§ I.—CHAPTER I.

PRINCIPLES OF EVIDENCE.

THE Theistic Evidence, in its common inductive form, derives its logical force from certain principles implied in its very conception. It is necessary, therefore, in entering upon our subject, to determine these principles, and the grounds on which they rest. The special necessity of such an initial explanation and verification of principles, is shown by the fact that it is in regard to them alone that there remains any dispute. The question between the Theist and the Anti-Theist—Pantheist or Atheist—necessarily always resolves itself into one of this fundamental character. It becomes a controversy, not as to the existence of certain phenomena in nature whose existence is really indisputable on either side but as to the true meaning or interpretation of these phenomena. And especially is this the present aspect of the question, amid the new stir which, from opposite quarters, has begun in philosophical inquiry. We cannot therefore save ourselves, even if we would, from taking up the speculative discussions which lie across the threshold of our subject, and endeavouring to establish our position securely on the narrow platform of First Principles. In this way, besides, we shall exhibit, better than in any other, the condensed logical force of the Evidence, illustratively expanded in the succeeding section. The theistic argument may be syllogistically expressed as follows, in a form which appears to us at once simple and free from ambiguity—viz., First or major premiss,

Order universally proves Mind.

Second, or minor premiss,

The works of Nature discover Order.

Conclusion,

The works of Nature prove Mind.

Dr Reid long ago expressed the theistic argument in a syllogistic form, as follows: “First, That design and intelligence in the cause may, with certainty, be inferred from marks or signs of it in the effect. This is the major proposition of the argument. The second, which we call the minor proposition, is, That there are in fact the clearest marks of design and wisdom in the works of nature; and the conclusion is, That the works of nature are the effects of a wise and intelligent Cause. One must either assent to the conclusion, or deny one or other of the premises.”

To this statement of the theistic syllogism, which, to say the least, is not remarkable for precision, considerable exception has been taken by succeeding writers. Dr Crombie, in his work on Natural Theology, maintains that the syllogism of Reid is vicious in this respect, that in passing from the major to the minor proposition, he tacitly carries over to the “works of nature” the conclusion suggested by the term “effect;” while yet, according to Dr Crombie, this is the very thing to be proved—viz., That the world is an effect. He thus represents Reid’s statement of the argument: “Marks of design in the effect prove design in the cause. The works of nature are an effect, and exhibit marks of design; therefore the works of nature prove design in the cause.” Besides the invalid assumption which Dr Crombie maintains is here introduced into the minor premiss, he objects, and we think with perfect justice, to the mode in which the first proposition is stated, “marks of design in the effect” being simply equivalent to “design in the cause.”

The more general form in which we have put the syllogism in the text, appears to us entirely to obviate these objections; and especially to liberate us from any such preliminary necessity as that of proving the world to be an “effect.” By putting out of view this term, and dealing simply with the fact of order, we have already, according to the truth of our first proposition, Mind as its cause. It is not necessary that we show previously that the orderly fact or phenomenon is an “effect,” for this simple reason, that in its very nature it is such. In virtue of its character as manifesting order it is already declared a product or effect. This of course may be held equally true on the syllogistic basis of Reid; and we do not therefore concur in this part of Dr Crombie’s criticism. Only by avoiding the use of the term “effect,” we obviate such an objection. Our mode of expression disencumbers the argument of an extraneous element of debate, and so far places the sceptical cavil of Hume simply beside the question.

It is of great importance to keep clear in the outset of all ambiguous or misleading terms. And this conviction has led us to reject from our syllogism such common expressions as not only “cause” and “effect,” but also “design.” There will be abundant use in the sequel for this latter expression in all its full and appropriate significance, when we have established the great general doctrine on which it rests—viz., That Mind is everywhere the only valid explanation of Order—its necessary correlate.

It is this doctrine—the equivalent obviously of the major premiss of our syllogism—which appears to us to present, in its really valid and fundamental character, the theistic problem. Essentially, it is neither more nor less than the old doctrine of Final Causes; but, for the reason already stated, we prefer considering it in the mean time in a new and untechnical form of expression.

Upon this fundamental position rests the whole burden of the inductive theistic argument. If this position can be established—if the right of Intelligence to stand everywhere as the correlate of Order can be made good—the Pantheist or Positivist very well knows that, even according to his own favourite mode of viewing nature as a system of law or order, the theistic conclusion directly follows. The fact of a supremely Intelligent Cause then everywhere asserts itself. The discoveries of science, in all their rich variety, became only tributary witnesses to this fact. Here, accordingly, the whole contest of Theism centres, and finds its most vital struggle. And of this the opposite school of thinkers are sufficiently aware. They clearly feel that it is here alone that a consistent position of denial can be taken up. The right of Mind to be held everywhere as the correlate of Order, and so to stand at the head of nature, is stoutly, and even scornfully, impugned by them. That Mind is in man and animals the appropriate explanation of many facts of order, is of course not denied; but it is expressly denied that it has any claim to be regarded as the only true source, and final explanation, of all order.

We may seem to have put the theistic problem in a somewhat unfamiliar form. But, while confessedly not the form in which it has been usually discussed, it is nevertheless that in which, beyond all doubt, it most urgently presses itself upon our attention. Even in the writings of Hume it is this aspect of the question which suggests itself most powerfully, and which gives the main point to his famous sceptical reasoning—a fact which has not been sufficiently perceived. Interest has been concentrated upon his ingenious attempt to represent the world as a “singular effect,” but without a clear insight into the deeper principle by which he was led to take up this ground, and which alone gives to it all its force. If we can establish Mind as the universal correlate of order, it must be manifest that there is no room for such a position as that the world is a “singular effect.” The only question is, Does the world discover order? That Hume was perfectly aware of this, and that the real and final question regarding Theism related to the rightful claims and dignity of Mind, is so abundantly plain in the course of his reasoning, that it seems strange that it has not hitherto attracted more special examination. Even Dr Chalmers—who plainly enough saw that the mode, adopted by Reid and Stewart, of settling the matter by at once declaring design to be an intuitive principle of belief, was not all that was demanded against such an opponent—does not seem to have penetrated to this essential element of the subtlety which he manfully encounters. So far triumphant in his vindication of the theistic inference, as resting on the same basis of experience as any other inference from design, he does not yet reach, and bring out fully, the ultimate rational truth on which alone that inference, in the end, must rest.

To employ his own illustration, “If we can infer the agency of design in a watchmaker, though we never saw a watch made, we can, on the very same ground, infer the agency of design on the part of a world-maker, though we never saw a world made.” All that is requisite to constitute the inference valid in either case is not, as the sceptical objection implied, experience with the actual production of the special effects—with the making of a watch on the one hand, or the making of a world on the other—but only with the simple fact of adaptation on the one hand, and Mind as its explanation on the other. This general form of experience is the sufficiently warrantable basis of inference in either case.

This is virtually the import of Chalmers’ amplified argument. See his Natural Theology, pp. 150-151.

How this appears in the writings of Hume as the really vital element of the question, is abundantly clear from the following paragraphs:—

Dialogue concerning Natural Religion, HUME’S Works, vol. ii. pp. 446, 448.

“But can you think, Cleanthes, that your usual philosophy has been preserved in so wide a step as you have taken, when you compared to the universe houses, ships, furniture, machines, and, from their similarity in some circumstances, inferred a similarity in their causes? Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others which fall under daily observation. It is an active cause by which some particular parts of nature, we find, produce alterations on other parts. But can a conclusion, with any propriety, be transferred from parts to the whole?”

“But, allowing that we were to take the operations of one part of nature upon another for the foundation of our judgment concerning the origin of the whole (which never can be admitted), yet why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a principle as the reason and design of animals is found to be upon this planet? What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain, which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?”

“Admirable conclusion! Stone, wood, brick, iron, brass, have not, at this time, in this minute globe of earth, an order or arrangement without human art and contrivance; therefore the universe could not originally attain its order and arrangement without something similar to human art. But is a part of nature a rule for another part very wide of the former? Is it a rule for the whole? Is a very small part a rule for the UNIVERSE?”

The real subject of dispute, then, on the old battle-ground of Theism, which has descended to us, regards the valid claim of Mind to stand universally as the Interpretation of Order. And more eminently than ever, in the present day, is this the vital point at issue. The views thrown out with such an apparently heedless, yet far-reaching subtlety, by Hume, have at length been taken up in a strictly scientific form, and elaborated into a philosophical creed, which boasts numerous and able advocates. Positivism, indeed, if springing directly from the irreverent soil of French scientific culture, yet traces back its lineage to the Scottish sceptic, of whose keen and arrogant genius it is so fitting a representative.

It is true that, in this modern sceptical system, the theological bearing of the views advocated is not always prominently brought forward—sometimes rather simply passed by, as beyond the concern of science. This is especially the case with the writer who is, in this country, its ablest and most systematic expositor. But in other cases no opportunity is lost of bringing out this bearing in the most decided manner; and, even in the chief work of the writer in question, it is so clear and unmistakable that it is impossible not to perceive, under the show of courtesy, the deadly shafts levelled at the foundation of the theistic argument. This will be sufficiently apparent from the following quotation, which condenses the result of a train of argument, the object of which is to prove that what Mr Mill calls the “Volitional Theory”

Mill’s transposition of the Theistic Principle into a “Volitional Theory,” is just one of the many instances in which the real import of the principle has been obscured under a one-sided and wilfully perverted nomenclature. It is surely time that, in the search after truth, men should cease to be content to escape from the pressure of an antagonistic doctrine, by hiding its highest meaning under an easily degraded phraseology! There is a further misrepresentation conveyed by Mr Mill’s language, which, although it will be afterwards fully cleared up, it may be well to notice here, as tending to involve our own position in some degree of doubt. He speaks of the writers, against whom he argues, maintaining volition to be the “direct cause of all phenomena”—a statement very readily suggesting a caricature of their true doctrine—which does not for a moment deny the fact of physical causes, in Mr Mill’s sense of that term, but only that these causes, save as taking their rise in a RATIONAL Will, and forming an expression of such a Will, afford no satisfactory explanation of the phenomena. It is not by any means as their direct or immediate cause (in the sense of excluding physical causes—general laws), but only always as their First or Original Cause, that Mind is spoken of as the explanation of physical phenomena.

“Though it were granted,” he says,

MILL’S Logic, vol. i. p. 371.

§ I.—CHAPTER II

DOCTRINE OF CAUSATION.

THERE have been few if any questions in Philosophy more thoroughly discussed than that of causation. Especially since the sceptical genius of Hume carried its pitiless search into the foundations of the prevailing philosophy of his day, and exposed its genuine logical consequences, has speculative discussion gathered round this point as a centre, and found unceasing life in it. It appears to us that at length the ground may be said to be pretty well cleared, if not for a settlement of the question, yet for a definite truce regarding it. For it has become clearly apparent that the combatants, on one side at least, contend, not so much in direct opposition to the view held on the other side, as for a further and higher view in addition. The two classes of thinkers are indeed fundamentally opposed, but they are not throughout opposed. For the one class only insists on carrying up the position of the other into a higher, and, as they think, more comprehensive Truth than the other will admit. The one feels impelled to look beyond the mere physical view, and to find everywhere in Nature a further and more sacred MEANING than the other is content to accept.

It is no longer, for example, disputed by any school of philosophy, that all we perceive of the relation between physical phenomena is a relation of succession. “It is now universally admitted that we have no perception of the causal nexus in the material world.”

SIR W. HAMILTON’S Discussions, Appendix, p. 587.

§ I.—CHAPTER III.

DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSES.

THE conclusion of the preceding chapter already clearly pointed to what we mean by the doctrine of Final Causes. The idea of causation we found to resolve itself into that of the operation of a rational will or mind in nature; and this operation, looked at deductively from a theological point of view, is neither more nor less than the doctrine before us. But while thus implicitly given in our previous argument, this doctrine, in its distinctive form, deserves from us a further and more attentive consideration. It deserves this especially, on account of the obscurity and misrepresentations in which it has been involved.

There is no doctrine which has been more misunderstood. The scientific applications of it have been confounded with its genuine theological import, and abuses resulting from the former perversely passed over to the discredit of the latter. What it really signifies, what is the comprehensive meaning in which the doctrine must be held, if it is to be held at all; has been often as little understood by its supporters as by its opponents.

§ I—CHAPTER IV.

THEISTIC CONCLUSION. (GENERAL LAWS.)

THE major premiss of our theistic syllogism has been made good, according to the validity of our previous reasoning. More than this, the theistic conclusion itself, in its primary and most naked form, has been made good along with it. In the very nature of the case, the question passed over from its initiative and abstract, to its direct and conclusive statement. The minor premiss was held as implied; and the essential question came to be whether a mode of conception, valid in certain human applications, was valid in reference to nature at large—whether, in short, Mind, admitted to be to man the only efficient cause, was yet entitled to be considered the only efficient cause and final explanation of the universe.

We have claimed this position for Mind in virtue of a rational necessity, which will not allow us to rest short of such a conclusion. More particularly, we have endeavoured to vindicate it by determining the true nature of causation, which we find to be always a relation of efficiency, and which, therefore, at the very first, carried us beyond the mere range of physical sequences to some Power in which they originate. This Power can be nothing else than a Mind, as it is only in the fact and conscious operation of our own minds that we have the conception of power at all. The rational necessity on which the argument thus rests can only be consistently set aside by denying the veracity of our rational being altogether, and so destroying the foundations of all science and philosophy whatever. Mind is found in nature as a whole, and held to be its only ultimate explanation on the very same grounds on which we apply to nature the forms of our mental life at all. The theistic conclusion is only the fair result of the rational interpretation of nature carried out.

The conclusive sum of our previous argument gives us, then, when fully expressed, an Intelligent First Cause of nature. The root of this conclusion, however, is not in external nature, but in our rational consciousness. Nay, it emerges in what is distinctively called our moral consciousness. It starts from this as its special source. But, inasmuch as our spiritual life is a unity, this distinctive origin of the theistic conception does not affect, as some would seem to think, the appropriate significance and validity of the general argument from design. It only points to the deep harmony which underlies the whole of the theistic evidence. It only indicates where the links of that evidence gather up into a final and irrefragable postulate of our spiritual being.

Before passing from this branch of our subject, there is a relation of it which it may be well to consider,—with such perverseness has it been misinterpreted and misapplied. It has been held that our conclusion is at variance with the results of Science. Science gives us, as the final expression of phenomena everywhere, general laws, to which the phenomena may all be traced back, and upon which they seem to depend. It is simply the aim of Science to discover these laws in every department of nature, and so to give to man a greater mastery over its multiplied resources. It is not, perhaps, much to be wondered at that, in the proud and continued triumph with which Science has pursued her course, there should have been some of her votaries who believed themselves not only exposing the domain of nature, but revealing the last truths which it concerns man to learn. And while the great conclusion of Theism has been thus deliberately discarded by certain minds, it has been felt by many more as if that conclusion were somehow dangerously affected by the discoveries of Science.

