
 
 admit, high above the dull level of His epoch ? What 
 influences, what environment, were there in J udsea, or 
 even in the then civilized world, adequate to produce 
 a character of such moral grandeur, a soul with such 
 spiritual insight ? I grant, indeed, that there were fore- 
 runners — “ morning stars ” of the coming orb of light ; 
 I grant that the thoughts of these were gathered as it 
 were into one focus by the new Teacher. But could 
 the moral deadness of the Sadducee or the spiritual 
 ossification of the Pharisee produce Him? Was He 
 the Deliverer for whom any rank of society was look- 
 ing ? All these might have given birth to a leader of 
 revolt, either religious or political while He came not 
 to destroy, but to fulfil — to disappoint alike zealot and 
 patriot. If the man is the result of the joint action 
 of hereditary tendencies and surrounding influences, 
 how can we explain this abnormal phenomenon ? 
 Jesus Himself, as a Man of that age, was a living 
 miracle. 
 
 Again, accepting the narrative as above stated, how 
 shall we explain the sudden transformation of His 
 imperfectly educated and half-hearted followers into 
 men “full of the Spirit ” and earnest in their belief? 
 Surely the blood-stained Cross could be no emblem 
 of hope? The knowledge that “the ashes of Jesus 
 mingled with the dust of Palestine ” would have been 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL . 
 
 197 
 
 the despairing epitaph of a lost cause. Scorned and 
 reviled, He had died in the sight of the multitude ; 
 claims and predictions alike falsified ; and yet crush- 
 ing defeat converts these timid disciples into men of 
 high resolve and unshaken courage. There is no 
 time, mark you, for the slow growth of a seductive 
 myth which might at last acquire such power as to 
 exercise a transforming influence. In a few days — 
 that we learn from St. Paul’s genuine writings — the 
 belief in a Divine and Risen Saviour had become part 
 of the lives of these men, so unpromising as subjects, 
 so different in their dispositions. If there were 
 no Resurrection, is not this a miracle, for it is 
 inexplicable ? 
 
 Further, in St. Paul’s own case, the change, to say 
 the least of it, is strange and startling. He knew the 
 moral beauty of the doctrine of Jesus, he was aware 
 of the new-born zeal of the Apostles while he strove 
 to crush by persecution this revolt against ancient 
 faiths. So sudden a conversion, on the part of a 
 thoughtful man, as that which occurred, is at any 
 rate difficult to explain. One explanation has been 
 hinted; but, looking at the question as a matter of 
 evidence, it seems to me inadmissible, for St. Paul’s 
 subsequent writings are not like those which usually 
 emanate from men with a craze. 
 
198 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 But, I shall be told, these and other considerations 
 are idle. The story is incredible, because “ miracles 
 do not happen.” They are simply the outcome of 
 human credulity, always prone to indulge in the 
 marvellous. That, we are told, is proved by the study 
 of the history of religions; they exhibit a gradual 
 progress from the grossest superstition and the most 
 abject credulity to more refined and more spiritual 
 forms. I may grant all this, without admitting more 
 than the education of the human race and the progress 
 of a Divine order, in which many of the critics to 
 whom I allude believe no less fervently than my- 
 self. I admit also the tendency to see a miracle in 
 everything unexpected, and the extreme credulity 
 which often accompanies religious earnestness. 
 Traces of this may possibly be found in books which 
 we regard as part of the Canon of Scripture. But if 
 exaggeration or possible inaccuracy in detail is to be 
 an absolute bar to belief, I should be a victim to 
 historic doubt after a few weeks’ extensive study of 
 the current newspapers, and end in believing nothing 
 which I had not seen. 
 
 But let us look at the matter from another point of 
 view. Do you believe that for yourself and others 
 there is a possibility of an eternal life — that it is not 
 the doom of ardent and earnest seekers after God to 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 199 
 
 vanish like the morning mist from the universe of His 
 creatures ? My friend, if you have this life, how came 
 it, whence came it ? You will ask that question in 
 vain of science. It can only tell us that for man and 
 beast alike there seems to be but one life, and there 
 is no reason why this should survive the dissolution 
 of the organism. A “ living soul ” is no part of the 
 order of Nature as we know it from scientific research. 
 If you believe in the soul's existence, you must regard 
 it apart from animal life, and obtain jmur assurance 
 from other sources than those which are furnished by 
 the laboratory. In a word, if you believe in a personal 
 immortality you believe in a miracle. 
 
 Still, some may reply, when pressed by this argu- 
 ment, “ Though we believe in God as Creator, Ruler, 
 Sustainer of this world, as in very truth Father of all, 
 we cannot believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrec- 
 tion, because both are contrary to the order of Nature, 
 which is His order, and He cannot contradict Him- 
 self." I have so often dwelt upon this topic that, im- 
 portant though it be, I shall take leave now to dismiss 
 it in very few words. The difficulty has no real exist- 
 ence, and is created by our incautious use of words. 
 The “ order of Nature ” simply represents the results of 
 observation and of inductive reasoning at this time. 
 Our conception of it differs from that of our ancestors, 
 
200 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST PAUL. 
 
 and that of our posterity will differ from our own. 
 To admit that its laws are invariable, and to claim 
 a complete comprehension of them, are two very 
 different things. What appears in one age to be a 
 miracle, because it is contrary to the experience of 
 the day, may in another prove to be in accordance 
 with the order of Nature. In a word, our concep- 
 tion of a miracle is an imperfect one, due to our 
 anthropomorphic ideas and our regarding the All-Wise 
 and All-Perfect as if He were a man who has to alter 
 his plans, and, as we call it, interfere with their working. 
 There is no need that a miracle should be a departure 
 from law — that is, from the Divine purpose and plan. 
 The causes seem the same to us as in some everyday 
 event, but it is a bold assumption to say that they are 
 the same. Are not the phenomena of life miraculous 
 when viewed restrictedly from the standpoint of 
 physical science ? The tissues of your bodies continue 
 because you are alive, and you can give no better 
 reason; they will quickly decompose when you are 
 dead. Please explain this before you begin to be 
 too confident about the order of Nature and the 
 impossibility of so-called miracles. 
 
 Thus there is no a priori impossibility in the 
 matter — the question is one of evidence ; but this must 
 be viewed in the widest sense, so as to include the 
 
THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL . 
 
 201 
 
 position of the event in the economy of the world. 
 Here, then, the genesis of the idea of the Risen Saviour 
 appears to me incredible, unless He were a Being 
 absolutely unique, Who by His birth, life, and re- 
 surrection was the crown of the revelation of God to 
 man, the satisfaction of a longing hope, the earnest 
 of the victory over sin and death. A Christianity 
 without a Christ is at least as incredible as a Divine 
 Christ. 
 
 How, then, shall we confront the days that are 
 coming ? How seek to turn their darkness into light ? 
 In the days of old, the noblest philosophy of the 
 Gentile, the partial knowledge of the Jew, had alike 
 been tried and found wanting. Amid the luxury of 
 Corinth, the learning of Athens, the rottenness of 
 Rome, Paul preaches Jesus Son of man, and Jesus Son 
 of God — the Cross and the Resurrection. The problems 
 are still the same, the remedy is still the same. Com- 
 passed by temptations, borne down by sorrows, man 
 needs the help of man, but of something more than 
 man. Looking on the grim fact of death, into the 
 dark uncertainty of the hereafter, his faith — scorn its 
 weakness if you will, it has to be reckoned with — his 
 faith needs the assurance of one traveller returned 
 from that bourne, or he will not quit the realities of 
 the present for the chances of a future of which you 
 
202 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 can give him no certainty. Dark indeed is the path 
 of life, with all its sad realities, unless it be illumined 
 with the light that shone from the Easter sepulchre ; 
 sad the toil that a stern necessity has imposed upon 
 us, unless we can hope for the rest, not of eternal 
 sleep, but of the redeemed sons of God. Christianity, 
 you say, has failed. No, it is not Christianity that 
 has failed, but mans parody of it. Let Christ be 
 preached, as by the mouth of Paul, and once more, 
 among all the difficulties of this or of coming ages, 
 man will with Christ die unto sin and rise unto 
 righteousness. 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA . 1 
 
 “ So the devils besought Him, saying, If Thou cast us out, 
 suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.” 
 
 St. Matt. viii. 31. 
 
 Christians in this age of the world are often 
 challenged to the wager of battle, as it was called 
 in olden time . 2 We are asked to narrow the great 
 question, whether Christianity be a substantial truth 
 or a fond illusion, to some single issue, and stake our 
 faith upon the result of a particular controversy. 
 The conciseness of this process renders it very attrac- 
 tive to many minds, especially those of an aggressive 
 habit. To attack is always easier than to defend. 
 It also evokes more sympathy, for there is something 
 attractive in the noise of breaking glass, so that most 
 of us have a certain liking for the thrower of stones, 
 
 1 Preached at St. Peter’s, Vere Street, on the First Sunday in 
 Lent, 1889. 
 
 2 This sermon was suggested by an article from the pen of Professor 
 Huxley, in the Nineteenth Century , vol. xxv. p. 169, the words of which 
 are occasionally quoted. There were replies to it by the Bishop of 
 Peterborough and Dr. Wace (see pp. 351, 369), and the controversy w T as 
 continued. 
 
 203 
 
204 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GAD AT A. 
 
 provided, of course, that they are aimed at another 
 persons windows. 
 
 The attack, no doubt, would be both fair and 
 formidable if the Church of England as a body were 
 committed to certain views of inspiration of which 
 I have lately spoken — views undoubtedly held, once 
 very generally, and still rather commonly, by its indi- 
 vidual members — namely, that, allowing for certain 
 possible textual imperfections, Scripture cannot err 
 on a matter of science or history. But inasmuch as 
 the Church of England, with singular wisdom, in my 
 opinion, has abstained from committing herself to 
 any definition of inspiration or precise statement of 
 its province — inasmuch as I do not myself hold any 
 such views — I venture to claim the right of the 
 challenged person, and decline the conflict on my 
 adversary’s conditions. My belief in Christianity — I 
 mean New Testament Christianity, not that which 
 often passes current for it — is not grounded upon a 
 single fact or the result of any single induction. The 
 conclusions are reached, making due allowance for 
 the very important differences, by processes similar 
 to those which I have employed in my special depart- 
 ment of science. Here I have arrived at convictions 
 on the substantial accuracy of which I am content to 
 rest the conduct of my work ; yet I would not accept 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 205 
 
 a challenge to give up my general theories, if I were 
 defeated upon some particular issue, which had been 
 selected by an adversary. Issues, doubtless, there are 
 which would be fatal, and the same is true of Chris- 
 tianity. In regard to it, for instance, if the Resurrec- 
 tion of Christ be an illusion, then I have no more to 
 say ; Christianity might still be an admirable scheme 
 of morality, and a great force tending to righteous- 
 ness, but the feature would have disappeared which 
 had hitherto distinguished it from all other religious 
 and all other ethical systems. So I prefer to reason in 
 a like way in all cases where direct experimental 
 proof is not possible, and I am not going — to put the 
 matter in plain words — to be abashed into accepting 
 conditions on a Sunday which I should refuse without 
 a blush on a Monday. 
 
 Quite lately we have been challenged to fight on 
 the issue of the reality of such a thing as the so- 
 called demoniacal possession, and particularly on the 
 incident from the account of which my text is taken. 
 I should like, in regard to this, to indicate, so far as 
 may be in a few words, the reason why — though, I 
 hope, a fairly honest man of science — I do not feel 
 bound to become an agnostic. 
 
 Before dealing with certain details in the incident, 
 I will notice one general objection, which was so 
 
206 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 worded as to cause me a little surprise. The de- 
 struction of the swine is thus severely censured by 
 the critic : “ Everything I know of law and justice 
 convinces me that the wanton destruction of other 
 people’s property is a misdemeanour of evil example.” 
 As a general remark this is perfectly true, and as I do 
 not suppose that the writer is much infected with the 
 flabby sentimentality which is so prevalent at this 
 epoch of our national history, I think we should very 
 probably agree that in many cases the destruction of 
 other people’s property, so far from being a misde- 
 meanour of evil example, was a necessity and a duty, 
 as the only way of appealing to their feelings, and 
 stopping them from being a curse to the world ; but 
 the insertion of the epithet “ wanton ” seems to me to 
 be a quiet begging of an open question. How do we 
 know that the destruction was wanton, i.e. not puni- 
 tive ? If the inhabitants of Gadara were Jews, the 
 keeping of swine was an outrage on the law which at 
 that time was their standard of right and wrong. I 
 do not assert that they were Jews, because, as the 
 place was east of Jordan, this is uncertain, but we 
 must make due allowance for the fact, which at any 
 rate is remarkable, that the incident, though so 
 different from the ordinary procedure and teaching 
 of the Saviour, does not appear, to any one of the 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 207 
 
 narrators, to call for explanation or defence. As any 
 act of wanton destruction was wholly unlike what we 
 know of the Saviour s usual line of action, this appli- 
 cation of the term “ wanton,” grounded on the barest 
 outline of the facts, appears to me to indicate a frame 
 of mind not precisely judicial. 
 
