THE RELATIONSBETWEENRELIGION AND SCIENCE

EIGHT LECTURESPREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDIN THE YEAR 1884

ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M. A. CANON OF SALISBURY

BY THE RIGHT REV. FREDERICK, LORD BISHOP OF EXETER

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITEDNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1903

_First Edition_, 8vo, 1884. 

_Reprinted January and February (twice)_, 1885, _April_, 1885;

_Re-issue_ (_Crown_ 8vo), _November_, 1885, 1903. 

OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

EXTRACT

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

OF THE LATE

REV. JOHN BAMPTON, CANON OF SALISBURY. 

--"I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to holdall and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to theintents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will andappoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for thetime being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profitsthereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductionsmade) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight DivinityLecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, andto be performed in the manner following:

"I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, aLecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by noothers, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hoursof ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight DivinityLecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, betweenthe commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of thethird week in Act Term. 

"Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermonsshall be preached upon either of the following Subjects--to confirm andestablish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics andschismatics--upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures--upon theauthority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith andpractice of the primitive Church--upon the Divinity of our Lord andSaviour Jesus Christ--upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost--upon theArticles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' andNicene Creeds. 

"Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermonsshall be always printed, within two months after they are preached; andone copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and onecopy to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the cityof Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and theexpenses of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Landor Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons; and thepreacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before theyare printed. 

"Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preachthe Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Masterof Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge;and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermonstwice. "

CONTENTS. 

LECTURE I. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 

Psalm civ. 24. 

_O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all;the earth is full of Thy riches. _

The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysicsexcluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume'saccount of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development ofScience from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate:which nevertheless can never attain to universality. 

LECTURE II. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 

Genesis i. 27. 

_So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created Hehim. _

The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this tobe relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. Thecommand to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe inthe supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hopeof Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God;the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, ifany be made. The contrast between Religion and Science. 

LECTURE III. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 

Genesis i. 27. 

_So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created Hehim. _

Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler'sexamination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interferenceof the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixednature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life. 

LECTURE IV. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

Romans i. 20. 

_For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world areclearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even Hiseternal power and Godhead. _

Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recenttimes. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argumentfrom design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds forceto the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress;from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real. 

LECTURE V. 

REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

Hebrews i. 1. 

_God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past tothe Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by HisSon. _

The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor ofReligion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to beRevelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament;yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. Themiraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of thismode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty. 

LECTURE VI. 

APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

Psalm c. 3. 

_Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not weourselves. _

Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formationof the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yetexamined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesisnot at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man notinconsistent with dignity of humanity. 

LECTURE VII. 

APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 

St. John xiv. 11. 

_Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or elsebelieve Me for the very works' sake. _

The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. Themiracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord'sResurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous inthe scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the timewhen the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by ourLord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required toprove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence;not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility ofdemonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to theprogress of Science. 

LECTURE VIII. 

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 

1 Corinthians xii. 3. 

_No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. _

Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in twocases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exceptionno bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physicalworld, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests onitself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But weexpect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are thepurpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physicalcannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers fromleaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee forspiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. 

LECTURE I. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 

The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysicsexcluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume'saccount of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development ofScience from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate:which nevertheless can never attain to universality. 

LECTURE I. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 

 'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches. '--_Psalm_ civ. 24. 

Those who believe that the creation and government of the world are thework of a Being Whom it is their duty to love with all their hearts, Wholoves them with a love beyond all other love, to Whom they look forguidance now and unending happiness hereafter, have a double motive forstudying the forms and operations of Nature; because over and abovewhatever they may gain of the purest and highest pleasure in the study, and whatever men may gain of material comfort in a thousand forms fromthe results of the study, they cannot but have always present to theirminds the thought, that all these things are revelations of Hischaracter, and to know them is in a very real measure to know Him. Thebeliever in God, if he have the faculty and the opportunity, cannot finda more proper employment of time and labour and thought than the studyof the ways in which God works and the things which God has made. Amongreligious men we ought to expect to find the most patient, the mosttruth-seeking, the most courageous of men of science. 

We know that it is not always so; and that on the contrary Science andReligion seem very often to be the most determined foes to each otherthat can be found. The scientific man often asserts that he cannot findGod in Science; and the religious man often asserts that he cannot findScience in God. Each often believes himself to be in possession, if notof the whole truth, at any rate of all the truth that it is mostimportant to possess. Science seems to despise religion; and religion tofear and condemn Science. Religion, which certainly ought to put truthat the highest, is charged with refusing to acknowledge truth that hasbeen proved. And Science, which certainly ought to insist ondemonstrating every assertion which it makes, is charged with giving therein to the imagination and treating the merest speculations aswell-established facts. 

To propose to reconcile these opposites would be a task which hardly anysane man would undertake. It would imply a claim to be able to rise atonce above both, and see the truth which included all that both couldteach. But it is a very useful undertaking, and not beyond the reach ofthoughtful inquiry by an ordinary man, to examine the relations betweenthe two, and thus to help not a few to find a way for themselves out ofthe perplexity. And this inquiry may well begin by asking what is theorigin and nature of scientific belief on the one hand and of religiousbelief on the other. In this Lecture I propose to deal with the former. 

It is not necessary to include in the Science of which I am to speakeither Mathematics or Metaphysics. In as far as I need touch on whatbelongs to either, it will be only for the purpose of answeringobjections or of excluding what is irrelevant. And the consequentrestriction of our consideration to the Science which concerns itselfwith Nature greatly simplifies the task that I have undertaken. For itwill be at once admitted in the present day by all but a very few thatthe source of all scientific knowledge of this kind is to be found inthe observations of the senses, including under that word both thebodily senses which tell us all we know of things external, and thatinternal sense by which we know all or nearly all that takes placewithin the mind itself. And so also will it be admitted that the SupremePostulate, without which scientific knowledge is impossible, is theUniformity of Nature. 

Science lays claim to no revelations. No voice of authority declareswhat substances there are in the world, what are the properties of thosesubstances, what are the effects and operations of those properties. Notraditions handed down from past ages can do anything more than transmitto us observations made in those times, which, so far as we can trustthem, we may add to the observations made in our own times. Thematerials in short which Science has to handle are obtained byexperience. 

But on the other hand Science can deal with these materials only on thecondition that they are reducible to invariable laws. If any observationmade by the senses is not capable of being brought under the laws whichare found to govern all other observations, it is not yet brought underthe dominion of Science. It is not yet explained, nor understood. As faras Science is concerned, it may be called as yet non-existent. It is forthis very reason possible that the examination of it may be of the verygreatest importance. To explain what has hitherto received noexplanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress. Theobservation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soonas it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be aninstance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifyingand perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted. When it wasfirst noticed in Galileo's time that water would not ascend in thesuction pipe of a pump to a greater height than 32 feet, the old lawthat nature abhors a vacuum was modified, and the reasons why and theconditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. Thesuction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanicalpressure. The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fairgeneralization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to thattime had been observed. A new fact was observed which would not fallunder the rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule beingsuperseded; and Science advanced a great step at once. So in our own daywas the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain factswhich could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless theLaw of Gravitation was to be corrected. The result in this case was notthe discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a greatconfirmation of the old Law. But in each case and in every similar casethe investigation of the newly observed fact proceeds on the assumptionthat Nature will be found uniform, and on no other assumption canScience proceed at all. 

Now it is this assumption which must be first examined. What is itssource? What is its justification? What, if any, are its limits?

It is not an assumption that belongs to Science only. It is in someform or other at the bottom of all our daily life. We eat our food onthe assumption that it will nourish us to-day as it nourished usyesterday. We deal with our neighbours in the belief that we may safelytrust those now whom we have trusted and safely trusted heretofore. Wenever take a journey without assuming that wood and iron will hold acarriage together, that wheels will roll upon axles, that steam willexpand and drive the piston of an engine, that porters and stokers andengine-drivers will do their accustomed duties. Our crops are sown inthe belief that the earth will work its usual chemistry, that heat andlight and rain will come in their turn and have their usual effects, andthe harvest will be ready for our gathering in the autumn. Look on whilea man is tried for his life before a jury. Every tittle of the evidenceis valued both by the judge and jury according to its agreement ordisagreement with what we believe to be the laws of Nature, and if awitness asserts that something happened which, as far as we know, neverhappened at any other time since the world began, we set his evidenceaside as incredible. And the prisoner is condemned if the facts beforeus, interpreted on the assumption that the ordinary laws of Nature haveheld their course, appear to prove his guilt. 

What right have we to make such an assumption as this?

The question was first clearly put by Hume, and was handled by him withsingular lucidity; but his answer, though very near the truth, was notso expressed as to set the question at rest. 

The main relation in which the uniformity of Nature is observed is thatof cause and effect. Hume examines this and maintains that there isabsolutely nothing contained in it but the notion of invariablesequence. Two phenomena are invariably found connected together; theprior is spoken of as the cause, the posterior as the effect. But thereis absolutely nothing in the former to define its relation to thelatter, except that when the former is observed the latter, as far as weknow, invariably follows. A ball hits another ball of equal size, bothbeing free to move. There is nothing by which prior to experience wecan determine what will happen next. It is just as conceivable that themoving ball should come back or should come to rest, as that the ballhitherto at rest should begin to move. A magnet fastened to a piece ofwood is floating on water. Another magnet held in the hand is broughtvery near one of its poles or ends. If two north poles are thus broughttogether the floating magnet is repelled; if a north and a south poleare brought together the floating magnet is attracted. The motion of thefloating magnet is in each case called the effect; the approach of themagnet held in the hand is called the cause. And this cause is, as faras we know, invariably followed by this effect. But to say that one iscause and the other effect is merely to say that one is always followedby the other; and no other meaning, according to Hume, can be attachedto the words cause and effect. 

Having established this interpretation of these words, Hume goes on toask: What can be the ground in reason for the principle universallyadopted, that the law of cause and effect rules phenomena, and that acause which has been followed by an effect once will be followed by thesame effect always? And he concludes that no rational ground can befound at all, that it is the mere result of custom without anythingrational behind it. We are accustomed to see it so, and what we havebeen so perpetually accustomed to see we believe that we shall continueto see. But why what has always been hitherto should always behereafter, no reason whatever can be given. The logical conclusionobviously is to discredit all human faculties and to land us inuniversal scepticism. 

It was at this point that Kant took up the question, avowedly inconsequence of Hume's reasoning. He considered that Hume had been misledby turning his attention to Physics, and that his own good sense wouldhave saved him from his conclusion had he thought rather of Mathematics. Kant's solution of the problem, based mainly on the reality ofMathematics, and especially of Geometry, is the direct opposite ofHume's. 

It will be most easy to give a clear account of Kant's solution by usinga very familiar illustration. There is a well-known common toy called aKaleidoscope, in which bits of coloured glass placed at one end are seenthrough a small round hole at the other. The bits of glass are notarranged in any order whatever, and by shaking the instrument may berearranged again and again indefinitely and still without any orderwhatever. But however they may be arranged in themselves they alwaysform, as seen from the other end, a symmetrical pattern. The patternindeed varies with every shake of the instrument and consequentre-arrangement of the bits of glass, but it is invariably symmetrical. Now the symmetry in this case is not in the bits of glass; the coloursare there no doubt, but the symmetrical arrangement of them is not. Thesymmetry is entirely due to the instrument. And if a competent enquirerlooks into the instrument and examines its construction, he will be ableto lay down with absolute certainty the laws of that symmetry whichevery pattern as seen through the instrument must obey. 

Just such an instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Spaceand Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument. Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space andTime, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time areforms of the mind itself, and, like the kaleidoscope, arrange all thingson their way to the senses according to a pattern of their own. Thispattern is as it were super-added to the manifestations that come fromthe things themselves; and if there be any manifestations of such anature that they could not submit to this addition, or, in other words, could not submit to Mathematical Laws, these manifestations could notaffect our senses at all. So too our Understanding has a pattern of itsown which it imposes on all things that reach its power of perception. What cannot be accommodated to this pattern cannot be understood at all. Whatever things may be in themselves, their manifestations are notwithin the range of our intelligence, except by passing through thearranging process which our own mind executes upon them. 

It is clear that this wonderfully ingenious speculation rests itsclaims for acceptance purely on the assertion that it and it aloneexplains the facts. It cannot be proved from any principle of reason. Itassumes that there is a demonstrative science of Mathematics quiteindependent of experience, and that there are necessary principles ofPhysics equally independent of experience. And it accounts for theexistence of these. 

With Mathematics we are not now concerned, and I will pass them by withonly one remark. The ground on which Kant's theory stands is notsufficient, for this simple reason. It accounts for one fact; it doesnot account for another fact. It accounts for the fact that we attachand cannot help attaching a conviction of necessity to all mathematicalreasoning. We not only know that two straight lines cannot enclose aspace, but we know that this is so and must be so in all places and atall times, and we know it without any proof whatever. This fact Kantaccounts for. Space is according to him a part of our kaleidoscope; youcan always look into it and see for yourself what are the laws of it. But there is another fact. This space of which we are speaking isunquestionably to our minds not a thing inside of us but outside of us. We are in it. We cannot get rid of a sense that it is independent ofourselves. We can imagine ourselves non-existing, minds and all. Wecannot imagine space non-existing. If it be a part of our minds, how isit that we can picture to ourselves the non-existence of the mind whichis the whole, but not the non-existence of space which, according to thehypothesis, is the part? For this fact, which we commonly call theobjectivity of space, Kant's theory does not account. In fact Kantappears to have no escape from assigning this objectivity of space todelusion. But a theory which requires us to call an ineradicableconviction of consciousness a delusion cannot be said to explain all thefacts. John Stuart Mill maintains that the other fact, namely, theconviction of the necessity of mathematical truth, is a delusion. Andhis account also must be pronounced for that reason to fail inaccounting for all the facts. 

But our present concern is not with Mathematics but with Physics. Andhere Kant fails altogether to convince; for, taking Time and thePerceptive Powers of the Understanding as parts of the human mind, heshows, what indeed is clearer and clearer every day, that the principles(so called) of Physics are indispensable Postulates, not indeed ofobserving with the senses, but of comprehending with the understanding, whatever happens. In order to give anything that can be called anexplanation of any event we must show that it falls under the generalrules which constitute the uniformity of Nature. We have no othermeaning for the words understanding or explaining an event. Thinking, when analysed, is found to consist in bringing all that happens underuniversal laws, and no phenomenon can be said to be explained in thoughtexcept by being so related to all other phenomena. But it does not byany means follow that events cannot happen or cannot affect our senseswithout being susceptible of such explanation. To say that an eventcannot be understood, and to say either that it cannot happen or that itcannot be observed by the senses, are two very different things. Thefact is that Mathematics and Physics do not, as Kant assumes, presentthe same problem for solution, and do not therefore admit of onesolution applicable to both. It is not the case that there is a scienceof abstract Physics corresponding to the science of Mathematics andsharing in the same character of necessity. In Mathematics we havetruths which we cannot but accept, and accept as universal andnecessary: in Physics we have no such truths, nor has Kant evenendeavoured to prove that we have. The very question therefore that weare asked to solve in regard to Mathematics does not present itself inPhysics. I am constrained to believe that two and two are four and notfive; I am not constrained to believe that if one event is followed byanother a great many times it will be so followed always. And thequestion is, why, without any constraint, I nevertheless so far believeit that I require special evidence in any given case to convince me tothe contrary. And Kant's answer is irrelevant. He says that we cannotthink the sequence of events unless they fall under the postulates ofthinking, that is, the postulates of science; but this is no answer tothe question. Why do we believe that, unless the contrary be proved, everything that is observed by the senses is capable of being reducedunder these postulates of thinking? The sequence of things cannototherwise be explained; but why should the sequence of all things thathappen be capable of being explained? The question therefore stillremains unanswered. What right have we to assume this Uniformity inNature? or, in other words, what right have we to assume that allphenomena in Nature, observed by our senses, are capable of beingbrought within the domain of Science? And to answer this question wemust approach it from a different side. 

And there is the more reason for this because it is undeniable that boththe definition and the universality of the relation of cause and effect, as they were accepted by Hume and his followers, are not accepted by menin general. In ordinary language something more is meant by cause andeffect than invariable sequence, and the common assumption is not thatall Nature obeys this rule with absolutely no variation, but that therule is sufficiently general for all practical purposes. 

If then we begin by asking what is the process of Science in dealingwith all questions of causation, we find that this process when reducedto its simplest elements always consists in referring every event as aneffect to some cause which we know or believe to have produced someother and similar event. Newton is struck by a falling apple. His firstthought is, 'how hard the blow. ' His second is wonder, 'how far theearth's attraction, which has caused this hard blow, extends. ' Histhird, 'why not as far as the moon?' And he proceeds to assign themotion of the moon to the same cause as that which produced the motionof the apple. Taking this as a working hypothesis, he examines whatwould be the motions of all the planets if this were true. And theexamination ends with establishing the high probability of the Law ofGravitation. 

Now this being the invariable process of Science, it follows that ourconception of cause must come originally from that cause which we havewithin ourselves and with which we cannot but begin, the action of thehuman will. It is from this action that is obtained that conceptionwhich underlies the ordinary conception of cause, namely, that of forceor power. 

This conception of force or power is derived from the consciousness ofour own power to move our limbs, and perhaps too of passions, temptations, sentiments to move or oppose our wills. This power is mostdistinctly felt when it is resisted. The effort which is necessary whenwe choose to do what we have barely strength to do, impresses on us moreclearly the sense of a force residing in ourselves capable of overcomingresistance. Having the power to move our limbs, and that too againstsome resistance, we explain, and in no other way can we explain, othermotions by the supposition of a similar power. In so doing we arefollowing strictly the scientific instinct and the scientific process. We are putting into the same class the motions that we observe in otherthings and the motions that we observe in ourselves; the latter are dueto acts of our own wills, the former are assigned to similar acts ofother wills. Hence in infancy, and in the infancy of mankind, the wholeworld is peopled with persons because everything that we observe to moveis personified. A secret will moves the wind, the sun, the moon, thestars, and each is independent of the others. 

Soon a distinction grows up between the things that seem to have aspontaneous motion and those that have not, and spontaneous motion istaken as the sign of life. And all inanimate things, of whatever kind, are held to be moved, if they move at all, by a force outsidethemselves. Their own force is limited to that of resisting, and doesnot include that of originating motion. But though they cannot originatemotion they are observed to be capable of transmitting it. And thenotion of force is expanded by the recognition that it can becommunicated from one thing to another and yet to another, and that wemay have to go back many steps before we arrive at the will from whichit originated. We began with the notion of a power the action of whichwas or appeared to be self-originated: we come to the notion of a powerthe action of which is nothing more than the continuance of precedingaction. And the special characteristic of the action of this force asthus conceived, which we may call the derivative force, is seen to beits regularity, just as the special characteristic of theself-originating action was its spontaneity. 

