Cornell University Library arV15148 The relatione between religion and scien imiiiii 3 1924 031 696 424 olln,anx 6LtV lS. ^ Cornell University WB Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924031 696424 THE BAMPTON LECTUEES FOR M.DCCC.LXXXIV. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AJSfD SCIENCE / EIGHT LECTUEES PEBACHED BEfOEB THE UOTVERSITY OP OXFORD IN THE YEAR 1884 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A. CAKON OF SALISBUET BT THE EIGHT BEV. feTA^V'-e- FREDEEICKrLORD BISHOP OF EXETER i^fa fork MACMILLAN AND CO. 1884 [All rights reserved ] ^-^^"^ The '^''■ President White ^O Library ^/VED ELIGION and Science both begin with -*-*' the human will. The wUl is to Science the first example of power, the origin of the conception of cause ; the bodily effort made by the will lies at the root of the conception of force. It is by comparing other forces with that force that Science begins its march. And the will is to religion the recipient of the Diviae command. To the will the inner voice addresses itself, bidding it act and believe. It is because we have a wiU that we are respon- sible. In a world in which there were no creatures endowed with a wiU, there could be no right-doing or wrong-doing; no approval 70 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. by conscience and no disapproval ; no duty and no faith. Here is the first possibility of collision be- tween Science and EeUgion. Science postulates uniformity; Beligion postulates liberty. Science cannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to unity if a whole class of phenomena, aU those that belong to the action of human will, are to be excluded from the postulate of invariable sequence. The action of the will is in this case for ever left outside. The evidence for the absolute uniformity of nature seems to be shaken, when it is found that there is so im- portant a part of phenomena to which this law of uniformity cannot be appUed. If a human will can thus interfere with the law of uni- formity, there enters the possibility that behind some phenomena may lurk the interference of some other will. Eeligion, on the other hand, tells every man that he is responsible, and how can he be responsible if he is not free 1 If his action be determined by something which is not himself, how can the moral biu-den of it be put on him ? To tell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 71 is tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself from doing it. But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have a direct consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reason^ ing appears to extinguish. We sharply dis- tinguish between that which goes on within us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which we are not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger. We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or our pursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we can cherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our wills seem power- less, but even here we are conscious of our power to struggle for self-assertion and self- control. There is very much in us which is not free ; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which is not free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our wills are overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer a perfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to be quite the same. 72 Apparent Confiict between [Lect. This question of the freedom of the will was considered by Bishop Butler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make what theory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men in practice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise ; we accept promises ; we punish ; we reward ; we estimate character ; we admire ; we shun ; we deal with ourselves ; we deal with others ; as if we and all others were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that sense of justice in God's dealings with us. But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine foreknowledge arrang- ing everything by supreme Will, not from the conception of a blind mechanical rule holding in.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 73 aU in its unrelaxing grasp. And thougli to the cold reason it may make no difference how the will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsion differ as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutely in the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having no liberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems possible to accept the one and call it an un- fathomable mystery; but to accept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream. And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theory and based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very dif- ferent antagonist from the same doctrine ad- vanced as a conclusion of science, and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observa- tions. We may dismiss the mere theory after showing that it has not substance enough to hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so treat what claims to b6 a scientific inference. The modern examination of the questiou begins with Hume, who maintains that the doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are both true and of course compatible with each 74 Apparent Conflict between [Lect, other. Bat his arguments touch only the broad question whether they are true for practical purposes, not whether either is true in the strict sense and without exception or modifi- cation. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it was essential that both doctrines should be true in the strictest sense. Holding that invariable sequence was a law of Nature known indepen- dently of experience and applicable to all phe- nomena in the minutest detail, he could not allow that any act of the human will lay out- side the range of this law. Such an act being a phenomenon must, in his view, be subject to the law which the constitution of our minds imposed on all phenomena apparent to us. And yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternal Moral Law made us responsible for all our acts, he could not but maintain that in the doing of those acts we must be free. His mode of reconciling the two opposites amounted to this, that our action throughout life considered as a whole is free, but that each separate act considered by itself is bound to the preceding acts by the law of invariable sequence. We may illustrate this by the familiar instance of III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 75 a prism acting on a ray of light. The ray has or may have a colour of its own before it passes through the prism. The prism spreads it out and shows a series of colours. The order in which this series is arranged is determined by the character of the prism acting on the nature of the ray. The colours when combined give the colour of the ray; when separated by the prism each has its own distinct character, and the order of the colours is determined, and