It will afterwards be our aim, in a more special way, to show how little the theistic position is affected by the most notable of these discoveries; how little, in truth, we can rest in even the most signal of general laws as self-explanatory,—as furnishing the last expression of truth for the human mind. The fact is, that any such law, instead of explaining the phenomena which seem to issue from it, is merely the general condition in which these phenomena express themselves, and apart from which it has no existence. Instead of the law explaining the phenomena, therefore, it might be more truly said that the phenomena explain the law, just as a sum in arithmetic gives the answer rather than the answer the sum. The true realities are the separate facts. The law is only the summary expression by which we hold these facts before our mind.

In the mean time it concerns us to show how finely and truly, in a right point of view, the highest conceptions of Science harmonise with the theistic conclusion. It is only an unworthy and absurd representation of either that leaves any ground for hostility between them.

It has been presumed, for example, that there is an inconsistency between a self-acting power and that invariable uniformity which is seen to characterise the operations of nature. The order which Science discovers everywhere is supposed, in its silent and undeviating march, to exclude any personal agency. This agency is apprehended as something necessarily arbitrary, and hence as conflicting with general laws. Volition, in short, and law or order, are conceived of as incompatible realities; and the idea of any directing Volition is held as dispelled by the knowledge which Science enables us to acquire of natural phenomena, so that we can foretell and even control them.

The following quotation will show that we do not misrepresent the doctrine of Positivism: “The fundamental character of all Theological Philosophy is the conceiving of phenomena as subjected to Supernatural Volition, and consequently (!!) as eminently and irregularly variable. Now, these Theological conceptions can only be subverted finally by means of these two general processes, whose popular success is infallible in the long run—(1) the exact and rational prevision of phenomena, and (2) the possibility of modifying them, so as to promote our own ends and advantages. The former immediately dispels the idea of any ‘Directing Volition;’ and the latter tends to the same result, under another point of view, by making us regard this power as subordinate to our own.”—COMTE’S Philosophy of the Sciences, by LEWES, pp. 102, 103.

SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.

The character of the evidence treated of in this chapter sufficiently separates it from the general range of merely illustrative evidence. This, upon the whole, seemed to be the proper position for it.

SPECIAL (GEOLOGICAL) EVIDENCE OF A CREATOR.

THE doctrine of an Intelligent First Cause, which it has been the aim of the foregoing chapter to establish, has been supposed to derive a special testimony and confirmation from the facts of Geological science. It has been maintained that these facts not only enable the Natural Theologian—as in the case of existing organic products—to infer a supreme Creative Mind, although this, too, they eminently do; but moreover conduct us directly backwards to the presence and agency of such a Mind. In a word, they are said to take us out of the region of natural cause and effect, and to bring us face to face with the great Creative Cause. Lord Brougham, in his review of the memorable labours of Cuvier in the department of Fossil Osteology, was among the first to draw attention to the distinctive character and cogency of this branch of the theistic evidence. Dr Chalmers was disposed to place great stress upon it, especially as serving in a direct and tangible way to extricate the Natural Theologian from the meshes of Hume’s sophistry. The question it involves, the reader will at once recognise as one which has recently assumed a peculiar prominence and importance in scientific discussions.

Interesting, however, as this question is to the Natural Theologian, it is right to observe that we do not hold it to involve the essential interests of Theism. The theistic argument no doubt receives a striking illumination from the idea of successive creative interpositions, manifest in the very structure of the earth and its organic remains. It is in the highest degree significant, that, as we turn over the stony tablets of the Geological volume, we should not merely be arrested at every page with impressive manifestations of that pervading design which we perceive everywhere, but at definite intervals should gaze with awe upon the very record of Creation, and behold, as it were, the finger of Omnipotence in mysterious operation. Yet it is clearly evident to us, and deserves to be carefully considered, that even should advancing science tend to throw obscurity upon the supposed traces of direct Creative Energy, the great doctrine of Theism would remain altogether untouched. Even if those finger-prints of the Creator, upon which the Christian Geologist has delighted to expatiate, should become dim and obliterated, as the eye of Science grows more familiar with them, and pierces them with a keener scrutiny, the fact of a Creative Presence would not thereby be really affected. God would equally, if not so strikingly, live and work in the supposed extended development of creation, as in the supposed instances of direct Creative Power.

It is worthy of notice how completely this is admitted by the chief expounder of the development hypothesis in our own country.

This admission is, upon the whole, so clearly and happily expressed, that we are prompted to submit it to the reader. “What, in the Science of Nature,” asks the author of the Vestiges, “is a law? It is merely the term applicable where any series of phenomena is seen invariably to occur in certain given circumstances, or in certain given conditions. Such phenomena are said to obey a law, because they appear to be under a rule or ordinance of constant operation. In the case of these physical laws, we can bring the idea to mathematical elements, and see that numbers, in the expression of space or of time, form, as it were, its basis. We thus trace in law, Intelligence. Often we can see that it has a beneficial object, still more strongly speaking of Mind as concerned in it. There cannot, however, be an inherent intelligence in these laws. The intelligence appears external to the laws: something of which the laws are but as the expressions of the Will and Power. If this be admitted, the laws cannot be regarded as primary or independent causes of the phenomena of the physical world. We come, in short, to a Being beyond nature—its Author, its God; infinite, inconceivable, it may be, and yet one whom these very laws present to us with attributes showing that our nature is in some way a faint and far-cast shadow of His, while all the gentlest and beautifullest of our emotions lead us to believe that we are as children in His care, and as vessels in His hand. Let it then be understood—and this is for the reader’s special attention—that when rational law is spoken of here, reference is only made to the mode in which the Divine Power is exercised. It is but another phrase for the action of the ever-present and sustaining God.”—P. 10.

§ II.—CHAPTER I.

COSMICAL ARRANGEMENTS.

IN the course of our previous argument we have assumed that nature everywhere presents an aspect of ORDER. This we were quite warranted in doing from the universal testimony of Science; and on this assumption our argument advanced directly to its conclusion. Mind was found entitled to stand at the head of nature as its only valid explanation. With a view, however, to the complete exhibition of the theistic doctrine, it is necessary to return to the minor premiss of our syllogism, and unfold it at length. It is only by a detailed exposition of the fact of order, as it reveals itself in manifold forms in nature, that we can fully show “that there is an all-powerful, Wise, and Good Being, by whom everything exists.”

We begin our illustrative survey with the most general and comprehensive phenomena that can engage us; those, namely, disclosed by astronomy. The celestial arrangements are at once the most simple and the most magnificent of which we have any knowledge—the most independent, and at the same time the most widely influential, of all others. Astronomical science, above every other, has enlarged and transformed our conceptions of the universe. Has the grand utterance of ancient piety, “The Heavens declare the glory of God,” lost anything of its meaning in the light of modern discovery? Or have the ever-expanding disclosures of the telescope only added to it a depth and grandeur of meaning hitherto inconceivable? We will endeavour in this chapter to find an answer to these questions.

The general character of our solar system may be said to be now familiar to the common intelligence. It is composed, so far as has hitherto been discovered, of eight planetary bodies of what is called first-class magnitude, surrounding the sun at different distances, with a comparatively numerous group of smaller bodies circling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Previous to the year 1845 there were only reckoned four of these lesser bodies; but, on the 8th of December of that year, a fifth member of the group was discovered by Hencke; and, since then, yearly observation has been adding to their number.

Up to the present date no fewer than thirty-two of these smaller bodies have been discovered, chiefly through the labours of an English observer, Mr Hind.

§ II. CHAPTER II.

STRUCTURE OF THE EARTH.

DESCENDING from the contemplation of the celestial order, in the composition of which our globe is only an insignificant element, we turn our attention to the massive structure of that globe itself. We carry our illustrative survey from the vast regions and unnumbered worlds, lying all around us in space, and with which we are only enabled dimly to converse, to the bosom of that familiar earth on which we dwell, and which everywhere invites our inspection.

We are prepared to trace order here, as in the far-off regions we have been traversing. To the untutored eye, the mass of our earth may seem a mere vast conglomeration, even as the heavens seem a mere mazy dance of sparkling lights; but as science has disclosed the magnificent system of the one, so has it unfolded the special structure of the other. As in the heavens we still read in the blaze of modern astronomy the glory of God, so in the crust of the earth do we read, in the light of modern geology, the impress of Divine power and wisdom. As we confine our attention here to the massive construction of this crust, a few words will suffice to bring before us the facts which the subject involves.

The component rocks of the earth are divided into two great classes—stratified and unstratified. The latter represent the oldest, and, so to speak, the original material of the earth. They constitute its solid basement. The foundations of the structure are laid in granite. The hard and agglutinated character of these rocks favours the supposition that they were originally in a state of fusion. There cannot, at least, be any doubt that they are of igneous production. Their unworn and angular crystals clearly point to such a mode of production.

The stratified rocks, in all their varieties, present different peculiarities of formation. Those which lie immediately above the unstratified granitic mass, closely resemble the latter in character: they are in fact composed of the same constituents, different only in the form and proportion in which they are aggregated. Their crystalline texture betrays the same fiery agency which discovers itself in the parent rock. At the same time, they bear marks of distinctive origin. Their crystals are worn and abraded by the action of atmospheric and aqueous influences. Yet the igneous character is here still predominant; and, as might be expected, in the fire-locked embrace of these primary rocks there is to be found no trace of organic existence.

Above what we may call this hard and unfossiliferous basis, the fossiliferous rocks rise in an ascending series, comprehending various systems which geologists have grouped into three great periods or epochs, successively called Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary. The Palæozoic group, which is next in age to the metamorphic rocks, comprehends the vast systems of the lower and upper Silurian, the Old red sandstone, and the Coal-measures. The crystalline texture of the previous rocks disappears, save among the lowest of these strata, and a clayey or sandy texture takes its place, discovering the more powerful working of those atmospheric and aqueous influences which we have mentioned. Here, also—as the name of the group implies—in the Llandeilo flags of the lower Silurian, we find the first traces of organic being, which henceforth multiply, in endless and marvellous forms, in the onward course of the earth’s growth. In the great carboniferous system we perceive in a very large degree the operation of a further influence in the formation of the earth’s crust—the submersion and depression, namely, of organic remains. This, in the ascending history of our globe, is one of the most extensive of all the causes contributing to the earth’s formation, in respect not merely of vegetable, but also of animal remains. The former, it is well known, are the peculiar ingredient of the vast coal-measures. In them we behold the deposition of the enormous vegetation which, in the carboniferous era, must have overspread the earth—vegetation in comparison with which, it has been said, the existing jungle of the tropics is mere barrenness.

In the secondary period we have, as in the Palæozoic, three great systems, the New red sandstone, the Oolitic, and the Chalk—the Oolitic being especially remarkable as the era of those gigantic reptiles, whose strange and fearful forms at once amaze the ignorant and interest the curious.

With the tertiary period—with whose subdivisions, as laid down by Lyell, and generally accepted by geologists, we need not here concern ourselves—we approach our own era. We meet with animals of dimensions, indeed, far exceeding any with which we are now familiar, but in structure allied to existing species. We are carried forwards to an arrangement of physical conditions not differing widely from the present.

Such is a brief statement of the successive materials, so to speak, which compose the structure of the earth. Imperfect as it is, it is sufficiently complete for our purpose. In the mere facts thus disclosed, there seems already evidence of the order for which we seek. The actual structure of the earth, however, is something very different from that now suggested. It is not built up in the manner we have described, with the successive systems regularly laid upon one another, as they were progressively formed—the earliest everywhere lowest, and the latest highest. If such had been its actual construction, that construction would probably have for ever remained a secret to us. We could not have penetrated to its deep and hidden foundations. As it is, however, we are enabled to explore the whole structure, and find order and beauty in it, through means which might have seemed only destined to insure its destruction. Its foundations have been laid bare to us; while its later architecture lies equally exposed, not in mere disrupted fragments, but in vast and orderly terraces. The fact is, that in the process of the earth’s formation, during the long periods which had been employed in the gradual deposition of the various strata in the order of time we have described, those igneous agencies concerned in the production of the earliest rocks continued at work, breaking up and dislocating the incumbent strata, and forcing the granite upwards in all directions. To the same causes the different species of trap-rocks, piercing upwards in great veins, owe their elevation causes which we still see in some degree active in our volcanoes. Whatever theory may be held as to the special intensity of these causes in the past periods of the earth’s history—whether we adopt a catastrophic or a uniformitarian hypothesis—the result is the same. The granite, which is everywhere the base of the earth’s crust, has yet been elevated far above all the posterior strata. It is no longer merely the impenetrable foundation or central abutment of the rocky systems; but it stretches upwards in vast branches, forming, so to speak, a skeleton framework for the earth. Somewhat as the bony skeleton in the living body everywhere ramifies it, giving strength and consistency to all its parts, so the granitic framework pierces on all sides throughout the earth’s crust, compacting and consolidating it into its present state. And even somewhat as the muscular tissues and folds of flesh overlie the bony skeleton, and find in it their ultimate points of support, so do the various rocky tissues, the successive folds of softer material, rest against the mountain masses. We must surely in all this trace evidence of special arrangement. “It is not,” as Dr Chalmers has said, “from some matter being harder than others that we infer design; but when we see the harder placed just where it is most needed, the inference seems irresistible.” And in the present case it is surely impossible to contemplate the peculiar disposition of the granite in our earth, without recognising that so it must have been placed. The very terms which we are compelled to use in speaking of it, after the least theological fashion, imply so much. That so it is by any mere accident, is altogether inconceivable. The enormous agencies concerned in the elevation of the granite—could we have seen them operating—might have seemed merely blind and lawless; but the result is order, and we cannot help concluding that some presiding mind has been at work. The granite has been upheaved, it may be, by convulsive agencies of a magnitude and intensity far beyond any of which we have now experience; the superimposed strata have been rent, and tossed hither and thither. The vast process by which this was accomplished might have seemed mere wild confusion. But pierce and bore the earth in all directions, there is really nothing like confusion. The term is indeed unknown to science, and to no science more than to geology, immense and catastrophic, according to the most common opinion, as are the changes with which it has to do. Let the granite, for example, rise to whatever heights—let it tower in whatever alpine magnitudes—we never find that its proper, or what we might call its constitutional position, is altered: the foundations are still granite, if the granitic mass yet stretch in cleaving branches through the sedimentary strata, and far overreach their roof.

§ II.—CHAPTER III.

COSMICAL AND TERRESTRIAL MAGNITUDES DIVINE POWER.