As experience increases the regularity of the action of the derivativeforce is more and more observable, and then arises the notion of a lawor rule regulating the action of every such force. And a perpetuallyincreasing number of phenomena are brought under this head, and areshown to be, not the immediate results of self-originating action, butthe more or less remote results of derivative action governed by laws. And even a large number of those phenomena, which specially belong tolife and living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, theself-originating action is to be found, are observed to be subject tolaw and therefore to be the issue not of self-originating but ofderivative action. And this observed regularity it is found possible totrace much more widely than it is possible to trace any clear evidenceof what we understand by force. And so, at last, we frequently use theword force as it were by anticipation, not to express the cause of thephenomena, which indeed we do not yet know, but as a convenientabbreviation for a large number of facts classed under one head. Andthis it is which enables Hume to maintain that we mean no more by acause than an event which is invariably followed by another event. Wediscover invariability much faster than we can discover causation; andhaving discovered invariability in any given case, we presume causationeven when we cannot yet show it, and use language in accordance withthat presumption. Thus, for instance, we speak of the force ofgravitation, although we cannot yet prove that there is any such force, and all that we know is that material particles move as if such a forcewere acting on them. 

As Science advances it is seen that the regularity of phenomena is farmore important to us than their causes. And the attention of allstudents of Nature is fixed on that rather than on causation. And thisregularity is seen to be more and more widely pervading all phenomena ofevery class, until the mind is forced to conceive the possibility thatit may be absolutely universal, and that even will itself may comewithin its supreme dominion. 

But to the very last the idea of causation retains the traces of itsorigin. For in the first place every step in this building up of scienceassumes a permanence underlying all phenomena. We cannot believe thatthe future will be like the past except because we believe that there issomething permanent which was in the past and will be in the future. Andthis assumption of something permanent in things around us comes fromthe consciousness of something permanent within us. We know our ownpermanence. Whatever else we know or do not know about ourselves, we aresure of our own personal identity through successive periods of life. And as our explanation of things outside begins by classing them withthings inside we still continue to ascribe permanence to whateverunderlies phenomena even when we have long ceased to ascribe individualwills to any except beings like ourselves. And without this assumptionof permanence our whole science would come to the ground. 

And in the second place let it be remembered that we began with the willcausing the motions of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know, noother power in us to affect external nature than by setting something inmotion. We can move our limbs, and by so doing move other things, and byso doing avail ourselves of the laws of Nature to produce remotereffects. But, except by originating motion, we cannot act at all. And, accordingly, throughout all science the attempt is made to reduce allphenomena to motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action, electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to reduce to vibrations orundulations, that is, to motion of some sort or other. The mind seems tofind a satisfaction when a change of whatever kind is shown to be, orpossibly to be, the result of movement. And so too all laws of Natureare then felt to be satisfactorily explained when they can be traced tosome force exhibited in the movement of material particles. The law ofGravitation has an enormous evidence in support of it considered simplyas a fact. And yet how many attempts have been made to represent it asthe result of vortices or of particles streaming in all directions andpressing any two bodies together that lie in their path! The facts whichestablish it are enough. Why then these attempts? What is felt to be yetwanting? What is felt to be wanting is something to show that it is theresult of some sort of general or universal motion, and that it thusfalls under the same head as other motions, either those which originatein ourselves and are propagated from our bodies to external objects, orthose which, springing from an unknown beginning, are for evercontinuing as before. 

This then is the answer to the question, Why do we believe in theuniformity of Nature? We believe in it because we find it so. Millionson millions of observations concur in exhibiting this uniformity. Andthe longer our observation of Nature goes on, the greater do we find theextent of it. Things that once seemed irregular are now known to beregular. Things that seemed inexplicable on this hypothesis are nowexplained. Every day seems to add not merely to the instances but tothe wide-ranging classes of phenomena that come under the rule. We hadreason long ago to hold that the quantity of matter was invariable. Wenow have reason to think that the quantity of force acting on matter isinvariable. And to this is to be added the evidence of scientificprediction, the range of which is perpetually increasing, and whichwould be obviously impossible if Nature were not uniform. And yet againto this is to be added that this uniformity does not consist in a vastnumber of separate and independent laws, but that these laws alreadyform a system with one another, and that that system is daily becomingmore complete. We believe in the uniformity of Nature because, as far aswe can observe it, that is the character of Nature. 

And I use the word character on purpose, because it indicates betterthan any other word that I could find at once the nature and limitationof our belief. 

For, if the origin of this belief be what I have described, it isperfectly clear that, however vast may be the evidence to prove thisuniformity, the conclusion can never go beyond the limits of thisevidence, and generality can never be confounded with universality. Thecertainty that Nature is uniform is not at all, and never can be, acertainty of the same kind as the certainty that four times five aretwenty. 

We can assert that the general character of Nature is uniformity, but wecannot go beyond this. Every separate law of nature is established byinduction from the facts, and so too is the general uniformity. Everyseparate law of Nature is a working hypothesis. So too is the uniformityof Nature a working hypothesis, and it never can be more. It is truethat there is far more evidence for the uniformity of Nature as a wholethan for any one law of Nature; because a law of Nature is establishedby the uniformity of sequences in those phenomena to which it applies;whereas every uniformity of sequence, of whatever kind, is an evidenceof the general uniformity. The evidence for the uniformity of nature isthe accumulated evidence for all the separate uniformities. But, howevermuch greater the quantity of evidence, the kind ever remains the same. There is no means by which we can demonstrate this uniformity. We canonly make it probable. We can say that in almost every case all theevidence is one way; but whenever there is evidence to the contrary wecannot refuse to examine it. 

If a miracle were worked science could not prove that it was a miracle, nor of course prove that it was not a miracle. To prove it to be amiracle would require not a vast range of knowledge, but absolutelyuniversal knowledge, which it is entirely beyond our faculties toattain. To say that any event was a miracle would be to say that we knewthat there was no higher law that could explain it, and this we couldnot say unless we knew all laws: to say that it was not a miracle wouldbe _ex hypothesi_ to assert what was false. In fact, to assert theoccurrence of a miracle is simply to go back to the beginning ofscience, and to say: Here is an event which we cannot assign to thatderivative action to which we have been led to assign the great body ofevents; we cannot explain it except by referring it to direct andspontaneous action, to a will like our own will. Science has shown thatthe vast majority of events are due to derivative action regulated bylaws. Here is an event which cannot be so explained, any more than theaction of our own free will can be so explained. Science may fairlyclaim to have shown that miracles, if they happen at all, areexceedingly rare. To demonstrate that they never happen at all isimpossible, from the very nature of the evidence on which Science rests. But for the same reason Science can never in its character of Scienceadmit that a miracle has happened. Science can only admit that, so faras the evidence goes, an event has happened which lies outside itsprovince. 

To believers the progress of Science is a perpetual instruction in thecharacter which God has impressed on His works. That He has put Order inthe very first place may be a surprise to us; but it can only be asurprise. In the great machinery of the Universe it constantly happensto us to find that that which is made indispensable, is nevertheless notthe highest. The chosen people were not the highest in all moral or evenin all spiritual characteristics; if we refuse the explanation given byGoethe that they were chosen for their toughness, yet we have no betterto give. The eternal moral law is of all we know the highest andholiest. Yet the religious instinct seems to have been moreindispensable for the development of humanity according to the Divinepurpose than the observance of that moral law in all its fulness. Itwould never have occurred to us beforehand to permit in Divinelegislation any concession to the hardness of men's hearts; yet we knowthat it was done. Science now tells us that Order takes a rank in God'swork far above where we should have placed it. It is not the highest; itis far from the highest: but it appears to be in some strange way themost indispensable. God is teaching us that Order is far more universal, far more penetrating than we should have supposed. But, nevertheless, itis not itself God; nor the highest revelation of God. It is the stampwhich, for reasons higher than itself, He appears to have put on Hisworks. What is the limit to its application we do not know. There may beinstances where this Order is apparently broken, but really maintained, because one physical law is absorbed in a higher; there may be instanceswhere the physical law is superseded by a moral law. But we shallneither refuse to recognise that God has stamped this character on Hisworks, nor let it on the other hand come between us and Him. For we knowstill that He is greater than all that He hath made, and He speaks to usby another voice besides the voice of Science. 

LECTURE II. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 

The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this tobe relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. Thecommand to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe inthe supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hopeof Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God;the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, ifany be made. The contrast between Religion and Science. 

LECTURE II. 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 

 'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him. ' _Genesis_ i. 27. 

The order of phenomena is not the highest revelation of God, nor is thevoice of Science the only nor the most commanding voice that speaks tous about Him. The belief in Him and in the character which we assign toHim does not spring from any observation of phenomena, but from thedeclaration made to us through the spiritual faculty. 

There is within us a voice which tells of a supreme Law unchangedthroughout all space and all time; which speaks with an authorityentirely its own; which finds corroboration in the revelations ofScience, but which never relies on those revelations as its primary orits ultimate sanction; which is no inference from observations by thesenses external or internal, but a direct communication from thespiritual kingdom, the kingdom, as philosophers call it, of things inthemselves; which commands belief as a duty, and by necessaryconsequence ever leaves it possible to disbelieve; and in listening towhich we are rightly said to walk not by sight but by faith. 

Now, before going on to say anything more about the message thus givento us from the spiritual world, it is necessary to consider an objectionthat meets us on the threshold of all such doctrines, namely, that it issimply impossible for us to know anything whatever of things inthemselves. Our knowledge, it is urged, is necessarily relative toourselves, whereas absolute as distinct from relative knowledge is forever beyond our reach. We can speak of what things appear to us to be;we cannot speak of what they are. We know or may know whatever comesunder the observation of our senses as phenomena; we cannot know whatunderlies these phenomena. And sometimes it has been maintained that wenot only cannot know what it is that underlies the phenomena, but cannoteven know whether anything at all underlies the phenomena, and that, foraught we can tell, the whole world and all that exists or happens in itmay be nothing but a system of appearances with no substance whatever. This doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge is not only applied tothings external but to our very selves. We know ourselves, it ismaintained, only through an internal sense which can only tell us how weappear to ourselves, but cannot tell us in any the least degree what wereally are. 

Now this contention is an instance of a tendency against which we arerequired to be perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all scienceand of all philosophy is to find some unity or unities that shallco-ordinate the immense complexity of the world in which we live. Nowthere is one and only one legitimate way of attaining this aim, and thatis by patient, persevering study of the facts. But the facts turn out tobe so numerous, so multifarious, that not one life nor one generationbut many lives and many generations will assuredly not co-ordinate themsufficiently to bring this aim within probable reach. Hence theincessant temptation, first, to supply by hypothesis what cannot yet beobtained by observation, and, secondly, to bend facts to suit thishypothesis; and, if the framing of such hypotheses be legitimate, thedistortion of facts is clearly not legitimate. It seems too long to waitfor future ages to complete the task. We must in some sort complete itnow; and for that purpose if the facts as we observe them will not suit, we must substitute other facts that will. Accordingly every doctrinemust be made complete, and to make this doctrine of the relativity ofknowledge complete, we must get rid of all exceptions. But there is oneexception that we cannot get rid of, and that is the conviction of ourown identity through all changes through which we pass. Every manamongst us passes through incessant changes. His body changes; he mayeven lose parts of it altogether; he may lose all control over some ofhis limbs, or over them all. And there are internal as well as externalchanges in each man. His affections change, his practices, his passions, his resolutions, his purposes, his judgments; everything possibly bywhich he knows his own character. But through all these changes he isconscious of being still one and the same self. And he knows this; andknows it, not as an inference from any observation of sense external orinternal, but directly and intuitively. All other knowledge mayconceivably be relative, a knowledge of things as they appear, not ofthings in themselves. But this is not; it is a knowledge of a thing asit is in itself; for amidst all changes in the phenomena of each man'snature, this still remains absolutely unchanged. We do speak of samenessin application to phenomena; we say this is the same colour as that;this is the same musical note as that; this is the same sensation asthat. But here we mean a different thing by the word same. We meanindistinguishability. We mean that we cannot distinguish between the twocolours, the two notes, the two sensations. And this no doubt is arelative knowledge, not a knowledge of things in themselves. But we donot mean incapacity of being distinguished when we speak of our ownpersonal identity. When a man thinks to-day of his life of yesterday, and regards himself as the same being through, all the time, he doesnot simply mean that he cannot distinguish between the being thatexisted yesterday according to his memory and the being that existsto-day according to his present consciousness: he means that the beingis one and the same absolutely and in itself. 

And this conviction of personal identity will presently be found to fallin with the revelation of the Moral Law, which is my subject in thisLecture. For it is by virtue of this personal identity that I becomeresponsible for my actions. I am not merely the same thinking subject, Iam the same moral agent all through my life. If I changed as fast as thephenomena of my being changed, my responsibility for any evil deed wouldcease the moment the deed was done. No punishment would be just, becauseit would not be just to punish one being for the faults of a totallydifferent being. The Moral Law in its application to man requires as abasis the personal identity of each man with himself. 

If corroboration were needed of the directness of the intuition by whichwe get this idea of our own personal identity, it would be found in theentire failure of all attempts to derive that idea from any othersource. Comte, the founder of the Positive School, can do nothing withthis idea but suggest that it is probably the result of some obscuresynergy or co-operation of the faculties. John Stuart Mill passes it byaltogether as lying outside the scope of his enquiries and of hisdoctrine. Mr. Herbert Spencer deals with it in a very weak chapter[1] ofhis remarkable volume of First Principles. He divides all themanifestations made to our consciousness, or, as we commonly say, allour sensations, into two great classes. He selects as the main but notuniversal characteristic of the one class, vividness; of the otherclass, faintness; a distinction first insisted on, though somewhatdifferently applied, by Hume. He adds various other characteristics ofeach class, some of them implying very questionable propositions. And wecome finally to the following astonishing result. Sensations are dividedinto two classes; each has seven main characteristics which distinguishit from the other. One of these classes make up the subject, that whichI mean when I use the words I myself; the other the object or thatwhich is not I. But there is absolutely nothing to determine which iswhich, which class is the subject and which is the object, which is Imyself, and which is not I myself. Vividness and faintness plainly havenothing in them by which we can assign the one to that which is I, theother to that which is not I. If we were to conjecture, we should bedisposed to say that surely the most vivid sensations must be thenearest and therefore must be part of that which is I; but we find it isquite the other way. The faint sensations are characteristic of thatwhich is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. And the same remarkapplies to each pair of characteristics in succession. The fact is thatMr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to complete his argument; hehas not shown, nor endeavoured to show, nor even thought of showing, howout of his seven characteristics of the subject the conception of asubject has grown. It is quite plain that he not only makes his classesfirst and finds his characteristics afterwards, which we may admit tohave been inevitable; but he fails altogether to show how that by whichwe know the classes apart has grown out of the characteristics that hehas given us. The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I, all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for thatsense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the rootof my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, inthe sense in which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be definedexcept by reference to my own sameness with myself. It is a simple ideaincapable of analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my lastLecture, the root of the character of permanence which we assign tothings external. To say that this conception has been evolved from thecharacteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumerated is like saying that acat has been evolved without any intermediate stages from a fish, or asmell from a colour. 

But, if we now go a step further, and ask in what form this personalidentity presents itself in the world of phenomena, the answer is clear:our personality while bound up with all our other faculties, so that wecan speak of our understanding, our affections, our powers of perceptionand sensation, as parts of ourselves, yet is centred in one facultywhich we call the will. 'If there be aught spiritual in man, ' saysColeridge, 'the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be aspirituality in man. ' The will is the man. It is the will that makes usresponsible beings. It is for the action of our will, or the consent ofour will, that we come to be called in question. It is by the will thatwe assert ourselves amidst the existences around us; and as the will isthe man in relation to phenomena, so on the other side the will is theone and only force among the forces of this world which takes cognizanceof principles and is capable of acting in pursuit of an aim not to befound among phenomena at all. The will is not the whole spiritualfaculty. Besides the power of willing we have the power of recognisingspiritual truth. And this power or faculty we commonly call theconscience. But the conscience is not a force. It has no power of actingexcept through the will. It receives and transmits the voice from thespiritual world, and the will is responsible so far as the conscienceenlightens it. It is the will whereby the man takes his place in theworld of phenomena. 

It is then to the man, thus capable of appreciating a law superior inits nature to all phenomena and bearing within himself the conviction ofa personal identity underlying all the changes that may be encounteredand endured, that is revealed from within the command to live for amoral purpose and believe in the ultimate supremacy of the moral overthe physical. The voice within gives this command in two forms; itcommands our duty and it commands our faith. The voice gives no proof, appeals to no evidence, but speaks as having a right to command, andrequires our obedience by virtue of its own inherent superiority. 

Its first command we call duty. The voice within awakes a peculiarsentiment which, except towards its command, is never felt in our souls, the sentiment of reverence. And it commands the pursuit of that, whatever it may be, to which this sentiment of reverence attaches. Thisis the positive test by which we are to know what is ever to be ourhighest aim. And along with this there is a negative test by which weare perpetually to correct the other, namely, the test of universality. The moral law in its own nature admits of no exceptions. If a principleof action be derived from this law it has nothing to do with time, orplace, or circumstances; it must hold good in the distant future, inplanets or stars utterly remote, as fully as it holds good now and here. 

This duty we can subdivide under four heads, accordingly as we apply itto our dealings with ourselves, with other moral and spiritual beings, with other creatures that can feel pleasure and pain, with things thatare incapable of either. If we are thinking of ourselves only, dutyconsists in the pursuit of holiness, that is, in the absolute subjectionof what does not demand reverence to that which does. It is plain thatwhat deserves reverence in us is that which approaches most nearly tothe moral law in character. The appetites, the affections, the passions, have each their own separate objects. They may be useful in the highestdegree, but they cannot in themselves deserve reverence, for theirobjects are not the moral law; they must therefore be absolutelysubordinated to the will and the conscience which have for theirobjects the very law itself. Holiness consists in the subjection of thewhole being, not in act alone, but in feeling and desire as well, to theauthority of conscience. 

If we are thinking of other moral agents, duty prescribes strict andunfailing justice; and justice in its highest and purest form is love, the unfailing recognition of the fullest claims that can be made on usby all who share our own divine superiority: to love God above all else, and to love all spiritual beings as we love ourselves, this is duty inrelation to other spiritual beings. 