 Next in regard to the incident. The evidence in 
 its favour at first sight appears very strong; it is 
 related in each of the synoptic Gospels, and the 
 marked variations in the different accounts make it 
 more probable that these were derived from a tra- 
 ditional groundwork, than that they were interpola- 
 tions into the original documents, as we know to be 
 the case with one or two passages. The dates of these 
 three Gospels in their present form cannot be fixed 
 with precision. Two of them, however, those bearing 
 the names of Mark and Luke, are admittedly not the 
 work of persons who were eye-witnesses of the inci- 
 dents. Matthew, indeed, was one of the chosen twelve, 
 but in this case we cannot be sure that we possess 
 the original document. Indeed, it would seem more 
 probable, though there is much to be said on both 
 sides, that this was written in Hebrew, and that the 
 one known to us is a very ancient translation. At 
 the same time (I say this lest I should be misunder- 
 stood in admitting thus much), I fully believe that 
 
208 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 these three Gospels are very ancient writings ; that 
 they are very probably — though this cannot be proved 
 beyond question — the work of the authors whose names 
 they bear ; that if not, they can hardly be later than 
 the first century of our era, and that they narrate the 
 story of Jesus of Nazareth in all important particulars 
 as it was told by those who were eye-witnesses of His 
 life. But I am prepared to admit that the authors 
 may possibly have included, here and there, an in- 
 cident which formed a part of the common stock 
 of tradition, but nevertheless might not be strictly 
 authentic, though it might have some foundation. 
 
 Now, in regard to this incident, as soon as we begin 
 to scrutinize it, difficulties arise. If we except the 
 destruction of the fig tree, where also there are diffi- 
 culties, and the parallelism may be disputed, this 
 miracle is totally different from all the others which 
 our Lord is said to have worked, but it reminds us 
 of a type frequent in the Apocryphal Gospels and in 
 later legends. This, however, is not all. Where did 
 the miracle happen ? St. Matthew, according to the 
 Authorized Version, says “in the land of the Gerge- 
 senes,” but the Revised Version reads Gadarenes, and 
 one ancient manuscript Gazarenes. In St. Mark and 
 St. Luke we find Gadarenes in the Authorized Ver- 
 sion and Gerasenes in the Revised. Now, in regard 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA . 
 
 209 
 
 to these places, the existence of a town near the lake 
 named Gergesa has been asserted by commentators, 
 but apparently on no better authority than the sup- 
 posed needs of exegesis. Gerasa is a well-known 
 town, but it was in Eastern Persea, twenty miles east 
 of the Jordan, and at a yet greater distance from the 
 lake. Gadara can be identified with the modern 
 Om-Keis, evidently once a flourishing town, with 
 numerous rock-hewn tombs in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood. But this identification has its own diffi- 
 culties, for the town is a considerable distance — three 
 and a half hours’ journey — from the lake shore, and the 
 rocky slope in its neighbourhood descends to a river. 
 Topographical difficulties, then, exist in regard to this 
 passage which are not usually present in other parts 
 of the Gospel history. Moreover, St. Matthew dis- 
 tinctly mentions two demoniacs, St. Mark and St. 
 Luke only one, and there are other minor discre- 
 pancies. It is, then, evident that we are not in pos- 
 session of a very accurate version of what occurred 
 on this occasion, and thus are justified in declining 
 to be bound by inferences founded on its details. 
 
 Still it must be frankly admitted that our difficulties 
 do not disappear with this particular incident. In 
 several passages of the New Testament the existence 
 of such, a condition as is described by the words 
 p 
 
210 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 “ demoniacal possession ” is affirmed, and the lan- 
 guage attributed to the Saviour ascribes to Him a 
 belief in its reality; that is to say, He employs, on 
 more than one occasion, words which are meaningless 
 unless addressed to a something external to the man, 
 which, like a motive force, was the prime influence in 
 his actions. We are, therefore, presented with this 
 dilemma: “ Either Jesus said what He is reported to 
 have said, or He did not. In the former case, it is 
 inevitable that His authority on matters connected 
 with the unseen world should be roughly shaken ; in 
 the latter, the blow falls upon the authority of the 
 synoptic Gospels. If their report on a matter of so 
 stupendous and far-reaching import as this is un- 
 trustworthy, how can we be sure of its trustworthiness 
 in other cases ? ” 
 
 As regards the latter alternative, I grant that by 
 accepting it we do to a certain extent diminish the 
 credit of the authors of the synoptic Gospels, but I 
 humbly demur to the matter being regarded as one 
 of “ stupendous and far-reaching import.” Reserving 
 for a moment my full reasons for this, I content myself 
 with remarking that, to my mind, the main outlines 
 of the message brought by J esus to mankind appear 
 to me vastly more important than the correction of 
 the diagnosis, however inaccurate, of a disease. 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA . 
 
 21 1 
 
 Let us take the former alternative, that Jesus, as 
 man, accepted the current belief in demoniacal pos- 
 session, and let us assume for the moment that in so 
 doing He was wrong. As I pointed out on a former 
 occasion , 1 we are told distinctly that by His Incarna- 
 tion He subjected Himself to the conditions of human 
 life, and thus to limitation, or even imperfection, of 
 knowledge. So, it will be said, His authority in 
 matters connected with the unseen world is roughly 
 shaken. Doubtless, in certain matters, if that can 
 be said to be “ shaken” which we do not admit to 
 be existent. I learn, on what appears to be good 
 authority, that He came to bring life and immortality 
 to light through the Gospel, and it does not appear 
 to me, as I infer it did not appear to His special 
 messengers, that such matters as the details of the 
 Divine scheme of government, the nature and influ- 
 ences on man of beings other than human (admitting 
 for a moment their existence), the end of the world, 
 and the like — notwithstanding the attractions which 
 they afford to our minds— were regarded as of primary 
 and vital importance. 
 
 But it is affirmed the right or wrong of the idea of 
 demoniacal possession is of such importance that a 
 declaration on the subject could not, ought not to, 
 
 1 See pp. 169-173. 
 
212 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 have been withheld. This sounds to me very like the 
 way in which children often pass judgment on the 
 actions of their elders. They assume that they are 
 in possession of all the facts and an equal power of 
 dealing with them, and then have not the slightest 
 doubt of the accuracy of their conclusions. We older 
 folk, on the contrary, often think that their know- 
 ledge of facts is very imperfect, and that their methods 
 of induction are very hasty. 
 
 But let us leave generalities and proceed to the 
 particular assertion. In support of this two reasons 
 are given. This is one : “ If physical and mental 
 disorders are caused by demons, Gregory of Tours and 
 his contemporaries rightly considered that relics and 
 exorcisms were more useful than doctors, and the 
 gravest questions arise as to the legal and moral 
 responsibilities of persons inspired by demoniacal 
 impulses.” There seems to me some confusion of 
 thought or question-begging here. I was not pre- 
 viously aware that I was bound to believe that relics, 
 or the repetition of some form of words, had any power 
 at all of themselves. Indeed, I thought that the 
 Church of England — whatever superstitious members 
 of it might say — expressly repudiated any such idea. 
 Is not this much the same as saying, “ If you believe 
 in the existence of God you are bound to worship a 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 213 
 
 graven image”? The principle, in short, which it is 
 sought to affirm — and there is nothing new in the 
 attempt — is this: “ Faith is responsible for the errors 
 of superstition.” I will alter it, so that we may see 
 whether it will be palatable all round : “ Science is 
 responsible for the errors of charlatans.’’ For myself, 
 1 believe the latter no more than the former. 
 
 Further, I fail to see what questions as to the legal 
 or moral responsibility of persons thus afflicted are 
 raised which do not already exist and have not been 
 dealt with. They appear to me identical with those 
 presented by the admitted existence of insanity, and 
 I do not see in what important respect these are 
 modified by the diagnosis of the ultimate cause of 
 the disease. In either case a certain amount of re- 
 sponsibility, moral or legal, may rest upon the afflicted 
 person, and this fact — no doubt involving great prac- 
 tical difficulties — appears to be already recognized 
 both by law and by public opinion. 
 
 The other reason advanced is this — that a belief in 
 the reality of demoniacal possession gave rise, through 
 the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to the 
 most horrible persecutions and judicial murders, and 
 the record of a plain and simple declaration upon 
 such an occasion as this would have rendered the 
 long agony of mediaeval humanity impossible. 
 
214 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA . 
 
 I venture to question this rather confident state- 
 ment. The prediction does not appear to me borne 
 out by facts. The plainest precepts of the Gospel 
 have been violated again and again in the name of 
 Christ by the ministers of the Church. That Gospel 
 which was to bring peace on earth has impelled the 
 sword, and has been made to mankind one long agony. 
 Read the history of the conflicts and anathemas of 
 the early Church, of the persecutions of the mediaeval 
 and later Churches ; read the tale of the Albigenses, 
 Waldenses, Lollards, the outrages perpetrated by 
 Romanists and Protestants, Episcopalians and Cove- 
 nanters — none can show clean hands, though some are 
 more guilty than others — perpetrated for the honour 
 of God and for the. furtherance of the Gospel of 
 Christ, and then say if you can feel very hopeful as 
 to the effects of a declaration adverse to the general 
 tide of popular opinion. Men are so teachable, so 
 ready to accept truth ! Permit me to propose a test 
 if you are the victim of this illusion. Read the New 
 Testament without prejudice till you have fairly 
 grasped its principles, and then devote yourself to 
 a brief study of the so-called religious newspapers. 
 
 As regards, then, the idea of demoniacal possession. 
 Gi anted that it is a belief to which human nature 
 seems especially prone ; granted that it is most intense 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 215 
 
 among the most ignorant ; granted that in regard to 
 it the wildest and most absurd notions have been 
 prevalent ; granted that the general tendency of scien- 
 tific study has been to attribute its phenomena to 
 so-called physical causes, — all this, I maintain, is no 
 proof that the idea may not have a true basis. If 
 I admit the above facts as conclusive in a destructive 
 sense, I must also, if I am to be consistent, abandon 
 all belief in the existence of anything but myself, 
 because the most absurd ideas have been from time 
 to time entertained about everything external to 
 mj^self, and then, inasmuch as I have no sure test 
 of my own sanity, no means of ascertaining the trust- 
 worthiness of my own consciousness, I am driven to 
 a kind of mental suicide. I see the difficulties in- 
 volved in attaining to a belief in anything which 
 cannot be demonstrated by direct experiment, but 
 fail to see that we are placed in a much better posi- 
 tion by practically refusing to admit the possibility 
 of a revelation. We have, in effect, to deal with this 
 dilemma. If we disbelieve Christianity, there is a 
 great body of historic facts which are most difficult 
 to explain on the theory that it is an illusion. If 
 we accept it, we must receive as facts certain things 
 which doubtless are incapable of experimental demon- 
 stration and contrary to general experience. This, 
 
216 
 
 THE DEMONIACS OF GAD A R A. 
 
 indeed, raises a point on which I would gladly en- 
 large, but time does not now permit. It is this — that 
 to say that a certain phenomenon is the result of 
 causes wholly physical is misleading. Scientific re- 
 search only discloses to us the sequence of phenomena; 
 it in no case explains the cause. Even if you can 
 go so far as to connect the exhibition of certain 
 symptoms of disease with the deterioration or even 
 the mechanical disturbance of a particular organ, you 
 cannot say why it is ; you have got no further than 
 that (as most would admit) every phenomenon of life, 
 so far as we know it, must have a physical basis. If, 
 then, there be a God Who is the Ruler of this world — 
 and this many who are not Christians would admit — 
 and if man, in this world, be in a state of trial, be, so 
 to say, at school, then it seems to me impossible to 
 assert that there may not be creatures other than 
 man, whether better or worse than he, who may be 
 intermediaries in the government and discipline of the 
 human race. When this is stated on what seems to 
 me good authority, I do not feel justified in pro- 
 nouncing it incredible on a priori grounds, simply 
 because I cannot put it to experimental proof. Even 
 in matters capable of being submitted to this test, I 
 often cannot say what it is that causes the phenomena. 
 I have never yet found any one who could really 
 
THE DEMONIACS OF GADARA. 
 
 217 
 
 explain such a simple thing as magnetism. So, in 
 regard to the existence of spirits of good or evil, I 
 do not think that we can yet say more than that 
 caution is needed, because evidently any opinion con- 
 cerning them is liable to be perverted into a super- 
 stition. Further, I will add that the whole question 
 appears to me of very secondary importance. The 
 great duty of life, both to you and to me, is not to 
 discuss the existence and sphere of action of angels or 
 of demons, but to seek to follow the footsteps of Christ, 
 and strive to come to Him, Whom truly to know is 
 eternal life. 
 
 [P.S. — Since this sermon was written the subject has received 
 further attention, the latest contribution being an article by Mr. 
 Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century (February, 1891), which appeared 
 while this sheet was passing through the press. The article is a 
 learned and interesting disquisition, but seems to me to leave the 
 main difficulties almost untouched.] 
 
THE MIRACLES OF APOSTOLIC AND 
 MEDIAEVAL TIMES . 1 
 
 “ There shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and 
 shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it 
 were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” 
 
 St. Matt. xxiv. 24. 
 
 Christianity is now frequently attacked, in the 
 following way. Critics select a particular case, and 
 present to us alternative propositions; to take one 
 side is a virtual surrender, to take the other speedily 
 lands us in an absurdity, ft is tacitly assumed that 
 no third course is possible. 
 