IN the two previous chapters we have dwelt mainly on the celestial and terrestrial structures, as evincing an intelligent First Cause. It is order, as such, we have been contemplating. We have glanced but slightly at the peculiar evidence which the phenomena both of astronomy and geology furnish of immense power concerned in their creation and maintenance. So striking and impressive, however, is this evidence, that it seems right to. devote a brief chapter to its statement. The phenomena in question bring before us, more signally than any other, an all-powerful as well as wise Being.

It is of course obvious, according to our whole plan of treatment, that we do not present this illustrative evidence as a logical proof of the Divine omnipotence. We do not profess to find the infinite in the mere bewildering magnitude and duration of the finite. This was indicated already in our introductory remarks. Yet it deserves to be noticed, that the only conceivable way in which the infinite could be exhibited and impressively set forth to finite beings, is by such an array of phenomena as the sciences of astronomy and geology unfold to us—namely, by an accumulated display of vast magnitudes and apparently interminable durations. If we do not amid such views logically reach the infinite, we are yet carried onwards to it, on the wings of an imagination which in vain essays to grasp the immensity of the fields of contemplation open to it.

The simple extent of the celestial space, briefly exhibited in our first chapter, is well calculated to fill our minds with vast ideas of Divine power. Looking out from beyond our earth, the sphere of observation extends immeasurably on all sides. Inexhaustible to the naked eye, it is equally inexhaustible when, by the aid of the telescope, we are carried into regions so inconceivably remote that the mind sinks utterly overwhelmed by the spectacle. Neptune circles round the sun at a distance of nearly three thousand millions of miles; the nearest fixed star (α Centauri) is seven hundred times farther removed; while the bright Dog-star, according to the parallax given to it by Professor Henderson, is almost four times farther off than a Centauri, or about eighty billions of miles! These distances, however, inconceivable as they are, are nothing to those of the nebulous clusters which people the more inaccessible tracts of space, whose light, it is stated, can only reach us in thousands and even millions of years.

Sir J. HERSCHEL’S Astronomy, 590.

§ II.—CHAPTER IV.

ELEMENTARY COMBINATIONS CRYSTALLISATION.

BENEATH the architectural structure of the earth, there is an interior elementary structure of great interest and significance. The stones of the building are not merely disposed in an orderly and fitting manner, but in the composition of the stones themselves there is found an order of the most exquisite kind. The separate masses of matter are not only arranged; but matter itself, with which we have been hitherto only dealing in masses, presents a constitution of the most exact and definite character, highly illustrative of the Divine wisdom. As geology makes us familiar with the mechanical, or, as we have termed it, architectural structure of the earth, chemistry unfolds its elementary constitution.

Chemists reckon at present upwards of sixty elementary substances. This; however, is a merely provisional reckoning, liable any day to alteration. A hitherto hidden bond of identity may yet be discovered between many substances which now obstinately resist identification. It is found, in fact, that only a comparatively small number of these substances enter, to any large and pervading extent, into the constitution of nature—viz., oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and, among the metals, silicium and aluminium. Oxygen is considered by far the most abundant substance in the earth. United with hydrogen, it constitutes water; with nitrogen, and a comparatively small proportion of carbon, it makes common air; while it enters, at the same time, largely into every kind of rock in the crust of the earth. Carbon, again, is the main constituent of all vegetable and animal matters; and silicium, in nearly equal combinations with oxygen (making silica), is said to form the basis of about half of the rocks of the earth.

There appears to us to be something profoundly impressive in the contemplation of the few simple substances to which we can thus trace back all the multiform diversity of nature. How marvellous to reflect that the solid earth, the compact rocks, the limpid stream, and the clear atmosphere, the fields clothed with grass, and the valleys covered over with com, are only the varied combinations of a few elementary ingredients! So plastic is Nature! Science strips off the glorious forms in which she is everywhere robed, and brings us into her secret laboratories. But surely this does not diminish, but only heightens, the impression of wonderful intelligence which she everywhere reveals. So exquisite did nature’s forms seem to the Grecian mind, that a Divine Presence seemed to speak from all of them. Beside the beautiful there everywhere arose the spiritual. The Oread, the Dryad, and the Nereid, were the graceful embodiments of the plastic Life, that seemed thus to animate the mountain, the forest, and the ocean; and, surely, intelligence is not less but more visible, that science shows us the few ingredients which, in different combinations, induce these diverse phenomena of nature. Although the mystery has been so far unveiled, and we can look far beyond the simple-hearted view of Paganism, yet we cannot get rid of the truth to which it dimly testified. We find ourselves among the last analyses of nature’s processes, more impressively than ever in the presence of a living and presiding Intelligence.

This is in the highest degree evident, when we contemplate the special character of those elementary combinations with which chemistry makes us acquainted: for it is ascertained, not merely that all the great features and products of nature are compounded of a comparatively few elementary ingredients, but that these ingredients everywhere combine only in certain definite and unvarying proportions. They obey laws of the greatest simplicity and exactness, “which never change, and which govern the formation of compounds of all classes and descriptions.”

FOWNES’ Chemistry, p. 39.

§ II.—CHAPTER V.

ORGANISATION DESIGN.

WE have been hitherto tarrying amid the comparatively simple and general phenomena of inorganic matter. By degrees we have advanced from the most simple and comprehensive to the more special and definite laws which mark the inorganic world. We have contemplated the vast and beautiful cosmical order subserved by the law of gravitation, and the general laws of motion; the structure of the earth in its apparently irregular, yet most orderly flights of architecture—the constitution of matter, revealing relations so exact, and a higher and more refined law of kindred or elective attraction. We have further observed the regular geometrical forms exhibited in crystallisation—no longer merely chemical compositions, but symmetrical arrangement. Our illustrations have been thus of a progressive character. Material order has been contemplated in an ascending series of complexity, from the ruder form of mere mechanical adjustment, to the higher forms of chemical affinity and geometric adaptations.

§ II.—CHAPTER VI.

SPECIAL ORGANIC PHENOMENA VEGETABLE.

IN entering on the wide and diversified field of organic contrivance, our sole difficulty is that of selection. So crowded is it with illustrations fitted to our subject, that volumes might easily be devoted to special sections of it; and in fact, there is no other department of our evidence that has received such ample and varied, and, we may add, such skilful treatment. The work of Paley alone has made all familiar with its interesting details; and, conceived as this work is throughout in so fine a vein of homely English sense; rich with the light of a meaning everywhere clear and impressive, if not highly consecutive or profound; written, moreover, with such inimitable grace and felicity of style, it seems as if it were at once presumptuous and useless for us to enter upon ground which he has traversed with such fascinating success.

The Natural Theology, and in fact the general works of Paley, have of late somewhat lost the distinction they once enjoyed. This is undoubtedly owing to their marked deficiency in philosophic depth and comprehension, which leaves the reader so often unsatisfied, while yet pleased with their admirable clearness and sense. With an exquisite tact and homely intellect unrivalled, Paley was certainly no philosopher; and it is needless now to urge his claims in this respect. What he saw, he saw with a precision, and could express with a force and lucidity unsurpassed by any writer; but, for the most part, he not only did not see far into the deeper bearings of his subject, but there does not seem to have been any desire in his mind to do so. It will not, however, be a good sign of British thought if the works of Paley ever come to be generally depreciated. Types as they are of that healthy sobriety, tolerant temper, and quiet unobtrusive piety, which have hitherto distinguished the highest products of British theology—characteristics which, in the present day, we may well pray God it may not lose—their study can never fail to be highly advantageous to the Christian student, and to reward him with an increase of strength and manliness.

§ II.—CHAPTER VII.

SPECIAL ORGANIC PHENOMENA CONTINUED—ANIMAL.

BlCHAT first clearly propounded the distinction between merely vegetable and animal life

Bichat’s own language is organic and relative; but we prefer, for obvious reasons, the less technical, more readily intelligible language.

§ II.—CHAPTER VIII.

TYPICAL FORMS DIVINE WISDOM.

THE general conception of order with which we set out, has in the few last chapters become mixed up with the more special conception of design. The teleological aspect of organic phenomena is that which most readily fixes the attention of the Natural Theologian, as it is that which has hitherto proved the most successful key of discovery in prosecuting their study. Under the influence of the illustrious Cuvier, this teleological view had assumed such a prominence in physiology as almost to obscure the more general view of a unity of plan or order. Of late, however, and especially through the profound and laborious researches of Professor Owen, this latter view has begun to claim renewed interest. In his two works—“On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton,” and “On the Nature of Limbs”—he has especially shown its value and fruitfulness as a guiding principle of investigation in comparative anatomy; and the same principle has, in truth, been gaining ground in the whole region of physiology, as probably furnishing, here no less than in other departments, the deepest and most pervading key of explanation. It is felt now, at length, after the extravagance of polemic on either side has passed away, that there is no necessary contradiction between the more special and the more comprehensive and yet grander doctrine.

We have already seen the numerical relation which subsists between the different parts of plants. In the great division of the vegetable kingdom, 3 is found to be the pervading or typical number of the monocotyledonous plants, and 5 the pervading or typical number of the dicotyledonous. This numerical unity is found, on closer examination, to be merely a single indication of the typical unity which, throughout the whole range of the vegetable kingdom, underlies its infinite variety. Beneath all this variety, apparently and in reality so boundless, there emerges to the critical gaze an identity of form of the most interesting and wonderful character.

The science which treats of this pervading feature of the organic kingdom has been termed Morphology,

In so far as we know the term, morphology was first made use of in application to anatomy in the year 1819, by Burduch, in his treatise Über die Aufgabe der Morphologie. Leipzig: 1819.

§ II.—CHAPTER IX.

MENTAL ORDER.

IN advancing to this farther and higher branch of our illustrative evidence, we do not consider it necessary to enter into any formal proof of mind as a substance essentially distinct from matter. That it is so distinct has been assumed in the whole course of our preliminary reasoning, and quite warrantably so. For, to say the least, mind is as much entitled, apart from proof, to be held a distinct reality as matter. Nay, of the two, there cannot be any doubt to the genuine thinker which is the real, primary, and constitutive element of knowledge: and for the materialist, therefore, to demand a proof of the separate existence of mind, and for the philosopher or theologian to grant him the validity of this demand, is simply among the absurdities which have sprung out of the degradation both of philosophy and theology.

The assumption that mind is nothing else than a material function, and that the science of mind is only the highest range of the general science of physiology, is one among the many specimens of the thoroughly unphilosophic procedure which characterises Positivism. The whole tone and reasoning of M. Comte on this subject (Philosophic Positive, tome ii. p. 766 et seq.) are in fact ignorantly arrogant to such a degree as to need no refutation. His followers in this country have expressly repudiated his confusion of psychology with physiology as merely one of its branches. Vide Mr MILL’S Logic, vol. ii. p. 422-423, and Mr LEWES’ Exposition of Positivism, p. 212.

If any one desires to see the degraded and unintelligible substitute which, under the name of “a New Cerebral Theory,” M. Comte would give us, in place of our mental philosophy, let him consult the statement of this theory, in the Politique Positive, or in the concluding section of the first part of Mr Lewes’ volume.

§ II.—CHAPTER X.

SENSATION—DIVINE GOODNESS.

THE phenomena of sensation form in all cases the lowest range of mental life, while in many of the inferior races this life reaches no farther. There are some, indeed, to whom it may seem strange to speak of mind as expressed in mere sensation. But we have no other name by which to denote that higher element or presence beyond mere organic life, which sense, even in its lowest stages, implies. That which feels is everywhere something more than that which merely lives. Sense is only such in virtue of a sentient subject, which we can only conceive intelligibly, even in the brute creation, as the dim, crude, and frequently unawakened presence of mind. It is necessary, at the same time, that we carefully preserve the distinction of mind, as possessed by man, in its fully-expressed reality of reason. Any doubt on this point would leave our argument, or indeed any theistic argument, in a somewhat hopeless state of confusion and uncertainty.

With this explanation, a mental presence is to be held as everywhere manifested in sensation. With every sensitive act there is ever, according to Sir William Hamilton,

Vide Appendix to Reid’s Works, p. 878.

Sensations admit of an obvious classification in relation to the different organs on which they depend. In man they are commonly reckoned in a five-fold series, as the sensations of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. It is, nevertheless, now almost universally admitted that this classification is not complete. Dr T. Brown contended for a sixth sense, under the name of the muscular sense, to which he traced various feelings generally ascribed to touch; and it cannot be doubted that there is a separate range of sensations of which our muscular frame is the appropriate organ. As this frame is tense or relaxed, as it moves rhythmically or convulsively (in shuddering, for example), or again, as it is vigorous or exhausted, it gives forth various impressions which enter into the sensory system, and form a large share of our daily sensational experience. In the very same manner the different affections flowing from the constant processes of vegetative life—those, for example, arising from a state of healthiness or disease, vigour or debility—and other affections still less defined, may very well claim to be ranked as distinct orders of sensations. It cannot be doubted that the feelings connected with such states of the bodily organisation, however diffused, make a large portion of the common consciousness, and of the happiness or misery of our common mental existence. It is not necessary for our purpose, however, to determine such matters of purely psychological classification.

Of the five more specially recognised senses, taste and smell are rightly grouped by themselves; and again, hearing and sight stand in a similar group. Touch stands by itself, as in some respects the most important and necessary of all our senses.

Taste and smell are intimately allied: they both convey impressions derived from the chemical qualities of bodies, the one in the fluid (substances tasted must be either naturally fluid, or must be dissolved by the saliva), the other in the gaseous state. They are chiefly instrumental as subserving the more physical wants of existence; and smell, from its subservience in this point of view, is well known to reach a much more intense and powerful development in some of the lower animals than in man.

The senses of sight and hearing are more intellectual in their character and relations than the former. They carry the mind more outward, fixing it more upon the object awakening its regard. The former, as has been often pointed out, is more immediately related to the cognitive, the latter to the emotional powers, a relation which is thus curiously contrasted in a passage quoted by Mr Morell from Erdmann’s Psychologische Briefe. “The one,” says Erdman, “is the clearest, the other is the deepest of the senses. The same contrast shows itself in the objects by which these organs are severally affected. In the former case the object shows its outward surface, as it exists unmoved in space; in the latter case it betrays, by means of the tone it gives forth, what exists within and under the surface. It is not the form and colour of an object which tells what it is, but its sound. For that reason the sight of a thing does not penetrate so much to the heart, it only tells us what is its appearance. On the other hand, the tone moves us; it tells us how the thing or the person stands to the heart itself. On that account we can easily explain the phenomena so often observed, that deafness is hard and distrustful, while blindness is mild and confiding.”

Psychology, pp. 113, 114.