If we are thinking of creatures which, whether moral agents or not, arecapable of pain and pleasure, our duty takes the form of goodness ortenderness. We have no right to inflict pain or even refuse pleasureunless, if the circumstances were reversed, we should be bound inconscience to be ready in our turn to bear the same infliction orrefusal. The precept, Do as you would be done by, is here supreme, andit is to this class of duties that that precept applies, and the limitsof our right to inflict pain on other creatures, whether rational orirrational, will be determined by this rule. 

And, lower still, our duty to things that are incapable of all feelingis summed up in that knowledge of them and that use of them which makesthem the fittest instruments of a moral life. 

The sentiment of reverence is our guide in determining our duty, and thetest of universality perpetually comes in to correct the commands ofthis sentiment and to clear and so to refine the sentiment itself. 

As is the case in a certain degree with every other kind of knowledge orbelief, so in a very special degree the Moral Law finds its place evenin minds that have very little of thought or of cultivation. The mostuntutored is not insensible to the claim made on our respect by acts ofcourage, self-sacrifice, generosity, truth; or to the call upon us forreprobation at the sight of acts of falsehood, of meanness, of cruelty, of profligacy. Even in the most untutored there is a sense that thesesentiments of respect and reprobation are quite different in kind fromthe other sentiments which stir the soul. And this is even more clearin condemnation than in approval. However perverted the conscience (theseat of these sentiments) may be, yet the pain of remorse, which isself-reprobation for having broken the moral law, is always, as has beenwell said, 'quite unlike any other pain we know, ' and is felt in someform and measure by every soul that lives. And as the sentiment thusholds a special place in the most untutored, so too does the sense ofuniversality by which we instinctively and invariably correct or defendthat sentiment if it be challenged. The moment we are perplexed inregard to what we ought to do or what judgment we ought to pass onsomething already done, we instinctively, almost involuntarily, endeavour to disentangle the act from all attendant circumstances and tosee whether our sentiment of approval or disapproval would still holdgood in quite other surroundings. We try to get, at the principleinvolved and to ascertain whether that principle possesses theuniversality which is the sure characteristic of the Moral Law. 

It will be matter of consideration in a future Lecture how our knowledgeof the Eternal Law of the holy, the just, the good, and the right, isthus purified in the individual and in the race. At present it will beenough to have indicated the general principle of what may be called theevolution of the knowledge of morals. 

But I now go on from the Moral Law as a duty to the Moral Law as afaith. For the inner voice is not content with commanding a course ofconduct and requiring obedience of that kind. This is its firstutterance, and the man who hears and obeys unquestionably has within himthe true seed of all religion. But though the first utterance it is notthe last. For the same voice goes on to require us to believe that thisMoral Law which claims obedience from us, equally claims obedience fromall else that exists. It is absolutely supreme or it is nothing. 

Its title to our obedience is its supremacy, and it has no other title. If it depended on promises of reward or threats of punishment addressedto us, it might be considered as a law for us, but could be no law forothers. It would in that case, indeed, be a mere physical law. Thingsare so arranged for you, and as far as you know for you only, thatterrible pain will come to you if you disobey, and wonderful pleasure ifyou obey. Such a law as that might proceed from a tyrant possessed ofabsolute power over US and the things that concern US, and might beeither good or bad as should happen. But such a law would not be able toclaim our reverence. Nay, rather, as is the case with all merelyphysical laws, it might be our duty to disobey it. In claiming ourreverence as well as our obedience, in making its sanction consist innothing but the fact of its own inherent majesty, the Moral Law calls onus to believe in its supremacy. It claims that it is the last andhighest of all laws. The world before us is governed by uniformities asfar as we can judge, but above and behind all these uniformities is thesupreme uniformity, the eternal law of right and wrong, and all otherlaws, of whatever kind, must ultimately be harmonised by it alone. TheMoral Law would be itself unjust if it bade us disregard all physicallaws, and yet was itself subordinate to those physical laws. It has aright to require us to disregard everything but itself, if it be itselfsupreme; if not, its claim would be unjust. We see here in things aroundus no demonstrative proof that it is supreme, except what may be summedup in saying that there is a power that makes for righteousness. Enlightened by the Moral Law we can see strongly marked traces of itsworking in all things. The beauty, the order, the general tendency ofall creation accords with the supremacy of the Moral Law over it all. But that is by no means all. We see, and we know that we see, but aninfinitesimal fraction of the whole. And the result of this partialvision is that, while there is much in things around us which asserts, there is also much which seems to deny altogether any supremacywhatever in the Moral Law. The universe, as we see it, is not holy, norjust, nor good, nor right. The music of creation is full of discords asyet altogether unresolved. And if we look to phenomena alone, there isno solution of the great riddle. But in spite of all imperfections andcontradictions, the voice within, without vouchsafing to give us anysolution of the perplexity, or any sanction but its own authoritativecommand, imperatively requires us to believe that holiness is supremeover unholiness, and justice over injustice, and goodness over evil, andrighteousness over unrighteousness. To obey this command and to believethis truth is Faith. 

This is the Faith which is perpetually presenting to the believer's mindthe vision of a world in which all the inequalities of this presentworld shall be redressed, in which truth, justice, and love shallvisibly reign, in which temptations shall cease and sin shall ceasealso; in which the upward strivings of noble souls shall find their end, and holiness shall supersede penitence, and hearts shall be pure of alldefilement. This is the Faith which holds to the sure conviction thatall things shall one day come to judgment; and whether by suddencatastrophe or by sure development, the physical system shall surrenderto the moral. This is the Faith which supplies perpetual strength to thehope of immortality; for though it cannot be said that the immortalityof the individual soul is of necessity involved in a belief in thesupremacy of the Moral Law, yet there is a sense, never without witnessin the soul, that all would not be according to justice if a being towhom the Moral Law has been revealed from within is nevertheless in nodegree to share in the final revelation of the superiority of that MoralLaw over what is without. We cannot say that it is a necessary part ofthe supremacy of the Moral Law that every one of those who know itshould partake of its immortal nature. We cannot even say that it is anecessary part of the ultimate redressing of all injustice andresolution of all the discords of life that the hope of it should provetrue in the individual as it will certainly prove true in the universe. For we are unable to weigh individual merit or demerit, and cannotassert for certain that the balance of justice is not maintained even inthis present life. But nevertheless the hope that it must and will be sois inextinguishable, and Faith in an Eternal Law of Morals isinextricably bound up with hope of immortality for the being that isendowed with a moral and responsible nature. 

Faith in the absolute supremacy of the Moral Law is the first, but thisagain is not the last step upwards in Faith. We are called upon, andstill by the same imperative voice within, to carry our Faith stillfurther, and to believe something yet higher. 

For the supremacy of the Moral Law must be a moral, not merely aphysical supremacy. In claiming supremacy at all the Moral Law does notassert that somehow by a happy accident, as it were, all things turn outat last in accordance with what is in the highest sense moral. Thesupremacy of the moral over the physical involves in its very nature anintention to be supreme. It is not the supremacy of justice, if justiceis done as the blind result of the working of machinery, even if that bethe machinery of the universe. In our very conception of a moralsupremacy is involved the conception of an intended supremacy. And theMoral Law in its government of the world reveals itself as possessingthe distinctive mark of personality, that is, a purpose and a will. Andthus, as we ponder it, this Eternal Law is shown to be the very EternalHimself, the Almighty God. There is a sense in which we cannot ascribepersonality to the Unknown Absolute Being; for our personality is ofnecessity compassed with limitations, and from these limitations we findit impossible to separate our conception of a person. And it will everremain true that our highest conceptions of God must fall altogethershort of His true nature. When we speak of Him as infinite, we are butdenying that He is restrained by limits of time and space as we are. When we speak of Him as absolute, we are but denying that He is subjectto conditions as we are. So when we speak of Him as a person, we cannotbut acknowledge that His personality far transcends our conceptions. Butit still remains the truth that these descriptions of Him are thenearest that we can get, and that for all the moral purposes of life wecan argue from these as if they were the full truth. If to denypersonality to Him is to assimilate Him to a blind and dead rule, wecannot but repudiate such denial altogether. If to deny personality toHim is to assert His incomprehensibility, we are ready at once toacknowledge our weakness and incapacity. But we dare not let go thetruth that the holiness, the justice, the goodness, the righteousness, which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, areidentical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, themore we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearlydo we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He doesnot make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law aredifferent aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast tothis is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itselfrudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme overall the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in AlmightyGod is the last and highest. 

It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in thisLecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said longago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls thespiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the nameof conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insiston the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within thesoul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science bysearching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of theuniverse to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done, tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritualthings. 

Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passedand treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can giveus a history of religion or of religions. But there is somethingunderlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evadesall attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attemptsto explain away our conviction of our own personal identity haveinvariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness, so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got outof phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating thefundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enablingus to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, orin shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlikeevery other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under thedominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more thanone of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat thesentiment of reverence which it excites, the remorse which follows ondisobedience to its commands, the sense of its supremacy, as delusions. It is always possible so to treat these things; but only at the cost ofstanding lower in the scale of being. 

But we have one step further to take. For as the spiritual faculty isthe recipient directly or indirectly of that original revelation whichGod has made of Himself to His rational creatures, so too this appearsto be the only faculty which can take cognizance of any fresh revelationthat it might please Him to make. If He commands still further dutiesthan those commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He bids us believewhat our reason cannot deduce from the primal belief in that Law and inHimself, it is to that faculty that the command is issued. If over andabove the original religion as we may call it there is a revealedreligion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone accept it. Such arevelation may be confirmed by signs or proofs in the world ofphenomena. He who is absolute over all nature may compel nature to bearwitness to His teaching. The spiritual may burst through the natural onoccasion, and that supremacy, which underlies all nature and which isnecessarily visible to intelligences that are capable of seeing thingsas they are in themselves, may force itself into the world of phenomenaand show itself in that manner to us. But this always is and must besecondary. The spiritual faculty alone can receive and judge ofspiritual truth, and if that faculty be not reached a truly religiousbelief is not yet attained. 

External evidences of revealed religion must have a high place butcannot have the highest. A revealed religion must depend for itspermanent hold on our obedience and our duty on its fastening upon ourspiritual nature, and if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain itin its place. 

This account of the fundamental beliefs of Religion when compared withthe fundamental postulates of Science shows that the two begin with thesame part of our nature but proceed by opposite methods. Both begin withthe human will as possessing a permanent identity and exerting a forceof its own. But from this point they separate. Science rests onphenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaksdirectly from the other world. Science postulates uniformity and isexcluded wherever uniformity can be denied, but compels convictionwithin the range of its own postulate. Religion demands the submissionof a free conscience, and uses no compulsion but that imposed by its owninherent dignity. Science gives warnings, and if you are capable ofunderstanding scientific argument, you will be incapable of disbelievingthe warnings. Certain things will poison you; certain neglects will ruinyour health; disregard of scientific construction will bring your roofdown on your head; to enter a burning building will risk your life; someof these things you may learn by ordinary experience, some of them bythat combination of experience which is called Science. But if you arecapable of the necessary reasoning you cannot doubt, however much youmay wish to do so. And yet to defy these warnings and take theinevitable consequences of that defiance may be your highest glory. Religion also gives warnings; it assures you that the Eternal Moral Lawis supreme; that, sooner or later, those who disobey will find theirdisobedience is exactly and justly punished; that no appearance to thecontrary presented by experience can be trusted. But Religion will notcompel you to believe any more than Science will compel you to obey. Disbelieve if you choose and Religion will do nothing but perpetuallyrepeat its warnings and add that your disbelief has lowered you in thescale of being. So too Science gives promises; it promises, to the racerather than to the individual, life on easier conditions, and of greaterlength; fewer pains, fewer diseases; perpetually increasing comforts;perpetually increasing power over nature. And Science is sure to keepthe promises. And yet we may refuse to accept the promises, and it isconceivable that the refusal may be far nobler than the acceptance. AndReligion promises also. It promises stainless purity in the soul; andtruth and justice and unfailing love; and tenderness to every creaturethat can feel; and a government of all that is under our dominion with asingle eye to the service of God. And we may refuse to believe thesepromises or to care whether they are kept or not. But the refusal orpursuit of such aims as these determines our position in the judgment ofthe Supreme and in the court of our own conscience. 

God has made man in His own image: that is, He has given man power tounderstand His works and to acknowledge Himself. And it is inacknowledging God that man finds himself divine. He is a partaker of thedivine nature in proportion as he recognises the Supreme Law and makesit the law of his own will. And therefore has his will been made free aswell as his mind rational: he has the power to choose as well as thepower to know. And our choice lays hold on God Himself and makes us onewith Him. 

LECTURE III. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 

Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler'sexamination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interferenceof the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixednature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life. 

LECTURE III. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 

 'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him. ' _Genesis_ i. 27. 

Religion and Science both begin with the human will. The will is toScience the first example of power, the origin of the conception ofcause; the bodily effort made by the will lies at the root of theconception of force. It is by comparing other forces with that forcethat Science begins its march. And the will is to religion the recipientof the Divine command. To the will the inner voice addresses itself, bidding it act and believe. It is because we have a will that we areresponsible. In a world in which there were no creatures endowed with awill, there could be no right-doing or wrong-doing; no approval byconscience and no disapproval; no duty and no faith. 

Here is the first possibility of collision between Science and Religion. Science postulates uniformity; Religion postulates liberty. Sciencecannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to unity if a whole class ofphenomena, all those that belong to the action of human will, are to beexcluded from the postulate of invariable sequence. The action of thewill is in this case for ever left outside. The evidence for theabsolute uniformity of nature seems to be shaken, when it is found thatthere is so important a part of phenomena to which this law ofuniformity cannot be applied. If a human will can thus interfere withthe law of uniformity, there enters the possibility that behind somephenomena may lurk the interference of some other will. Religion, on theother hand, tells every man that he is responsible, and how can he beresponsible if he is not free? If his action be determined by somethingwhich is not himself, how can the moral burden of it be put on him? Totell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he istempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself fromdoing it. 

But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have adirect consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reasoningappears to extinguish. We sharply distinguish between that which goes onwithin us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which weare not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger. We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or ourpursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we cancherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our willsseem powerless, but even here we are conscious of our power to strugglefor self-assertion and self-control. There is very much in us which isnot free; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which isnot free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our willsare overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer aperfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to bequite the same. 

This question of the freedom of the will was considered by BishopButler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make whattheory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men inpractice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise; we acceptpromises; we punish; we reward; we estimate character; we admire; weshun; we deal with ourselves; we deal with others; as if we and allothers were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had toreconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense ofjustice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishmentswere plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealingswith one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with thatsense of justice in God's dealings with us. 

But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that fortwo reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was mostoften in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divineforeknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from theconception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxinggrasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how thewill is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsiondiffer as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutelyin the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having noliberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seemspossible to accept the one and call it an unfathomable mystery; but toaccept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream. And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theoryand based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very differentantagonist from the same doctrine advanced as a conclusion of science, and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observations. We maydismiss the mere theory after showing that it has not substance enoughto hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so treat what claims tobe a scientific inference. 

The modern examination of the question begins with Hume, who maintainsthat the doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are both true and ofcourse compatible with each other. But his arguments touch only thebroad question whether they are true for practical purposes, not whethereither is true in the strict sense and without exception ormodification. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it was essential thatboth doctrines should be true in the strictest sense. Holding thatinvariable sequence was a law of Nature known independently ofexperience and applicable to all phenomena in the minutest detail, hecould not allow that any act of the human will lay outside the range ofthis law. Such an act being a phenomenon must, in his view, be subjectto the law which the constitution of our minds imposed on all phenomenaapparent to us. And yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternalMoral Law made us responsible for all our acts, he could not butmaintain that in the doing of those acts we must be free. His mode ofreconciling the two opposites amounted to this, that our actionthroughout life considered as a whole is free, but that each separateact considered by itself is bound to the preceding acts by the law ofinvariable sequence. We may illustrate this by the familiar instance ofa prism acting on a ray of light. The ray has or may have a colour ofits own before it passes through the prism. The prism spreads it out andshows a series of colours. The order in which this series is arranged isdetermined by the character of the prism acting on the nature of theray. The colours when combined give the colour of the ray; whenseparated by the prism each has its own distinct character, and theorder of the colours is determined, and invariably determined, by theprism. So too in Kant's view the character of a man in itself may befree, but when it passes through the prism of time into the world ofphenomena and is spread over many years it shows a number of separateactions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits the man, though allput together are the true representation of him to human perception. Theman is free. His life represents his free choice. But his separate actsare what that free choice becomes when translated into a series ofphenomena, and are bound each to the preceding by the law of invariablesequence. It is plain at once that this does not satisfy ourconsciousness. We are not conscious of freedom as regards our life as awhole; we are conscious of freedom as regards our separate actions. Ourlife as a whole embraces our past which is absolutely unchangeable, andour future which is not yet within our reach; we are conscious of nopresent power over either. Our separate acts are perceptibly subject toour own control; nay, it is by the use of our free-will in our separateacts that we are able to change the character of our life or to preserveit from change; and with this corresponds our responsibility. We holdourselves responsible for each act as it is done; we hold ourselvesresponsible for the character of our lives only so far as we might havechanged it by our acts. The solution leaves the difficulty where it was. 

It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity toexpress it by a different word, and call it the doctrine of determinism. The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations withthe idea of compulsion; just so in Science it is thought better to getrid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence, in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recognisable by usin the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man'you will be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you will assuredlydo so. ' There will be no compulsion; but the action is absolutelycertain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so ingiven circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is yourcharacter in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom issimply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from anyforce put upon you from without. 

But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to avery large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be nomore than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, ourcharacter to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us;but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float asit were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, buthaving no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom ornecessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for usnot to know ourselves as well as others know us, and to do many thingswhich an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which weourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases wesometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our livesis not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannotthen escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had powerto act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it iswhen a conflict arises between duty and inclination that our innercertainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. Inthe great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the powerof temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for amoment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves; which isthe free agent and which is the blind force; which is responsible forthe issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in thiscase a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense ofresistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this caseto account for the sense of being a free agent, by saying that thismerely means that we are conscious of no external force. We areconscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will ofours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our veryselves, and this distinction between the will and the forces againstwhich the will is striving is ineffaceable from our minds. That the willis often weak and on that account overpowered, and that after a hardstruggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by ourpassions or our appetites, is unquestionable. Often has the believer topray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often willhe feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knowsthat whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have touse it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to doso. 