 I purpose to notice briefly one of these attacks 
 which was published in a recent number of a well- 
 known periodical , 2 and probably has been read by 
 many of my hearers. The alternative which it offers 
 to us amounts to this. Miracles are asserted to have 
 occurred frequently in the Middle Ages. In some 
 
 1 A sermon preached for the Christian Evidence Society, 1889. 
 
 2 Nineteenth Century , March, 1889 : “The Value of Witness to the 
 Miraculous ” (Professor Huxley). 
 
 218 
 
MIRACLES OF APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES . 219 
 
 instances the evidence by which they are supported 
 is as good as can be produced in favour of those 
 narrated in the New Testament. Will you believe 
 both or neither? The difficulty is not a new one. 
 No great theological learning is needed to convince 
 us that, if the case proposed has not been already 
 considered, it is exactly like others that have been 
 discussed; but a seasoning of modern science acts 
 as a stimulus to the mental palate. 
 
 Briefly, the story is this. In the earlier part of the 
 ninth century there was living one Eginhard, secretary 
 of Karl the Great, who, in his later years, founded a 
 monastery of which he became abbot. He is anxious 
 to enrich its church with some relics. A certain 
 deacon from Rome intimates that for a consideration 
 he can put Eginhard in possession of the relics of two 
 saints named Marcellinus and Petrus. Eginhard sends 
 him back to Rome in company with a trusty agent. 
 The deacon, however, proves to be an impostor; he 
 has promised to sell what he does not possess, so 
 Eginhard’ s men steal the relics, and escape with them 
 to Germany. As these are being conveyed to the 
 church, where they were finally deposited, and after 
 they have been enshrined there, numerous miracles 
 are wrought, a few of which were witnessed by 
 Eginhard. 
 
220 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF 
 
 Of all this he has left a record, which has come 
 down to us in a manuscript, itself dating from the 
 tenth century. From it we also learn, that on the 
 journey from Rome the chest containing the relics 
 was secretly opened, and portions were stolen by the 
 emissary of another abbot, and that Eginhard, after 
 discovering his loss, did not easily get back the 
 missing treasure. The induction which we are invited 
 to draw is as follows : In ordinary life Eginhard was 
 a shrewd man of affairs and a sober historian, but no 
 sooner is an appeal made to the religious (or super- 
 stitious) side of his nature than he appears to be 
 almost as destitute of critical faculty as of moral 
 sense. Indeed, throughout the story its chief actors 
 seem about as conspicuous for their degraded knavery 
 as for their fatuous credulity. 
 
 So we are expected to arrive at this conclusion : 
 “ If Eginhard’s calm and objective narrative of the 
 historical events of his time is no guarantee for the 
 soundness of his judgment where the supernatural is 
 concerned, the fervid rhetoric of the Apostle of the 
 Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the inner light, 
 and the extraordinary conceptions of the value and 
 requirements of logical proof which he betrays in 
 page after page of his Epistles, afford still less security.” 
 
 As it happens, I have given more attention than 
 
APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES . 
 
 221 
 
 most people to some parts of St. Paul’s writings, so 
 may be pardoned for demurring to the censures thus 
 glibly passed upon a highly inconvenient witness, 
 whom it is of the utmost importance to discredit. 
 I admit, indeed, that St. Paul thought and reasoned 
 as a Jew and a man of the first century, not as a 
 professor of Teutonic or Latin race, born in the nine- 
 teenth century; that, as he is speaking of things 
 which cannot be tested by the galvanometer or the 
 microscope, his methods of reasoning are not always 
 in accordance with those adopted in physical science, 
 but they seem to me at least as sound and trust- 
 worthy as many which pass muster in metaphysical 
 works of good repute. 
 
 This, however, it may be said, is a matter of opinion, 
 so we will pass on to consider briefly these three ques- 
 tions. (1) What is a miracle ? (2) Have miracles 
 
 ceased? (3) Is there any difference of importance 
 between the miracles of Christ and His Apostles and 
 those which are related by Eginhard, and similar 
 authors ? 
 
 1. Perhaps it may be well to remind you that three 
 words are used in the Greek of the New Testament 
 to designate the phenomena which are commonly, but 
 vaguely, termed miraculous. These words may be 
 rendered in English as marvels, signs, powers. The 
 
222 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF 
 
 first refers simply to the effect upon the mind of the 
 spectators, and may indicate nothing more than 
 superior knowledge. The miracle here consists in 
 the inexplicability of an event, so far as the witnesses 
 were concerned. A “ sign ” may be in itself quite a 
 commonplace event, the whole significance being its 
 occurrence at a particular juncture; the “ miracle ” 
 here consisting in the coincidence. The last term — 
 “ powers”— predicates that certain persons can produce 
 results which indicate the possession of exceptional 
 power. Here, also, what would be called a miracle 
 in one age would be in another an unusual and re- 
 markable phenomenon. From this it follows that the 
 word “ miracle,” so vaguely employed, has a very com- 
 prehensive sense, and includes a large number of 
 phenomena which are only relatively miraculous, that 
 is amazing and inexplicable. Hence the term “miracle” 
 merely expresses an event as viewed from the stand- 
 point either of a past age or of our present know- 
 ledge. We include in it events for which we cannot 
 discover an adequate cause among the modes of force 
 known to us, and which, as they are connected with 
 the religious sentiment, are referred to the direct or 
 indirect intervention of the Almighty. But this mode 
 of accounting for them obviously is no more than an 
 expression of the dominant opinion of a particular 
 
APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES . 
 
 223 
 
 epoch; the idea of “ interference with the laws of 
 nature,” though usual, is needless, and, as I think, 
 misleading. The miracle may be the result of law 
 as much as the fall of a stone, but of a law of infre- 
 quent operation; so that in regard to it the phrase 
 “ interference with law” is as inappropriate as it 
 would be in the case of an electro-magnet, which, 
 though it hinders a bar of iron from falling, so long 
 as the current is passing, does not in any way inter- 
 fere with the law of gravitation. 
 
 Further, we must not forget that these wonders, 
 signs, and powers were not regarded by the Saviour 
 or His immediate followers as conclusive proof of the 
 validity of a commission or the truth of a message. 
 The life of the prophet, the appeal of his doctrine to 
 the conscience and moral sense of his auditors, were 
 the only safe criteria. Christians are warned with 
 much solemnity, and not seldom, as in the passage 
 which I have taken for my text, that if they trusted 
 only to the evidence of miracles, they might be de- 
 ceived and led hopelessly astray. Another point also 
 may be noticed in passing, that Christ would not 
 work these miracles to gratify mere curiosity or stop 
 the mouth of captious unbelief; and that the result 
 often depended to no small extent on the mental 
 attitude of the person relieved. Where men did not 
 
224 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF 
 
 believe in Christ, there His power was not made 
 manifest. * 
 
 2. These considerations clear the way for an answer 
 to the second question — Do miracles continue ? If 
 this question means, Have there been occurrences, 
 since the close of the New Testament canon, which 
 were connected with religious sentiment, and cannot 
 be accounted for by any known physical causes? — I 
 reply, without hesitation, Certainly. You may think 
 that I am making a rather large admission. If so, 
 explain such things as the effect of bad news upon 
 the health ; the influence of the will, the phenomena 
 — endless in their variety — of hysteria and its cure. 
 In accounting for these you must appeal to forces, as 
 you may call them, which are not, strictly speaking, 
 physical. Such phenomena, from one point of view, 
 might be justly called miracles, and such miracles 
 continue to occur. I can believe that at Lourdes, 
 La Salette, and other like places, the imagination— 
 the faith in a certain sense — of the sufferers in some 
 cases has wrought their cure. But you say that is 
 no miracle. Well, you may find a place for it in your 
 system of the universe ; you may call it an effect of 
 the imagination, or you may devise for it a long and 
 magniloquent name, but in so doing you neither 
 explain it nor make it a merely physical process, as 
 I understand the word. 
 
APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES. 
 
 225 
 
 I must not be supposed to assert that all the miracles 
 related in the New Testament can be classed with the 
 above named. There are some which in all probability 
 will always remain as miracles to man. I simply draw 
 attention to the relativity of the term. As knowledge 
 grows, the sphere of the natural enlarges by gain from 
 the outer region of the supranatural, but even these 
 additions bring us no nearer to the ultimate causes 
 of things, so that, turn where we will, true miracle 
 ever confronts us. 
 
 3. There remains the question — Is there any differ- 
 ence of importance between the miracles recorded by 
 Eginhard and those ascribed to the Saviour and His 
 Apostles ? Restricting ourselves to those for which 
 Eginhard vouches — and this seems to me justifiable, 
 owing to the circumstances of the time— one, obviously, 
 is no miracle at all, but merely a natural phenomenon. 
 Some spots of a red fluid appear outside the coffer 
 containing the relics ; these, on the most insufficient 
 evidence, simply as being a red fluid, are considered 
 to be blood. This, had it been true, would have been 
 a mere prodigy, and without a parallel in the New 
 Testament. The other two may be classed with the 
 cases of “ faith-healing ” which I have already men- 
 tioned. You cannot explain them, you cannot ensure 
 their occurrence like the result of an experiment, and 
 Q 
 
226 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF 
 
 so far they are miraculous. But I venture to affirm 
 that had the coffer contained the bones of any other 
 persons, or even had it been empty, the result would 
 have followed, provided of course the sufferer had not 
 been aware of the change. 
 
 But there is another and yet more important 
 difference— the character of the men and the nature 
 of their teaching. Eginhard’s emissaries steal the 
 relics; he is a willing, nay, a joyful recipient of stolen 
 property ; others in turn rob him. As our critic 
 remarks quite truly, we seem to be reading about 
 the doings of a gang of horse coupers. The desire to 
 possess a collection of relics overpowers all sense of 
 right and wrong ; the worst of all evils has happened 
 to the men of this age, their religious feelings have 
 led them into flagrant sin; to speak metaphorically, 
 the devil has enshrined himself in the chapel of their 
 souls ; they are seeking to win entrance into the 
 kingdom of heaven by deeds of evil. Is that the path 
 which Christ and His Apostles indicated ? Is that 
 the way which leads to eternal life ? 
 
 Again, what is the doctrine which these miracles 
 supported and inculcated ? It is that some scrap, 
 whether of bone or rag, which has belonged, or is 
 reputed to have belonged, to a holy man is a talisman 
 of inestimable value. This doctrine might indeed be 
 
APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAEVAL TIMES. 
 
 227 
 
 vaguely supported by an inferential interpretation of 
 one or two incidents in the New Testament, but it 
 is totally opposed to its direct statements. Charms, 
 amulets, relics, and the like, are part and parcel of 
 old-world superstitions, which Christ would have had 
 His Church abandon, but to which its members in 
 their weakness too soon reverted. Then the last 
 state became even worse than the first ; Christianity 
 in its superstition more degraded than Judaism, or 
 even than some forms of heathenism. The corruption 
 yet lingers, its roots lie deep in human nature, and 
 few branches of the Church, even in this nineteenth 
 century, have wholly succeeded in purging themselves 
 from it. 
 
 In the one case, then, we are dealing with repre- 
 sentatives of Christianity at one of its lowest stages 
 of degradation, a stage when men of perverted moral 
 sense were constantly, almost greedily, expecting the 
 miraculous to establish an immoral and thoroughly 
 unchristian doctrine. Can that be said of the other 
 case ? The Apostles might be mistaken, they might 
 be victims of an illusion, but can any man question 
 their transparent honesty, their singleness of purpose, 
 their perfect unselfishness, their noble self-devotion, 
 their moral grandeur of life ? Whither do we turn 
 when we seek for an approved standard of right and 
 
228 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF 
 
 wrong, for principles of conduct which have won the 
 obedience of mankind, but to the pages of the New 
 Testament, the chronicle of the lives, the words, the 
 thoughts, of these first missionaries of the Gospel of 
 Christ ? What would Paul, what would James, what 
 would John have said of theft and fraud and lying 
 however pious the purpose ? Their successors on 
 such occasions have been too prone to indulge in 
 euphemistic phrases ; but they would have used plain 
 speech and strong words. With what withering 
 scorn would Paul have spurned these old rags and 
 bones, these ordinances worse than Jewish, these 
 idolized relics of weak and fallible men ! It is an 
 insult to the Apostles to make the comparison. It 
 betrays a complete inability to comprehend their 
 moral position ; it is as if one asserted that approved 
 character and a life of honour counted for nothing 
 in weighing testimony, and that the existence of 
 perjured knaves rendered worthless the evidence of 
 men of unsullied reputation. If we adopt such canons 
 of criticism, whither shall we be landed ? Because in 
 politics there are self-seeking knaves, is there no such 
 thing as an honest worker for the State ? Because 
 there are quacks in medicine, are we to sneer at all 
 physicians ? Because in science there has been care- 
 less observation, hasty generalization, loose induction 
 
APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAE VAL TIMES. 
 
 229 
 
 and irresponsible chatter, are we to abandon all trust 
 in it, and say that some truth may be there, but that 
 we shall never find it ? 
 