The sense of touch is peculiar in its range and the diversity of its applications. This extent and variety of operation constitute its importance and rank in comparison with the other senses; for, in point of mere intellectual dignity and refinement, it must certainly be classed below the sense of vision. It is the same characteristic which has led to that subdivision of its functions to which Dr T. Brown led the way, many separating with him the more objective phenomena of the sense, through which we are supposed to come to a clear knowledge of the primary qualities of matter—extension, solidity, hardness, &c.—from the more subjective phenomena, or those of feeling, strictly so called; and others ranging in a further separate class the sensations of temperature, usually considered to form merely a variety of those of touch.

§ II.—CHAPTER XI.

INSTINCT.

BEFORE passing onward in our inductive psychological survey, we are met by a question of special theistic interest, in regard to the display of mind in certain of the lower animals. We do not here, indeed, propose to meddle with the general question of animal mind, which presents so many apparently insuperable difficulties; but that peculiar manifestation of intelligence, in many of the lower creation, which has received the name of “Instinct,” and which has been supposed to bear with a very conclusive effect upon our subject, demands from us a passing notice.

The cell-making of the bee, and the nest-building of the bird, are familiar examples of instinct. The mental power, displayed by the animal in these operations, appears to be wholly singular. In ordinary cases, mind works only according to instruction and experience: it is dependent on education, and increases with exercise. In these and other similar cases it operates, in the language of Paley, “prior to experience, and independent of instruction.” Nor is this all. The definition of Paley—broadly as it demarcates the mode of instinct from that of mind in the ordinary sense—is considered by Lord Brougham to fail in expressing the most essential element of distinction between the two; viz., the conscious intention or foresight which is ever present in the one case in any effort of higher constructiveness, but which, in many cases of instinct, it seems wholly impossible to conceive present. The bee or the bird, for example, not only works towards the most beautiful results—builds the one its cell, and the other its nest—with a skill and precision which human effort only approaches at a distance,—neither of them having ever seen a cell or a nest before, or having ever previously tried to make one; but, in many cases, there seems also, as the most wonderful fact of all, the certain absence of any foresight of the end towards which all this animal ingenuity is expended. In the case of the bee, as his lordship has well put it in his discussion with Lord Althorpe, in the first of his dialogues, “I see her doing certain things which are manifestly to produce an effect she can know nothing about—or example, making a cell, and furnishing it with carpets and with liquid, fit to hold and to cherish safely a tender grub, and knowing nothing, of course, about grubs, or that any grub is ever to come, or that any such use, perhaps any use at all, is ever to be made of the work she is about. Indeed, I see another insect—the solitary wasp—bring a given number of small grubs, and deposit them in a hole which she has made over her egg, just grubs enough to maintain the worm that egg will produce when hatched—and yet this wasp never saw an egg produce a worm—nor ever saw a worm—nay, is to be dead long before the worm can be in existence; and, moreover, she never has in any way tasted or used these grubs, or used the hole she made, except for the prospective benefit of the unknown worm she is never to see. In all these cases, then, the animal works positively without knowledge, and in the dark. She also works without designing anything, and yet she works to a certain defined and important purpose.”

Dialogues on Instinct, pp. 25, 26.

It is, of course, impossible to pronounce so decidedly as to the absence of design, on the part of the animal, towards the end for which she is working, as it is to pronounce regarding her want of instruction. We have no means of absolutely determining the relation of the animal’s consciousness to her work; whereas it is easy to ascertain, and is beyond all dispute, that she has never learned her art from others. She is as perfect at it at the first as at the last; and every bee, and every succeeding race of bees, works exactly in the same manner, and with the same exact degree of perfection—all which plainly declares the endowment to be of a specific character, distinct from ordinary intelligence. There is, however, as in the cases described, and certain others, the strongest evidence for concluding in the animal ignorance of intention towards the special end for which she works. If we did the same things, we know we should be planning in ignorance. And even those who have endeavoured most earnestly to reduce the operations of instinct to the category of ordinary intelligence, have been found to acknowledge such an absence of foresight in the animal in cases where the most refined and difficult end is yet subserved.

CHAMBERS’S Papers for the People, No. 182, p. 29.

It has been a favourite attempt, it is true, of certain naturalists to explain such examples of animal skill by the aid of simple sensations. The bee and the bird are supposed to proceed in their work under the guidance of certain corporeal feelings, which only reach their gratification in its accomplishment. But, granting this, which is very probable, it seems to go but a little way towards an explanation; for, while such sensations may account for the animal’s impulse toward her work, and even her continuance in it, they can never surely account for her ability to perform it. They may prompt it, but it is inconceivable that they can execute it; and we find, accordingly, that the very writers who would reduce the whole process to a series of sensations, many of them purely hypothetical, are yet, in the very nature of the case, obliged to call in a “constructive head” and a “stroke of genius “to complete the work. No one, indeed, could desire a better exposure of the futility of all such attempts to account for instinct on the mere ground of sensation, than that which is furnished by the very character of these attempts, as described by the writers in question. The impression which they must make on every mind, which is less eager to support an hypothesis than to ascertain the truth, is in the highest degree unsatisfactory. The mystery, as explained, is only tenfold more mysterious, while the explanation itself is incumbered by an amount of hypothesis which renders it wholly valueless.

Vide Papers for the People, No 182, pp. 30, 31,—which we mention because of the eminent ability that marks it, entirely inconclusive as we conceive its reasoning to be.

§ II.—CHAPTER XII.

COGNITIVE STRUCTURE IN MAN.

IN entering upon the subject of this chapter, it is perhaps especially necessary for us to disclaim any pretension of treating the subject by itself. Here, as throughout in these chapters, our object is only to exhibit the bearing of the facts with which we deal upon the illustration of the Divine perfections. To a scientific investigation of the facts by themselves it would be wholly absurd in us to pretend. We take them, for the most part, simply as they are presented to us by the labours of others, who have cultivated the respective sciences to which they relate. It is enough for us that they are recognised as facts, although in some cases they may admit of a higher scientific explanation than that which we give of them. Our only concern is to set forth their theistic meaning, neither mistaking, nor, if possible, exaggerating aught.

In regard to the facts treated of in this and the succeeding chapter, we can scarcely hope to be even so far successful. The pregnant interest of the facts, in our point of view, irresistibly prompted a survey of them; yet their subtlety, and the dire polemic which everywhere encompasses them, render such a mere summary survey as was at all compatible with our purpose peculiarly difficult. This, however, is to be kept in mind, that even where our statement and explanation of the fact may not be accepted, the theistic conclusion which we draw will, for the most part, remain untouched.

There is no fact more difficult than that which meets us on the threshold of the sphere of cognition, and constitutes its condition. Perception is, in truth, the eternal problem of philosophy, from the special solution of which systems take their divergent course after an obvious and consistent manner, passing on the one extreme to materialism, on the other to idealism.

Sensation in its lowest forms we formerly found to give, as its essential condition, a sentient self or subjective. Perception, in every case, gives not only a self, but also in correlation a not-self, an objective. The former draws and contains the field of apprehension within, the latter shuts it out from the sphere of self; no contrast or distinction being given in the former, distinction and contrast (apprehension of relation) being the characteristic of the latter.

Sir W. HAMILTON’S Appendix to Reid’s Works, p. 880.

§ II.—CHAPTER XIII.

EMOTIVE STRUCTURE IN MAN.

WE pass finally, in this section of evidence, to a brief consideration of the emotive sphere of our nature, which is very rich in results for our purpose. It is its emotional capacity which imparts to human life all its peculiar and ever-freshening interest. It may be possible to conceive a being made capable of intellectual without emotional activity. “We might, perhaps,” says Dr Thomas Brown, “have been so constituted with respect to our intellectual states of mind, as to have had all the varieties of these, our remembrances, judgments, and creations of fancy, without one emotion. But without the emotions which accompany them, of how little value would the mere intellectual functions have been! It is to our vivid feelings of this class we must look for those tender regards which make our remembrances sacred—for that love of truth and glory and mankind, without which, to animate and reward us in our discovery and diffusion of knowledge, the continued exercise of judgment would be a fatigue rather than a satisfaction; and for all that delightful wonder which we feel, when we contemplate the admirable creations of fancy, or the still more admirable beauties of their unfading model—that model which is ever before us, and the imitation of which, as it has been truly said, is the only imitation that is itself originality. By our other mental functions we are mere spectators of the machinery of the universe, living and inanimate; by our emotions we are admirers of nature, lovers of men, adorers of God. The earth, without them, would be only a field of colours, inhabited by beings who may contribute, indeed, more permanently to our means of physical comfort than any one of the inanimate forms which we behold; but who, beyond the moment in which they are capable of affecting us with pain or pleasure, would be only like the other forms and colours which would meet us wherever we turned our weary and restless eye; and God himself, the source of all good, and the object of all worship, would be only the Being by whom the world was made.”

BROWN’S Lectures, tenth edit., p. 339.

The truth is, that while it may be possible for us to imagine intellectual life apart from emotional, we cannot imagine any development of the one without the other; for the advancement of knowledge and of civilisation, if the direct product of our intellectual, is no less truly the indirect product of our emotional nature, the one being called into activity all along its course only by the other. All the progressive springs of humanity take their rise in our emotional being. In virtue of it alone do we own the spur of a happiness which is never satisfied, and of a glory which is still distant. In the very fact, therefore, of our combined emotive and cognitive activity, we are bound to recognise the wisdom and goodness of the Creator. How blank and unbeneficent would life have been as a mere round of passionless intellectuality! Where would have been all that now makes its charm, and renders it, amid the gathering darkness of death, still dear? Where would have been all the most exquisite products of literature and of art, without passion to portray or interest to kindle? And we must surely, then, acknowledge the beneficence of the Hand which has clothed life with all those soft and tender attributes—that garment of ever-varying emotion which makes it truly life. Here, indeed, we shall find the most abundant traces of the Divine goodness.

We do not attempt any systematic analysis, far less any exhaustive classification, of the emotions. Here, as everywhere, our purpose only requires, and our space can only afford, a general glance at the phenomena which crowd upon us.

Among the lowest and most universal group of emotions seem to be those which serve to guard, and, so to speak, intrench life, of which Alarm on the negative side, and Anger

We are sensible that these very names already suggest an inference unfavourable to the benevolence of the Creator. But here, as before, we must ask a postponement of judgment as to the hostile suggestions which everywhere necessarily arise with the very first statement of the evidence for the Divine goodness.

§ III.—CHAPTER I.

MORAL INTUITIVE EVIDENCE.

THE theistic evidence universally runs back into a region of First Truths or Principles. It rests only on a definite spiritual philosophy, as we have seen in the outset. It remains to be further seen how it only attains to its highest force and significance in the same region. An attentive examination of certain features of our spiritual life will be found to yield a set of theistic elements of a peculiarly direct and important kind, which are necessary to complete our evidence, and to carry upwards the conceptions of power, wisdom, and goodness, already unfolded, into the full conception of God.

We deem it unnecessary to enter into any question as to the separate force and value of this department of evidence. All such questions are, according to our view, quite irrelevant. For the genuine apprehension of the theistic evidence is not that of a series of separate and independent proofs, but that of a great scheme of argument presenting itself under a variety of aspects. All special instances of design derive their conclusive force from certain principles; and these principles again must be seen in practical manifestation, in order to bring before us a lively and clear impression of the Divine existence and attributes.

In assigning a distinctive name to this section, we do not mean, therefore, to detach it from our inductive scheme of evidence. We mean simply to point out the distinctive range of inquiry before us, which is sufficiently marked off from that in which we have been engaged. We are no longer merely to be concerned with facts from which we are warranted to infer Divine wisdom and goodness, but with facts which, in a peculiar sense, reveal to us God, which bring God before us intuitively, rather than in the ordinary inductive way. We enter among those prime elements of our spiritual constitution which are the appropriate organs of the theistic conception. This conception, in its radical form of cause, took its rise in this region, and here no less is it found to complete itself.

This may serve to explain the views of some of our highest thinkers as to the supposed conclusive force of the moral, in comparison with all other evidence for the being of a God. Kant, after submitting to a destructive criticism all the other modes of theistic evidence, as separately apprehended in his day, made the existence of God a postulate of our moral being; and Sir W. Hamilton has expressly said that “the only valid arguments for the existence of a God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man’s moral nature.”

Philosophical Discussions, p. 595.

§ III.—CHAPTER II.

FREEDOM—DIVINE PERSONALITY.

THE fact which demands our consideration in this chapter is of the utmost importance, not only in respect of the theistic meaning which still remains to be drawn from it, but as constituting, moreover, the real foundation of our whole evidence. For already, in our preliminary chapters, its reality was presupposed, and the weight of our initiative conclusion made to rest upon it. It is, therefore, eminently the theistic fact round which, as their rational nucleus, all the others gather.

The exact character of the fact is to be carefully kept in view. It is of this sort: Is man’s rational being essentially distinct from nature? Does it constitute a source of activity, in a sense altogether unique and contradistinguished from any other movements we perceive in nature? While the latter, through all its range, is a mere series of sequences, of arrangements, and re-arrangements, in the same unbroken flow, is there in man something wholly different, which cannot be resolved into any mere play of sequences, but constitutes a source of power? Is there, in short, a soul in man? This seems to us the last and simplest reduction of the question. According to the affirmative view of this question, mind, in its full meaning, is not only something specifically different in its manifestations from matter, but something in its root and character essentially contradistinguished from matter. In the various forms, indeed, in which it expresses itself, or becomes phenomenal, it obeys the same law of sequences which obtains among all other phenomena; but in its spring and source it wholly evades this merely natural law, and refuses to be bound by it. It is only in this apprehension of mind that we found that fact of efficiency with which we set out, and without which our argument has no rational basis whereon to rest.

This fact of a free rational activity, or soul in man, is implied in every form of spiritual philosophy, and appears to constitute the essential basis of all theology. It has, however, beyond doubt, been greatly obscured by certain views which have long held sway, both in philosophy and in theology. These views have been all the more powerful that they express so far an undoubted truth, and have been supposed to bear with a peculiar effect upon the confirmation of certain Christian doctrines. In so far as they can be held consistently with our fundamental position—and we cannot imagine any Christian necessitarian denying that position—we have, of course, no controversy with such views. It must at the same time be observed, and deserves to be carefully considered in such a discussion as the present, that whatever consistency there may be between a true doctrine of necessity, and that assertion of a free rational activity in man which is the basis of our argument, and however that doctrine may be authorised by great names, it is yet in no sense a Christian doctrine; and that those truths of Scripture, in whose defence it has been supposed to be triumphantly wielded, are wholly independent of any logical strength thence derived, as they had, in fact, assumed their place in the great scheme of Protestant belief long before any of those formal enunciations of the doctrine of necessity, to which so much weight has been attributed.