The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive, and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. Thefirst proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will iscertainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there beany human action which appears to be without any motive, it is not insuch action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice iseven more completely at the mercy of passing inclination than one who isacting from passion or from overpowering temptation. The freedom of thewill is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing betweenmotives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from thestronger motive, the question immediately follows, what determines whichis the stronger motive? It cannot be anything in the motives themselves, or all men would act alike in the same circumstances; and it is clearthat they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if itbe something in the man, it must be either his will acting at themoment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be hischaracter, then follows the further question, what determines hischaracter? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we mustanswer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surroundingand preceding circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law ofuniformity but this; that, given such and such parents, such and suchcircumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and noother. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility?I did not on this supposition make my character; it was made for me; anyone else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessityhave acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimedat the same, and won the same moral victories, and suffered the samemoral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure resultof the circumstances in which I was born? But if, on the other hand, itbe said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents andsurroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element hascome into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of theantecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedentsand surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, andyet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would havealtogether differed. 

It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and inregard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchasedcompleteness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to beaccounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spiteof all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselvesfree and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected. 

But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific viewand the religious view of human action extends. 

Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of humanaction, much even of that which appears at first sight to be moreespecially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by lawsof nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed outhow often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the manhimself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consentsinstead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to denythat nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so, but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we callcaprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as toassign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. Butit is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of menthat we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and thattheir conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. Thatamongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the sameconditions from year to year, there should be every year a given numberof suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis thatlike circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way onlycan we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion ofmen who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country foranother, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter auniversity, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) whichcan be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far asit goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for theuniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all theuniversality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of provingas much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action ofinanimate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the lawsof mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than theinduction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it ishardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstractarguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionablyunproven. 

And this agrees with the result of a careful examination of the facts ofhuman consciousness from the opposite point of view. We cannot butacknowledge that when we look very closely we find a very largeproportion of our own actions to be by no means the result of aninterference by the will. A large proportion is due to custom; a largeproportion to inclination, of which the will takes no special notice, and is not called on by the conscience to notice; a large proportion toinclinations which we know that we ought to resist, but we do notresist; a much smaller proportion, but still some, to passions andappetites against which we have striven in vain; only a very smallproportion to deliberate choice. There is, in fact, no irresistiblereason for claiming freedom for human action except when that actionturns on the question of right or wrong. There is no reason to callaction free that flows from inclination or custom, or passion, or adesire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain pleasure. The will claims tobe free in all these cases, but it is free in the sense that it might beexerted; and so, since it is not exerted, the action is not free. Butwhen, at the call of duty, in whatever form, the will directlyinterferes, then and then only are we conscious not only that the willis free, but that it has asserted its freedom, and that the action hasbeen free also. 

The relation of the will to the conduct falls under four distinct heads:for sometimes the will simply concurs with the inclination; sometimes itneither concurs nor opposes; sometimes it opposes but is overpowered;sometimes it opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclination ofsome kind or other prompts the man to action. The inclination, whetherset up by an external object of desire or by an internal impulse ofrestlessness or blind craving or the like, comes clearly from thenature, and is not free choice. There is no reason to believe that it isnot in most cases, possibly in all cases, under the dominion of fixedlaw. It may be as completely the product of what has preceded it as theeclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs in the inclination, it isneedless to discuss the question whether the will acts or not. Theconduct is the same whether the will adds force to the inclination or issimply passive. The freedom of the will may in this case be consideredas negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will be considered negativein the second case, which is that of the will neither concurring withinclination nor opposing it. In this case there may be a distinctconsciousness of freedom in the form of a sense of responsibility forwhat inclination is permitted to do. A man in this case knows that he isfree, perhaps knows that he ought to interfere and control the conduct. But as he does not interfere, the freedom of the will is not asserted inact. And it is possible that, as far as all external phenomena areconcerned, there may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. This, however, can hardly be in the third case, which is when the will and theinclination are opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although theinclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is an event of the mostimportant kind, and is sure to leave traces on the character, and to befollowed by consequences. In this case we are distinctly conscious of apower to add force to that one of the contending opposites which is mostidentified with our very selves, and we know whether we have added thatforce or not. And not only may we add this force directly from within;we may and we often do go outside of ourselves to seek for aids to addstill more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose what we shouldnot do otherwise. We dwell in thought on the higher aims which are theproper object of will; we read what sets forth those higher aims intheir full beauty; we seek the words, the company, the sympathy of menwho will, we are sure, encourage us in this the higher path. And, on theother hand, we turn away from the temptation which gives strength tothe evil inclination, and if we cannot escape from its presence weendeavour to drive the thought of it from our minds. All this action isnot for the sake of anything thus done, but for the sake of its indirecteffect on the struggle in which we are engaged. Whenever there is astruggle, we are not only conscious that the will is free, but that itis asserting its freedom. In these struggles there is not a mere contestbetween two inclinations. We are distinctly conscious that one of thecombatants is our very selves in a sense in which the other is not. But, nevertheless, when all has been said, it still remains in this case thatthe will is beaten and inclination prevails, and the conduct in the mainis determined by the inclination, which is under the dominion of the lawof uniformity, and not by the will, which claims to be free. The fourthcase in which the will prevails may, of course, make a momentous breachin the uniformity of sequence of the conduct. But in far the largestnumber of cases the struggle is very slight, and the difference betweenthe will and the inclination is not, taken alone, of grave importance inthe life. And in those instances in which the struggle is severe andthe resulting change is great, it is very often the case that the wayhas been prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet accumulation ofhidden forces of the strictly natural order ready to burst forth whenthe fit opportunity came. In the great conversions which have sometimesseemed by their suddenness and completeness to defy all possibility ofreduction to natural law, there are often nevertheless tokens of deepdissatisfaction with the previous life having swelled up slowly withinthe soul for some time, even for some long time beforehand. Theinclination to go on in evil courses has been broken down at last, notmerely by the action of the will, but by the working of the machinery ofthe soul. 

To this it must be added that the action of the will is such that itvery often happens that, having been exerted once, it need not beexerted again for the same purpose. A custom is broken down, anexceedingly strong temptation has been overpowered, and its strength sodestroyed that its return is without effect. Or sometimes the act of thewill takes the form of deliberately so arranging the circumstances oflife that a dreaded temptation cannot return, or if it return cannotprevail; the right eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut off, andthe sin cannot be committed even if desired. While therefore the will isalways free, the actual interference of the will with the life is not sofrequent as to interfere with the broad general rule that the course ofhuman conduct is practically uniform. In fact the will, though alwaysfree, only asserts its freedom by obeying duty in spite of inclination, by disregarding the uniformity of nature in order to maintain the higheruniformity of the Moral Law. The freedom of the human will is but theassertion in particular of that universal supremacy of the moral overthe physical in the last resort, which is an essential part of the veryessence of the Moral Law. The freedom of the will is the Moral Lawbreaking into the world of phenomena, and thus behind the free-will ofman stands the power of God. 

When the real claim of the will for freedom has been clearly seized bythe mind, it becomes apparent that there is no real collision betweenwhat Science asserts and what Religion requires us to believe. Scienceasserts that there is evidence to show that an exceedingly largeproportion of human action is governed by fixed law. Religion requiresus to believe that the will is responsible for all this action, notbecause it does, but because it might interfere. Science is not able, and from the nature of the case never will be able to prove that therange of this fixed law is universal, and that the will never doesinterfere to vary the actions from what without the will they would havebeen. Science will never be able to prove this, because it could not beproved except by a universal induction, and a universal induction isimpossible. At present there is no approximation to such proof. Religion, on the other hand, does not call on us to believe that thewill often interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually telling usthat it does not interfere as often as it ought. Revealed religion, indeed, has always based its most earnest exhortations on the reluctanceof man to set his will to the difficult task of contending with theforces of his nature, and on the weakness of the will in the presence ofthose forces. 

And when we pursue this thought further we see that for such creaturesas we are the subjection of a large part of our own nature to fixed lawsis as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity ofexternal nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us. The fixity of a large part of our nature--nay, of all but the whole ofit--is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but asuperficial self-examination to discern the indications of what theprofoundest research still leaves a mystery--that we are not perfectcreatures of our own kind--that our nature does not spontaneouslyconform to the Supreme Moral Law--that our highest and best consists notin complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetualupward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispensablecondition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shallbe made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the nextascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare withevil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appetites had to becarried on through life without the possibility of making any victorycomplete, the formation of a perpetually higher and nobler characterwould be impossible; our main hope in this life, our best offering toGod would be taken away from us; we could never give our bodies to be aliving sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God; we could give our separateacts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to formourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the will isnot only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature; butdiscipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to bedisciplined. 

And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply andperceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strangeway infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure willcapable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress everwas or could be made. The tremendous strain of fighting with an enemythat might be defeated again and again for ever without ever sufferingany change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving theslightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for the mostunearthly, the most noble, the most godlike of human wills. But willssuch as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to theirown best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could perseverethrough such a hopeless conflict. 

It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed fromglory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when allis over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is. But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some suddenstroke fashioning the soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenlylineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees that the Christian believesthat he shall be thus blessed. And this progress rests on the fixedrules by which his nature is governed, and which admit of the characterbeing gradually changed by the life. The Christian knows that God has somade us that a temptation once overcome is permanently weakened, andoften overcome is at last altogether expelled; that appetites restrainedare in the end subdued and cost but little effort to keep down; that badthoughts perpetually put aside at last return no more; that a clearerperception of duty and a more resolute obedience to its call makes dutyitself more attractive, fills us with enthusiasm for its fulfilment, draws us as it were upwards, and ennobles the whole man. The Christianknows that the thought of the Supreme Being, the contemplation of Hisexcellency, the recognition of Him as the source of spiritual life has astrange power to transform, and evermore to transform the whole man. Inthis knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights his battle. Andwhat is this but a knowledge that he has a nature subject to fixed laws, which he can indeed interfere with, but without which hisself-discipline would be of little value, and assuredly could not longcontinue. 

And if the progress of Science and the examination of human natureshould eventually restrict more closely than we might have supposed thelength to which the interference of the will can go; if it should appearthat the changes which we can make at any one moment in ourselves arewithin a very narrow range, this, too, will be knowledge that can beused in our self-discipline and quite as much perhaps in our mutualmoral aid. It is conceivable that the branch of science which treats ofhuman nature may in the end profoundly modify our modes of education, and our hopes of what can be effected by it. But if so the knowledgewill only add to the store of means put within our reach for theelevation of our race. And we may be sure that nothing of this sort willreally affect the revelation that God has written in our souls that weare free and responsible beings, and cannot get quit of ourresponsibility. 

LECTURE IV. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recenttimes. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argumentfrom design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds forceto the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress;from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real. 

LECTURE IV. 

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

 'For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. ' _Romans_ i. 20. 

The regularity of nature is the first postulate of Science; but itrequires the very slightest observation to show us that, along with thisregularity, there exists a vast irregularity which Science can only dealwith by exclusion from its province. The world as we see it is full ofchanges; and these changes when patiently and perseveringly examined arefound to be subject to invariable or almost invariable laws. But thethings themselves which thus change are as multifarious as the changeswhich they undergo. They vary infinitely in quantity, in qualities, inarrangement throughout space, possibly in arrangement throughout time. Take a single substance such, say, as gold. How much gold there is inthe whole universe, and where it is situated, we not only have noknowledge, but can hardly be said to be on the way to have knowledge. Why its qualities are what they are, and why it alone possesses allthese qualities; how long it has existed, and how long it will continueto exist, these questions we are unable to answer. The existence of themany forms of matter, the properties of each form, the distribution ofeach: all this Science must in the last resort assume. 

But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, and Science soon makesit evident that it is true, that some forms of matter grow out of otherforms. There are endless combinations. And the growth of new out of oldforms is of necessity a sequence, and falls under the law ofinvariability of sequences, and becomes the subject-matter of Science. As in each separate case Science asserts each event of to-day to havefollowed by a law of invariable sequence on the events of yesterday; theearth has reached the precise point in its orbit now which wasdetermined by the law of gravitation as applied to its motion at thepoint which it reached a moment ago; the weather of the present hour hascome by meteorological laws out of the weather of the last hour; thecrops and the flocks now found on the surface of the habitable earth arethe necessary outcome of preceding harvests and preceding flocks and ofall that has been done to maintain and increase them; so, too, if welook at the universe as a whole, the present condition of that whole is, if the scientific postulate of invariable sequence be admitted, and inas far as it is admitted, the necessary outcome of its former condition;and all the various forms of matter, whether living or inanimate, mustfor the same reason and with the same limitation be the necessaryoutcome of preceding forms of matter. This is the foundation of thedoctrine of Evolution. 

Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine will be, and indeed ifScience be admitted at all must be, accepted by everybody. Even theRoman Church, which holds that God is perpetually interfering with thecourse of nature, either in the interests of religious truth or out ofloving kindness to His creatures, yet will acknowledge that the numberof such interferences almost disappears in comparison of the countlessmillions of instances in which there is no reason to believe in anyinterference at all. And if we look at the universe as a whole, thegeneral proposition as stated above is quite unaffected by theinfinitesimal exception which is to be made by a believer in frequentmiracles. But when this proposition is applied in detail it at onceintroduces the possibility of an entirely new history of the materialuniverse. For this universe as we see it is almost entirely made up ofcomposite and not of simple substances. We have been able to analyse allthe substances that we know into a comparatively small number of simpleelements--some usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But thesesimple elements are rarely found uncombined with others; most of thosewhich we meet with in a pure state have been taken out of combinationand reduced to simplicity by human agency. The various metals that weordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do notgenerally obtain them pure except by smelting. The air we breathe, though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to ourlife is a compound. And, if we pass from inorganic to organicsubstances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained byvarious articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how havethese compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, orall of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. IfScience could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviouslycannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and becompelled to start with it as a given fact--a fact as incapable ofscientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on theother hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-dayexperience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing throughthese processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare muchof our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the timewhen these processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point ofthe history of the universe be a condition in which the simple elementswere still uncombined? If Science could go back to the beginning of allthings, might we not find all the elements of material things readyindeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unitethem in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separatefrom each other? Scattered through enormous regions of space, but drawntogether by the force of gravitation; their original heat, whatever itmay have been, increased by their mutual collision; made to actchemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease oftemperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, bythe incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown;these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own propernature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomenathat we observe. We do not even then get back to regularity. Why theseelements, and no others; why in these precise quantities; why sodistributed in space; why endowed with these properties: still arequestions which Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason toexpect that any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know notwhether it may not be asserted that the impossibility of answering oneat least among these questions is capable of demonstration. For thewhole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetualrotation of the heavenly bodies; and without original irregularity inthe distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever havespontaneously arisen. And if this irregularity be thus original, Sciencecan give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin withassuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it_may_ begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was alwaysvery much what we see it now, and that composition and decompositionhave always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been fromthe beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, thesame minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, andpossibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changeshave never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation ofthe forms which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science _may_assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of ourmaterial system; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown upunder the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as theinitial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseousmatter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how thesegradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leanedto the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be statedthus: We all distinguish between the original creation of the materialworld and the history of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to assign to the original creation a great deal thatScience is now disposed to assign to the history. But the distinctionbetween the original creation and the subsequent history would stillremain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the onemay be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was formerlysupposed. However far back Science may be able to push its beginning, there still must lie behind that beginning the original act ofcreation--creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds ofmatter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and ofthe distribution of this matter in space. 

This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it anenormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that thedoctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows byregular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown outof a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon theearth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, thevery planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and all thisalso by regular law--that is quite another thing. And the bearings ofthis new application of Science deserve study. 

Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sensewhatever antagonistic to the teachings of Religion, though it may be, and that we shall have to consider afterwards, to the teachings ofrevelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relationto revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reasonis that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence andsupremacy of God exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cutaway, some of the main arguments for that truth. 

Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to proveor to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, totake these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is notto disprove or take away the truth itself. We find every day instancesof men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know tobe untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when theyfind out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground theyare to take their stand. And some men succumb in the trial and losetheir faith together with the argument which has hitherto supported it. But the truth still stands in spite of the failure of some to keep theirbelief in it, and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by theold arguments. 

And when men have become accustomed to rest their belief on new groundsthe loss of the old arguments is never found to be a very seriousmatter. Belief in revelation has been shaken again and again by thisvery increase of knowledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow tomany in the days of Galileo to find that the language of the Bible inregard to the movement of the earth and sun was not scientificallycorrect. It was a dreadful blow to many in the days of the Reformationto find that they had been misled by what they believed to be aninfallible Church. 

Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritualconviction, and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can nolonger establish by the arguments which have hitherto been to them thedecisive, perhaps the sole decisive, proofs. 

And yet in spite of these shocks belief in revelation is strong still inmen's souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world. 

But let us go on to consider how far it is true that the argumentswhich have hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a SupremeCreator are really affected very gravely by this doctrine of Evolution. 

The main argument, which at first appears to be thus set aside, is thatwhich is founded on the marks of design, and which is worked out in hisown way with marvellous skill by Paley in his Natural Theology. Paley'sargument rests as is well known on the evidence of design in createdthings, and these evidences he chiefly finds in the frame-work oforganised living creatures. He traces with much most interesting detailthe many marvellous contrivances by which animals of various kinds areadapted to the circumstances in which they are to live, the mechanismwhich enables them to obtain their food, to preserve their species, toescape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature thus examined, and particularly all animated nature, seems full of means towards ends, and those ends invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well besupposed to have in view. And whilst there is undeniably one greatobjection to his whole argument, namely that the Creator is representedas an Artificer rather than a Creator, as overcoming difficulties whichstood in His way rather than as an Almighty Being fashioning thingsaccording to His Will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence ofdesign remains exceedingly powerful, and it has always been considered astrong corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a God. Now it certainly seems at first as if this argument were altogetherdestroyed. If animals were not made as we see them, but evolved bynatural law, still more if it appear that their wonderful adaptation totheir surroundings is due to the influence of those surroundings, itmight seem as if we could no longer speak of design as exhibited intheir various organs; the organs we might say grow of themselves, somesuitable, and some unsuitable to the life of the creatures to which theybelonged, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable havesurvived. 