 What good are we to obtain from an Agnostic 
 position ? It is that which in science we should be 
 most reluctant to accept, for it leaves us without a 
 working hypothesis. Is it without its difficulties ? 
 I think not. Suppose we concede that Christianity 
 was born of a mixture of imposture and illusion, 
 we have to account for many phenomena which are 
 unique in the world’s history, and for the part played 
 by it in the development of mankind. The latter 
 seems to me not less inexplicable than the idea of a 
 Divine Founder. There are difficulties in Christianity, 
 the Agnostic urges — certainly there are. I know 
 them well, and the weakness, fallibility, and credulity 
 of man. But there are difficulties also in Atheism, 
 yet that creed — or rather no creed — seems to me 
 logical compared with the position of the Agnostic, 
 who halts between two opinions ; who neither asserts 
 nor denies the existence of a God ; who repudiates the 
 name of Atheist, but excludes God from the world ; 
 who cannot make up his mind whether a Creator’s 
 love and a Creator’s care have been guiding men on 
 “ stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher 
 things,” or whether individual life is but a bubble on 
 
230 MIRA CLES OF APOSTOLIC AND MEDIAE VAL TIMES. 
 
 the stream, the course of nations like a river hasting 
 to lose itself in the sands of the desert. “ Behold, we 
 know not anything,” is a poor creed for this weary 
 world. With all its difficulties, with all its alleged 
 imperfections, Christianity is easier to believe than 
 that God made man, with his deep capacities for loving 
 and for suffering, and then left him to perish in the 
 hurly-burly of life, where the individual counts for 
 nothing, and there is no other hope than in the pro- 
 gress of the race. It is better, methinks, to accept 
 the mystery of the Incarnation and the fact of the 
 Resurrection, with their legitimate consequences, 
 though they must ever remain to us as miracles 
 beyond the sphere of scientific proof, and transcending 
 our powers of thought, than to make ourselves the 
 measure of all knowledge, and proclaim to the Creator, 
 “ Thus far shalt Thou go, and no farther.” 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW’S SON . 1 
 
 “Jesus said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he 
 that was dead sat up, and began to speak.” 
 
 St. Luke yii. 14, 15. 
 
 If there are no other laws of Nature than those 
 known to us, this story cannot be true. There is one 
 bourne from which no traveller returns. Whatever 
 weight we may be disposed to allow to the widety 
 prevalent belief in the immortality of the soul — to 
 use a general phrase — and in the possibility of com- 
 munication between the living and the spirits of the 
 dead, we may say that it is the result of experience, 
 practically universal, that, so far as this world is 
 concerned, death is the end of life. Is, then, the story 
 true ; and if so, what are its lessons ? 
 
 Well, if we have made up our minds that, slightly to 
 alter a well-known axiom, testimony may be false but 
 a miracle cannot be true, or that “ miracles do not hap- 
 pen,’’ to adopt the more modern formula, it is needless 
 
 1 Preached in St. Peter’s, Yere Street, Sixteenth Sunday after 
 Trinity, 1889. 
 
 231 
 
232 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 to go further, and we must content ourselves with 
 such spiritual consolation as we can derive from the 
 legend. But some of us, though always sceptical as 
 to miraculous occurrences, feel that we are surrounded 
 by so many phenomena in our daily experience which 
 we cannot really understand or explain, as to doubt 
 whether this method of cutting the Gordian knot 
 succeeds in liberating us from difficulties. 
 
 Direct proof of the truth of the alleged raising of 
 the widow’s son is impossible. All that we can do is 
 to enquire whether it seems an accretion to the story of 
 Christ’s life, and if not, it will stand or fall with that 
 story. Let us, then, briefly recall the circumstances of 
 the narrative, that we may see from internal evidence 
 whether the tale bears the marks of a fabrication. It 
 is related by St. Luke alone. In like manner the raising 
 of Lazarus is mentioned only by St. John, while the 
 raising of Jairus’s daughter is found in each of the 
 synoptical Gospels. Thus the last named cannot be 
 rejected on the ground that concurrent testimony is 
 wanting. But if we admit the truth of one case, we 
 abandon all a priori objections against the others. 
 Really, however, it matters little whether one or all of 
 the Evangelists mention the incident. No one can read 
 the Gospels carefully without seeing that, according 
 to our modern notions, they are very far from being 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON 
 
 233 
 
 systematic compositions; they indicate an age and 
 habits of thought very different from our own. I think, 
 indeed, that a better knowledge of ancient literature 
 would sometimes make us a little distrustful of the 
 results of measuring the documents of the first cen- 
 tury by the canons of nineteenth-century criticism. 
 Each of the Gospels is a biographical sketch, more or 
 less fragmentary, so that it is as unreasonable to try 
 them by the rules of modern historians as it would 
 be to reject the testimony of any living writer, who 
 publishes in a magazine some reminiscences of a 
 friend, because he does not tell us the name of the 
 village where that friend was born, or of the lady 
 whom he married. 
 
 The story itself is perfectly simple, clear, and 
 natural. Nain was a town of some size — reduced 
 now to a paltry village among heaps of ruins — stand- 
 ing on the rough slopes of the hill called Little 
 Hermon, and overlooking the upper reaches of the 
 fertile valley of Esdraelon. The town was walled, 
 and had gates. There is an old burial-ground near 
 the track leading from Endor to Nain, and this route 
 would be taken by any one coming from Capernaum . 1 
 The details of the incident, in their occasional minute- 
 ness and general simplicity, seem to mark the hand of 
 1 Canon Tristram, The Land of Israel , ch. vi. 
 
2 34 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON 
 
 an eye-witness; the fact that the Saviour saw and 
 spoke to the weeping mother before He reached the 
 bier indicates, as has been pointed out, a perfect 
 familiarity with the Jewish funeral rites, because she 
 would precede the bier, the male relations and friends 
 following it. It has also been well remarked, on this 
 and a like miracle , 1 “The simplicity and absence of 
 all extravagant details ; the Divine calmness and 
 majesty on the part of the Christ, so different from 
 the manner in which legend would have coloured the 
 scene . . . and lastly, the beauteous harmony, where 
 all is in accord, from the first touch of compassion till 
 when, forgetful of the bystanders/heedless of "effect/ 
 He gives the son back to his mother; — are not all 
 these worthy of the event, and evidential of the truth 
 of the narrative ? ” “ Christ is never in haste ; least 
 
 of all on His errands of love. And He is never in 
 haste, because He is always sure” 
 
 Thus we have, as it seems to me, this choice only : 
 to believe the story a deliberate fabrication, or to 
 believe it true, for it does not resemble a parasitic 
 legend. I know what the latter, position involves. 
 I know that the raising of the dead cannot be demon- 
 strated by experiment, and is contrary to the general 
 experience of mankind. But in professing myself a 
 1 Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah , ch. xx. 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 235 
 
 Christian I abandon a strictly scientific position, and 
 must be prepared to accept the consequences ; for this 
 profession is inseparable from a belief in Christ’s own 
 Resurrection and in the Word made flesh ; and these, 
 though they may be made probable, cannot, I know, 
 be proved. Once admit that Christ, in the full sense 
 of the words, was not only Son of Man but also Son 
 of God, and though critical laws have their place in 
 dealing with every incident of His life, we need not 
 trouble ourselves with any antecedent improbability 
 of this story. In the presence of the very Source of 
 life, the Centre of force — if the phrase be permitted — 
 of the whole universe, what marvel if the sick became 
 whole and the dead were made alive ? 
 
 What, then, are the lessons of the incident ? In 
 glancing at these we shall perhaps see better how 
 congruous it is with the mission of the Saviour. 
 
 Death is a painful fact — apart from sin, the most 
 painful fact in human experience. Without revela- 
 tion, as we can see from the plaintive laments of 
 ancient poets, it was a melancholy and inevitable 
 necessity ; it might be faced with courage, it might be 
 endured with stoicism, but all the praise and all the 
 philosophy of man could not make it welcome, except 
 as a release from suffering, which, after all, is really 
 part and parcel of the same thing. With revelation, 
 
236 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 though man has found the consolation of hope and the 
 support of faith, he has obtained an increased sense of 
 responsibility and a deepened conviction of sin. 
 
 Suppose, however, that to those who are called away 
 death does come as a friend ; suppose that in this 
 solemn hour the soul begins to perceive the eternal 
 light beyond the melting mists of earth, and attains 
 to the assurance that “ to depart is far better.” What 
 is it to those who remain ? Call us selfish if you will, 
 but parting is pain, whatever blessings it may bring. 
 Is there no blank in the home even when the daugh- 
 ter has gone away as a happy wife, or when the son 
 has sailed for a distant land, though his departure 
 be to fame and fortune which he could not have 
 enjoyed at home ? Yet these partings are but for a 
 season ; that parting is for ever in this life. Granted 
 that “ to die is gain ” to the one who goes, this cannot 
 be purchased without a loss to others. Parting is 
 sorrow, even as pain is pain, and no poetry, no philo- 
 sophy, no faith, can ever alter that fact. We may 
 accept a sorrow as part of the discipline of life ; we 
 may receive it as from a Fathers hand, in the as- 
 sured conviction that it will work for our good ; but 
 welcome it cannot be so long as man is man, any 
 more than a drug can be made pleasant to the taste 
 by the knowledge that it will cure. 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 237 
 
 Yet more, so long as the life is strong in a man, the 
 summons to lay it down cannot, I believe, be other 
 than painful to himself. The preacher of old spoke 
 truth when he said that death might be acceptable 
 to the needy, the despairing, and the man worn out 
 by age, but it was bitter to the prosperous and 
 vigorous. I believe that a desire to live to the period 
 allotted to man is not only natural but also healthy — 
 that it is no more blameworthy than any other 
 natural affection. It, like they, may be abused, may 
 be perverted, but it is a part of God’s order of nature, 
 and is designed for the preservation of man and the 
 good of humanity. Constituted as we are, it would 
 be very seldom that a man could take up with much 
 energy or interest a piece of work which he did not 
 desire to finish — indeed, rather hoped he would not. 
 So, though trust in God and the love of God enable 
 us to say, “ Thy Will be done,” nature protests, and 
 will protest whenever the summons comes, while 
 work seems to open out before us, and the way to 
 the grave is not yet smoothed by the gentle advance 
 of old age. Did not Christ Himself feel this ? Was 
 not the dread hour of Gethsemane, in part at least, 
 a protest of the human nature against the coming 
 Cross and the abruptly closed career ? What else 
 meant that cry of agony, “ Father, if it be possible, 
 
238 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON 
 
 let this cup pass from Me ” ? But that was the prayer 
 of the Perfect One; for it ended, “ Nevertheless not as 
 I will, but as Thou wilt.” 
 
 Remembering this, we understand better the signifi- 
 cance of those three instances in which it is on record 
 that Christ recalled the dead to life. As has often 
 been pointed out, the Divine power is exhibited in 
 three stages of progress, if the phrase be permissible. 
 On one occasion (the first, according to most authori- 
 ties) the last sigh had not long been drawn; on 
 another, life had departed at least some hours before, 
 for the body was being taken to burial; on the third, 
 it had lain, perhaps, four days in the tomb. But there 
 is also a progress of another kind. On one occasion 
 it is the child, the household darling, that is restored ; 
 on another, the young man, the sole stay of his 
 widowed mother; on the third, the full-grown man, 
 the blameless and beloved friend and brother. Yet 
 all these were types of cases where nature most 
 readily and, as we may say, most reasonably protests ; 
 for two of them certainly were young, and there is 
 every probability that Lazarus, though we are not 
 told his age, was still in the early prime of life. 
 
 Thus, in these three visible victories over the power 
 of death, we see a help to faith just where its trial 
 is sorest. Of all the perplexities and anomalies which 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON 
 
 239 
 
 this life offers, I think few are harder than the 
 seemingly blindfold way in which the darts of death 
 fly about in the world. The days of him who honours 
 his parents are often not long, and the promised gift 
 is not found in the right hand of wisdom. The stay 
 of the house, the hope of the family, the unselfish 
 worker for others, the leader in discovery, the benefi- 
 cent ruler of the people, is taken away from the earth; 
 while the idler and the selfish, the drone and the 
 cumberer of the ground, the empty-headed fool and 
 the designing knave, obtain the crown of an old age, 
 though it be not venerable. How often does it seem 
 as if death struck down the one in a household, in 
 a village, in a town, in a country, who w^as most 
 sorely needed, and spared a thousand whom nobody 
 would have regretted ? Are these the ways, poor 
 and heart-broken human nature is tempted to cry — 
 are these the ways of a heavenly Father ? Does He 
 care for us ? May not those, after all, be right who 
 said that the gods lay beside their nectar careless of 
 this world’s trials, and even found 
 
 a A music centred in a doleful song 
 Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong ” ? 1 
 
 The faith is strong that has never felt this temptation. 
 
 Why, we ask, is the old epitaph, “ But shown to earth,” 
 
 1 Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters. 
 
240 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 so often true ? Why is there so often a survival of the 
 unfittest — at least, for all the nobler ends of man — 
 rather than of the fittest ? 
 
 We ask the question, and of ourselves we can give 
 it no answer. We may reply that, as a rule, vice 
 shortens and temperance prolongs life, but the ex- 
 ceptional cases are numerous, and every one knows 
 that the issue of life and death is not in his own 
 hands, for no armour that man can make is without a 
 joint where the dart of death can penetrate. We can 
 say no more than that this is a dark mystery, and 
 vaguely hope that it will some day be cleared up. 
 In the light of revelation the mystery still remains, 
 but it becomes less dark. One doubt, at any rate, 
 disappears. The trouble comes by the Will of God. 
 Jesus was, in very truth, the Resurrection and the 
 Life. It needed but a word from Him to bring back 
 the spirit when it had fled from the body. Therefore 
 He permits the trial ; He, in a sense, lays the burden 
 upon us. Trial it is, burden it is; that He knows, 
 that He acknowledged by His tears at the tomb of 
 Lazarus, by His intervention in these three cases, each 
 of which would have been numbered by us among 
 the more perplexing and peculiar hardships. Is the 
 little one gone, just when childhoods charm is sweetest? 
 Is the young man gone, just when we miss him most ? 
 
THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 
 
 241 
 
 Is the worker called, just when our need is sorest ? 
 Jesus could have called them back. To Him there is 
 no limitation of place. He is as near to us now as He 
 was to that mourning procession at the gate of Naim 
 Though passed away from this earth, He has not lost 
 the power of sympathy with human infirmity and 
 human sorrow ; and if He let these trials visit us, if 
 He let our bodies be racked with pain or our hearts 
 be wrung with sorrow, we may be sure that this is 
 no mere chance, no accident from the rolling wheels 
 of some vast insensate machine, no apathy on His 
 part, but the correction of a loving Hand, which will 
 lead us, though by a way which is dark, and a path 
 which is hard, to a land better than earth, beautiful 
 as it often is ; to a life better than this, great as its 
 pleasures and grand as its opportunities may be. 
 Earth is fair, but there may be worlds fairer yet; 
 work is sweet, but there may be labour yet more 
 welcome, in which weariness never comes and failure 
 is never known. 
 
 Thus, though sorrow and pain cannot be dismissed 
 from our lives, though they remain as bitter facts in 
 the economy of this world, which no faith and no 
 trust can make other than they are, still the life of 
 J esus has enabled us to bear them with a new spirit, 
 because He has shown the world more clearly than 
 R 
 
242 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON 
 
 it had ever known before that all does not end with 
 the parting breath, and that notwithstanding mans 
 weaknesses, follies, and infirmities, He loves those for 
 whom He was willing to die with a love which passeth 
 knowledge. We, then, though we do not cease to 
 suffer or to sorrow, no longer do this as those who 
 have no hope. Believing where we cannot prove, 
 trusting where we cannot understand, we can cast 
 all our care upon Him, knowing that He careth 
 for us; and though we are often forced to cry with 
 Him, “ Let this cup pass from me,” we, too, learn at 
 last to add, “ Nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be 
 done." 
 
PATIENCE IN WORK . 1 
 
 “ Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the 
 Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit 
 of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive 
 the early and latter rain. ,, — St. James v. 7. 
 
 The key-note sounded in these words is one which 
 should be dominant in every great undertaking, most 
 of all in that to which you dedicate yourselves to-day. 
 It would be easy to find one which, like the sound of 
 a trumpet, seemed at first sight better fitted to stir 
 the heart and awaken enthusiasm, but none which 
 in my opinion is so much needed, especially at the 
 present time. 
 
 The Apostle bids his hearers to be content to sow, 
 and to wait till the appointed season before they 
 expect to reap the fruits. The husbandman in 
 Palestine sows the seed in the late autumn; then 
 come the November rains, when he must perforce 
 leave it to lie in the ground. Again, at the end of the 
 
 1 Preached at the Ordination in Manchester Cathedral on the Fourth 
 Sunday in Advent, 1887. 
 
 243 
 
244 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 winter, there is another rainy period, preventing field- 
 work ; then, in the month of May, some half a year 
 after the sowing, he puts the sickle into the corn. 
 During this period he has had to work, to wait, and 
 even to watch, knowing always that he could not 
 accelerate the ripening by a single day. Laws were 
 in operation over which he had no control. The 
 most that he could do was to give them free play 
 by removing impediments and by counteracting 
 obstacles. 
 
 The Apostle refers us to a law of nature, that is, 
 to a law of God. As was the wont of his Master, he 
 grounds his teaching upon the order of nature. To 
 this we are constantly referred for lessons in the 
 earlier days of Christianity ; for the divorce of what 
 God hath joined together is the outcome of a later 
 age, and a less healthy faith. The more carefully we 
 consider it, the more shall we see that nature has 
 analogies with grace, and that diverse as they may 
 seem in their modes of manifestation, there is an 
 underlying unity in the spiritual, like that in the 
 material forces. 
 
 What laws, then, do we see working in nature ? 
 Two especially — the law of continuity and the law of 
 development. The law of continuity : that is to say, 
 that every event at any time is the outcome of a long 
 
PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 245 
 
 series of antecedent causes ; the law of development : 
 that from the germ comes the seedling, from the 
 mature plant the flower, and from the flower at last 
 the fruit. 
 
 Students of science for years past have been 
 engaged in deciphering the picture-writing of the 
 book of Nature. The result of their labours has been 
 to carry us back into a far-distant past. We are 
 enabled to behold the surface of this globe as it 
 solidifies in cooling, to watch the gathering of seas in 
 its depressions, until after many years it becomes 
 habitable by living creatures. These at first are simple 
 in organization, less specialized in their functions 
 than those of succeeding ages. As time proceeds we 
 note the appearance of new types of plants and 
 animals, higher in the scale of being — “ the old order 
 changing, yielding place to new/’ until at last man 
 enters upon the scene, the first being of whom it 
 could be said that he was made in the image of God. 
 In the uniformity of this order there are indeed minor 
 catastrophic changes ; birth and death also are dis- 
 continuities in the individual life, but with these 
 exceptions continuity and development are the laws 
 which we formulate by induction from our observa- 
 tion of the order of nature. 
 
 The testimony of history leads to the same 
 
246 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 conclusion, when its facts receive inductive treatment, 
 and this, as the only scientific method, is alone likely 
 to produce any really useful results. Those un- 
 numbered centuries which fade away into the distant 
 past, the fragmental records of which are being slowly 
 recovered and pieced together by students — those 
 centuries exhibit one long preparation for the coming 
 of Christ, and the establishment of a spiritual 
 kingdom. In those distant ages we can now see 
 men, as it were, feeling in the darkness after God, 
 gradually laying aside the imperfect conceptions and 
 puerile superstitions of the childhood of a race. We 
 can watch the growth of a deeper sense of human 
 unworthiness, of a clearer apprehension of the Divine 
 perfection, of a purer morality, of a more assured 
 faith, and of an eternal hope. So that in the Gospel 
 all that is best and noblest in the teaching of sage 
 and prophet alike is embodied, and we recognize 
 thankfully and hopefully the work of the preparation 
 of man in the long period of the dawn which heralded 
 the rising of the Sun of Righteousness. 
 
 But even then the process of development was not 
 ended. In the order of nature the actual rising of 
 the sun is an epoch of rapid passage from shadow 
 into light ; yet as the hours advance towards noon, 
 that light increases in brilliancy and intensity. So 
 
PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 247 
 
 has it been in the centuries which have elapsed since 
 the first great Advent. True, that after the analogy 
 of the natural day there have been clouds which have 
 obscured the light ; true, that the darkest and most 
 misleading in their effects, like the fogs of a great 
 city, have been mainly of mans own raising ; true, 
 that the tendency towards deterioration or hurtful 
 exaggeration, bringing as its penalty the “ Nemesis 
 of disproportion/’ has produced so much sorrow, 
 suffering, and superstition, that we are sometimes 
 tempted to think that no sacrifice would be too great 
 could we recover the clear light and the fresh coolness 
 of those early hours. Yet, although these evil ten- 
 dencies have done their worst, although too often the 
 spiritual guides of our race have led their flocks 
 back into air infected by pagan idolatries, instead 
 of upwards on the slopes of the Mount of God ; yet, 
 notwithstanding, that race as a whole has attained 
 a higher standard of moral consciousness, and to us 
 a better, because a less imperfect, knowledge of God 
 is possible than it was to the Christian of the first 
 century. 
 
 We often hear the lament that this is a sceptical 
 age. We are told that men no longer listen to the 
 voice of the Church. Certainly when her repre- 
 sentatives talk nonsense, men tell them so in very 
 
248 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 plain terms. If that were all, I for one should make 
 no complaint. The only difference I can recognize 
 between ordinary nonsense and religious nonsense is 
 that the latter is more mischievous than the former, 
 and so should have the prompter treatment from the 
 besom of destruction. But undoubtedly, apart from 
 this prevalence to outspoken criticism, in itself a 
 healthy feature, and salutary, if unpleasant, to those 
 exposed to it — the present is an anxious time. He 
 would be a bold man who would venture to predict 
 what will be the state of England in the beginning 
 of the coming century. A cloud has been rising and 
 gathering for some years, and now darkens the sky ; 
 a cloud, where the destructive electricity of rapine 
 and murder and the vilest tyranny is concealed in 
 the vapours of high-sounding phrases of universal 
 benevolence and virtue. But if this cloud, as has 
 happened before, and I pray may happen again, be 
 dissipated by the unquenchable light of Christ's Gospel, 
 then I predict there will be for the coming age 
 a stronger faith : for it will be founded on a clearer 
 knowledge, it will be the faith of the man as compared 
 with the faith of the youth. 
 
 Into the arena of contest, at this important crisis 
 of our national history, you are this day about to 
 descend. Let me, then, for a few moments, call 
 
PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 249 
 
 attention to a very great danger and a very great 
 temptation to which you will all be exposed. The 
 danger and the temptation are the outcome of an 
 infection in the spirit of the age, and it is one 
 suggested by the text which I have chosen, and the 
 remarks which I have been making. 
 
 In one word, a fault, perhaps the fault, of the age 
 is impatience. Whatever is done in the present 
 day, we must have “ results,” as we call them. Well, 
 I am as opposed as any man can be to a waste either 
 of time or of money, but I consider worthless results, 
 bad results, as in some ways worse than no results at 
 all. A house built in a hurry is pretty sure to double 
 its cost in endless repairs before many years are 
 over, and is very apt to tumble down on the heads of 
 its occupants. So is it with all the work inspired by 
 an impatient spirit. God has set in the world His 
 laws of continuity and development. We, in our 
 conceit, imagine that we can overrule those laws. 
 You may as reasonably flatter yourselves that you 
 can gather summer fruits in this country for 
 Christmas Day, or alter the position of the earth’s 
 axis of rotation. 
 
 By this feverish impatience the whole community 
 is more or less infected, but it works thus on Christian 
 societies. Our own branch of the Church, in common 
 
250 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK. 
 
 with other religious communities, has become of late 
 years keenly conscious of past shortcomings, and is 
 animated by an earnest zeal to win to Christ the 
 multitudes in this and other lands who are now living 
 literally without God in the world. Against such a 
 zeal I would be the last to protest, but must never- 
 theless impress upon you that if divorced from 
 discretion it may do much harm, possibly so much 
 as to overcome the good. “We must attract the 
 people/’ is the constant cry of ministers of the Gospel 
 at the present day. Certainly, but how ? Are any 
 means justifiable ? No one in his senses would 
 answer that question in the affirmative. So it is 
 tacitly admitted that there are means which it is 
 neither wise nor right to employ, and we must regard 
 them as well as the end. Now, with a great number of 
 earnest workers at the present day the means most in 
 favour are founded on an appeal only to the emotions. 
 This appeal takes very diverse, sometimes antagonistic, 
 forms. By some men the results and consequences 
 of sin are depicted in such glowing terms that the 
 auditors are lashed into an hysteric condition, which, 
 transitory though it be, is assumed to indicate a 
 revolutionary change in the whole nature. By others 
 it is thought that, by some mode of localizing the 
 Divine Presence on earth, the sense of reverence may 
 
PATIENCE IN WORN. 
 
 251 
 
 be deepened, and men be less forgetful of Him. The 
 consecrated wafer in one branch of the Catholic 
 Church, the eucharistic rite in another, with all the 
 attendant ideas (or superstitions, as some would call 
 them) concerning sacred vestments, mystic rites, 
 symbolical worship, and a miracle-working priesthood, 
 are supposed to replace the Temple and the Shechinah 
 of the Jewish Church. 
 
 Neither of these methods is in any sense a modern 
 discovery. The latter certainly has had a long trial, 
 and the verdict of history is adverse to its claims. 
 By it you may snatch a temporary victory, but you 
 will have to pay dearly for it. Fighting the demon 
 of infidelity with the broken crutch of superstition 
 in the long run has not succeeded in the past, and is 
 still less likely to do so in the future. History 
 declares that neither method was employed by the 
 most successful missionaries, who also worked under 
 the greatest difficulties — I mean the Apostles and 
 their immediate followers ; it declares that growth in 
 morality and in spiritual knowledge have always 
 been in accordance with the laws of continuity and 
 development. Bear, then, these in mind. They are 
 God’s laws, and you cannot alter them. First the 
 seed cast upon the earth, then the green blade, then 
 the ear, then the full corn in the ear, and at last, 
 
252 
 
 PATIENCE IN WORK, 
 
 when the fruit is ripe, the season of harvest. Like 
 unto this, we are told by our Master, is the kingdom 
 of God. Therefore be patient. Be content to work 
 along the lines which God has prescribed. 
 
 But, you may say, I want to see the fruits of my 
 labours. A very natural feeling. I suppose every 
 one who plants a tree would like to sit under the 
 shadow of it ; that, however, is not given to us. But, 
 you may say, this neighbour of mine, by preaching 
 a gospel of hell-fire amidst a blare of trumpets, collects 
 thousands to listen to him ; and that neighbour, by 
 the attractions of music, incense, and vestments, gets 
 his church crowded. Well, it is not the making of 
 proselytes, but what we make of them, which matters. 
 For that statement we have pretty good authority. 
 But, you may say, men praise those teachers as earnest 
 and energetic ; they will never recognize my work. 
 Recognize your work ! what does that matter ? The 
 important thing to the world is that the work should 
 be done well, not that it should be recognized. Never 
 mind whether you are praised, whether you may be 
 tracked across the country by newspaper paragraphs : 
 take care that you are not justly blamed : that is the 
 only thing which you need mind. The pulpit of a 
 church is not the stage of a theatre, the sphere of 
 a parson’s work is not the area of a circus, and even 
 
PATIENCE IN WORE. 
 