The best way of clearing up the bearing of such views upon our position will be by a brief re-statement and examination of it. We shall approach it from facts formerly reached. Already, in the mere presence of sentient and even organic life, we found, in some sense, a centre of action. Every such existence develops itself from within. But this development is, in such cases, bound to an immutable necessity of nature. It is throughout physically conditioned. The evolution of self is, on this lower platform of life, a mere determination of natural causes. The question before us is one which concerns the character of this self-evolution in man. Is it in him nothing more than it is in the lower animals—the mere play of nature, “the mere result of physical succession;” or is it something wholly peculiar, and, if not independent of nature, yet by no means subject to it? Do we find, in short, within us not merely a power of action, under the impulse of physical causes, but a power of action which owns no law ab extra, but is what we call free? That we have some such power of free action, not merely a feeling of self, which would seem to be the condition of all mental existence, but a feeling of what has been called self-determination or choice, cannot admit of dispute. Every one must allow that he has such a power of doing what he will. All language and all social practice imply so much.

But this, it is said, is little to the point: for while it is admitted that man seems to act freely—nay, that, in a certain sense, he does so act—it is nevertheless true that his action always follows the strongest motive, just as effect follows cause. Inasmuch as he cannot act without motive, the motive felt by him to be the strongest at the time, and under which he does act, is the cause of his action. His rational activity analysed is found to be everywhere encompassed by a subtle atmosphere of motives strictly and rigorously conditioning it. All the particular facts of his mental life are thus only links in a great chain of necessity, although he may not feel them to be so. The law of cause and effect obtains among them, and binds them all, no less surely than it is found to regulate and control all other facts. In these views there is an amount of truth which none now dispute, however they may object to the language in which it is sometimes expressed. It is undeniable that man’s intellectual and moral being, in all its most subtle and complex manifestations, shows the same order that we everywhere discover in nature. It was our special aim, in previous chapters, to expose, in some degree, this order. If this, therefore, be all that is anywhere meant by the doctrine of necessity, that doctrine must be held as expressive of an important truth. But something far more than this is maintained by most necessitarians, and seems to be logically implied in the doctrine. They mean not only to assert that man’s rational activity displays itself under the same law of cause and effect as the course of nature does, but that there is really nothing more in it than this display. Volition goes forth under motive; motive, again, is dependent on organisation, or at least on some external cause; and this is all. The whole question plainly lies in this higher region. What constitutes motive? What is the spring of the order which is universally admitted to obtain among the facts of man’s spiritual being, no less than among all other facts? Is that spring in nature, and bound to its immutable sequences? or is it deep in the central being of the man himself, and essentially separated from nature? The materialistic necessitarian holds as his cardinal principle the former of these views. He knows nothing beyond the mere series of phenomena which collectively he may call Mind. Any spiritual unit or soul beneath the multiplicity, and therein expressing itself, while yet essentially distinguished from it, has no place in his system; and quite consistently so. The theological necessitarian of course shrinks from this conclusion, but his language has not unfrequently been such as to bear it out. Carrying up with an iron hand the phenomenal law of cause and effect into the region of spiritual life, he may have seemed to gain a temporary triumph over an adversary; but he has done so too often at the risk of total peril to his faith, and to the very ground and condition of all religion.

The true advocate of liberty, on the other hand, simply maintains that in the last resource the mind or soul is unconditioned by any natural cause. The self-conscious reason, or ego, is incompressible by the law of phenomena. It only is, and lives in opposition to that law. The spring of the soul’s activity is ever within the soul. It displays itself, no doubt, serially, in regular obedience to the strongest motive; but the strength of the motive comes from within, from the soul’s own preference; otherwise it would be truly no motive, but would for ever remain a mere inducement or solicitation presenting itself to the mind. It is always the mind’s own act that changes a mere inducement into a motive, and leads to action. According to the well-known pithy saying of Coleridge, “it is not the motive makes the man, but the man the motive.”

The liberty thus defined, it may deserve to be remarked, is entirely different from the old imagination of a liberty of indifference. This latter represented the mind, as it were, in equilibrio, till it put forth the power of choice among the motives bearing upon it. It placed the soul, as it were, on one side, and motives on the other, and pretended to give an explanation of the mode of action between the two. The true theory of liberty makes no such pretensions; it knows nothing of the soul save as active. An abstract potentiality, which of its own sovereignty keeps itself apart from motives, or yields to them at pleasure, is in no respect recognised by it. It simply contends, that in every case of actual human conduct the motive power is from within the soul itself, and not in any respect physically conditioned. It simply says that man is free to act, but it does not pretend for a moment to explain the mode of his freedom. This it so little does that it acknowledges the fact of human freedom to be in its very character inexplicable.

This character of mystery—of irresolvability, under the great inductive law of cause and effect—comprises, in truth, all that can be argumentatively said against the doctrine of liberty. The fact will not come within the conditions of our logical faculty, and must therefore be repelled. But this is a thoroughly vicious mode of argument: for, by the very supposition, the fact transcends these conditions; and to reject it on this account is simply to beg the whole question. If this fact be at all, it is primary and constitutive, and therefore not to be reasoned to, but from. It stands at the head of our rational nature as its source. And as such a source—as the inherent activity whence all our mental modes are born—the fountain whence they flow—the me, of which they are the varied manifestations—it defies the application of that inductive law under which they arise, and for the very reason that it is what it is—not any one of these modes, but the root of them all—not any of the manifold sides of consciousness, but the unity in which all its sides centre. In this view it is not only not wonderful that we cannot understand freedom, but the fact is such in its very idea that it is impossible we ever can understand it, transcending as it necessarily does that logical power of which it is the condition. Thus apprehended in its primitive distinction, it leaves us no alternative but to abide by it in its necessary incomprehensibility. It is there—we are bound to recognise it. But we have no claim to comprehend it, for (as logicians) we do not contain it—it contains us. Whatever we are in our mental and practical character is just the expression of this mysterious personality, to which all our activity leads back, and from which it all flows.

It is as the irresistible testimony of consciousness that this fact forces acceptance. It attests its reality within us, and we cannot get quit of it under whatever ingenuity of explanation. On this ground the advocate of liberty has an advantage which is wholly indisputable; for that we feel ourselves to be free, none can truly deny. This feeling—our deepest and most ineradicable consciousness—the doctrine of necessity cannot accept as a fact; or, if it does, we have no dispute with it; only we do not see how it can consistently maintain itself if it does. For the feeling cannot represent a reality, and yet man’s spiritual, no less than his material being, be held as naturally determined. In such a case the feeling can only be an illusion, and man a bondman, wholly a creature of nature, howsoever he may seem every moment to create a circle of free activity around him. But if consciousness be thus held false, man is cast adrift on an ocean of utter uncertainty. Truth becomes for him a mere dream, if the voice within him be held incompetent to give it valid utterance.

The deliverance of consciousness is, on the contrary, held by the advocate of freedom to be at once decisive and ultimate on the point. It is not, in his view, any mere dim experience which disappears under analysis, but a truth which makes itself good under whatever logical assaults. The alternative is simply one of fact. The human consciousness either tells the truth absolutely, unheeding how it may clash with some other truth in the dim-lighted chamber of the logical understanding, or it must be admitted to be false. No saving clauses of ingenious explanation will avail. Man is either free really, or he is not free. There is in him a centre of action wholly peculiar, a naturally undetermined source of activity, otherwise his deepest experience belies itself, and his moral nature is a devout imagination. There is nothing but the recognition of such a free agency in man, however mysterious and unaccountable, that can preserve to him faith in himself, or the perilous dignity of responsibility among the creatures of earth. If he has not in a true sense such a power of action springing from within his own spiritual being, his consciousness deceives him, and he is and can be nothing else than a mere irresponsible link in the chain of phenomena.

As the only rational means of escape from such a conclusion, consciousness must be held in its attestation of freedom to express a reality, to declare a truth, admitting of no exception, however ingeniously represented. Man must be recognised as free in a sense quite peculiar, separating him from all other earthly creatures. While owning, in the actual course of his thought and volition, the great phenomenal law of cause and effect, there must be admitted to be in him at the same time a mysterious centre of personality—nothing else than the soul, which withdraws itself from this law, and asserts itself against it.

What, then, is the bearing of this fact on our subject? As we previously said, it is the most vital for our purpose in our whole range of inquiry; but just corresponding with its peculiar depth and importance is the difficulty of fully seizing and expressing its significance. We have already seen in what respect it lies at the root of our inductive evidence as the source of our idea of cause. The strange relation of affinity and yet conflict which thus emerges between the principles of personality and causality were an interesting subject of consideration, but cannot occupy us here.

See Note at the end of the chapter.

So far is this from being the case, that we here approach the very peculiarity of the theistic meaning which this prime fact yields us; for, in the very act of expressing itself, it is found to be its essential characteristic, at the same time, to express Another. It only realises itself in Another. The more we sink back into the depths of consciousness, and the more vivid force and reality with which we seize our personal being, as something unconditioned by nature, and rising above it, the more directly and immediately do we at the same time apprehend ourselves as relative and dependent. The more we become self-conscious, the more do we feel, at the same time, that the ground of our existence is not in ourselves, but in Another and a Higher. Our personality, in asserting itself to be distinct from nature, yet with equal force asserts itself to be derived, or, in other language, to take its rise in a Principle above nature. The human self, in a word, irresistibly suggests a divine Self; the limited cause, an absolutely original and unlimited Cause.

It is true that we thus, in the last analysis, bring into special prominence the logical incomprehensibility which meets us in the testimony of consciousness. We realise ourselves as free, and yet dependent. Nay, in our very freedom we at the same time find our dependency. The more we sink into ourselves, the more do we feel ourselves to rest on a Higher. Just as we accept the testimony of consciousness in giving us liberty—the soul’s efficiency for its own acts—so do we accept its testimony in giving a relation to this efficiency in the All-efficient. Let it be that we cannot construe to ourselves this relation intelligibly—cannot compass it in thought—this is no valid ground for rejecting either term of it. We can only do so by trampling upon consciousness, and exposing ourselves to the whole peril of scepticism. The facts must be accepted as given, however impossible it may be for us to join them logically together; and for this obvious reason, which, if it does not give satisfaction, ought yet to give resignation, that our mere capacity of thought cannot, in the nature of the case, be the measure of truth here nor anywhere. Great master in its own sphere (in the evolution and determination of all the forms of science), it must yet be content to be the minister of reality.

§ III.—CHAPTER III.

CONSCIENCE DIVINE RIGHTEOUSNESS.

AS freedom is the fundamental condition of our moral being, so conscience is its guide and regulator. The soul, while self-acting, is at the same time spiritually controlled. It is then, indeed, most itself, most truly free, when most fully informed and controlled by conscience.

As in the case of every other element of man’s spiritual being, the special character of conscience has been greatly disputed. Philosophy has found here even a favourite field of struggle. Among all our most earnest thinkers, however, there may be said to be at length something like unanimity in regarding conscience as a primitive and distinct fact or faculty. The attempts which have been made to resolve it into some simpler element of our mental constitution have merely served to prove the intimate alliance between conscience and our other mental powers, and their necessary influence upon its education and development. But in no case have they sufficed fully to explain its origin. The most skilful analysis of the association of ideas, or of our common intellectual judgments, into both of which it has been sought to be explained, still leaves a residuary element unaccounted for, which, whatever name we give to it, is nothing else than the germ which expands into the full moral reality which we mean by conscience.

In its most general application it may be defined as that element of our being by which we become conscious of duty. It introduces man into a set of relations bearing to him the peculiar character of obligation, which, however little he may be able to analyse it, is felt by him in the strongest manner. Viewed as a mental power, its chief peculiarity accordingly consists in the position which it thus assumes amongst our other powers. It not only perceives, but commands; not only points the way, but orders to walk in it.

Since the profound and luminous expositions of Butler, in his Sermons on Human Nature, the attention of moralists has been prominently fixed on this authoritative aspect of conscience. Its special function has been recognised as that of a guide and governor. It is impossible, as Butler has pointed out, to dissociate from it the notion of direction and superintendency. “This is a constituent part of the idea—that is, of the faculty itself; and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it.” “This faculty,” he adds, “was placed within us to be our proper governor; to direct and regulate all under principles, passions, and motives of action. This is its right and office. Thus sacred is its authority. And how often soever men violate and rebelliously refuse to submit to it, for supposed interest which they cannot otherwise obtain, or for the sake of passion which they cannot otherwise gratify, this makes no alteration as to the natural right and office of conscience.” Even when its judgments are set aside, or trampled under foot, by the perverse force of the will, conscience, as Butler here truly indicates, does not, rightly speaking, lose its authority. It holds the transgressor in its grasp, and can bring him trembling before its judgment-seat, even when he would seem to have broken loose from all its restraints, and completely overborne its power. It asserts its sovereignty with a fearful reality, even although its sceptre has been broken, and its throne desecrated. Aloft itself, even among the ruins of its kingdom, it arraigns the stoutest rebel, and often holds in cowering bondage the most reckless criminal. “Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would,” in Butler’s expressive language, “absolutely govern the world.”

It is especially this supreme and legislative aspect of conscience which gives it significance for the natural theologian. As a simple fact of creation it yields, undoubtedly, like every other fact, its appropriate testimony to the Creator; but here, in its authoritative import, is rightly recognised a peculiar and important element of theistic evidence. For the question immediately arises, whence this authority of conscience? Does not the very fact of a law within us directly testify to a Lawgiver without and above us? Does not the one fact, in its very nature, involve the other? The argument seems irresistible. The sense of government in every heart can only proceed from a living governor, who placed it there. The moral power within us, therefore, gives, as its immediate inference, a Divine Power above us.

Every one will recognise in our statement a form of the theistic argument which, expounded by the zealous eloquence of Dr Chalmers, has passed into familiar currency in our natural theology. “The felt presence of a judge within the breast,” he says, “powerfully and immediately suggests the notion of a Supreme Judge and Sovereign who placed it there. Upon this question the mind does not stop short at mere abstraction, but, passing at once from the abstract to the concrete, from the law of the heart it makes the rapid inference of a Lawgiver. The sense of a governing principle within, begets in all men the sentiment of a living Governor without and above them, and it does so with all the speed of an instantaneous feeling; yet it is not an impression—it is an inference notwithstanding, and as much so as any inference from that which is seen to that which is unseen. There is, in the first instance, cognisance taken of a fact, if not by the outward eye, yet, as good, by the eye of consciousness, which has been termed the faculty of internal observation. And the consequent belief of a God, instead of being an instinctive sense of the Divinity, is the fruit of an inference grounded on that fact. There is instant transition made, from the sense of a monitor within to the faith of a living Sovereign above; and this argument, described by all, but with such speed as almost to warrant the expression of its being felt by all, may be regarded, notwithstanding the force and fertility of other considerations, as the great prop of natural religion among men.”