But Paley has supplied the clue to the answer. In his well-knownillustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passingtraveller, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly notlessened if it be found that the watch was so constructed that, incourse of time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinkingnot of Evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation ofanimals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step further, and we may with equal justice remark that we should certainly notbelieve it a proof that the watch had come into existence without designif we found that it produced in course of time not merely another watchbut a better. It would become more marvellous than ever if we foundprovision thus made not merely for the continuance of the species butfor the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essential to animallife that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances; if besidesprovision for such adaptation in each generation we find provision forstill better adaptation in future generations, how can it be said thatthe evidences of design are diminished? Or take any separate organ, suchas the eye. It is impossible not to believe until it be disproved thatthe eye was intended to see with. We cannot say that light was made forthe eye, because light subserves many other purposes besides that ofenabling eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for light there isso strong a presumption that it cannot easily be rebutted. If indeed itcould be shown that eyes fulfilled several other functions, or thatspecies of animals which always lived in the dark still had fully-formedeyes, then we might say that the connexion between the eye of an animaland the light of heaven was accidental. But the contrary is notoriouslythe case; so much the case that some philosophers have maintained thatthe eye was formed by the need for seeing, a statement which I need takeno trouble to refute, just as those who make it take no trouble toestablish, I will not say its truth, but even its possibility. But thefact, if it be a fact, that the eye was not originally as well adaptedto see with as it is now, and that the power of perceiving light and ofthings in the light grew by degrees, does not show, nor even tend toshow, that the eye was not intended for seeing with. 

The fact is that the doctrine of Evolution does not affect the substanceof Paley's argument at all. The marks of design which he has pointed outremain marks of design still even if we accept the doctrine ofEvolution to the full. What is touched by this doctrine is not theevidence of design but the mode in which the design was executed. Paley, no doubt, wrote on the supposition (and at that time it was hardlypossible to admit any other supposition) that we must take animals tohave come into existence very nearly such as we now know them: and hislanguage, on the whole, was adapted to that supposition. But thelanguage would rather need supplementing than changing to make itapplicable to the supposition that animals were formed by Evolution. Inthe one case the execution follows the design by the effect of a directact of creation; in the other case the design is worked out by a slowprocess. In the one case the Creator made the animals at once such asthey now are; in the other case He impressed on certain particles ofmatter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the history ofHis creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in theordinary course of time living creatures such as the present weredeveloped. The creative power remains the same in either case; thedesign with which that creative power was exercised remains the same. He did not make the things, we may say; no, but He made them makethemselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from thegreat argument. It seems in itself something more majestic, somethingmore befitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as one day and one dayas a thousand years, thus to impress His Will once for all on Hiscreation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one originalimpress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifyingwhat He had previously made. It has often been objected to Paley'sargument, as I remarked before, that it represents the Almighty ratheras an artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with somewhatintractable materials and showing marvellous skill in overcomingdifficulties rather than a beneficent Being making all things inaccordance with the purposes of His love. But this objection disappearswhen we put the argument into the shape which the doctrine of Evolutiondemands and look on the Almighty as creating the original elements ofmatter, determining their number and their properties, creating the lawof gravitation whereby as seems probable the worlds have been formed, creating the various laws of chemical and physical action, by whichinorganic substances have been combined, creating above all the law oflife, the mysterious law which plainly contains such wonderfulpossibilities within itself, and thus providing for the ultimatedevelopment of all the many wonders of nature. 

What conception of foresight and purpose can rise above that whichimagines all history gathered as it were into one original creative actfrom which the infinite variety of the Universe has come and more iscoming even yet?

And yet again, it is a common objection to Paley's and similar argumentsthat, in spite of all the tokens of intelligence and beneficence in thecreation, there is so much of the contrary character. How much there isof apparently needless pain and waste! And John Stuart Mill has urgedthat either we must suppose the Creator wanting in omnipotence orwanting in kindness to have left His creation so imperfect. The answerusually given is that our knowledge is partial, and, could we see thewhole, the objection would probably disappear. But what force andclearness is given to this answer by the doctrine of Evolution whichtells us that we are looking at a work which is not yet finished, andthat the imperfections are a necessary part of a large design thegeneral outlines of which we may already trace, but the ultimate issueof which, with all its details, is still beyond our perception! Theimperfections are like the imperfections of a half-completed picture notyet ready to be seen; they are like the bud which will presently be abeautiful flower, or the larva of a beautiful and gorgeous insect; theyare like the imperfections in the moral character of a saint whonevertheless is changing from glory to glory. 

To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out, and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution addsthe design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animalsare perpetually better adapted to the life they have to live. The veryphrase which we commonly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survivalof the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase ofenjoyment for all creatures that can feel. If they are fitter for theirsurroundings, most certainly they will find life easier to live. And, asif to mark still more plainly the beneficence of the whole work, theless developed creatures, as we have every reason to believe, are lesssensible of pain and pleasure; so that enjoyment appears to grow withthe capacity for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes as sensitivity tosuffering increases. And there can be no doubt that this is in many waysthe tendency of nature. Beasts of prey are diminishing; life is easierfor man and easier for all animals that are under his care: many speciesof animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those thatremain have far greater happiness in their lives. In fact, all thepurposes which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures are notonly fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilledfrom age to age. And though the progress may be exceedingly slow, thenature of the progress cannot be mistaken. 

If the Natural Theology were now to be written, the stress of theargument would be put on a different place. Instead of insisting whollyor mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structureof living animals and plants, we should look rather to the originalproperties impressed on matter from the beginning, and on the beneficentconsequences that have flowed from those properties. We should dwell onthe peculiar properties that must be inherent in the molecules of theoriginal elements to cause such results to follow from their action andreaction on one another. We should dwell on the part played in theUniverse by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of thegreat heat-givers; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; ofwater, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat; of the atmosphereand the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. Weshould trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in theirsubservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purposeimpressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible thanever before. 

And we could not overlook the beauty of Nature and of all created thingsas part of that purpose coming in many cases out of that very survivalof the fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and yet a distinct object initself. For this beauty there is no need in the economy of naturewhatever. The beauty of the starry heavens, which so impressed the mindof Kant that he put it by the side of the Moral Law as proving theexistence of a Creator, is not wanted either for the evolution of theworld or for the preservation of living creatures. Our enjoyment of itis a super-added gift certainly not necessary for the existence or thecontinuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to theteaching of the doctrine of Evolution, has generally grown out of theneed which makes it good for plants to attract insects. The insectscarry the pollen from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix thebreed; and this produces the stronger plants which outlive thecompetition of the rest. The plants, therefore, which are mostconspicuous gain an advantage by attracting insects most. Thatsuccessive generations of flowers should thus show brighter and brightercolours is intelligible. But the beauty of flowers is far more than mereconspicuousness of colours even though that be the main ingredient. Whyshould the wonderful grace, and delicacy, and harmony of tint be added?Is all this mere chance? Is all this superfluity pervading the wholeworld and perpetually supplying to the highest of living creatures, andthat too in a real proportion to his superiority, the most refined andelevating of pleasures, an accident without any purpose at all? IfEvolution has produced the world such as we see and all its endlessbeauty, it has bestowed on our own dwelling-place in lavish abundanceand in marvellous perfection that on which men spend their substancewithout stint, that which they value above all but downrightnecessities, that which they admire beyond all except the Law of Dutyitself. We cannot think that this is not designed, nor that the Artistwho produced it was blind to what was coming out of His work. 

Once more, the doctrine of Evolution restores to the science of Naturethe unity which we should expect in the creation of God. Paley'sargument proved design, but included the possibility of many designers. Not one design, but many separate designs, all no doubt of the samecharacter, but all worked out independently of one another, is thepicture that he puts before us. But the doctrine of Evolution binds allexisting things on earth into one. Every mineral, every plant, everyanimal has such properties that it benefits other things beside itselfand derives benefit in turn. The insect developes the plant, and theplant the insect; the brute aids in the evolution of the man, and theman in that of the brute. All things are embraced in one great designbeginning with the very creation. He who uses the doctrine of Evolutionto prove that no intelligence planned the world, is undertaking theself-contradictory task of showing that a great machine has no purposeby tracing in detail the marvellous complexity of its parts, and thestill more marvellous precision with which all work together to producea common result. 

To conclude, the doctrine of Evolution leaves the argument for anintelligent Creator and Governor of the world stronger than it wasbefore. There is still as much as ever the proof of an intelligentpurpose pervading all creation. The difference is that the execution ofthat purpose belongs more to the original act of creation, less to actsof government since. There is more divine foresight, there is lessdivine interposition; and whatever has been taken from the latter hasbeen added to the former. 

Some scientific students of Nature may fancy they can deduce in theworking out of the theory results inconsistent with religious belief;and in a future Lecture these will have to be examined; and it ispossible that the theory may be so presented as to be inconsistent withthe teaching of Revelation. But whatever may be the relation of thedoctrine of Evolution to Revelation, it cannot be said that thisdoctrine is antagonistic to Religion in its essence. The progress ofScience in this direction will assuredly end in helping men to believewith more assurance than ever that the Lord by wisdom hath founded theearth, by understanding hath He established the heavens. 

LECTURE V. 

REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor ofReligion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to beRevelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament;yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. Themiraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of thismode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty. 

LECTURE V. 

REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

 'God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son. ' _Hebrews_ i. 1. 

The doctrine of Evolution has been applied not only to the formation ofall created things, but to the development of human knowledge; and thiswith perfect justice, though with some risk of misunderstanding. It iscertain, and, indeed, it is obvious, that knowledge grows. The ordinaryexperience of mankind becomes larger and clearer in the course of time, and the systematised experience which we call Science makes the sameprogress in still greater measure and with more assurance. 

Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in pastages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucialexperiments devised by another, new instruments of observation inventedby another, --these have been the steps by which Science has grown andestablished its authority and enlarged its dominion. When or by whom thefirst steps were made we have no record. No mathematician that everlived showed greater natural power of intellect than he, whoever he was, who first saw that the singular contained the universal; but we knowneither his name nor his age, nor his birthplace nor his race. But afterthose first steps had been taken, we know who have been the leaders inscientific advance. And we know what they have done, and what they aredoing; and we can conjecture the direction in which further advanceswill be made. And so we can trace the development of this kind ofknowledge, and in a certain and very real sense this development may becalled an evolution. 

But there is this difference between the evolution of nature and theevolution of the science of nature. The evolution of nature results inthe existence of forms which did not exist before; the evolution ofknowledge results in the perception of laws which were already inexistence. 

The knowledge grows, but the things known remain. The knowledge is nottreated as if independent of the things known or believed to be known, as a phenomenon belonging merely to the human mind, with beginnings andlaws and consequences and history of its own. And, consequently, itshaving a regular growth is not used as an argument against itssubstantial truth. 

The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but nomathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects itsclaims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought tobelieve the deductions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer ourown question by tracing the steps; but our conviction is not shaken thatthese deductions are true. 

And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisationsof Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out ofCopernicus, and Newton out of Kepler; but the proof that the knowledgeof one truth has been evolved out of the knowledge of another, and thatout of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all thisScience has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a naturalgrowth of human thought. Science has grown through all manner ofmistakes--mistakes made by the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakeswhich men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be nodoubt laughed at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, treatscientific thought as nothing more than one of the phenomena ofhumanity; ways of thinking which necessarily grew out of the conditionsin which men have existed, but sufficiently accounted for by theirorigin and mode of growth having been shown, and having no solidity oftheir own. 

What has been said of Science may be said also of Religion. Religionalso has had its development, and in some respects a developmentparallel to that of Science. 

It is possible to trace the steps by which men have obtained an everlarger and fuller knowledge of the Supreme Law of Right, a clearerperception of its application, of its logical results, of its relationto life, to conduct, to belief. It has grown through mistakes as Sciencehas. There has been false Religion, as there has been false Science. Unsound principles of conduct have been inculcated in Religion asunsound generalisations have been set up in Science. There have beenimproper objects of reverence in Religion, as there have been impossibleaims proposed for scientific investigation. Ezekiel rises above thedoctrine that the children are punished for the sins of their parents, just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum. The parallel is all the more complete in that in many cases falsereligions have been also false sciences. The prayer to the fetish forrain is as contrary to true religion as it is contrary to true science. Many false religions are most easily overthrown by scientificinstruction. Many false sciences begin to totter when the believers inthem are taught true religion. The ordinary superstitions which have sostrong a hold on weak characters and uninstructed minds, are asinconsistent with true faith in God as with reasonable knowledge ofnature. Science grows, but the facts, whether laws or instances of theoperations of those laws, are not affected by that growth. And Religiongrows, but the facts of which it takes cognisance are not affected bythat growth. Neither in the one case nor in the other is the fact thatthere has been a development any argument to show that the belief thusdeveloped has no real foundation. The pure subjectivity of Religion, touse technical language, is no more proved by this argument than the puresubjectivity of Science. 

But there is one most important particular in which the development ofReligion entirely differs from the development of Science. The leadersof scientific thought, from the time that Science has been conscious ofitself, have never claimed direct divine instruction. For a long time, indeed, scientific thought rested largely on tradition, and thattradition was handed on from generation to generation without anyexamination into its foundations. The stores of past observations seemedso very much larger in quantity than any that men could add in their ownday, that it was natural to give more weight to what was received thanto what was newly observed. The experience of each generation insuccession seemed nothing in comparison with the accumulated experienceof all preceding generations. And in many cases old traditions stoppedthe growth of Science by preventing the acceptance of observationsinconsistent with them. But such old traditions never claimed to rest ona revelation from God; or, if such a claim was made here and there, itnever had strength enough to root itself in Science and form part of therecognised authority on which Science stood. 

Science, from the time when it recognised itself as Science, has owedits development to observation of nature, and long before it shook offthe fetters of unexamined tradition it had disclaimed, even for thattradition, any other basis than this. But not so Religion. Manyreligions, and among them the purer and higher religions, in proportionto their nearer approach to perfection, have claimed to rest on a DivineRevelation, and to be something more than either speculations ofphilosophic observers of nature, or deductions from innate principles ofreason or conscience. Not thinkers, but prophets, or men claiming to beprophets, have given the purest religions to their disciples amongmankind. It has always been possible to bring all religious teaching tothe bar of conscience; it has been possible to put all religiousteaching to logical examination; to systematise its precepts, whether offaith or conduct; to inquire into its fundamental principles, and to askfor the authority on which the whole teaching rests. But theseapplications of our intellectual faculties to Religion have always beenadmitted as coming after, not as preceding, the teaching to which theyare made. The prophet does sometimes reason when he is deducing fromprinciples already accepted, new precepts, or new prohibitions; but hedoes not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of hismission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it bysuch means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will, in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to pastrevelations which they have already received, and with which his newmessage is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his powerover nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. TheHebrew prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat theold revelation with its old unshaken and unshakeable precepts, but hewill not stop there: he will also give signs from the Lord to prove thathe has a right to the title of prophet which he claims. Armed with thistitle, he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Restorer, theMessiah; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passedin its appointed day; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, andthe execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives. 

It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown upwith no such claim at all. The worship of ancestors, where it hasprevailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams, in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of thedead who were reverenced while they lived, and cannot be readilyforgotten after death. Such worship barely attains to what may be calledin strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, thetrue seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid toa sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only the differencethat those who receive this worship are supposed to reside not in adistant capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes, of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some ofthe inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to becalled religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, theacknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imperceptibleby the senses; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons. But the central idea of a rule of holiness is either altogether wanting, or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developinginto ultimate supremacy. These religions do not often lay claim to arevelation from a supreme authority. And they have withered away withthe growth of knowledge and with clearer perceptions of what Religionmust be if it is to exist at all. 

All the higher religions have claimed to rest on a divine revelation, and the Christian Religion on a series of such revelations. TheChristian Religion does not profess (as does for instance theMahommedan) to be wrapped up in one divine communication made to oneman and admitting thereafter of no modifications. Though resting ondivine revelation it is professedly a development, and is thus inharmony with the Creator's operations in nature. Whether we considerwhat is taught concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or concerning humannature and its moral and spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God andHis dealings with us His creatures, it is undeniable that the teachingof the Bible is quite different at the end from what it is at thebeginning. 

The New Testament considered by itself as a body of teaching is such anadvance on all that preceded it as to be quite unique in the history ofthe world. The ideas conveyed in the Old Testament are absorbed, transformed, completed, so as to make them as a whole entirely new; andto these are added entirely new ideas sufficient by themselves to form awhole system of doctrine. And because of this it is difficult to speakof the new teaching as having grown out of the old. 

But the Old Testament covers many centuries, and within its range wecan trace a steady growth, and that growth always of the same character, and always pointing towards what the Gospel finally revealed. Thestrength of the moral sentiment in the earlier books is always assignedto the belief in, and reverence for, Almighty God. It is evidently heldto be more important to believe in God and to fear Him than to see theperfection of His holiness. If we distinguish between Religion andMorality, Religion is made the more important of the two. It is moreimportant to recognise that the holy God exists and reigns than to seeclearly in what His holiness, and indeed all holiness, consists. Thesentiment of reverence is more important than the perception of thatuniversality which we now know to be the essential characteristic of theMoral Law. In analysing the origin and nature of Religion in the secondof these Lectures, it was necessary to follow the order of thought, andbeginning with Duty to end with God. But the order of fact is not thesame. In actual fact man began with God and ends with a clearerperception of Duty. Hence in all the earlier stages the morality isimperfect. The profaneness of Esau is a serious offence. The ungeneroustemper, the unfairness and duplicity of Jacob are light in comparison. Truth is not an essential. Blood-shedding and impurity when in horribleexcess are treated as most grievous sins; but restrained within limitsare easily condoned. Women are placed below their true and naturalplace; polygamy if not distinctly allowed is certainly condoned; divorceis permitted on one side, not on the other. Slavery is allowed thoughput under regulation. But the unity and spirituality of God are guardedwith the strongest sanctions, and nothing could be said against idolatryand polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language than was used then. The reverence for God required then was as great as the reverencerequired now. But the conception of the holiness which is the mainobject of that reverence has changed; has in fact been purified andcleared. And the change is traceable in the Old Testament. The prophetsteach a higher morality than is found in the earlier books. Cruelty iscondemned as it had not been before. The heathen are not regarded asoutside God's love, and the future embraces them in His mercy even ifthe present does not. Conscience begins to be recognised and appealedto. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly is exposed; it istreated not only with condemnation, but with scorn. Individualresponsibility is insisted on. Children are not held responsible fortheir fathers, though the inheritance of moral evil and of theconsequences of moral evil is never denied. And even trust in God risesto a higher level in Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall neverbe shaken by any calamity that may befall him, than in the earlierbelief that calamities would never befall those who held fast thattrust. 