 2 53 
 
 on these latter he is not the best actor who plays his 
 part to the gallery. Above all, do not make the fatal 
 mistake of supposing that good intentions will render 
 harmless any folly. I sometimes hear it said, So-and- 
 so is such an earnest, zealous, well-meaning man, that 
 we must not criticize or check him. I am sorry to 
 say good intentions will not alter the natural order of 
 events. The best intentions will not save your finger 
 from being burnt if you put it in the fire, and all the 
 zeal in the world will not avert the evil consequences 
 if that zeal is wrongly directed. The words of our 
 great dramatist have a terrible truth — 
 
 “ The evil that men do lives after them, 
 
 The good is oft interred with their bones. ,, 
 
 So long as a man of noble aims but with mis- 
 directed energies is acting as leader, that which is 
 hurtful in his system is neutralized by his personal 
 goodness ; but when he is gone, and inferior men take 
 his place, the evil part develops and the good withers, 
 because the one is innate and the other adventitious. 
 Antony the hermit and Simeon of the pillar, Francis 
 of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola, not to mention many 
 others among the fathers and doctors of the Church 
 Catholic, were men of the most earnest piety and the 
 very best intentions, but their mistakes have borne 
 and continue to bear a prolific crop of hurtful fruit. 
 
254 
 
 PA TIENCE IN WORK 
 
 Undertake, then, your work this day in the spirit 
 of patience, in the spirit of self-abnegation, in full 
 trust in God. Let not one word which I have spoken 
 chill your enthusiasm. I only seek to save you from 
 misdirecting it. Never was there a time when there 
 was a grander task before the clergy, or when they 
 could do more to save their country from a great 
 catastrophe. The condition of things in England 
 bears a very dangerous resemblance to that in France 
 before the great Revolution. Not only is there the 
 same widespread poverty, the same unequal dis- 
 tribution of wealth, the same sundering of interests 
 and classes ; but there is the same hysteric senti- 
 mentality, the same hazy morality, the same confusion 
 of the laws of right and wrong, as there was in that 
 country shortly before the time when men sobbed 
 forth maudlin platitudes about liberty and fraternity, 
 and then went away to torture and murder those who 
 differed from them. It is your business, as was that 
 of the prophets of old, to tell your people in no un- 
 certain voice that God’s laws of right and wrong are 
 immutable, and that no amount of verbose oratory or 
 flaccid sentimentality can make a lie into truth, can 
 ennoble a base deed, can change vile tools into 
 honourable implements. It is your business to 
 guide your people to a more perfect sense of the 
 
PATIENCE IN WORN 
 
 255 
 
 omnipresence, the omnipotence, and the omniscience 
 of the all-loving Father, instead of leading them back 
 towards the worship of idols and the conceptions of 
 times of ignorance. You must be content to work 
 on in silence, for the path which I have described 
 will not be that of earthly fame ; in unpopularity, 
 for the prophet’s task is a thankless one; in hope, for 
 you will be only a sower of seed. But its fruit will 
 some day ripen ; you will not gather it, but others 
 will. In your lifetime, however, you will have this 
 reward, that by degrees you will win the affection 
 and confidence of many, the respect of all whose 
 respect is worth having ; and when you cease from 
 labour, you may say — “ I have done what I could ; it 
 has been little, yet I did it with all my might, and so 
 in God’s hands I leave the issue. I have striven, 0 
 gracious Saviour, to tread, though at a long distance, 
 in Thy footsteps ; to work, though so imperfectly, 
 after Thy example. Failure rather than success has 
 seemed my lot ; yet I know that truth is stronger 
 than falsehood, that right will at last prevail over 
 wrong, and in the light of Thy presence all evil will 
 be consumed. The seed which I have sown has 
 borne but little fruit in the brief span of this earthly 
 life, yet I trust to see a more abundant harvest 
 in that better land where the wicked cease from 
 troubling, and the weary are at rest.” 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 1 
 
 “ Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil 
 not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you, That even 
 Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” — 
 
 St. Matt. vi. 28, 29. 
 
 Life had its anxieties nineteen centuries since no 
 less than it has no w ; men and women had to toil for 
 food and for clothing, and sometimes knew not whence 
 to-morrow’s bread would come. But then, even as 
 now, they were apt to weary themselves by seeking 
 more than a sufficiency ; to deprive life of all its light, 
 in order that they might heap up riches, might fare 
 sumptuously every day, and go clothed in purple and 
 fine linen. Here, then, we are told on Whom to cast 
 our care in those anxieties which may be called lawful, 
 and the unwisdom of those which are unlawful; we 
 are led to see the Fatherhood of God in the fowls of 
 the air and in the flowers of the field. 
 
 But on the general principle inculcated by this 
 
 1 The “Fairchild Lecture,” preached in Shoreditch Church, 
 Whitsun Tuesday, 1890. 
 
 256 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 257 
 
 reference, I do not now purpose to speak. I shall 
 restrict myself to a few thoughts which seem appro- 
 priate to the present occasion, and arise out of the 
 example selected by the Saviour to show the un- 
 wisdom of anxious thought for this world’s wealth. 
 
 “ Consider the lilies of the field.” What flowers 
 were they, we naturally ask, from which the listeners 
 were to take a lesson ? Were they conspicuous for 
 their beauty ? Did they rise high above the general 
 level, like the butterfly-orchis or the purple loose- 
 strife; or were they common but inconspicuous, like the 
 daisy of our lawns, or the celandine of our meadows ? 
 Was the appeal to something which the hearers could 
 hardly help admiring, or to something which they 
 might almost despise ? Was it as though the Saviour 
 had said, “ You cannot rival the beauty of the orchid ; ” 
 or was it, “ Adorn yourselves as you will, you are still 
 far less fair than the daisy, insignificant as it may 
 seem in your eyes ” ? Either sense is possible, and 
 we have no means of knowing which is intended. 
 But it is more probable, I think, that the appeal was 
 made to some flowers which, at any rate, were con- 
 spicuous enough to catch the eyes of those who were 
 listening — flowers which at that very time were 
 dappling the slopes in view of the hill on which the 
 crowd was gathered. There are many such in 
 s 
 
258 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 Palestine. They are called lilies in our Bible. This 
 is the English name by which the original Greek 
 word is always rendered, but of course we cannot 
 assert that the terms in the two languages are exactly 
 identical. The Greek word probably would be em- 
 ployed more generally and vaguely than the English 
 one ; it might include some plants which we should 
 not designate as lilies, and we must remember that 
 it is only a translation of the actual word which was 
 used by our Lord, for we cannot doubt that He was 
 speaking in the ordinary language of the country — a 
 dialect of Hebrew. We should naturally, I think, 
 look for such a flower as our daffodil or primrose; 
 one which was common in Galilee, which was suffi- 
 ciently large to be seen at some distance, and which 
 was attractive in appearance. Of these, travellers 
 tell us, there are several. Bulbous plants abound on 
 the hilly pastures of Northern Palestine in the spring- 
 time — such as the tulip, the fritillary, the star of 
 Bethlehem, the iris, and the amaryllis. There is also, 
 in Galilee, a scarlet anemone, of which it is said by 
 one traveller, well competent to express an opinion, 
 “ There have been many claimants for the distinctive 
 honour of ‘ the lilies of the field ; ’ but while it seems 
 most natural to view the term as a generic expression, 
 yet if. one special flower was more likely than another 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 
 
 259 
 
 to catch the eye of the Lord as He spoke, no one 
 familiar with the flora of Palestine in springtime can 
 hesitate in assigning the place to the anemone / 7 1 
 Yet this flower of the field, whatever it may have 
 been, is declared to surpass in beauty “ Solomon in all 
 his glory / 7 Think for one moment of the comparison 
 which is here challenged. We must remember the 
 customs of past times and of Eastern nations in order 
 to appreciate it fully. Among ourselves there is 
 usually little splendour of dress to mark rank and 
 even royalty. In olden time, and in the East, it was 
 not so. That a king would appear in public so clothed 
 as to be with difficulty distinguished from one of his 
 ministers, or one of his generals, would have seemed 
 a strange idea. Then splendour of apparel went with 
 high rank, and “ Solomon in all his glory 77 would 
 mean at least as much as the “ Queen in her corona- 
 tion robes 77 would now signify. More than this, the 
 reign of Solomon, in popular tradition, was the golden 
 age of Israel. It was literally so ; the shields of his 
 household guards, the ornaments of his ivory throne, 
 the plate at his table, were all of gold. “ Gold came 
 to him in abundance ; as for silver, it was not anything 
 accounted of in the days of Solomon . 77 Yet the glory 
 of the central figure in all this splendour — a splendour 
 1 Canon Tristram, Land of Israel , ch. xviii. 
 
26 o 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 
 
 which overpowered the spirit of the Queen of Sheba 
 — is said to be surpassed by the flower which in each 
 returning spring blossoms in its uncounted thousands 
 on the hill-pastures around the Galilean lake. 
 
 It is true ; and after more than eighteen centuries 
 of progress we know its truth, far better than those 
 who heard, perhaps half incredulously, the words of 
 Christ. God’s work may be tried by a standard 
 which man’s work cannot bear. This is made for the 
 eyes of man. The work of God can endure a far more 
 severe test, as though it were designed for powers of 
 intelligence far more perfect. The perfection of the 
 one is only relative ; of the other, so far as we know, 
 absolute of its kind. Familiar as the facts may be to 
 some of you, it is, I think, worth while to contrast, for 
 a few minutes, man’s works of art and God’s works in 
 nature. To take a single example. I have seen the 
 image of a small sewing-needle, greatly magnified, 
 projected upon a screen. You would think that if 
 aifything would be sharp and smooth and finished, it 
 would be the point of this. I saw the outline of a 
 small mast, with its upper end trimmed to a rough 
 spike, which terminated in a rather jagged tooth or 
 wisp of metal. Far different is it with the structures 
 of plant or of animal. The more these are magnified, 
 the more marvellous, the more exquisite, they appear. 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 261 
 
 That this is simple truth, most people, at the present 
 day, can sometimes ascertain for themselves, but there 
 is one test which can be yet more readily applied. 
 A fairly good pocket-lens is generally not difficult to 
 obtain. Look through this at a few of the com- 
 monest wayside flowers. Pick, if you like, a daisy 
 from the nearest plot of grass on which you may walk. 
 To your eye it seems one of the homeliest of flowers — 
 a little circular cluster of yellow dots with a fringe of 
 white petals just edged with pink. If these were 
 made of the finest tissues of the loom, if they were 
 painted by the hand of the most cunning artist, they 
 would seem, when largely magnified, coarse fabrics 
 like sackcloth, coarsely spotted with colour. Not so 
 the petal of the daisy ; its texture becomes yet more 
 exquisite ; its coloured edge breaks up into granula- 
 tions yet more and more delicate in tint and in size, 
 rendering the transition yet more and more har- 
 monious. Turn then to those spots on the yellow 
 disc; each becomes a perfect little flower, revealing 
 many a complicated detail, of the existence of which 
 you previously had no conception. 
 
 Man often boasts of the wonders which he has 
 done. Comparing himself with himself, the civilized 
 man with the savage ; looking at the complicated 
 apparatus which he has contrived — his machines, his 
 
262 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 
 
 railroads, his telegraphs,— he begins to think that to 
 his greatness there is no limit, and that he may 
 worship himself as God. Can there be any rebuke 
 more gentle, yet more crashing, than this : “ The 
 common wayside flowers, at which you scarce cast 
 a glance, which even your sheep and oxen trample 
 underfoot, — these are far more wonderful than all 
 your contrivances, far more exquisitely finished than 
 any of your works. Poor vain insect ! for in com- 
 parison with this vast universe you are nothing 
 more ; there is but one thing wonderful about you — 
 that which you do not make yourself — your own 
 body ” ! 
 
 Another lesson may be drawn from this saying of 
 the Saviour. Here, as on more than one occasion, 
 He appeals in His teaching to the natural world. 
 But some persons tell us that this is everywhere 
 tainted with sin ; nay, they go so far as to hint that 
 it is so corrupt that the very study of nature will lead 
 us away from God. They assert, not indeed ex- 
 pressly, but in so many words, that if in truth God 
 were the Maker of this world— as they are obliged to 
 admit — He allowed it at a very early period to be 
 wrested from His dominion by an alien and an evil 
 power. It would not be difficult, but it would take 
 too long a time, to show that this idea — a very 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 263 
 
 common one among Christian people — arises from 
 confused thinking and mistaken conceptions as to the 
 nature of sin and evil ; on the present occasion it will 
 suffice to say that Christ’s frequent appeal to the 
 natural world could not have been made if it had 
 ceased to be a part of the kingdom of God. If, indeed, 
 the devil has become lord of any spot on earth, it is 
 not where the lilies of the field mostly do grow, or 
 the birds of the air make their nests, but it is where 
 the buildings reared by man stand thickest on the 
 ground. We talk sometimes of consecrating places to 
 God’s service, but except as a precautionary measure 
 to save them from man’s desecration, or a symbolical 
 cleansing from man’s defilement, the ceremony is idle 
 and meaningless. The earth itself is consecrated ; it 
 is a sacred thing, for it is as it came from God’s hand. 
 The lilies of the field, if they toil not, neither do they 
 spin, so also they spoil not, neither do they sin. Men 
 sometimes profess to hear the voice of God in the 
 thunder and the tempest, but they are too often deaf 
 to that still small voice which sounds in Nature’s 
 most silent hour, alike from tree and flower, from 
 forest and from field. 
 