Natural Theology, vol. i. p. 331-332.

It is a question of little moment for the substantial conclusion involved—which is good in either case—whether the act by which it is reached be considered, with Dr Chalmers, really inductive, or rather intuitive. This obviously depends upon the further question as to what are regarded to be the special constituents of conscience. If we recognise it, with Butler, according to the view already set forth, to be itself a delegated power, and not merely the perception or revelation of a power, we obviously leave room for an inductive step or inference. We have in this view, as the immediate fact of consciousness, a sense of authority which, as we cannot conceive it to be self-constituted, we necessarily refer to a supreme or divine Source. But if, according to the more simple view, and what would seem to be the direct import of the name conscience, we consider it as not in any way containing in itself the power with which it rules us, but as directly revealing to us that power in another, then we leave no room for induction. We have, in the very fact of conscience, the intuition of the Divine will, just as we have in the fact of self-existence the intuition of the Divine existence. As we cannot realise our own being without at the same time realising another and a higher Being, so we cannot become conscious of duty, without at the same time realising another and a higher Will. The moral law is to us nothing more than the revelation of this higher or divine Will in the soul. We do not, therefore, need to rise from it to God, for it is already the voice of God within us. We are carried out of ourselves, so to speak, in the simple reality of conscience. The authority which, in conscience, speaks to us is not merely something from which we may infer a divine Power, but is already the direct expression of that power.

This, upon reflection, we feel convinced, is the more just and penetrating view of the subject. Preserving all the truth of Butler’s view, in even a higher form than he presented it, it gives, in a psychological respect, a more discriminating and consistent interpretation of conscience, than when it is regarded as in itself both a perceptive and imperative faculty. Viewed simply as the organ of a higher power, its psychological dignity is at once vindicated, and its possible abuse readily understood. For let the organ be untrained or neglected, and its intuition will be dim and obscure, or even absolutely perverted. But let it be appropriately disciplined, and its intuition will rise into clearness and truth. We do not see, in any case, how conscience can ever be adequately explained, without bringing into prominence the theological meaning which it so essentially expresses. Apart from God it would be an inexplicable riddle: held as revealing God, it becomes beautifully intelligible. It is the light within whereby we perceive at once the Hand that guides us, and, although more dimly, the destination that awaits us.

We have not yet, however, exhausted the theistic significance of conscience. It is not merely to the fact of a divine Power that it testifies, but eminently to the character of that power. The moral law, which it reveals, is not simply the expression of a supreme Will, but of a Will which is essentially good and righteous. It is this, in truth, which gives all its force to conscience. It is by the good alone that it governs. It is the law of goodness which asserts itself in the human heart, under whatever violation, and holds itself a sovereign, even when its kingdom has been invaded and laid waste. To this idea of a Good above man, claiming his obedience, we alone owe the very conception of duty. It is this which gives all its peculiar sacredness and beauty to human life. Apart from it man would merely be as the brutes around him, with no nobleness of piety in his heart, and no long-suffering love mingling its purifying fires in his lot. In conscience, therefore, we must recognise a peculiar testimony to the divine goodness. As the organ of duty, it is in fact specifically the revelation of the Supreme Good. It brings man not only into converse with Goodness, but relates him to it, as the power which binds him in his daily life, and would guide him to daily happiness.

But the divine Goodness, to which conscience testifies, is at the same time divine Righteousness. This is a further very significant and wholly peculiar element of theistic evidence disclosed in conscience. The Supreme Good interprets itself here as the Supreme Right. This idea of Right is one which, hitherto, we could not possibly have encountered; for it only finds an application in the region of free moral life, where it emerges correlatively with duty. It is the idea in which alone duty finds its complement, and so becomes the sacred bond which holds our moral being in harmony. The element or attribute of righteousness is one, therefore, which a comprehensive natural theology must ever recognise in the Divine Being. The broad and earnest mind of Dr Chalmers did, perhaps, especial service in making this clear and prominent. And it has since become more and more a matter of conviction that Theism is not only bound to take up this element, but that it furnishes, to some extent, the key to the profound mysteries which lie around the special attribute of divine goodness. For in order to perceive a benevolent meaning in much that would otherwise seem opposed to benevolence, we have only to see that goodness completes itself in righteousness, and can never validly come short of it. The conception of goodness becomes thus not only exalted, but discriminated. Whereas, in the lower regions of sentient and intellectual life, the former attribute is apparent merely as a disposition to bestow happiness—here, in the light of the further conception into which it rises, it appears before us as something which may, in the highest sense, assert itself, not certainly irrespective of happiness, yet apart from its immediate bestowal—yea, even in the bestowal of partial and temporary unhappiness. For, as the good is at the same time ever the right, as love only sustains itself in holiness, so it becomes conceivable that, where the right has been invaded, and the holy desecrated, goodness may express itself most distinctively in suffering or punishment. This bearing of the subject we now merely indicate, as it will afterwards come before us for special consideration.

In the mean time we fix attention upon the fact of Righteousness, as it has come before us at this upward point in the course of our theistic evidence. It is among the last facts which meet us in the evolution of the idea of God, which is the appropriate task of Natural Theology; but in another sense it is undoubtedly among the reasoned primary springs of Theism. For there is no deeper or more universal source of the divine consciousness in every heart. It is, above all, as a righteous power that God is spontaneously known in the common mind. It is the ineradicable testimony of conscience which, above all, preserves the sense of Divinity in the world, amid the corruptions of passion or the delusions of intellectual self-conceit. It asserts a divine Presence with a cogency which no sophistry can parry, and no argument gainsay. And while man retains within him this impressive monitor, the belief in God can never cease, even although the manifold adaptations of matter and of mind should fail to arrest his wonder, and engage his study.

§ III.—CHAPTER IV.

REASON—INFINITY.

(À PRIORI ARGUMENT.)

MIND begins in faith, in holding for true the objective, presented to it in sensible perception. Thus intuitive in its lowest energy, it is equally so in its highest. If, looking outward, it has no further explanation to render of the reality of the visible world than that it is present in apprehension, and therefore must be conceived as existent; so, looking upward from the sphere of finite reality, it perceives a higher world of truth, which equally makes itself good in apprehension.

Such a higher power of intuition, by which we apprehend realities beyond the region of the sensible, is one which is admitted by every school of philosophy, save that which, from the extremely unphilosophical assumption lying at its basis, is bound to ignore everything beyond the sensible.

Even empiricism may be said to give us, under the form of generalisations, a mimicry of the truths which it yet denies.

§ IV.—CHAPTER I.

STATEMENT OF DIFFICULTIES, ETC.

WE have already noticed certain “difficulties” that directly meet us in unfolding the theistic argument. In carrying up our varied trains of induction from the wide province of nature, we encounter facts, which not only, on the first view, do not contribute to our argument, but seem to stand in obvious contradiction to it.

These facts do not meet us in the outset, but only as we advance. So long as we confine our range of induction to material phenomena, to the combinations of inorganic matter, or even of the lower forms of organic existence, there is nothing that can be said to interrupt the harmonious flow of the theistic evidence. All is order, unbroken by check or flaw. There is no room for the conception of imperfection or evil.

We trace certainly, within the domain of matter, the signs of what we are apt to call disorder. The planetary system, in some of its features, seems to present indications of disturbance. The frame of the earth has apparently, in past times, been rent and broken up by mighty throes. And there are instances even now of such material convulsions; as when the lightning desolates, or the volcano pours its fiery doom over surrounding towns and villages, or the earthquake engulfs them with sudden terror. But it is only to us, or because we contemplate these things in the light of life, that such phenomena assume for a moment the appearance of disorder. In themselves—apprehended simply in regard either to their causes or their material results—such a term has no application to them; for they are merely appropriate issues in the great plan of physical development, whereby the constant growth of its order and beauty is maintained.

When, however, we pass beyond material arrangements to those of life in its higher forms, we find phenomena which in themselves appear dark and contradictory. Pain emerges as a parallel fact with pleasure in sensation; death as a parallel fact with life throughout all its range. The facts of pain and death are peculiar in this respect, that they appear to contradict and nullify the very order amid which they occur: they are evil amid the good. It is this conception of evil which, in the mere domain of matter, has obviously no place—which constitutes, in its manifold forms, the grand difficulty of the Natural Theologian.

In the sphere of animal life, evil is present in such apparent contradictions as we have now mentioned, and especially in the direct provision made for the event of these in the existence of animals of prey. The joy and life of certain animals are the agony and death of others. This arrangement of nature seems to present itself as a mal-arrangement.

§ IV.—CHAPTER II.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

BEFORE entering on the special examination of the difficulties before us, it may help to clear our way, and throw some light around it, to draw attention to certain general considerations bearing on the subject.

The first of these arises from the fact, already more than once insisted upon, that phenomena of evil are truly of an exceptional character: they come before us as exceptions to general order and prevailing good. While, therefore, they appear formidable difficulties when viewed by themselves, it is not yet by themselves, but as mere spots of darkness in an otherwise fair and bright picture, that they can fairly claim to be regarded. Let them be considered, in the fullest sense, obstacles in the way of the complete theistic inference—anomalies demanding explanation; they have yet no claim to set aside that inference, in virtue of their mere existence. An indefinite array of facts bears witness to the Divine wisdom and goodness with an accumulating force of evidence which is irresistible. This evidence is entitled to hold good its place for what it is worth, notwithstanding that there is a certain amount of what appears counter-evidence. Let both go into court, and be judged according to their respective value; but it were surely a strange injustice that the mere presence of certain phenomena appearing to form negative evidence should be held, per se, to dispose of the whole array of positive evidence. It were a strange injustice to deny that any valid inference of corresponding qualities in an artist can be founded on the general excellence, the harmonious skill, displayed by his work, because it may contain what may seem to us imperfections. And yet this is really the injustice which has been perpetrated, as with a show of superior acuteness,

“If the celebrated argument of design is to hold good as evidence in favour, it must hold equally good as evidence against the wisdom and beneficence of the Creator;—a startling proposition, and one, we believe, never made before, but one from which logic has no escape. When you point to the perfection of organisations as evidence of wisdom, and to their manifold enjoyments as evidence of goodness, you force the reflective mind to think of the imperfections and the misery so abundantly displayed. When you take your relative good for the absolute good, you must equally accept your relative evil for the absolute evil. Now this is shocking; the mind refuses to accept such a conception, and would be plunged in despair, did it not learn that Wisdom, Goodness, Evil, are but relative terms, and pertain to our human finite conditions, not to the Infinite. Yet, if men will persist in measuring the Infinite according to their finite standard, they must do so in the one case as in the other. Theologians usually escape from the dilemma by saying, when any case of manifest evil is propounded, ‘God’s ways are inscrutable;’ and they are right. But if inscrutable in one direction, inscrutable in all. We do not understand evil, nor do we understand good; the finite cannot understand the Infinite.” Leader, No. 116, July 12, 1852.

We present this as a specimen of our most recent antitheistic logic. The passage, as it proceeds, is not without an air of speciousness, which is yet, as it appears to us, only derived from a perversion of the assumption against which it is directed. It is not true, for example, that the Theologian takes the relative good which he finds in nature as equivalent to absolute good. So far is this from being the case, that the whole question as to the theistic significance of evil only occurs from the admission that the good in nature is relative. Were it absolute, or assumed to be absolute, there would and could be no such question. The fact is, that the argument of design, according to its only right interpretation, and as abundantly evident from the whole course of our previous evidence, does not deal with the absolute in any sense at all. Its sole aim is to verify the theistic idea, as revealed in nature. It does not, therefore, affect to reach, far less to understand, the Infinite. It does profess, however, to determine comprehensively according to their full character the theistic contents given in nature; and its conclusion certainly is that wisdom and goodness are among their number. Looking with an open glance upon creation, the Theologian has the evidence of wisdom and goodness forced upon him, and by the laws of his rational constitution he cannot fail to carry up these attributes of creation to the Creator. But if you do this, says the sceptic, you are equally bound to carry up to the same source the opposite attributes of “imperfection and misery so abundantly displayed” in creation. Yes, bound to carry them up in the shape of negative presumptions—but this is all. And this is really what the Theologian does, and these negative presumptions are just the difficulties with which he has to deal. The force of these difficulties may be such as to leave the conclusion of absolute goodness uncertain on the mere sphere of nature, this conclusion being only perfected in the rational intuition of the Infinite; but it cannot surely be maintained to be such as to leave the fact of goodness in the Deity, even on this sphere, in any degree uncertain.

§ IV.—CHAPTER III.

SPECIAL EXAMINATION OF DIFFICULTIES PHYSICAL PAIN AND DEATH.

WE have already seen what are the first difficulties which meet us in the course of our theistic induction. In the region of sentient existence, which brings us into the presence of Divine Goodness, we meet, in immediate connection with the phenomena of pleasure, the phenomena of pain; and death we find ceaselessly alternating with life. In examining these difficulties, we shall regard them in their widest manifestation throughout the sphere of animal being. Any special reference that they may have to man will be sufficiently considered under those higher forms of evil that peculiarly belong to him.

The first thing to be said of physical pain is what we have already urged.

See p. 191-193.

IV. CHAPTER IV.

SPECIAL EXAMINATION CONTINUED SORROW.

IT is, however, in the sphere of human life that evil appears in its most marked and difficult forms. It is only here, indeed, that evil, in the peculiar and emphatic sense in which we commonly use the term, is found at all. It is here that it assumes at once a malignity which defies palliation, and a darkness which is still profound when we have thrown upon it the clearest light which nature or even revelation supplies.

This mystery of evil in humanity from the first assumes all its special hatefulness and darkness from the element of moral corruption which mingles in it, and which, in all its forms, it more or less indicates. If it were not this moral element, there would remain nothing peculiar, save its dignity, in human evil. It is the presence of a deeper shadow lying within the varied shades which chequer human life, that alone gives to them all their special mournfulness, and constitutes that master-problem before which speculation retires baffled, and the heart stands in awe. It is important now to bring this into view, because, while we trust to be able to show various considerations tending to mitigate the common ills of our race, and even to transmute them into good, we would yet have it to be seen, from the outset, that these ills—deriving as they do their worst hue from that deeper evil which lies behind—at the same time find in it their highest explanation. The fact of sin, if it intensifies the picture of human suffering, at the same time serves to account for it. The lesser, and, as it were, accessory evils, become intelligible in the greater. While striving to carry the light of special explanation along with us, it is, accordingly, of some consequence to see that, in this darker difficulty of sin, all the lower difficulties finally merge. To it they are easily pushed back. In this grand enigma all other enigmas of human life gather up and concentrate themselves. If the problem, therefore, acquires only a more inexplicable character in the end, it is yet reduced to a single point, from the very intensity of whose mystery a clearer explanation falls upon its lower levels.