If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that itcorresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working ofthat instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to allmoral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all theprophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy;justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side byside with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings ofother creatures that can feel. 

We are bound to recognise the claims of others to equal treatment withourselves, and any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must bejustified by a universal rule applicable to all alike. The perpetualattempt to justify exceptions in this way is sure to end in diminishingthe number of those exceptions. If we are compelled to think much of theposition of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to come to Malachi'sdeclaration that God hateth putting away. If we are compelled to thinkof the position of slaves, we cannot continue for ever to believe thatthere are some beings with consciences and free wills, who nevertheless, because of the accidents of their lives, have no rights at all; and weacknowledge the righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the breachof covenant when the nobles of Judah re-enslaved those whom they hadsolemnly emancipated. If we think of the nature of responsibility andthe justification of punishment, we find it impossible to believe thatan innocent man shall be rightly punished for the wrong-doing ofanother, even if that other be his father or his mother; and we areconvinced that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he proclaims onGod's behalf that 'the soul that sinneth it shall die; the son shall notbear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear theiniquity of the son. ' And once more, whatever divine purpose gave thechosen people a priority among all peoples in knowledge of divine willand possession of divine favour, it is impossible to find any rule bywhich this priority shall for ever exclude all other peoples from beingwithin the range of God's manifested love; and conscience cannot butaccept as a divine message that the Gentiles also shall come to theHeavenly 'Light, and their kings to the brightness of His rising. ' Soagain, to turn from justice to mercy, we recognise that we are bound tospare pain to all creatures that can feel, and this duty can only be setaside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a highermoral end. And if we are set by our consciences to seek for some ruleof universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetuallyclearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments inflicted on criminalsor enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Ourown nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry fromwithin compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. Andthe denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear themto be the voice of God. 

But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughoutwith the necessary working of the great moral principles implanted inthe spiritual faculty, it nevertheless remains true also that all thisteaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess tobe working out a philosophical system, but who claimed to bring amessage from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to betrusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority. Looking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in itssuccessive stages was a development, but it always took the form of arevelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possibleto judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty andfaith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of humanconsciences, can only be secured--has only been secured--by presentingspiritual truth in this form of a Revelation. 

When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taughtin the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, isrelated as the bud to the flower. The development, if it be indeed adevelopment, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems difficultto recognise that it is a development at all. 

First, the morality is in form, if not in substance, absolutely new. Theduty of justice and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme limits, evento the length of entire self-surrender. The disciple has his own rightsno doubt, as every other man has his; but he is required to leave hisrights in God's hands and to think of the rights of others only. Thehighest place is assigned to meekness in conduct and humility in spirit. The humility of the Sermon on the Mount may possibly by carefulanalysis be shown to be identical at bottom with the magnanimity ofAristotle's Ethics. But the presentation of the two is so utterlyopposed that in the effect on life the identity is altogether lost. Andas justice and mercy, so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it cango. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an integral part of the aimset before the will, hunger and thirst for righteousness, and penitencefor failure in keeping to it, are to fill up the believer's hopes forhimself. Of inward satisfaction and peace he is often assured; butthese, and these only, are the means to that peace. The disciple's lifeis to consist in bearing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully; inreturning good for evil, and love for indifference and even for hatred;in detaching his affections from all the pleasures to be obtained fromexternal things; in fixing his trust and his love on his Eternal Father. Taken as a whole, this is quite unlike all moral teaching that precededit, and there is no indication that any philosophy could ever haveevolved it. It has fastened on the human conscience from the day thatit was uttered; and whatever moral teaching since has not been inspiredfrom this source has soon passed out of power and been forgotten. Wefind when we examine that it exactly agrees with the fundamentalteaching of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is applied to suchcreatures as we are, and to such a God as the New Testament sets beforeus. But we find it impossible to assert that by any working of humanthought this morality could have been obtained by the spiritual facultyunaided. On the contrary, it seems more near the truth to say that wecould never have obtained so clear a conception of the great Moral Law, if the teaching of the New Testament had not enlightened and purifiedthe spiritual faculty itself. And to this is to be added that the moralteaching of the New Testament recognises what we may now almost considera proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic ofthe government of the world, that perpetual progress without whichnothing human seems to keep sweet and wholesome. Perfect as the NewTestament morality is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actualprecepts. It leaves questions to be solved some of which have not beensolved yet. It left slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. It saidnothing of patriotism. It gave no clear command concerning the right useof wealth. It laid down no principles for the government of states, though such principles must have a moral basis. There has been aperpetual growth in the understanding and in the application of thisperfect teaching, and there will yet be a growth. Of no philosophicalsystem of morals is it possible to say the same. 

But in the second place, the New Testament contains not only a newmorality, it contains also a new account of human nature. The mystery ofthat discord which makes the noblest and best of human souls a scene ofperpetual internal conflict is acknowledged and its counterpart in God'sdealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritualfaculty asserting its due supremacy, and the lower passions andappetites, impulses and inclinations, is so described by Saint Paul thatnone have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And ourLord's teaching of our absolute dependence on God and helplessnesswithout Him; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outsideChrist, 'lieth in the wicked one, ' lay down the same truth. And as themystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mysteryof the remedy for that evil. In the love of God shown in the Cross ofChrist, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross isthe power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upwardto spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed thetruth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man'smoral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they couldbear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of thatcontradiction and the renovation of that nature. Millions have lived anddied in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the NewTestament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest, the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And theyall concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives hasbeen communion with God through Christ. 

Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknownthe immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual bodywhich shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant growsfrom the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally, anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rootedpersuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testamentas it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Resurrection ofour Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith. How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty Ihave pointed out before. 

And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was toldbefore of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destinyhereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature ofGod and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity andspirituality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the OldTestament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysteriouscomplexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in theolder teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We mayfind anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of ourLord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in theProphets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the NewTestament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided byRevelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on theIncarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form, and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritualneeds of the great mass of believers. 

Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has hadupon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in whichthe teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that nomiracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence ofwhatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, sideby side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it asdivine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire attimes when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching ofthe Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence withinthe human soul. 

And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examinedafterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was alwaysgiven at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force ofthis internal evidence adds to it still more force than it wouldotherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation isthe doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound upwith conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to allbelievers that in that communion is to be found not only all strengthbut all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritualtruth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays toGod for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, andmakes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the facultiesthat God has given him to understand the great divine law; but heperpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be saidof that instruction his experience tells him that his advance inspiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought andfeeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritualknowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not tothinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired byGod, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man findswithin his own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees inothers. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness oflife attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holinessof the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of rightconduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and wellinformed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth bydirect communication from God, so too on communion with God far morethan on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledgein every human soul. 

But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believersunquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stageof its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave themessages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of theirauthority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. Theyprofessed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers;and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculouselement in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the OldTestament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous elementin it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable fromthe rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot saythis of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that hasreached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles areembedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of ourLord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives ofmiracles that the two cannot be torn apart: 'I have not seen so greatfaith, no, not in Israel;' 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;''Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;' 'Beware of the leaven of the Phariseesand the Sadducees;' 'It is not meet to take the children's bread andcast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;''Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?' 'Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. ' In fact, there can be no real doubtthat our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed towork them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, andincluded that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as goingabout doing good. And these disciples professed to work miraclesthemselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course truethat they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and wouldoften have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but notmiraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for whichclear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while theexclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, theexclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without acomplete surrender of the position taken by the first Christianteachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment whichwas not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each forhimself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whetherby virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or bydirect interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission byexhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of theMoral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world. 

The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimedsupernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message. This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul forsuch a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so muchthat without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it longif they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, ofcourse, justify their claim. They must justify their message to thehuman conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, andfinally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess tohave miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such poweris really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains thattheir very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature ofman, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful. 

It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when oncerevelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernaturalpower was needed to procure that access in the first instance. Webelieve because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up ourchildren in such discipline of conscience that they too shall havesufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if wehad lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see thespiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed withoutany external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, towhom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and weactually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile thatrevelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need someother and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernaturalin the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, cannever stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for thefirst reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and toall it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holdingthat such evidence was originally given. 

Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all otherteaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does notappear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look backafterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it maywell be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces. But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all thesedevelopments by the working of natural forces have perished. NotSocrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have beenable to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any largedegree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelationalone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that menhave obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that therewas no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace thecommand of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mountrobbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine whichunderlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of Godwhich has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning Hehas never forgotten His children. 

LECTURE VI. 

APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formationof the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yetexamined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesisnot at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man notinconsistent with dignity of humanity. 

LECTURE VI. 

APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

 'Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. ' _Psalm_ c. 3. 

Religion is rooted in our spiritual nature and its fundamental truthsare as independent of experience for their hold on our consciences asthe truths of mathematics for their hold on our reason. 

But as a matter of fact Religion has taken the form of a revelation. Andthis introduces a new contact between Religion and Science, and ofnecessity a new possibility of collision. There is not only possibleopposition or apparent opposition of Science in what is revealed, inwhat we may call the actual substance of the revelation; but also in theaccessories and evidences of the revelation, which may be no actual partof the revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all appearance, inseparably bound up with it. It is therefore no more than might havebeen expected that the general postulate of the uniformity of natureshould appear to be contravened by the claim to supernatural power madeon behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just at presentleading scientific doctrine, the doctrine of Evolution, should be foundinconsistent with parts, or what appear to be parts, of the revelationitself. And we have to consider the two questions, What has Revelationto say concerning Evolution? and what has Science to say concerningMiracles?

Concerning Evolution, we have first to consider how much in thisdirection has been made fairly probable, and what still remains to bedetermined. 

It cannot then be well denied that the astronomers and geologists havemade it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has beenbrought to its present condition by passing through a succession ofchanges from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps evenfrom a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as theplanet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed, that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it istending; that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank has formedthe elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions whichcontain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heatfrom within and water from without, and in consequence of this actionpresents the appearance when examined below the surface of successivestrata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life havefollowed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains arefound in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periodsof time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way inwhich, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientificlaws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of theradiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And thewhole solar system may and probably did come into its present conditionin this way. It certainly could have been so formed, and there is noreason for supposing that it was formed in any other way. 

Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the other end, and trace thingsbackwards from the present, instead of forwards from the remote past, itcannot be denied that Darwin's investigations have made it exceedinglyprobable that the vast variety of plants and animals have sprung from amuch smaller number of original forms. 

In the first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading anygreat class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. Why, for instance, should the vertebrate animals be formed on a commonplan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species, but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamentaltype? If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the variationswere introduced in the course of that descent, this remarkable fact isat once accounted for. But, in the second place, observation shows thatslight variations ARE perpetually being introduced with everysuccessive generation, and many of these variations are transmitted tothe generations that follow. In the course of time, therefore, from anyone parent stock would descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, inthe third place, it be asked why this variety does not range byimperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extremeforms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormousprodigality and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures. Plants and animals produce far more descendants than ever come even tosuch maturity as to reproduce their kind. And this is particularly thecase with the lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs aredestroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportionare the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. Thereis no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature. Livingcreatures are destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack of means ofreproduction, by accidents, by enemies. The inevitable operation of thiswaste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all thosevarieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keepthose that were. One species of animal has been preserved by length ofneck, which enabled it to reach high-growing fruits and leaves; anotherby a thicker skin, which made it difficult for enemies to devour;another by a colour which made it easier to hide. One plant has beenpreserved by a bright flower which attracted insects to carry its pollento other flowers of its kind; another by a sweet fruit which attractedbirds to scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and plants that hadnot these advantages perished for the lack of them. The result would beto maintain, and perpetually, though with exceeding slowness, more andmore to adapt to the conditions of their life, those species whosepeculiarities gave them some advantage in the great struggle forexistence. 

Here again we have the working of known laws of life, capable ofaccounting for what we see. And the high probability cannot be deniedthat by evolution of this kind the present races of living creatureshave been formed. And to these arguments the strongest corroboration isgiven by the frequent occurrence, both in plants and animals, of uselessparts which still remain as indications of organs that once were usefuland have long become useless. Animals that now live permanently in thedark have abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an ancestor witheyes that could see. Animals that never walk have abortive legs hiddenunder their skin, useless now but indicating what was useful once. Ourknowledge no doubt in this as in any other province of nature is but themerest fraction of what may be known therein. But there is no evidencewhatever to show that what we have observed is not a fair sample of thewhole. And so taking it, we find that the mass of evidence in favour ofthe evolution of plants and animals is enormously great and increasingdaily. 

Granting then the high probability of the two theories of Evolution, that which begins with Laplace and explains the way in which the earthwas fitted to be the habitation of living creatures, and that which owesits name to Darwin and gives an account of the formation of the livingcreatures now existing, we have to see what limitations andmodifications are necessarily attached to our complete acceptance ofboth. 

First, then, at the very meeting point of these two evolutions we havethe important fact that all the evidence that we possess up to thepresent day negatives the opinion that life is a mere evolution frominorganic matter. We know perfectly well the constituents of all livingsubstances. We know that the fundamental material of all plants and allanimals is a compound called protoplasm, or that, in other words, organic matter in all its immense variety of forms is nothing butprotoplasm variously modified. And we know the constituent elements ofthis protoplasm, and their proportions, and the temperatures withinwhich protoplasm as such can exist. But we are quite powerless to makeit, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature in the act of makingit. All the evidence we have points to one conclusion only, that life isthe result of antecedent life, and is producible on no other conditions. Repeatedly have scientific observers believed that they have come oninstances of spontaneous generation, but further examination hasinvariably shown that they have been mistaken. We can put the necessaryelements together, but we cannot supply the necessary bond by whichthey are to be made to live. Nay, we cannot even recall that bond whenit has once been dissolved. We can take living protoplasm and we cankill it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our best chemistry candiscover, but it will be dead protoplasm, and we cannot make it liveagain; and as far as we know nature can no more make it live than wecan. It can be used as food for living creatures, animals or plants, andso its substance can be taken up by living protoplasm and made to sharein the life which thus consumes it; but life of its own it cannotobtain. Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two evolutionslands us in acceptance of a miracle. The creation of life is unaccountedfor. And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle thanit did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made ascientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of livingcreatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or otherinorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to betaken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domainof Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, thecreation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a directinterference in the actual history of the world. There could have beenno life when the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely heated fluid. There came a time when the earth became ready for life to exist upon it. And the life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can account for itscoming. As it stands this is a great miracle. And from this conclusionthe only escape that has been suggested is to suppose that life came inon a meteoric stone from some already formed habitable world; asupposition which transfers the miracle to another scene, but leaves itas great a miracle as before. 

Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there was a purpose in itworthy of miraculous interference. For what purpose can rank side byside with the existence and development of life, the primary conditionof all moral and spiritual existence and action in this world? In theintroduction of life was wrapped up all that we value and all that wevenerate in the whole creation. The infinite superiority, not in degreeonly, but in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to a stone, justifies us in believing that the main purpose of the creation that wesee was to supply a dwelling-place and a scene of action for livingbeings. We cannot say that the dignity of the Moral Law requires thatcreatures to be made partakers in the knowledge of it, and evencreatures of a lower nature but akin to them, must have been the resultsof a separate and miraculous act of creation. But we can say that thereis a congruity in such a miracle, with the moral purpose of all theworld, of which we are a part, that removes all difficulty in believingit. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and can only say, 'Here isa puzzle yet unsolved. ' Nor can the most religious scientific man beblamed as undutiful to religion if he persists in endeavouring to solvethe puzzle. But he has no right to insist beforehand that the puzzle iscertainly soluble; for that he cannot know, and the evidence is againsthim. 

Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at oncethat it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompletenessgravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawnfrom it, and which, indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. Forthe theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission ofcharacteristics from progenitor to progeny, and the introduction ofminute variations in the progeny with each successive generation. Now, the former of these may be said to be well established, and we recogniseit as a law of life that all plants and animals propagate their ownkind. But the latter has, as yet, been hardly examined at all. Each newgeneration shows special slight variations. But what causes thesevariations? and what determines what they shall be? In Darwin'sinvestigations these questions are not touched. The variations aretreated as if they were quite indefinite in number and in nature. Heconcerns himself only with the effect of these variations after theyhave appeared. Some have the effect of giving the plant or animal anadvantage in the struggle of life; some give no such advantage; some arehurtful. And hence follows the permanent preservation or speedydestruction of the plants and animals themselves. But we are bound tolook not only to their effects but to their causes, if the theory is tobe completed. And then we cannot fail to see that these variations inthe progeny cannot be due to something in the progenitors, or otherwisethe variations would be all alike, which they certainly are not. Theymust, therefore, be due to external circumstances. These slightvariations are produced by the action of the surroundings, by the food, by the temperature, by the various accidents of life in the progenitors. Now, when we see this, we see also how gravely it modifies theconclusions which we have to draw concerning the ancestry of any speciesnow existing. Let us take, for instance, the great order of vertebrateanimals. At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to indicate that allthese animals are descended from one pair or one individual, and thattheir unity of construction is due to that fact; but if we go back inthought to the time at which the special peculiarities were introducedwhich really constituted the order and separated it from other animals, we see that it is by no means clear that it originated with one pair orwith one individual, and that, on the contrary, the probabilities arethe other way. Although the separation of this order from the rest musthave taken place very early, it cannot well have taken place untilmillions of animals had already come into existence. The prodigality ofnature in multiplying animal life is fully acknowledged by Darwin, andthat prodigality is apparently greatest in the lowest and most formlesstype of animal. There being, then, these many millions of livingcreatures in existence, the external surroundings introduce into themmany variations, and among these the special variations to which thevertebrate type is due. It is quite clear that wherever the externalsurroundings were the same or nearly the same, the variations introducedwould be the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far more probable thatexternal surroundings should be the same or nearly the same in manyplaces than that each spot should be absolutely unlike every other spotin these particulars. The beginnings of the vertebrate order would showthemselves simultaneously, or at any rate independently, in many placeswherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity ofthe plan in the vertebrata would be due, not to absolute unity ofancestry, but to unity of external conditions at a particular epoch inthe descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animalsinto orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for themost part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history oforganic evolution. Of course the descendants of any one of the originalvertebrata might, and probably in not a few cases did, branch off intonew subdivisions and yet again into further subdivisions, and we arealways justified in looking for unity of ancestry among all the species. But it is also quite possible that any species may be regularlydescended, without branching off at all, from one of the originals, andthat other species that resemble it may owe the resemblance simply tovery great similarity of external conditions. To find, for instance, theunity of ancestry between man and the other animals, it will certainlybe necessary to go back to a point in the history of life when livingcreatures were as yet formless, undeveloped--the materials, as we maycall them, of the animal creation as we now see it, and not in any but astrictly scientific sense, what we mean when we ordinarily speak ofanimals. The true settlement of such questions as these can only beobtained when long and patient study shall have completed Darwin'sinvestigations by determining under what laws and within what limits theslight variations which characterise each individual animal or plant arecongenitally introduced into its structure. As things stand theprobabilities certainly are that a creature with such especialcharacteristics as man has had a history altogether of his own, if notfrom the beginning of all life upon the globe, yet from a very earlyperiod in the development of that life. He resembles certain otheranimals very closely in the structure of his body; but the part whichexternal conditions had to play in the earliest stages of evolution oflife must have been so exceedingly large that identity or closesimilarity in these external conditions may well account for theseresemblances. And the enormous gap which separates his nature from thatof all other creatures known, indicates an exceedingly early differenceof origin. 

Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anythingbut itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt bemade, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development ofthe other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success willultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all thesubordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses, that our affections should have had a history, and that their presentworking should be the result of that history, has nothing in itimprobable. There can be no question that we inherit these things verylargely, and that they are also very largely due to specialpeculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of uswhich is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own willand our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject tolaws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the loweranimals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affectionabove appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can bepatient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight insociety: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind ofcivilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants andcompanions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotionsand affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in thearts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature isthus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of naturalforces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should befound to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, weare animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we mayexpect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature iscapable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of suchevolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. Thisnature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of thatspiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making ourwhole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done withthis instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, andmay be still further formed for the future. It is good to study theevolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual facultyitself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. Theessence of that law is its universality; and out of all thisdevelopment, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of suchuniversality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises tothe height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abrahamto say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very wordright in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used. 

Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what isloveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be fearedand what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comesnearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment ofshame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinctionbetween right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in thelast Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, justas there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness ofits meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learnsfrom generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature anymore than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come. It stands noton experience, and is its own evidence. Nor indeed have any of theattempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is theproduct of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception ofuniversal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were anunauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond allexperience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Lawaltogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing. 

Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by thedoctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once thatthe two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts isdifferent; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; thedetails are altogether different. The comparison must take note of thedifference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all. 

It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literalinterpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that thepurpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teachgreat spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature asthey appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentionedthere is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation waseffected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. Thenarrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done ina moment, or a process lasting through millions of years? The writer ofthe Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by manyvarieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, andmade them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knowsnothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblancesor their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of theircreation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people thescience of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstaclein the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible tobelieve in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their ownexperience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, sincetheir science was not in such a condition as to enable them tocoordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have beendead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance. 

But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can readthem still. 

He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained, was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not thematerial, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that thecreation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from theformless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from theinanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the loweranimal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest ofthe Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution thanthis. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point ofview. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week ofwork with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, thewriter made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspiredwriters. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example. That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but togive men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, infact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes verydifficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or toreconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning theSabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. ' There is no morereason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detailwith Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because allthrough the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth. 

And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to manin particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell thosefor whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how longthose processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it wouldhave been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes bywhich every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathingand living infant. He takes men--and he could not but take men as hesees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritualcapacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, thesubordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, theoriginal declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim anddistant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannotbe, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of theGarden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever thatcrosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that somany great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Churchdownwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth containedin it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution suchas science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man suchas he is before the narrative begins. 

It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man'snature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation waseffected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process ofevolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he becamea man. 

But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yetassert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, thatman became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts andinclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as wesee other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man isnow. His body may have been developed according to the theory ofEvolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but atany rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point inthe descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assertthat life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by adirect creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it istolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, thespiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was notgiven to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was tobe the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had beensufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have beenfirst prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should eitherhave been then given, or then first made to live in the image ofGod, --this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what theBible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved. 

And to this must be added that it is out of place for us to define whatis consistent or inconsistent with the dignity of man in the process ormethod by which he was created to be what he is. His dignity consists inhis possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in the method by whichhe became possessed of it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and theBible never professes to tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up inmatter itself, or in that living matter of which we are made. Howabsolutely nothing we know of the mode by which any single soul iscreated! The germ which is to become a man can be traced by thephysiologist through all the changes that it has to undergo before itcomes to life. Is the future soul wrapped up in it from the first, anddormant till the hour of awakening comes? or is it given at some momentin the development? We see in the infant how its powers expand, and weknow that the spiritual faculty, the very essence of its being, has adevelopment like the other faculties. It has in it the gift of speech, and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, and taste, and power of thought;self-sacrifice and unswerving truth; science and art, and spiritualunderstanding, all may be there in abundant measure and yet may show nosign. All this we know; and because it is common and well known we seenothing inconsistent with the dignity of our nature in this concealmentof all that dignity, helpless and powerless, within the form of aninfant in arms. With this before us it is impossible to say thatanything which Science has yet proved, or ever has any chance ofproving, is inconsistent with the place given to man in Creation by theteaching of the Bible. 

In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in teaching Evolution, hasyet asserted anything that is inconsistent with Revelation, unless weassume that Revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that thewriter of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the Bible, took nature as he saw it, and expressed his teaching in languagecorresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of Evolution, in so faras it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail thedeclaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous areThy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. ' There is nothing in allthat Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which conflictswith the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of thecreation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of aRevelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by HisLaw. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know nothow any human soul has been made since; but we know that we are, in asense in which no other creatures living with us are, the children ofHis special care. 

LECTURE VII. 

APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 

The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. Themiracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord'sResurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous inthe scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the timewhen the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by ourLord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required toprove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence;not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility ofdemonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to theprogress of Science. 

LECTURE VII. 

APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 

 'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake. ' _St. John_ xiv. 11. 

Science and Religion come into apparent collision on the question of thefreedom of the will. Science and Revelation come into a similar apparentcollision on the possibility of miracles. The cases are preciselyparallel. In each individual man the uniformity of nature is broken toleave room for the moral force of the will to assert its independentexistence. This breach of uniformity is within very narrow limits, andoccurs much more rarely than appears at first sight. But the demand toadmit not only the possibility but the fact of this breach isimperative, and to deny it is to turn the command of the Moral Law asrevealed in the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Revelation assertsits right to set aside the uniformity of nature to leave room for adirect communication from God to man. It is an essential part of theDivine Moral Law to claim supremacy over the physical world. Unlesssomehow or other the moral ultimately rules the physical, the Moral Lawcannot rightly claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as given to usmaintains that this superiority has been asserted in fact here in theworld of phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equivalent to denyingthat any revelation has been made. In this way Revelation asserts, forGod's message to the human race precisely the same breach of uniformitywhich every man's conscience claims for himself in regard to his ownconduct. 

It is, however, necessary to point out that when we speak of a breach ofuniformity we are never in a position to deny that the breach ofuniformity may be physical only and perhaps apparent only. It may befound, it probably will be found, at last that the Moral Law has insome way always maintained its own uniformity unbroken. The Moral Lawhas in its essence an elasticity which the physical law has not. Itoften takes the form, that, given certain conduct, there will followcertain consequences; and the law is kept though the conduct is free. Itis further possible, and Revelation has no interest in denying it, thatthe intervention which has apparently disturbed the sequence ofphenomena is, after all, that of a higher physical law as yet unknown. For instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miracle inthe strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power ofmind over body, a power which is undeniably not yet brought within therange of Science, and which nevertheless may be really within itsdomain. In other ways what seems to be miraculous may be simply unusual. And it must therefore be always remembered that Revelation is not boundby the scientific definition of a miracle, and that if all themiraculous events recorded in the Bible happened exactly as they aretold, and if Science were some day able to show that they could beaccounted for by natural causes working at the time in each case, thiswould not in any way affect their character, as regards the Revelationwhich they were worked to prove or of which they form a part. Revelationuses these events for its own purposes. Some of these events are spokenof as evidences of a divine mission. Some of them are substantive factsembraced in the message delivered. And if for these purposes they haveserved their turn, if they have arrested attention which would nototherwise have been arrested, if they have overcome prejudices, if theyhave compelled belief, the fact that they are afterwards discovered tobe no breach of the law of uniformity has no bearing at all on theRevelation to which they belong. The miracle would in that case consistin the precise coincidence in time with the purpose which they served, or in the manner and degree in which they marked out the Man who wroughtthem from all other men, or in the foreshadowing of events which are inthe distant future. 

Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that our Lord's Resurrectionmay be found hereafter to be no miracle at all in the scientific sense. It foreshadows and begins the general Resurrection; when that generalResurrection comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural issueof physical laws always at work. 

There is nothing at present to indicate anything of the sort; but ageneral resurrection in itself implies not a special interference but ageneral rule. If, when we rise again, we find that this resurrection isand always was a part of the Divine purpose, and brought about at lastby machinery precisely the same in kind as that which has been used inmaking and governing the world, we may also find that our Lord'sResurrection was brought about by the operation of precisely the samemachinery. We may find that even in the language of strict science 'Hewas the first fruits of them that slept, ' and that His Resurrection wasnot a miracle, but the first instance of the working of a law till thelast day quite unknown, but on that last day operative on all that everlived. 

Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction oflife into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone thatfirst introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeededin tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle itis a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believersare expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was onceworked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very goodreason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter torestore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men whothink that the introduction of life was not a miracle, that it came atthe fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words, that such properties are inherent in the elements of which protoplasm ismade that in certain special circumstances these elements will not onlycombine but that the product of their combination will live. If this beso, it is assuredly no such very strange supposition that there may besuch properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whetherparticles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certainspecial circumstances these particles will return to life. And if thisbe so the general resurrection may be no miracle, but the result of theproperties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of thelaws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord'sResurrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformityof nature. 

But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place whichour Lord's Resurrection holds in the records of Revelation. It is notthe purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature; ifsuch interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man canbe done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any suchinterference would take place. 

Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of healing. There is noquestion at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great, and has never yet been thoroughly examined. We know almost nothing ofthe extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellousrecoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for themexcept by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have beenroused to interfere with the working of the nervous system. And somemen, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered bymere imaginations. Some men of note have attributed the recoveriesclaimed for homoeopathy to this cause. Some have assigned to thiscause the extraordinary cures that have been undeniably wrought at theshrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints. The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for atime and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, aregenerally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the sameobscure working of unknown natural laws. They have been tested by theirsuccesses and their failures. They have succeeded, and for a timecontinued to succeed; but at last they have ceased to work because faithin them for some reason or other has been shaken down. Their falsehoodhas thus been detected; but nevertheless their genuine success for atime has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and thatreality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body. In this region all is at present unexamined; and all operations aretentative, and for that reason most are only successful for a time. Nowour Lord's miracles are never tentative; that is not the character givento them either by friend or by foe. Nor is there any instance recordedeither by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished. Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel ofany instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts ofthe Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew. The accounts of hisenemies charge Him with deceit, which is identical with saying that theydid not believe Him. But they do not ever charge Him with failure. Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles ofhealing may have been the result of this power of mind over body whichwe are now considering. It is possible that they may be due not to aninterference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in Hismental power to the similar power possessed by other men. Men seem topossess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies ofothers in different degrees. Some can influence other men's bodiesthrough their minds more; some less. Possibly He may have possessed thispower absolutely where others possessed it conditionally. He may havepossessed it without limit; others within limits. If this were so, theseacts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense. They would imply very great superiority in Him to other men. But theywould be in themselves under the law of uniformity. Now it is clear thatif this should turn out to be so, though these acts would not bemiracles for the purposes of Science, they would still be miracles forthe purposes of Revelation. They would do their work in arrestingattention, and still more in accrediting both the message and theMessenger. They would separate Him from ordinary men. They would proveHim to be possessed of credentials worth examining. To the believer itwould make no difference whether Science called them miracles or not. Tohim it would still remain the fact that here was a Messenger whom Godhad seen fit to endow with powers which no other man ever possessed insuch degree and such completeness, though others may have possessed sometouch of them greater or less. 

Further, it is necessary to repeat what was briefly remarked in aprevious Lecture, that the position which miracles take as regards uswho read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessedand recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracleswere the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought themhad been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not animposture; to us they are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of therevelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are convinced byPaley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved bysufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion thattherefore the teaching that was thus accompanied must be divine. Butmost men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records inwhich Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence takenalone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to thesubstance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on thecontrary, the Revelation is a whole, capable of being looked at frommany sides, and found to be divine from whatever side it is seen; andone of its aspects is this supernatural character by which it appearsto assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolutesupremacy over all the physical world. The main evidence of theRevelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritualfaculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come throughteachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborativeevidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law. That eternal law claims supremacy over the physical world and actuallyasserts it in the freedom of the human will; and a Revelation whichcomes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very lawpersonified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actualmanifestation in its approach to men. 

Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the miraculous elementin the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is thereinpresented. 

First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the originalexistence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not defineGod as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except ascausing other things to exist He does not exist Himself. But wedescribe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will, and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as theRevelation tells us that He is the source of all existence, the Creatorof the substance of things, so too does it assert that He gave allthings their special properties and the laws of those properties, andthat not only the original creation, but all the subsequent history ofall things has been the outcome of His design, and that He has thusprescribed the government of the whole universe. And yet again theRevelation from the beginning to the end maintains His living Presencein and over all things that He has thus formed, and denies that He hasparted with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh acts ofgovernment, whenever and wherever He sees fit. For He is necessarilyfree and cannot be restrained by anything but His own holiness. Andunless He expressly revealed to us that His own holiness prevented Himfrom interfering with His own creation, we could not put limits to whatHe could do. The Revelation that He has given us says just the contrary, and from end to end implies that He is present in the government of thecreation which He has made. 

What evidence, then, is there in the world of phenomena that He has everthus interfered? Putting aside as untenable all idea of _a priori_impossibility, admitting that God can work a miracle if He will, admitting that a miracle avowedly worked in the interest of a divinerevelation stands on a totally different footing from a miracle avowedlyworked in any other interest, putting the breach of the law ofuniformity made by a miracle on the same footing as the breach of thesame law made by a human will; we have to ask what evidence can be giventhat any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever beenworked?

It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No _such_ evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in theOld Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of theBooks not established with certainty; the mixture of poetry with historyno longer capable of any sure separation into its parts; and, if the NewTestament did not exist, it would be impossible to show such a distinctpreponderance of probability as would justify us in calling on any toaccept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true. 

But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have herefirst the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the earlyChristians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives aswitnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidencesand as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miraclesnor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. Theytestify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it thebasis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles aspart of the character of His life. It is necessary to maintain that theywere mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity whichwe feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miraclewas ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even theirhonesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basisof fact to rest on. No man who is not determined to uphold an opinionat all hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed thatour Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief. 

But, in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be said of the documents that compose the NewTestament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord wasuniversally believed by His disciples to have the power of workingmiracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regardto this; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of anydisclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could workmiracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him topossess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever havingimplied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim whatwas ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. 'Whycallest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God, ' weDO find. But 'Why askest thou Me to do this? There is nonethat can do this but One, that is God, ' we do NOT find. It isplain that He accepted the belief that assigned Him powers above thoseof other men--powers given Him by His Father in heaven--and neverdiscouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admitfor argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistleswithout altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented tous in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracleswere removed. And if He claimed to possess and exercise this power, theevidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom wecannot disbelieve. 

And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted byHis disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form butsimilar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, andhas ever since continued to exert on all succeeding generations. Thefirst disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christand not themselves. They referred everything to Him, and professed tohave no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellouspower of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to beeverything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but committedHis Revelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. Butthey are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosopherssucceeding a philosopher; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one ofthem does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him. St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be givingby our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his owninferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority asbelongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on allsubjects. 

And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. Thereis no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far themajority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Suchtoo has been the procedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ; stake yourhappiness on Him; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritualaspirations on Him; stake your power of winning the victory overtemptation on Him--this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, andsaint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thustried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. TheChristian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have beenwrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strangesuperstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, noother body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain thatthe lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who havetrusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, thesalt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know noother power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they havetaken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sortrivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rivaleven pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as aliving present power, able to give strength and victory in theconflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times ofspiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worstof times within the Church there has always remained a wonderfulrecuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects inthe past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperativepower has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely, a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never beenfalsified. 

The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief inHis supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was nogradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in theconvictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of ourLord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbelieve Hisclaims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations ofbelievers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistentevidence of eighteen centuries. 

Against this evidence what is to be said?

It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is sooverwhelming that nothing can set it aside. And further it is said, that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidencesufficient for the purpose has yet been produced. 

Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is thenature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirerdoes not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredlyno evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that God has workeda miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by Hisinterference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to usprimarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than wenow know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual andunmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has notso willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice withinourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. Itwill be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a God bypointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. Butif a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he toexpect to show him that God has interfered in the course of thecreation?

In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, thatis the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a characteras to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamentalevidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice ofconscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beautyand visible purpose of the creation are secondary--corroborative notdemonstrative--so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God mustbe found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for inmiracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God'spurpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, theclever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, thetender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their ownshortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness inself-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to usif the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over thehumble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shallbe an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritualfaculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelationwere the scientific faculty. 

And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidencefor miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properlybelongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence suppliedby the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because itwas never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence aswould now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events. The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but therewas no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on ourLord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searchingquestions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is onthe face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientificprocesses of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in thefirst, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind ofevidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to beconvincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have putthe miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether outof place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation whichthey were worked to introduce. 

Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to seewhat better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than wepossess concerning the life of our Lord. 

The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character whichintentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that Heshould have made a false claim. And the material evidence is thetestimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said. Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument onthis point. 

But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever besufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity ofnature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion aninstance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove againstwhich Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity ofnature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir astep. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only beby stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving thepossibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, andsome other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have allheard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom bindsthe mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw alocomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, becausehe had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode ofproducing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separateinvestigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science asa whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact thatScience has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain isco-extensive with nature itself. 

The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that fromthe beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has beensteadily extending without a check; that instance after instance ofapparent exception has been brought by further examination within itsprovince; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trialand has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried ithas the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he hasproved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, itnever gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showingthat the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded insilencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moralover the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge iscompared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the inductionfrom generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. Somuch as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that theuniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It isonly for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for sucha purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. Butbeyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim forfreedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations haveincluded records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does notaffect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has neversucceeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made andrules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on externalnature. 

Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men becomeclearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing inRevelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen thatdevout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look foruniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active animagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely allpossibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. Thebelief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yetobstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any studentwho repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from thatrepudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time mademany men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelationhave helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation iseverything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, aresure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are otherkinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers arealready learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the methodof Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn thatRevelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even suchdoctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature willcertainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching ofRevelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For mostcertainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God;'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork;His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, makingwise the simple. '

LECTURE VIII. 

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 

Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in twocases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exceptionno bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physicalworld, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests onitself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But weexpect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are thepurpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physicalcannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers fromleaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee forspiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. 

LECTURE VIII. 

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 

 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. ' 1 _Cor. _ xii. 3. 

It is now the proper time to review the argument of these Lectures, andto endeavour to trace, if possible, the source of the estrangement whichjust at present separates Religion and Science. 

The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformityof nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist inan induction from the facts which nature presents and our sensesobserve. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticedfor some time it is instinctively used as a working hypothesis. So usedit accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if weexcept two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of itsfailure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the actsof the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of theminstances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with thephysical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial ofuniversal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessaryis to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of theseexceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulatewas demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in itsfavour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientificbelief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it wouldnevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would notthereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or inutility to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives aspecial kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Sciencecould but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained innothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for thiscompleteness until every attempt to question it is resented. I haveseen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider theeffect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanicalproblems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed anyentrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it. And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students ofScience at the very thought of there being anything in the world notunder the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world whichthus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronouncedforthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which weare concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge ourimagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at anytime before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and thesense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to allhuman conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we livecontains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to thescientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense ofresponsibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Sciencecan crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of anunbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silencedtelling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we knowthat they will for ever fail. 

If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was reallybarred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assertthe unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that anyuncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false ormisleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, itwould undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously, whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelesslyat variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us onebelief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practicallyirreconcileable. But there is no reason whatever for thinking this. Newton's investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all truescientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truthof the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightesthindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expresslyacknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting thisuniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. Thebeliever who asserts the universality of a law except when God works amiracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage incomparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with noqualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, andever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be takeninto account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that thefreedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowlyand slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends onhuman conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations whennothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet innature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressednor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content withapproximations, and we know how to use them in Science. Many chemicalproperties can only be so expressed; many primary facts, such as thedistances, the volumes, the weights of heavenly bodies; and yet theapproximations serve our purpose. And so too, if there be a reservestill uncovered by the scientific postulate, that will not in any degreeaffect our investigation of what is so covered. 

In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking willbe found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical andspiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which isthe expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in nature, taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together. And this Science ought to recognise. 

Let us turn from the physical to the spiritual. 

The voice within us which demands our acceptance of religion makes nodirect appeal to the evidence supplied by the senses. We are called onto believe in a supreme law of duty on pain of being lowered before ourown consciences. And this law of duty goes on to assert its ownsupremacy over all things that exist, and that not as an accidentalfact, but as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy cannot be otherthan an accidental fact unless it be not only actual but intended. Andintention implies personality; and the law thus shows itself to be aSupreme Being, claiming our reverence, and asserting Himself to be theCreator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things that are. And this samevoice within us asserts that we are responsible to Him for all ourconduct, and are capable of that responsibility because free to choosewhat that conduct shall be. We are to believe not because the truth ofthis voice is proved independently of itself, but simply because we arecommanded. Corroborative evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but themain, the primary evidence is within the soul. 

Hence the strength of this belief depends on ourselves and on our owncharacter. To every man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt inproportion to the spirituality of each who hears. Its acceptance isbound up in some way with our own wills. How far it is a matter ofchoice to believe or to disbelieve it is not possible to define. Thewill lies hidden as it were behind the emotions, the affections, thenobler impulses. The conscience shades off into the other faculties, andwe cannot always isolate it from the rest. But though it be impossibleto say precisely how the will is concerned in the spiritual belief, there can be no doubt that it always takes its part in such belief. Itis the keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved to its depthsby the conscience, that grasp most strongly the certainty of the law ofduty. It is the man with the strongest and noblest aspirations, the manwho sees the beauty of humility, the man who feels most strongly thedeep peace of self-sacrifice, _that_ is the man who finds the voicewithin most irresistible. It is not by any means always the man wholives the most correct life; correctness of life may be due to naturaland not to spiritual causes. And the man whom we should find faultlessin point of morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, and not haveas yet, and perhaps may not have to the last, the spiritual facultystrong within him. But the man, even if he have many and grievousfaults, who nevertheless is keenly susceptible of higher things, is theone to whom the voice within speaks with authority not to be gainsaid, and to him that voice is final. 

It is this fact that the perception of things spiritual varies from manto man, and depends on character, and involves action of the will, thatmakes it always possible to represent our knowledge of the law of dutyas in itself standing on a less sure foundation than our knowledge ofscientific truth. Whether a man has or has not the necessary power ofmind to comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with comparative ease. And if he have that power, the reasoning is certain in course of time tobe understood, and when it is understood it compels assent so long as itkeeps within its own proper domain. But the perception of spiritualtruth depends on a faculty whose power or weakness it is far moredifficult to test; and it involves the will which may be exerted oneither side. And for this reason men sometimes dismiss this truth asbeing no more than an imagination, needed by some men to satisfy anemotional nature, but having no substance that can be brought to anexternal test. The believer in God knows that the truth which he holdsis as certain as the axioms of mathematics; but he cannot make othersknow this whose spiritual faculty is not awake; and he is liable to beasked for proof not of the spiritual but of the physical kind. 

Now this much must be acknowledged, that we cannot but expect the claimto supremacy over all things to show itself in some way in the creationwhich has come from Him who makes that claim. It would, no doubt, be aserious difficulty if things physical and things spiritual were cut offfrom one another by an absolute gulf; if we were required to believethat God had created and now ruled everything, and yet we could tracenot the slightest evidence of His hand either in the creation or in thehistory of the world. 

There are then two ways in which we are able to recognise Him even inthis world of phenomena. For in the first place, the creation in itsorder and its beauty and its marvellous adaptation of means to ends, confirms the assertion of the spiritual faculty that it owes its originto an intelligent and benevolent purpose, exhibited in the form in whichpurpose is always exhibited. It works towards ends which we shouldexpect a holy and benevolent Creator to have in view, and itaccomplishes those ends in so large a proportion that, making allowancefor the limited range of our knowledge, the general aim of the whole isseen with sufficient clearness. The argument is not strong enough tocompel assent from those who have no ears for the inward spiritualvoice, but it is abundantly sufficient to answer those who argue thatthere cannot be a Creator because they cannot trace His action. And thescientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away theforce of this argument, is found on examination to confirm it and expandit. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever design the worldwas formed, that design was entertained at the very beginning andimpressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearancesof failure are not only to be accounted for by the limitation of ourknowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the workbefore it has been completed. 

And in the second place, while the creation, the more closely it isexamined the more distinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and goodnessof the Creator, so the history of the world exhibits in the Revelationmade to man clear proofs of that heavenly love which corresponds to thecharacter of Him who has put love at the head of all the requirements ofHis law. The Revelation given to us has undeniably made a real mark onthe world. It has upheld millions of men in a holiness of lifecorresponding in a very real degree to the holiness required by the lawof duty. It has perpetually more and more cleared up the true teachingof that law. It is still continuing the same process, and generationafter generation is better able to understand that teaching. Its fruitshave been a harvest of saints and martyrs, some known and reverenced, some quite unnoticed. It has leavened all literature and alllegislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changingthem. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of thedevelopment of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Ruler, we have aright to ask what then could be the source of such a development, andhow is it that so great a power should always have worked in the name ofGod and should have always referred everything to His command? Thatfanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so isintelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice andpurity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law, should be the fruit of believing a lie? If there be a God, it is to beexpected that He would communicate with His creatures if those creatureswere capable of receiving the communication; and if He did communicatewith His creatures it is to be expected that His communication would besuch as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it, the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation containedin it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in theconscience. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on humanhistory is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exertedon the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not ademonstration of His existence; but it is a full answer to those whosay, 'If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of Hishand in its course?'

And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely taken the form of a messageor a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of aperson who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conceptionformed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divinelaw. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and allthe more because human faculties had not first framed the conceptionwhich He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and ourconception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes inHimself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power ofthe Revelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christcan bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul. 

Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship andto reverence, shown Himself in the world of phenomena. And He has givenproofs of His existence and His character precisely corresponding tothe conception which He has enabled, and indeed commanded, us to form ofHim. And it is because the proofs that He has given are of this naturethat we are tempted to ask for more proofs of a different kind. 

For it is undeniable that believers and unbelievers alike areperpetually asking for proofs that shall have more of the scientific andless of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctlyappeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for externalsupport to their faith; unbelievers have refused to believe unlesssupplied with more physical evidence. Believers shrink from being throwninwards on themselves; they fear the wavering of their own faith; theyare alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief beingtaken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual evidence, if they can first find much physical evidence. They wish (to use theApostle's words) to walk by sight and not by faith. And unbelievers wanta tangible proof that shall compel their understanding before it awakestheir conscience. They demand a Revelation, not only confirmed bymiracles at the time, but confirmed again and again by repeated miraclesto every succeeding generation. They want miracles in every age adaptedto the science of the age, miracles which no hardness of heart would beable to deny, which would convince the scientific man through hisScience independently of his having any will to make holiness his aimwhen he had been convinced. This kind of evidence it has not pleased Godto give. It is not the scientific man that God seeks as such, any morethan it is the ignorant man that He seeks as such. And the proofs thatHe gives are plainly in all cases conditioned by the rule that thespiritually minded shall most easily and most keenly perceive theirforce. 

And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need besaid except to tell them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is byanother way that they must look to find God, and not by the way thatthey insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need tobe warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith whichmakes too much of things not spiritual. 

For, first, there is a real and great danger that the spiritual may bealtogether obscured by the literal and the physical. We look back withastonishment on the Rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament, andall the more because of the really great and true thoughts that aresometimes to be found in the midst of their fanciful conceits. We cantrace the mischief they did to true Religion by the perverted reverencewith which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the veryshapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Theirperversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements ofinterpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleadingcomments and inferences, all certainly tended to encourage the hypocrisywhich our Lord rebuked, and against which St. Paul contended. But westill see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain averbal and even literal inspiration of the whole Bible, filling it notwith the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with minute details of doctrineand precept often questionable, and, whenever separated from theprinciples of the eternal law, valueless or even mischievous. God'sWord, instead of leading us to Him, is made to stand between and hideHis face. 

But, secondly, there is a serious risk that if the mind be fastened onthings external in some way connected with, but yet distinct from thesubstance of Revelation, it may turn out that these external thingscannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to begiven up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up longbefore. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of thestrength of that faith of which they had previously been not only thebuttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctlythe fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once agreat contest between the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since beena great contest between the Bible and Geology, that there is still agreat contest between the Bible and Evolution. In no one of these caseswas the Revelation contained in the Bible in danger, but only theinterpretation commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long afterwards tocondemn the opponents of Galileo and speak of their treatment of himand his teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such condemnation hasnot unfrequently been heard from the very lips that neverthelessdenounced the teaching of the geologists. But in all these cases theprinciple has been the same, and believers have insisted that the Bibleitself was gone unless their interpretation of it was upheld. And themischief is double. For many believers, and more especially unlearnedbelievers, instead of gently helping one another to form the necessarymodification of their view of the Bible teaching, instead ofendeavouring to find the way out of the perplexity and to disentanglethe true spiritual lesson from the accessories which are no part ofitself, insisted that it must be all or nothing, and prepared forthemselves a very severe trial. There was no doctrine involved whatever;there was nothing at stake on which the spiritual life depended. Theduty to be patient, to enquire carefully, to study the other side, towait for light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all this wasforgotten in a somewhat unreasoning impulse to resist an assault on thefaith. And there cannot be a doubt that on all these occasions manybelievers have been seriously shaken by slowly finding out that theposition they have taken is untenable. When men have to give up in suchcircumstances they generally give up far more than they need, and insome cases an unreasonable resistance has been followed by an equallyunreasonable surrender. And while believers have thus prepared astumblingblock for themselves they have put quite as great astumblingblock before others. For students of Science, informed byinstant voices all around that they must choose between their Scienceand the Bible, knowing as they did that their Science was true, andsupposing that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best knew what itsteaching was, had no choice as honest men but to hold the truth as faras they possessed it and to give up the Bible in order to maintain theirScience. It was a grievous injury inflicted on them; and though someamong them might deserve no sympathy, there were some whom it was agreat loss to lose. 

But in the third place, the result of this clinging to externals is toshut out Science and all its correlative branches of knowledge fromtheir proper office of making perpetually clearer the true and fullmeaning of the Revelation itself. It is intended that Religion shoulduse the aid of Science in clearing her own conceptions. It is intendedthat as men advance in knowledge of God's works and in power of handlingthat knowledge, they should find themselves better able to interpret themessage which they have received from their Father in Heaven. Ourknowledge of the true meaning of the Bible has gained, and it wasintended that it should gain, by the increase of other knowledge. Science makes clearer than anything else could have made it the higherlevel on which the Bible puts what is spiritual over what is material. Ido not hesitate to ascribe to Science a clearer knowledge of the trueinterpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and to scientifichistory a truer knowledge of the great historical prophets. The advanceof secular studies, as they are called, clears up much in the Psalms, and much in the other poetical Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt thatthis was intended from the beginning, and that as Science has alreadydone genuine service to Religion in this way, so will it do still betterservice with process of time. 

On this side also, as on the scientific side, the teaching of thespiritual faculty and the teaching of Revelation indicate that thephysical and the spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither iscomplete without the other. Science enters into Religion, and is itscounterpart, and has its share to take in the conduct of life and in theformation of opinion. And the believer is bound to recognise its valueand make use of its services. 

In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism between Science andReligion arises much more from a difference of spirit and temper in thestudents of each than from any inherent opposition between the two. Theman of Science is inclined to shut out from consideration a whole bodyof evidence, the moral and spiritual; the believer is inclined to shutout the physical. And each, from long looking at that evidence alonewhich properly belongs to his own subject, is inclined to hold the othercheap, and to charge on those who adduce it either blindness ofunderstanding or wilful refusal to accept the truth. And when such aconflict arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is Faith and notScience that is likely to suffer. For the physical evidence is tangible, and the perception of it not much affected by the character of the manwho studies it; the spiritual evidence stands unshaken in itself, but itis hid from eyes that have no spiritual perception, and that perceptionnecessarily varies with the man. 

By what means then can a man keep his spiritual perception in fullactivity? And is there any test by which a man may know whether hisspiritual faculty is in contact with the source of all spiritual lifeand is deriving from that source the full flow of spiritual power?Revelation, if it tells us anything, ought to tell us this. And theanswer which Revelation makes is expressed in the words of St. Paul, 'Noman can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. ' Thisdoctrine runs through the New Testament, and it implies that one mainpurpose of our Lord's appearance among men was to give them in Hislife, His character, His example, His teaching, at once a touchstone bywhich they could always try their own spirits, and judge of the realcondition of their own spiritual faculty, and also a vivid presentationof the supreme spiritual law by which they could for ever more and moreelevate and purify and strengthen their own spiritual power andknowledge. 

Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him put before his_conscience_ the teaching that Jesus gives; the picture drawn of ourFather in Heaven whose holiness cannot allow a stain upon a single soul, and whose tenderness cannot endure that a single soul should perish; Whoruleth all the universe, and yet without whom not a sparrow falleth tothe ground; the picture drawn of the ideal human life, the humility, thehunger and thirst after righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, thepurity; the picture drawn of human need, the helplessness, thehopelessness of man without God. Let him ponder on all this and on themany touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the force, thesuperhuman sweetness and gentleness with which all is presented. And ifhis conscience bows before it, and can say without reserve and inunalloyed sincerity, 'This is my Lord; He shall be my teacher; here Irecognise the fulness of the eternal law; at His feet will I henceforthsit and learn; through Him will I drink of the well-springs of eternaltruth; His voice will I trust to the very utmost;' then may that man besure that his conscience is in contact with the Father of spirits, andthat his study will guide him into fuller and clearer knowledge, andmore certain conviction that he is grasping the truth of God. 

Let a man put before his _heart_ our Lord's own character. Let him thinkof the life of privation without complaint, of service to His kindwithout a thought of self; of His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy, of His tenderness to the penitent; of His royal simplicity and humility;of His unwearied perseverance in the face of angry opposition; of Hisdeep affection for the friends of His choice even when they deserted Himin His hour of darkness; of His death on the Cross and the unearthlylove that breathed in every word He uttered and everything He did. Lethim read all this many times; and if his heart goes out to the Man whomhe is thus beholding, if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord;here is the supreme object of my affection; Him will I love with all mystrength; from Him I will never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve;no other do I know more worthy to be loved; no other will I keep moresteadily before my eyes; no other will I more earnestly desire toimitate; no other shall be my example, my trust, my strength, mySaviour; if a man can say this, it is certain that his heart is touchedby God, and the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul. 

Let a man put before his _will_ the Lord's commands; the aims, theself-restraints, the aspirations that the Lord required in Hisdisciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly courage in spite ofall that earth can inflict or can take away; the call to take up theCross and follow Him that was crucified; the warnings and the promises, the precepts and the prohibitions; let him think of the Leader who neverflinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid His own law; let him think on thenobleness of the aims to which He pointed; of the promise of inwardpeace made to those who sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord andre-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual being; let him think ofthe sure help promised in return for absolute trust, tried by millionsof saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man put this before hiswill, and if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here Irecognise Him who has a right to my absolute obedience; here is theMaster that I mean to serve and follow; and in spite of my own weaknessand blindness, in spite of my sins, in spite of stumbling and wearinessof resolution, in spite of temptations and in spite of falls, I will notlet my eyes swerve, nor my purpose quit my will; through death itself Iwill obey my Lord and trust to Him to carry me through whatever comes;that man most certainly is moving in the strength of God, and the powerof the Eternal Spirit lives within him. 

Our Lord is the crown, nay, the very substance of all Revelation. If Hecannot convince the soul, no other can. The believer stakes all faith onHis truth; all hope on His _power_. If the man of Science would learnwhat it is that makes believers so sure of what they hold, he must studywith an open heart the Jesus of the Gospels; if the believer seeks tokeep his faith steady in the presence of so many and sometimes soviolent storms of disputation, he will read of, ponder on, pray to, theLord Jesus Christ. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The Data of Philosophy. ]