 There is another way in which these words suggest 
 a lesson of humility. Man is sent to learn from the 
 commonest and least esteemed among the works of 
 
264 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 
 
 God ; not from the choice flowers of the garden, but 
 from those which spring up unheeded in every pasture. 
 We talk sometimes as if this world were made for us 
 alone. If so, there is a strange profusion, almost a 
 wastefulness, in the provision for us, its lords and 
 masters. Year after year the earth puts on its robe of 
 many colours, yet how few regard it ! There are vast 
 forests, where for century after century, generation 
 after generation, the giant trees have grown and died; 
 there are wide plains, there are broad chains of rolling 
 hills, which year after year have been gardens of 
 flowers on which the eye of man has never looked. 
 Even among the mountain solitudes, amid regions 
 of snow and ice, when we reach some crag on which 
 hitherto the foot of man has never been set, we find 
 the crannies among the rough rocks bright with the 
 blossoms of some lowly but lovely alpine plant. Naj^, 
 the earth was decked in all the glory of flowers for 
 myriad years or ever it was seen by the eye of man. 
 Were these, are these, for him alone ? It may be so, 
 and doubtless the idea is flattering to our complacency ; 
 but on what grounds do we make this assumption ? 
 Why may there not be those who see with clearer 
 eyes than ours ? Why must we suppose that the 
 shout of joy which the sons of God are said to have 
 raised over the completion of the work of creation 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 265 
 
 lias died away into an eternal silence, in watching the 
 never-ending recurrence of its effects, and the mani- 
 festations of the Will of God ? 
 
 “Love not the world,” we are told; but the words 
 mean the order of man’s contriving, not that of God’s 
 ordaining. In the old creation story it is said that 
 God planted a garden, wherein He placed the man and 
 the woman. Like all the rest of that story, this seems 
 to me symbolical. Face to face with the works of 
 God, there was the fitting abode of innocence ; there 
 communion with Him could best be held. Of this 
 parable we have lost sight. We have come to 
 associate the worship of Him with buildings made 
 with hands, forgetting that the Lord is in every place, 
 and not least in those which are of His own adorning. 
 The houses which we build are apt to become temples 
 of idols, when we forget that after all they are only 
 concessions to man’s infirmity ; for God may be found, 
 as He was by the saints of old, on any country-side, 
 where man can possess his soul in silence and listen 
 for that still small voice, which may be heard to whisper 
 from every green slope no less than among the wild 
 crags of Horeb. We need to be reminded of this, for 
 year by year in our densely crowded land, with the 
 gorged but ever-growing towns, it becomes more 
 difficult to consider the lilies of the field. No longer 
 
266 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . 
 
 is the country-side within easy reach of the Londoner ; 
 it is a journey of miles before he can get clear of the 
 houses, and, what is worse, the edge of a great town 
 is more hideous than the inner part. Far beyond its 
 border, almost every spot is fenced or walled or barred, 
 because men fear the inroads of those brutes in human 
 form, which a great city is constantly vomiting forth 
 for the destruction of all that is fair and beautiful. 
 For miles around London every wild flower is dis- 
 appearing — destroyed either of reckless selfishness, 
 or of sheer wantonness, by the excursionist or by those 
 prowling plunderers, who bring back the uprooted 
 plants, and obtain as public nuisances a miserable 
 living. They are half protected in their errands of 
 destruction by the flabby sentimentalism of the 
 present day, which is ever ready to sympathize with 
 the breaker, and to blame the enforcer of the law. 
 They are encouraged by the thoughtlessness which 
 enables them to find a sale for their spoil, for if there 
 were no purchasers the wild flowers would be left 'to 
 grow. If the destruction of these goes on for another 
 generation as it has done in the last, your children 
 or grandchildren will have to content themselves with 
 considering the lilies of the gardens or of the parks, 
 for there will be nothing left for them in the fields 
 except nettles and docks. 
 
THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 267 
 
 But I must admit that sometimes those who should 
 know better set an example of evil influence. There 
 is a practice in some countries — and an attempt, I 
 believe, has been made to naturalize it in this — of 
 holding what is called a battle of flowers. This 
 means that in idle sport these gifts of God are flung 
 about recklessly, are prevented from fulfilling their 
 course and ripening seed to perpetuate their kind, 
 plucked not that they may gladden the eyes and 
 brighten the dulness of those who dwell in the stony 
 wilderness of a great city, but that they may move 
 children of larger growth to a foolish mirth, and then 
 be trampled underfoot like worthless and contemptible 
 things. There is something tender, something touch- 
 ing, in the sentiment exhibited by the flower-services 
 sometimes held at this season, even though they are 
 apt to lead to a waste of flowers; but those who fling 
 the same about merely for destruction, put wealth 
 to an ill purpose, and show the heart of the savage 
 beneath all their purple and fine linen. 
 
 To some what I have been saying may seem poetic 
 sentiment and fruitless fancy. It is, I believe, real 
 and important truth. Faulty religious teaching, 
 mistaken theological ideas, have closed the eyes of 
 numbers of men and women to that great book of 
 nature, the pages of which are daily turned, the 
 
268 
 
 THE LILIES OF THE FIELD. 
 
 volumes of which are yearly renewed by the power of 
 God. The book of the revelation of the written Word 
 is great, it is inestimably precious ; but why on this 
 account should we refuse to listen to that other voice, 
 which is no less the voice of God ? We pride ourselves 
 upon our wisdom, yet we have forgotten truths which 
 were well known by the men of olden time. The J ew 
 found himself, in his fields and his vineyards, his 
 sheep-downs and forests, face to face with God; the 
 earlier Christians sought the wilderness when they 
 would find Him. The Bible again and again takes up 
 the note of thanksgiving for the works of God. We 
 also, if we would purge ourselves from the worship of 
 idols — be they set up in things spiritual or things 
 temporal — must submit to go back to the simple 
 teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and learn from 
 the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air the 
 great lesson of the Fatherhood of God ; for when that 
 is realized in our hearts and lives, all other things 
 shall be added to it. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL , 1 
 
 Whence came evil; what was its origin? This 
 is an old question, for it is more easy to ask than to 
 answer. It is a difficulty which cannot fail to arise, 
 so soon as man has become conscious of moral 
 responsibility and has recognized God as Creator and 
 Lord of all things. Thus any discussion might seem 
 idle, for by this time the problem should have been 
 either solved or admitted to be inscrutable. But in 
 the past it has been regarded mainly from the point 
 of view of the metaphysician or the theologian ; the 
 advance of knowledge during late years has intro- 
 duced new factors into the discussion. We have 
 learnt much concerning the past history of the earth 
 and our own race; our knowledge of the relation 
 between the physical, mental, and moral natures in 
 ourselves has vastly increased. New facts have risen 
 up on our horizon, of which we must take account 
 
 1 The substance of a paper read at Sion College on February 24, 
 1890, delivered as an afternoon lecture at St. Philip’s, Kegent Street, 
 on the Fifth Sunday in Lent. 
 
 269 
 
270 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 in framing any hypothesis in regard to man and his 
 motives. In short, whether we like it or not, dis- 
 trustful as we may feel of the new-comer, doubtful 
 whether it be friend or foe, we are compelled to 
 adopt methods of inquiry which are more strictly 
 scientific. Thus, while we are beginning to recognize 
 more clearly that the provinces of theology and 
 science are distinct, that we must not look to the 
 former to teach us the latter, or fear that the latter 
 can be in essential contradiction with the former, we 
 now prefer facts to phrases, and inductions to 
 authorities. 
 
 I purpose, then, in the rem arks which I am about 
 to make, to abstain from investigating the past 
 history of the subject. I shall not quote what has 
 been written by others, or attempt to discuss the 
 problem from a point of view strictly metaphysical ; 
 nor shall I, except indirectly, regard it from that of 
 theology, or seek to solve a difficulty by quotations, 
 either from a Father of the Church or from Scripture 
 itself. The latter undoubtedly have their place and 
 their value, but there is sometimes a distinct gain 
 in regarding a difficult subject from a new point of 
 view. Let us, then, try to look at it from that of a 
 student of science, to whom the book of nature is 
 more familiar than the volumes of theologians, who 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL . 
 
 271 
 
 dares hope to find in it some light which may illumi- 
 nate dark sayings even in the Word of God. 
 
 We assume, indeed — and this, no doubt, is a theo- 
 logical position — that God is the Author of all things, 
 and that He is perfect goodness. If, then, this be 
 accepted — as it must be by all Christians — what 
 account is to be given of the origin of evil ? The 
 inquiry, however, at once suggests a preliminary 
 question, an answer to which is imperatively demanded, 
 namely, What do we mean by the word “ evil ” ? This 
 is commonly assumed to be as definite in its meaning 
 as a mathematical term ; yet in reality, to most of us, 
 its position in our verbal exchange is not unlike that 
 which a Chinese silver coin would occupy in a busi- 
 ness transaction. We should have a rough notion, 
 but no precise idea of its value in currency. Thus 
 we can hardly listen to an argument or take up a 
 book without detecting traces of confusion in thought 
 and vagueness in expression which are due to this 
 uncertainty. Indeed, in common speech the word 
 “ evil ” is used to connote two ideas widely distinct, 
 different, as I believe, in their inception, even though 
 they become entangled and sometimes almost insepar- 
 able in the complicated nature and history of man. 
 
 Physical and moral evil— to use the ordinary quali- 
 fying terms, and admit for the moment the double 
 
272 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 sense of the noun — are commonly supposed to be 
 similar in nature, and, so far as this world is con- 
 cerned, identical in origin. Many persons, I believe, 
 would tell you that both were the consequence of the 
 fall of man (of which phrase I do not at present 
 discuss the meaning). There is in the tenth book of 
 the Paradise Lost a well-known passage, from which 
 I will select some extracts : — 
 
 “ At that tasted fruit 
 
 The sun, as from Thyestean banquet, turned 
 His course intended. . . . Thus began 
 Outrage from lifeless things ; but Discord first, 
 
 Daughter of Sin, among the irrational 
 Death introduced, through fierce antipathy. 
 
 Beast now with beast ’gan war, and fowl with fowl, 
 
 And fish with fish : to graze the herb all leaving, 
 
 Devoured each others 
 
 These words, I think, give a very fair summary of 
 the view which is held generally by the uneducated, 
 and not very seldom even by theologians. 
 
 Now, what can we learn from science as to the 
 date of the incoming of pain, disease, and death to 
 this earth ? The general tenor of the answer, if we 
 attach any value to inductive processes and results, 
 is beyond dispute. 
 
 Thus Science replies : The crust of the earth is a 
 great charnel-house. Death hath reigned on it from 
 the beginning. Predaceous animals date from an 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 ?73 
 
 early — perhaps a very early — period in its history, 
 and even the herbivorous cannot have moved about 
 or fed without being the cause of injury or death to 
 those smaller and weaker than themselves. We are 
 fully justified in maintaining that the earth, even 
 before life began, was subject to physical forces — 
 such as gravitation, heat, electricity— identical with 
 those which still operate. Hence, unless we suppose 
 that organized beings were endowed with properties 
 of which we have no knowledge, and, things being 
 as they are, can form no conception," they could not 
 escape from the pain and suffering to which they are 
 at present exposed in their natural state of life. 
 
 Suppose, however, that to the statement, “ Death 
 reigned from the beginning/’ it were answered, “ Yes, 
 but death may have been painless — even pleasurable, 
 like falling asleep ? ” But is it possible for an animal 
 capable of sensation to receive an injury without the 
 consequent pain ? Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of 
 the capacity for a pleasurable sensation existing in 
 beings constituted as those of which we know, with- 
 out admitting a capacity for the contrary sensation ; 
 there can be little or no doubt that, as a rule, each is 
 perceived with corresponding acuteness. Moreover, 
 pain in many cases results from either the absence or 
 the excess of that which is pleasurable. For instance, 
 T 
 
274 
 
 THE ORIGIH OF EVIL. 
 
 a certain temperature produces in myself, but not 
 necessarily in another person, the sensation of 
 pleasure. Less than this or more than this would 
 cause in me, and might cause in both, a sensation of 
 pain. 
 
 Further, in many cases pain is either protective in 
 its effects — -as when it serves to warn us of danger — 
 or a stimulus to exertion. If, then, we suppose the 
 world to have been subject in the past to the laws 
 which now exist, pain and pleasure are inseparable 
 from its order ; indeed, have been the dominant factors 
 in its evolution, as they must be in every system of 
 education. Pain is as inseparable from pleasure, as 
 shadow from light, cold from heat. Under the exist- 
 ing order of things there is a necessary dualism, 
 though it is not that of the Manichee. So, if we 
 use the word “ evil ” in its physical sense, as meaning 
 sickness, pain, and death, we have no choice but to 
 admit that these are inseparable from the present order 
 of nature, and must have entered into its original 
 design, whatever form of teleology we may adopt. 
 
 Let us pass on to consider moral evil, which is 
 generally meant when the word “ evil ” is used in its 
 stricter sense. How came this into the world ; what 
 was its beginning ? If we regard God as the Creator 
 of all things, are we not driven to regard Him as the 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL . 
 