Under what is commonly meant by sorrow in the widest sense, we may sum up the different expressions of human evil. How pervading a presence sorrow is, it is needless to say. There is no heart which it has not touched, there is no life which it has not darkened. In one form or another it is all around us, and its shadow traces all earthly joy. Its presence is not only to be measured by its outward manifestation; it lies deep in the soul of many whose brow may yet be clear. It cuts into many a heart which gives no sign of bleeding. Of a certain great man,

Goethe.

§ IV.—CHAPTER V.

SPECIAL EXAMINATION CONTINUED—SOCIAL EVILS.

THE survey of human life, in its social aspects—in its aggregate character of communities and nations—presents perhaps more to perplex the contemplative mind than any other view of it. The disorders which meet us in such a survey are so numerous, and many of them of such appalling magnitude, that even the most devout have been sometimes led to ask themselves whether, after all, human history can be considered as a development of Divine wisdom and goodness. The evils of oppression, of miserable poverty, of social degradation in all its shapes, so cover with their dark shadows the historical picture, that the epical and beneficent lights of it seem often entirely obscured. And even at this better and brighter stage of the world’s progress, and in such a land as our own, where the higher social influences may be supposed working as actively at least as anywhere else, how much is there to sadden and bewilder the view! To any man in whom the faculties of heart and soul are full, who has a mind to see, and a bosom to be touched with the miseries around him, and upon whom has come even some dim sense of the infinite capacities and issues of all human life, it is certainly a most mournful and perplexing contemplation, that, with advancing civilisation, and such vast and ever-strengthening resources of science and art and wealth, there should remain so black and fearful a foil to the brightness,—that by the side of all this glittering increase there should harbour such dreadful sickening masses of human deterioration and suffering.

Sad as are the social evils which thus force themselves upon us, whether in the view of the past or the present, a few considerations will perhaps serve—so far as our subject is concerned—to obviate the difficulties that may be felt to arise from them.

And first of all, we must not overlook the conviction which, shaken as it may be in certain moods, never fails to return to the contemplative mind, that, under whatever appearances to the contrary, the collective life of mankind in history yet asserts itself to be “an immutable moral order, constituted by Divine wisdom.”

BUNSEN’S Hippolytus and His Age (Aphorisms), ii. 3.

§ IV.—CHAPTER VI.

SPECIAL EXAMINATION CONTINUED—SIN.

THE considerations presented in the foregoing chapters serve, we apprehend, somewhat to obviate special difficulties regarding the wisdom and goodness of God. The various forms of evil which meet us as apparently formidable obstacles in the way of the theistic inference, are found, on examination, to be at least by no means so formidable as at first they appear. At the very worst, they do not exhibit themselves as unmixed evils. They bear, every one of them, some compensatory significance of an important kind. On the general platform of animal life, and in reference to the most comprehensive phenomena of evil which there occur, this compensatory character is so prominent, and enters so directly into the intended constitution of things, that it seems greatly to remove the element of difficulty which superficially is felt to exist. Pain, while it shows itself to be contingently related to pleasure in the very nature of the sensitive organism—to be a liability springing out of the very fact of the good—appears reduced to its minimum throughout the lower brute creation; while organic extinction is seen to be a mere transition to higher and more abundant modes of life, in the wide and ever-expanding diversity of which the wisdom and goodness of the Deity are ever more truly and conspicuously displayed.

The same compensatory character, whereby a higher good is still developed from the partial evil, is found to mark the difficulties which occur in the sphere of human life, although manifestly it is no longer, in this sphere, so adequate for explanation. Here, while suffering is no less clearly seen to serve purposes of good, there is yet very clearly left a residuum of difficulty unexplained. The beneficent use of sorrow is indeed apparent, and thoroughly satisfactory as to its existence, proceeding on the fact that discipline is needed to purify and exalt human life; but the question at once presses itself, Why this disciplinary necessity? what explanation does it admit of?

We readily admit, therefore, that while, by the light of enlarged and impartial inquiry, we are enabled to see good everywhere in the evil, and so far to obviate the difficulties which arise from the latter regarding the Divine wisdom and goodness, we do not, by such considerations, remove the difficulties. The darkness clears away a little as we gaze steadily into it, and make ourselves familiar with it, but it is still there. The light has penetrated, but not dispersed it. It is somewhat broken up and driven back, but it only concentrates itself more deeply—in an aspect of more intense enigma—on the further point to which it has retreated.

Following this plan, however, of carrying up the different forms of evil which meet us in human life to their true source, we are enabled to see clearly the final amount of difficulty with which the theistic argument has to deal. If we fail to give an adequate explanation of the lower evils, it is only because they imply a further element of moral evil which arrests us. Bringing fully into view this difficulty, and holding it in all its inexplicable magnitude before us, it serves, in its very intensity, to cast a full meaning on the dependent perplexities. In this comprehending evil of sin, all the lower phenomena of evil in human life find their satisfactory explanation.

This higher view of the subject is one from which our older theistic literature has, for the most part, shrunk. It has aimed to bring out the compensatory significance of all suffering, and to show how largely good is everywhere subserved by evil; but the explanatory meaning which suffering everywhere assumes in the view of sin, has not been clearly apprehended by it. Sin has apparently been regarded as something beyond the sphere of its observation: and, holding this fact out of sight, it is not to be wondered at that an air of unsatisfactoriness should attach to its best endeavours

See PALEY’S Nat. Theol., chap. xxvi. BROWN’S Lectures, lect. 94.

On the other hand, by bringing into view the fact of sin, if the problem in the end be only deepened, it is yet simplified. The mind is left to rest on a single point of darkness, whose apprehension leaves all the different phenomena of human suffering at least fully intelligible. For when we consider the fact of sin, it no longer remains wonderful that there should be suffering. The true marvel would have been, if, with the presence of sin, there had not been suffering. For a moral instinct of the most direct and irresistible character assures us that the latter is everywhere the inevitable consequence of the former—that the two are bound together, and essentially coexistent, in the nature of the case. Because man is a sinner, he is a sufferer. It is sin that smites him with pain, and wounds him with sorrow. It is sin which darkens life for him, and embitters death. When we seize, therefore, this fact of sin, the mystery of suffering disappears within it.

Especially is this the case when we apprehend the fact of sin in clear connection with that complete doctrine of Theism as to the Divine goodness which formerly opened up to us in the course of our argument. In the law of conscience we found that the good interprets itself as the right. The moral good which commands us in conscience is righteousness. The one idea only sustains itself in the other, and finds its complement in it. The attribute of Divine goodness becomes, accordingly, in relation to moral life, also Divine righteousness. The two conceptions are essentially inseparable. If we regard sin, then, in this higher theistic light, we will at once see that suffering is its necessary mark of punishment. Asserting itself in opposition to the law of conscience, it thereby directly opposes itself to the righteous will of God, of which that law is the expression, and so provokes His punishment. Existing only as a rebellious infraction of Divine will, it necessarily calls forth the Divine wrath. In its very character, wherever it occurs in the universe of God, sin accordingly is, and must be, marked by His displeasure. It must bear the brand of suffering. It must have its doom written on it. And in this point of view, so far is suffering from constituting a valid objection to the Divine goodness, that it is truly a manifestation of that goodness. Rightly viewed, the Divine punishment of sin is merely another side of the Divine goodness. Tor inasmuch as goodness only completes itself in righteousness, were sin or unrighteousness not visited with punitive suffering, the Divine goodness could not be the reality which conscience demands. It might remain a vague and beautiful dream of the imagination; but a goodness which in any respect came short of righteousness would, in the very nature of the case, prove a vanishing shadow—a mere fiction, on which the heart could never rest. Let the one idea be lost sight of, and the other will altogether fail to legitimatise itself, or keep its ground. A goodness which does not rest on justice, and embrace it, would, in the highest meaning of the attribute, be no goodness—our own moral conscience being judge—and would leave, therefore, no real foundation for that happiness in whose behalf it is sometimes emptied of this essential element. In all this view, therefore, the Divine goodness is seen not only to be consistent with, but to be expressly called forth in human suffering as the punishment of sin.

But when we contemplate sin, in its own essential character, as most truly misery, this becomes still further evident. Any other conception we can form of misery is poor and trifling in comparison with that which is summed up in the fact of sin itself. The temporary evil of suffering is, therefore, most truly good, when viewed as the chastening of sin, to deliver us from its power. Its bitterness is a direct agency of Divine beneficence, to save us from a darker and more hopeless bitterness. Had sin not thus borne the reprobation of suffering, and man’s sinful progress experienced no check from it, the Divine goodness would undoubtedly have been left in far greater obscurity than it is.

But what of sin itself? What theistic explanation does it admit of? Has not our whole previous train of reasoning been merely a fencing with the outer or accessory difficulties of the subject, while the great difficulty lies here? We are certainly far from concealing that in the comprehensive fact of sin is contained the chief mystery with which we have to deal. We have, on the contrary, all along implied this. It has been our aim simply to show, in reference to human life, how all the difficulties attending the theistic inference run up into this point, and here find their ultimate force. And if, at length, in approaching this point, we find that the light of explanation fails us, or, in other words, find that we cannot at all resolve sin in our process of theistic induction, it may at the same time appear that this arises from its very nature, which is such as compels us to cast it out of the theistic argument, and per se liberates that argument from its injurious burden, mysterious and irresolvable as it may for ever remain. It may be seen that, while this mystery defies all solution, it separates itself by its character from all direct relation to the Divine agency. Profound as is the difficulty it involves, it is a difficulty, when rightly understood, not immediately regarding the Divine character (about which its own testimony leaves no doubt), but regarding its human possibility.

Sin, as we have already assumed, is in its essential conception the revolt of the human self against the Divine. Whereas the good consists for us in the harmony of the Divine and the human will, the evil consists essentially in the insurrection of the latter against the former. The soul passes out of the sphere of Divine conformity, and asserts itself in an attitude of opposition to God and to goodness. This is the most radical principle of moral evil. It is this element of rebellious self-will against the Divine law that we specially mean by sin. It expresses itself in many forms, and assumes many characters; but in this element of rebellious self-will they all take their rise. This is the perverted essence which pervades all.

Such being the true character of sin, it must be obvious, in its very definition, that we cannot bring it into inductive relation with the course of our evidence; or, in other words, that we cannot find any argumentative solution of it. For how can we intelligibly relate that to God, whose very essence consists in opposition to Him? How can we explain that which in itself, in its very conception, presents the uttermost contradiction? In order that anything may be capable of explanation, it must exhibit some ground of reason; but here all is unreason. That any creature should revolt against its Creator can only present itself as the most awful and unfathomable folly. Sin, therefore, baffles all explanation. Every attempt that has been made to throw any light upon it, or to resolve it inductively, has ended, in the very nature of the case, in denying it.

See note at the end of the chapter, where the attempts of this kind most deserving attention are briefly reviewed.

But in this very confession of the utter unintelligibility of sin, is not our argument relieved from its difficulty? We cannot give any theistic explanation of it. But why? Because, in its very essence, it is anti-theistic. It is in God’s creation, but it is there as a blot upon it—in direct violation of the Divine order which otherwise prevails. In its nature it wholly separates itself from God, and is, therefore, whatever we may make of it, not entitled to reflect injuriously on the Divine character. A true perception of sin leaves it, indeed, an insoluble difficulty, but is so far from allowing its darkness to rest on the Divine wisdom and goodness, that it is only against the truth of these attributes that its heinousness comes fully into view. It is only its opposition to Divine wisdom and love that makes sin what it is. And to this itself bears witness in its own innermost darkness. In the very act of stamping its atheistic impress upon the soul, it belies its own act; and in its deepest abandonment proclaims the reality of the Divine goodness with which it strives. The rebellious self-will which opposes itself to God, yet trembles before Him. It trembles because of its own unquenchable witness to the truth of those perfections which it practically denies. So long as conscience is not utterly extinguished, there arises from the very heart of depravity this irrepressible testimony. This it is, in fact, which—asserting itself against the most persistent godlessness—gives to that godlessness all its direst unrest and misery. The sense of guilt, in its worst agony, is nothing save the consciousness of hostility to Divine wisdom and goodness.

NOTE.

Various theories have professed to expound what is called the origin of evil. The most comprehensive and impartial account of these theories that we know of is to be found in the second book of Dr Julius Müller’s treatise on the Christian doctrine of sin. On a careful examination, one and all of them will be found to explain sin by virtually denying it in its true character. Dr Müller has reckoned them as four, under the several names of the theories of Dualism, of Contrast, of Sense, and of Metaphysical Imperfection. The only two of them that can be said to possess any special interest, or to deserve any special notice, are those of Contrast and of Metaphysical Imperfection. The former derives certain pretensions from its analogy to that compensatory mode of argument which we have pursued in previous chapters. It is, in truth, nothing else than this argument reduced to the palpable contradictoriness that lies in it when pushed to extremity. The latter claims attention from the influential names that have promulgated it, and the manner in which it has been associated with Christian literature. Both, besides, have this special claim upon our notice, that while neither of them can be said any longer to possess vitality as speculative theories, they yet truly live and find utterance in many of our current modes of literary and theological culture.

§ IV.—CHAPTER VII.

CONSIDERATIONS, ETC.—DERIVED FROM “WRITTEN REVELATION.”

IN the preceding chapters we have carried out our treatment of difficulties regarding the wisdom and goodness of God in so far as we are enabled to do by the light of nature. These difficulties, we have seen, in their most formidable aspect, concentrate in moral evil; which, on the other hand, refuses to be related inductively to the great Source of being, but asserts itself as the mysterious product of the human free-will. In its very nature, sin utterly separates itself from God, while yet bearing in its dark rebellion an unequivocal testimony to the Divine existence and character. Whatever may be its mystery and difficulty, therefore, it seems undoubted that the fact of moral evil is not entitled to affect injuriously the theistic inference.

This conclusion appears to us so far satisfactory. As to the final difficulty of the origin of evil, it has been our express aim to show that it admits in its nature of no solution. It presents an impenetrable mystery; only the hopeless darkness which here at length meets us, cannot be allowed to rest legitimately on the Divine character. According even to the testimony of sin itself, that character stands out in clear brightness against it.

In case, however, that any doubt should still surround this conclusion, we are finally led by the terms of our subject into the region of special Divine revelation. We do not suppose that it is meant that we should enter into any special proof of the Divine authority of this revelation. All that seems to us to be appropriately implied in the terms of the Essay is, that we should take a glance at this higher region of revelation before we close. Having sought in the lower region of natural inductive inquiry for all the light within our reach, we are invited finally to cast our gaze to that brighter light which professes to shine upon us directly from God Himself. The very strength and clearness of the lustre which the Christian revelation sheds around the Divine character, may at the same time go far, apart from any formal proof, to vindicate its Divine authority.