 275 
 
 Author of evil ; and if so, what follows ? So far as 
 this world is concerned, people have been content 
 generally to regard evil as an importation from with- 
 out— though this, of course, only shifts the main 
 difficulty rather further back. But can we predicate 
 an independency of origin and absoluteness of exist- 
 ence for moral evil ? Are we right in assuming it, as 
 so many appear to do, to be a positive ? Antagonistic 
 as it may be to good, is it not, under the existing 
 order, correlative to some extent with it ? They are 
 opposites, it is true, because a thing cannot be at once 
 sweet and sour; but correlative, and in thought in- 
 separable, because a necessary consequence of hetero- 
 geneity. Ought we not, then, to regard evil, at any 
 rate in its inception, whatever complications may 
 afterwards arise, as a relative ? — much as, in the 
 physical order, darkness is relative to light ? Light 
 is a positive ; it is a mode of motion. Darkness is a 
 negative — a non-existent; no motion. Our percep- 
 tion* of it also is relative, dependent on the environ- 
 ment of the perceiver. It is dark to me when it is 
 not so to a bat or an owl, and they are blinded with 
 excess of light when I can see distinctly. 
 
 Perhaps we may arrive at a clearer understanding 
 by tracing out in a particular instance the develop- 
 ment of our idea of evil. Hunger, to any organized 
 
2 76 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 being, is the stimulus to obtain food, which is needful 
 for the maintenance of life. Suppose that I leave my 
 food for a time unprotected in some desert place. A 
 hungry wild dog passes by and snaps it up. We say 
 the dog steals it, but I think no one would seriously 
 affirm that the animal had done evil. I might, indeed, 
 kill it, but should do this on the principle that there 
 was not room for both of us in the world, and so I, as 
 the stronger and, in my own opinion, the more im- 
 portant of the two, elected to be the survivor. My 
 own dog, in like case, I should chastise ; the punish- 
 ment, however, would not have a moral aim — though, 
 being inflicted for educational purposes, it would 
 come near this — but its intent would be to procure for 
 myself a security from future loss, which in the other 
 case I knew could not be obtained by a mild remedy. 
 If a very young child were the thief, we should view 
 the action in precisely the same light. Having an 
 eye to the future, we should indicate displeasure ; but 
 we should not regard the action as a crime, because, 
 as we say, “ he knows no better.” But if the child 
 were older, we should say he had done wrong, 
 because we suppose him to have acquired some idea 
 that it is better to suffer than to steal ; yet even here 
 we should estimate his guilt in accordance with the 
 extent of his need and the defect of his education. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, 
 
 277 
 
 If, however, a well-fed and well-taught child were to 
 steal simply for the sake of a dainty morsel, we should 
 regard the action as a grave moral wrong, and requite 
 it accordingly. 
 
 Here, then, the act is one and the same ; yet in its 
 moral aspect it is very differently regarded ; namely, 
 from not evil at all, to being very evil. 
 
 Apply the same method of examination to all sorts 
 of wrongs and crimes, and you will find that you can 
 trace them back to an obedience to some impulse or 
 instinct which operates in the animal either for the 
 preservation of the individual or for the perpetuation 
 of the race. 
 
 At first sight this statement may seem questionable, 
 but I believe that on investigation it will be found 
 to hold good. Murder, for example, is the misuse of 
 instincts the end of which is self-preservation; lust, 
 the abuse of sensations which lead to the perpetua- 
 tion of the species. Even a crime like forgery, the 
 illegitimate offspring, as we think it, of civilization, is 
 prompted by the desire to obtain the means of living 
 or of enjoyment, a desire which is the outcome of 
 instincts of self-preservation. Very often the right 
 or wrong in an action is entirely determined by the 
 motive of the doer, and we admit tacitly that evil, 
 if it exist, is relative rather than absolute. For 
 
278 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL . 
 
 instance, there are cases in which most persons, 
 perhaps all, will admit that killing is no murder, or 
 is even a righteous act. 
 
 What, then, causes the difference in the moral value 
 of actions in themselves identical ? Evidently it is 
 the impulse which has been obeyed in doing it. But 
 why do we view this in different lights in different 
 individuals ? Because we tacitly and implicitly assume 
 that two impulses have contended for mastery in the 
 one person, and that the lower of these has been 
 obeyed. As “ lower ” and “ higher ” are relative terms, 
 and as we have no right (at any rate, as Christians), 
 when there is but one impulse, to speak of this as 
 evil in itself — for that would be taking up the position 
 of a Manichsean — it would appear that the idea of 
 choice in beings constituted as we are involves, by 
 implication, that of evil, because in speaking of 
 “ choice ” we assume the existence of a relatively 
 better and worse. A physical illustration may serve 
 to bring out my ^meaning. Suppose that, wittingly 
 and without good reason, I take that which I know 
 to be the less beneficial to me — say I eat something 
 which I am convinced is unwholesome. I have obeyed 
 the law of self-preservation in its letter and not in its 
 spirit ; that is to say, by yielding to an appetite (the 
 end of which is self-preservation), I have injured my 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 279 
 
 health, and thus produced an opposite result. I have 
 chosen to follow the narrower view of the law, and 
 thus I have done evil, while one who had acted in 
 ignorance would still be innocent, though the physical 
 penalties in both cases would be the same. 
 
 Extend the application of this principle, and it 
 follows that a course of action may be right at one 
 period of the world’s history which is wrong at 
 another. For instance, at a particular epoch it might 
 have been right to punish one who had wronged u&, 
 but in the present age, when wider views of man’s 
 nature and his relationships have prevailed, it may be 
 better, under the same circumstances, to pardon him. 
 The line of action which once would have been right 
 now would be wrong, because we, knowing both the 
 lower and the higher law, choose to obey the former. 
 
 It follows, then, that if, in beings organized as we 
 are, we assume a power of choice and the existence of 
 impulses tending to progress, we must admit the 
 possibility of a refusal to obey those impulses, and 
 thus regard evil as the inevitable shadow of the good. 
 Thus any creatures which are living in perfect 
 harmony with their environment (using that word in 
 its widest sense) are good, but the alteration of the 
 environment, if it tend to raise them to a higher plane 
 of existence, supposing them to be free agents, would 
 
2 8o 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL . 
 
 open to them the opportunity of becoming evil. 
 Formerly their moral equilibrium would have been 
 stable. The alteration of the conditions has rendered 
 this unstable, and they become capable of evil. 
 
 Let us now consider how evil may have first arisen 
 in the case of man. So far as regards his physical 
 structure, it is impossible to separate him from other 
 living creatures. Such differences as there may be 
 are those of degree, not of kind. So far as his body 
 is concerned, there is nothing to suggest an origin for 
 it different from that of their bodies. We cannot, 
 of course, deny that it may result from a special act 
 of creation; but analogy, so far from favouring, is 
 rather adverse to this idea. 
 
 All attempts to establish a difference in kind 
 between the bodily frame of man and that of animals 
 have been complete failures. I cannot say that the 
 efforts to claim for him the sole possession of reason 
 have been more successful. If the true man differs, 
 as I believe that he does differ, from the rest of the 
 animal world, it is by the addition of something 
 which we hold to be the special gift of God — that by 
 which he becomes capable of attaining to the know- 
 ledge of God and to an immortal life. The presence 
 of this gift in man can neither be proved nor be 
 disproved by science. Our investigations bring us no 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 281 
 
 further than this — that there are phenomena in the 
 world very difficult to explain on a merely mechanical 
 theory of the genesis of the universe, and facts in 
 history which seem inexplicable on the hypothesis 
 that man is no more than an animal. Suppose, now, 
 that mans body, instead of being the result, as has 
 generally been believed, of a special act of creation, 
 had arisen, by gradual and progressive stages of 
 development, from less perfectly organized animal 
 forms, in obedience to that great law of evolution 
 which seems to have been prevalent in this world 
 since the dawn of life. Suppose, in short, that the 
 body of man were in its origin truly animal — inheritor 
 of the same instincts, animated by the same vitality. 
 Suppose, then, that in such a creature were implanted 
 an impulse — call it what you will — to live no 
 longer in obedience to the instincts which actuated 
 the remainder of the animal world, to follow a path 
 which had been trodden by no predecessor, to com- 
 mence the ascent of a mountain range, the summit 
 of which was lost in the clouds, instead of roaming 
 contentedly over the plains below. Such a being 
 would at once become capable of evil. Conceive such 
 a one placed in a position which gave some special 
 advantage to the new impulse, and tended to deaden 
 the inherited instincts when they might mislead 
 
282 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL . 
 
 Such a creature would be sinless in nature, because 
 its inherited tendencies would be those of obedience 
 to law, for up to that time it had never been invited 
 to disobey. It would be the first of a new race, with 
 responsibilities which were unknown to any prede- 
 cessor. But it would not follow that these were as 
 far-reaching and as complicated as those which have 
 affected the successors of that creature. It is enough 
 that there was an opportunity of choice between 
 obedience to the higher law (whether prohibitive or 
 directive), and following the course suggested by 
 the animal instincts. The moral nature of such a 
 creature, though for a time it be sinless, is obviously 
 in unstable equilibrium ; and, we may add, is likely, 
 when once the disturbance occurs, to depart further 
 from its original condition.. 
 
 The equilibrium was maintained so long as the 
 instinct, which might ultimately disturb it, was 
 dormant — very much as in the individual, for a 
 time, certain kinds of evil, though always potentially 
 present, are excluded by the undeveloped condition 
 of certain organs in the body. But after a disturb- 
 ance of equilibrium, the effect of heredity would be 
 unfavourable to recovery, because the innate instincts 
 of conformity to the environment, which is no longer 
 in the old relation to the individual and the race, may 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 283 
 
 work in the wrong direction, and cause as vigorous a 
 resistance to the upward tendency as it should have 
 done to the downward. The balance of such a nature 
 once disturbed, it is thrown into a confusion from 
 which it can never emerge by any natural process. 
 The slow effect of environment may result in the 
 high development of these tendencies, and the partial 
 abortion of those ; but even then there will be indi- 
 vidual irregularity — “ throwings back,” as they are 
 called, which will interfere with anything like a 
 perfect symmetry. Moreover, it is not probable that 
 by merely natural processes any very perfect moral 
 development will be attained, because the environ- 
 ment favours the development of the animal far more 
 than of the spiritual nature. The latter bases its 
 claim to obedience on things of which the senses cannot 
 take cognizance ; but hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness, 
 are often grim realities. The pleasures derived from 
 the gratification of the bodily appetites are real, they 
 may be said to have an objective existence ; while 
 those resulting from the due exercise of the spiritual 
 appetites, at any rate to a great extent, are subjective. 
 
 If, then, we feel ourselves compelled by the results 
 of scientific investigations to admit for the body of 
 man the same origin as for those of animals, we are 
 placed in a position which enables us to offer a simple 
 
284 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 explanation of the origin of evil. The mere animal, 
 in harmony with its environment, was good in its 
 generation. But by the addition to it of that 
 mysterious gift, commonly called a soul, evil became 
 at once possible, because then that which had been 
 good, viz. obedience to the earlier laws, now became 
 evil, as involving a disobedience to the newer and 
 higher laws. The principle of heredity, to use a 
 scientific term, indicates that “ the infection of nature 
 must remain even in the regenerate,” for the simple 
 reason that it was always there, only it did not 
 become an “ infection ” till some particular epoch, and 
 it cannot disappear so long as this bodily frame 
 continues. 
 
 Before I conclude, it may be well to notice an 
 objection which some have felt. It may be briefly 
 expressed thus : that by tracing evil to an obedience 
 on the part of man to his physical nature, we inter- 
 fere with the due appreciation of moral responsibility. 
 How can you, it is said, hold a man morally respon- 
 sible for obedience to a propensity which you assert 
 to be innate, and thus to be a part of the man himself, 
 as much as a tendency to scrofula or other maladies ? 
 Of this objection I cannot see the force. Society, 
 which punishes crime chiefly with a deterrent purpose, 
 recognizes in certain extreme cases that the individual 
 
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 285 
 
 is not responsible, and that the legal penalty ought 
 not to be inflicted. As, for example, when an insane 
 person commits a murder, he is not executed, but is 
 kept under ward for the security of the public. There 
 may, then, be cases where the commission of sin, as we 
 call it, entails no guilt, because the offender is morally 
 insane. But in regard to this we have no means 
 available for forming a judgment : that must be left 
 to Him Who sees with larger eyes than ours. With 
 such questions we can only deal as society does with 
 crime, namely, by acting on the facts within our 
 cognizance ; and we cannot even make the same 
 exceptions, because we have no criteria of moral 
 insanity. Of course, if we asserted that man was no 
 more than an animal, we should admit that he was 
 not morally responsible for his actions ; but when we 
 affirm that in his composite nature a factor exists, 
 which urges him to resist the others and submit 
 wholly to its guidance, then we assert the existence 
 of moral responsibility. In this inquiry we have 
 only endeavoured to throw some light on the sources 
 which give rise to temptation and eventuate in sin. 
 
 The remarks which I have made apply only to the 
 world of which we have cognizance by means of our 
 senses. Here I have endeavoured to distinguish 
 between what is termed physical evil — viz. pain, 
 
286 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 
 
 suffering, and those things which are misfortunes 
 inseparable from the present order— and moral evil, 
 to indicate how under changed environment conflict 
 may replace harmony, and ultimate good be the cause 
 of temporary ill. 
 
 The limitations which I imposed upon my inquiry, 
 namely, to consider it from the side of science rather 
 than of revelation, have prevented me from saying 
 anything about the existence of evil among orders of 
 beings other than human, and of their possible influ- 
 ence upon members of our race ; but it is obvious 
 that a similar line of reasoning would explain its 
 presence among beings of any kind in any part of 
 Gods universe, for there is no reason why this com- 
 mand to rise “ on stepping-stones of their dead selves 
 to higher things ” should be restricted to mankind. 
 
 THE END.