Taking up, then, our argument at the point at which we left it, we had reached the conclusion that sin, from its very nature, could not only have no productive relation to God, but was directly opposed to Him. At this point, the gospel meets us in the most significant manner. It declares in its very conception God’s hatred of sin, and opposition to it. It affirms that it was for the very purpose of destroying sin that He sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world. We are no longer left to infer from a process of reasoning regarding the Divine character, as revealed in the depths of our own conscience, that God is opposed to sin, but in the mission and death of the Lord Jesus He Himself makes this specially known to us with the most solemn effect. All our Lord did and suffered bore the same meaning of Divine hatred against sin. All expressed with an imperishable force that God is “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” and cannot “look on iniquity.”

Thus carrying on our argument from the negative point at which we left it, we see with what decisive clearness the gospel interprets the indications of nature, and shows that the burden and injury of sin, however inscrutable, are directly rejected by God. Ascending slowly towards this conclusion from the attentive scrutiny of our moral consciousness, we are met by a direct utterance from God Himself, which places our conclusion beyond all hesitation, and enables us to rest in it with an impregnable security.

But this negative testimony bears us but a little way into the full light which the Gospel sheds upon the Divine character. In this indirect manner it serves to vindicate that character from the application of the objection founded on the existence of moral evil; but in what a positive glory of wisdom and beneficence does it further place it! If its utterance, on the one hand, is that God is righteous, and hateth sin; its utterance, on the other, is that “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all;”

1 John, i. 5.

§ IV.—CHAPTER VIII.

THE DIVINE MAN INCARNATE WISDOM AND LOVE.

WITH the last chapter the argument, as apprehended by us, might appropriately have closed; it seems so superfluous to argue on the foundation of the gospel revelation for the wisdom and goodness of God—that revelation being only conceivable as in the highest degree an expression of both. Yet it may be well simply to glance at some of the special features of Divine excellence thus declared to us. The teaching and character of the Lord Jesus, and the adaptation of the gospel to the spiritual elevation and consolation of the human race, seem to present, in this view, the most prominent points for notice.

It is not now denied by any, even by those who repudiate the Divine authority of Christianity, that we have in the teaching and character of Christ a rare exhibition of wisdom and goodness. It is acknowledged that He who, eighteen hundred years ago, arose a Prophet among a feeble and distracted people, sunk in social and religious debasement, taught a purer and more exalted morality, and lived a life of more beautiful beneficence, than the history of the world elsewhere presents. While such a phenomenon, in all the circumstances, must appear somewhat inexplicable to those who do not recognise in it anything specially Divine, to the Christian it appears clearly intelligible and significant, He recognises in the man Christ Jesus the incarnation of Divine wisdom and love. He beholds in him the Word made flesh, who “dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

When we consider the special point in our argument at which we have arrived, we recognise the direct bearing upon it of this manifestation of Divine wisdom in Christ. With order everywhere pervading the physical world—with nature’s harmonies all around—there reigned confusion alone in the life of man. There were in him the promptings of a noble life, which at the best remained unsatisfied, and which too frequently were soon utterly crushed under the dominion of his lower propensities and tendencies. There was government everywhere, but here misrule. Morality seemed rather a varying fiction than a sovereign reality. Giving all honour to the aspiring aims of heathen wisdom, it will not be maintained that any ancient moralist succeeded in discovering a perfect polity for this sphere of misrule. In the Porch and in the Academy there had, no doubt, been taught some pure and elevated lessons, and certain hints of a Divine morality had there been reached, which, as we read them now, seem anticipations of a loftier truth; but in none of the classic schools do we find a moral doctrine at once adequate and consistent.

§ IV.—CHAPTER IX.

THE GOSPEL A DIVINE POWER OF MORAL ELEVATION AND CONSOLATION.

How directly the Gospel manifests the wisdom and goodness of God has been already apparent. It is throughout expressly and most impressively a revelation of both. It is not merely, however, on its own profession, as it were, but moreover in its practical effects, that we are enabled to appeal to it so confidently in this respect. It not merely tells us that God is love, but it exhibits the fact in its widely beneficent influence.

It is, indeed, impossible to conceive how the Divine wisdom and goodness could have been demonstrated, in the special circumstances which tend to obscure them, more effectually than by such a discovery as the gospel. The great difficulty, we have seen, upon which inquiry can throw no light—before which the highest efforts of human wisdom are powerless—is the existence of moral evil. In such a conjuncture the gospel meets us, not only telling us of Divine wisdom and goodness, but proving itself to be the revelation of both in its effectual dealing with sin. It lays hold of this fact as no philosophy has ever done, revealing at once its true character and the means of deliverance from it. It presents, for the first time, the full reality of the evil, and the full power of redemption from it.

This redemptive power of the gospel presents a twofold aspect of pardon and of sanctification. Human life, in its deep disorder, needed not only a new power of virtue, but a free gift of reconciliation. Before the soul can rise in holy love to God, the curse of estrangement from Him must be removed, and this is only accomplished by the sacrifice of the Cross. The living and thankful surrender of the human to the Divine will (whereby sin is evermore subdued, and virtue evermore advanced), only rests on the great fact of Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice. It is this which alone renders Christian virtue possible, and gives it all its meaning. It was such a sacrifice as this for which all heathenism cried out, but which all human effort could not make. It was the want of such a sacrifice that left heathenism so powerless. The human heart can only rest on the eternal foundation of an accomplished atonement, whereby God is beheld “reconciling the world unto Himself,” and “not imputing unto man his trespasses.” Here alone it finds a power of Divine peace and restoration. The blessing of pardon comes to it in Jesus Christ with an unspeakable force of healing. Its wounds are medicated, its terrors allayed, its burden of transgression removed; and, rejoicing in the grace of the Divine presence, it catches the sunlight of Divine purity as it falls on it in clear effulgence.

The gift of reconciliation and the power of moral renovation are inseparably conjoined in the gospel. It meets man’s necessity of mediation with an offended God in order that it may destroy within him the dominion of sin, and reconstitute and advance the kingdom of moral order. Heathenism could do neither. It could neither abate the terrors of guilt, nor give strength in the struggle with evil. But the gospel, by one and the same power, accomplishes both. The act of grace only completes itself in the work of holiness, which inseparably takes its rise in the former, and grows therefrom, as the fair tree from its happy springing in the prepared soil. The seeds of a new moral wellbeing are already quickened in the first contact of the soul with the Divine favour, and ready to develop into all forms of moral loveliness. All springs from, and all depends upon, the Divine power revealed by the gospel. Such a power alone enables man successfully to resist temptation and overcome evil. It alone secures him the mastery over all that is base and disorderly within him. It alone strengthens him for daily duty, and when the enticements of sin prove strongest, and the sense of responsibility sleeps, guards him from the snare of earthly passion, and guides him in the way of heavenly aspiration. Other agencies may so far help to improve his social condition, and even to refine and elevate his moral affections; but they cannot any of them, as this does, touch with renewing power the secret springs of his being, and advance him into a higher sphere of spiritual purity. They cannot any of them, as this does, raise him above the world of sense, and bring him near to the God of holiness. “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.”

Further, the gospel is an effectual source of consolation to man. In a previous chapter we have spoken of the beneficent use of sorrow, and of the virtuous strength and beauty which its presence often achieves in human life. It now becomes us to observe that the Divine element which is thus in sorrow, only rises to its genuine measure and reality in the gospel. Here alone does it become truly tempered into patience, and deepened into experience, and exalted into hope. Here alone does earthly grief become transmuted into heavenly fervour, and tears change into rapture. Here only does the sorrowing soul rise into spiritual strength, and a rare and self-denying devotion, where the light of Heaven illuminates its darkness; and in the brightness thus reflected from a higher sphere, “the sufferings of this present time are felt not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed.”

This consoling revelation of futurity is among the most divinely beneficent features of the gospel. Previously, there may have been a dim sense of man’s immortality, and of the preparatory character of this life in relation to a higher. There were some, we know, who could write with pathetic beauty of the nobler life upon which the soul would enter beyond the grave; but the clear reality of a future life was alone disclosed in the revelation of the Lord Jesus. He alone “abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” It is only through His blessed teaching that the faith of immortality has become the living possession of the human mind and heart. He alone has shed an eternal brightness around the darkness of the present, and made all who believe in Him to feel with an unquenchable conviction that they shall never die. “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

In what a light of Divine meaning does this revelation of immortality set the brief period of earthly life! What a source of consoling strength is it to the weary human heart in its struggles with sin and sorrow! It comes as a beam piercing the darkness from a higher region of wisdom and love, of truth and justice, touching what were otherwise dim and strange with a radiance of heavenly significance, and the “otherwise unmeaning ciphers of time changing to orders of untold value.” It is this faith of eternal life which now in so many homes lightens privation, and in so many hearts keeps off despair; which brings peace to the troubled, and resignation to the mourner, and takes even the gloom of fear from the night of death, as it opens up the heaven beyond.

The meaning which the gospel has thus shed on life and death and futurity, giving man to see their true relation, serves, perhaps more than anything else, to reconcile the difficulties of time, and “to justify the ways of God to man.” For it opens up a boundless prospect of being, in the light of which the perplexities of this earthly scene, if they do not disappear, yet become significant of divine results of the most exalted and beneficent character. Whatever there may be here that passes his comprehension, or even sometimes wearies his heart, the Christian, carrying as he does the peace of God within him, while the glory of immortality shines before him, is enabled to thank God and take courage.

IV. CHAPTER X.

LIMITED RECEPTION OF THE GOSPEL—MILLENNIAL PROSPECT.

THERE is an obvious objection, we are well aware, that may be taken to the foregoing representation. If the gospel be such a power of moral elevation and consolation to man—if it can so effectually restore the ruin wrought within him by sin, and thus manifests practically that perfect wisdom and goodness of which it speaks—why, it may be asked, has its influence hitherto been so limited? Why does it prevail within so narrow a compass, and, even where it does prevail, why is its beneficent power so obstructed and inadequate? A further difficulty would seem to emerge upon us from the very heart of the evangelical revelation of Divine wisdom and mercy.

That this, however, is only a new form of the old difficulty of sin—of the fact of moral evil at all—is evident on a little reflection. For the undoubted reason why the gospel is, at this day, so slightly influential, is, that it is opposed by man’s unbelief and selfishness. Men will not come unto Christ that they may have life. That sin which Christ lived and died to destroy, which His Spirit in the church everywhere is now working to destroy, opposes itself with hardened hostility to the truth, and where it cannot altogether oppose, degrades and corrupts it.

But could not God overcome this hostility? Is it not the special representation of the gospel that it is only everywhere overcome by His direct agency? And why is not that agency so powerfully and universally exerted, as to bring all under its benign and happy sway? In such depths of dark and almost irreverent questioning we lose our footing, and are perhaps better silent in hopeful trust than loud in curious reply. Having acknowledged to the full extent the awful mystery of sin, we might rest our answer on this mystery. Wholly inscrutable, there is nothing about it more inscrutable than its continued power of resistance to the gospel—than its opposition to the truth bearing upon it at every point, and summoning it to surrender. A few words of explanation, however, suggest themselves.

It is no doubt true that it is only through special Divine agency that the gospel everywhere makes progress, and that it is possible for us to conceive such a forth-putting of this agency as might speedily bring the whole world under its sway; yet it is no less, and in the very nature of the case, true, that this agency everywhere only works in co-operation with the free agency of man. It is a persuasive power, eliciting and strengthening man’s spirit, but in no case forcibly overbearing it even for its most holy purposes. “The whole course of history, as well as the express teaching of revelation, prove that God has ever dealt with man, not by the strength of an irresistible power crushing all that is contrary to it, but by the moral strength of those Divine influences by which He seeks to draw every inferior will into true harmony with His own perfect will. And no doubt this is so, because, consistently with the blessed perfection of God, it could not be otherwise; because He is most glorified in being served by a world of created beings, who are endued with the mysterious power of willing good or evil, and who, through His grace and goodness, have been each one brought into true harmony with Him.”

Sermons by the Bishop of Oxford, p. 95: 1849.

Here, therefore, we come back to the final mystery of creation, the fact of human freedom. In this fact is contained at once man’s glory and the possibility of his fearful revolt and shame. It is this alone which at once makes him a subject of Divine grace, and enables him to oppose that grace. Forcibly to destroy the capability of opposition, would be to destroy the very character of his being, and to leave him incapable of good any more than of evil. It is the awful peril of freedom, that while man may rise into union with God, and become a partaker of the Divine nature, he may no less harden himself against God, and fall away from Him into an ever deeper revolt and abandonment of selfishness.

While, therefore, it is truly saddening and perplexing that the benign influence of the gospel has hitherto been confined within such narrow limits, it must be kept in view that this restraint of the gospel springs from man’s sinful opposition, and not from any deficiency of wisdom or love in the Divine will. This, we apprehend, will not be denied by any Theist. Whatever be the more special views entertained in connection with this point, every Christian Theologian must admit that the perfection of the Divine character is not implicated in the restrained influence of the gospel. And this is all that is sufficient for our purpose to hold. Here, as hitherto, the mystery lies before us, impenetrably shrouded in its very nature, but reflecting its darkness directly, not on the Divine character, but on the mysterious fact of human freedom.

Let us observe, at the same time, before passing finally from the subject, that there is disclosed to us in the future the prospect of a universal reign of holiness. The kingdom of Divine order, we are assured, shall yet prevail throughout the whole moral, as now throughout the whole physical world. To this gloriously beneficent end, human progress is now, amid whatever perplexities, everywhere tending. There may be much to cloud this prospect; there may even seem, in certain aspects of social life, and of literary and speculative culture in our day, to be rather a recession than an advance of the “gospel of the kingdom.” Yet it is amid such very crises that Christianity is found pre-eminently to approve itself the power of God and the wisdom of God for the world’s salvation. It puts forth its greatest strength in seasons of the utmost spiritual darkness. When there seems to be only the disturbance of conflicting opinions, there is silently preparing beneath the embryotic confusion a fresh life, destined to rise into nobler and fairer forms of wisdom and beneficence than any that have gone before. And this will certainly be the issue of present as of former conflicts. The Truth of God, purified by the very assaults which seem to threaten it, will go forth with a new strength, “conquering and to conquer.”

And this it will continue to do, till its purifying spirit penetrate every relation, and beautify every aspect of human life, till it stamp its bright and gladdening impress on every feature alike of individual and social culture, and throughout the moral universe there reign at once the most perfect order and the purest love. As we believe in God, we believe in the advent of this better time, “when all the kingdoms of the earth shall become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ;” when unhappiness shall be no more, because sin shall be no more, and, amid the activities of unmingled beneficence, the world shall forget its past conflicts, and rejoice in an everlasting peace.