invariably deter- mined, by the prism. So too in Kant's view the character of a man in itself may be free, but when it passes through the prism of time into the world of phenomena and is spread over many years it shows a number of separate actions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits the man, though all put together are the true representation of him to human perception. The man is free. His life represents his free choice. But his separate acts are what that free choice becomes when translated into a series of phenomena, and are bound each to the preceding by the law of invariable sequence. It is plain at once that this does not satisfy our consciousness. We are not conscious of 76 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. freedom as regards our life as a whole ; we are conscious of freedom as regards our separate actions. Our life as a whole embraces our past which is absolutely unchangeable, and our future which is not yet within our reach ; we are conscious of no present power over either. Our separate acts are perceptibly subject to our own control ; nay, it is by the use of our free- will in our separate acts that we are able to change the character of our life or to preserve it from change ; and with this corresponds our responsibility. We hold ourselves responsible for each act as it is done ; we hold ourselves responsible for the character of our lives only so far as we might have changed it by our acts. The solution leaves the difficulty where it was. It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity to express it by a dif- ferent word, and call it the doctrine of deter- minism. The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations with the idea of compulsion ; just so ia Science it is thought better to get rid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence, in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recog-^ III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 77 nisable by us in the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man ' you will be forced to act in a particular way ; ' but ' you wUl assuredly do so.' There will be no com- pulsion ; but the action is absolutely certain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so in given circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is your character in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom is simply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from any force put upon you from without. But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to a very large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be no more than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, our character to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us ; but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float as it were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, but having no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom or necessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for us not to know ourselves as well 78 Apparent Conflict between [Lect; as others know us, and to do many things which an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which we ourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases we sometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our lives is not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannot then escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had power to act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it is when a conflict arises be- tween duty and inclination that our inner cer- tainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. In the great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the power of temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for a moment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves ; which is the free agent and which is the blind force ; which is responsible for the issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in this case a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense of resistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this case to account for the sense of being a III.J Science and Religion on Fre6-Will. 79 free agent, by saying that this merely means that we are conscious of no external force. We are conscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will of ours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our very selves, and this distinction between the will and the forces against which the will is striv- ing is ineffaceable from our minds. That the wiU is often weak and on that account over- powered, and that after a hard struggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by our passions or our appetites, is unques- tionable. Often has the believer to pray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often wiU he feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knows that whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have to use it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to do so. The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive, and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. The first proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will is certainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there 8o Apparent Conflict between [Lect. be any human action which appears to be with- out any motive, it is not in such action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice is even more com- pletely at the mercy of passing incHnation than one who is acting from passion or from over- powering temptation. The freedom of the will is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing between motives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from the stronger motive, the question immediately fol- lows, what determines which is the stronger motive 1 It cannot be anything in the motives themselves, or all men would act alike in the same circumstances ; and it is clear that they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if it be something in the man, it must be either his will acting at the moment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be his character, then foUows the further question, what determines his character ? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we must answer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surrounding and preceding III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 8i circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of uniformity but this ; that, given such and such parents, such and such circumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and no other. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility ? I did not on this sup- position make my character; it was made for me ; any one else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessity have acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimed at the same, and won the same moral victories, and sufiered the same moral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure result of the circumstances in which I was born 1 But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, ,my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have altogether differed. G 82 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in re- gard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be ao- coxmted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite of all attempts to explaia it away, the fact that we think ourselves free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains imaffected. But let us examine how far the difference be- tween the scientific view and the religious view of human action extends. Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more especially independent of all law, is really as much regu- lated by laws of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man himself, and how often the wiU is certainly passive and consents instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny that nature and not the will is producing III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 83 the conduct. And not only so, but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number of suicides, of miffderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for another, of men who remain un- married all their lives, of men who enter a university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable G 2 84 Apparent Conflict between ■ [Lect. as far as it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of proving as much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action of in- animate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the induction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it is hardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstract arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionably unproven. And this agrees with the result- of a careful examination of the facts of human consciousness from the opposite point of view. We cannot but acknowledge that when we look very closely we find a very large proportion of our own actions to be by no means the result of an interference by the will. A large proportion is due to custom; a large proportion to inclination, of which the will takes no special notice,, and is not called on by the conscience to notice ; a large proportion to inclinations which we know that II.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 85 we ought to resist, but we do not resist ; a much smaller proportion, but still some, to passions and appetites against which we have striven in vain ; only a very small proportion to deliberate choice. There is, in fact, no irresistible reason for claiming freedom for human action except when that action turns on the question of right or wrong. There is no reason to call action free that flows from inclination or custom, or passioti, or a desire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain pleasure. The will claims to be free in all these cases, but it is free in the sense that it might be exerted ; and so, since it is not exerted, the action is not free. But when, at the call of duty, in whatever form, the wiU directly interferes, then and then only are we conscious not only that the wiU is free, but that it has asserted its freedom, and that the action has been free also. The relation of the will to the conduct falls under four distinct heads : for sometimes the will simply concurs with the inclination ; some- times it neither concurs nor opposes ; sometimes it opposes but is overpowered; sometimes it opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclina- tion of some kind or other prompts the man to 86 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. action. The inclination, whether set up by an external object of desire or by an internal im- pulse of restlessness or blind craving or the like, comes clearly from the nature, and is not free choice. There is no reason to believe that it is not in most cases, possibly in all cases, under the dominion of fixed law. It may be as com- pletely the product of what has preceded it as the eclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs in the inclination, it is needless to discuss the question whether the will acts or not. The con- duct is the same whether the will adds force to the inclination or is simply passive. The freedom of the will may in this case be considered as negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will be considered negative in the second case, which is that of the will neither concurring with incli- nation nor opposing it. In this case there may be a distinct consciousness of freedom in the form of a sense of responsibility for what inclination is permitted to do. A man in this case knows that he is free, perhaps knows that he ought to interfere and control the conduct. But as he does not interfere, the freedom of the wiU is not asserted in act. And it is possible that, as far III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 87 as all external phenomena are concerned, there may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. This, however, can hardly be in the third case, which is when the will and the inclination are opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although the inclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is an event of the most important kind, and is sure to leave traces on the character, and to be followed by consequences. In this case we are distinctly conscious of a power to add force to that one of the contending opposites which is most identified with our very selves, and we know whether we have added that force or not. And not only may we add this force directly from within ; we may and we often do go out- side of ourselves to seek for aids to add still more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose what we should not do otherwise. We dwell in thought on the higher aims which are the proper object of will ; we read what sets forth those higher aims in their full beauty; we seek the words, the company, the sympathy of men who will, we are sure, encourage us in this the higher path. And, on the other hand, we turn away from the temptation which gives strength 88 Apparent Conflict between [Leet. to the evil incL'nation, and if we cannot escape from its presence we endeavour to drive the thought of it from our minds. All this action is not for the sake of anything thus done, but for the sake of its indirect effect on the struggle in which we are engaged. Whenever there is a struggle, we are not only conscious that the will is free, but that it is asserting its freedom. In these struggles there is not a mere contest between two inclinations. We are distinctly conscious that one of the combatants is our very selves in a sense in which the other is not. But, nevertheless, when all has been said, it stiH re- mains in this case that the will is beaten and inclination prevails, and the conduct in the main is determined by the inclination, which is imder the dominion of the law of uniformity, and not by the will, which claims to be free. The fourth case in which the will prevails may, of course, make a momentous breach in the xmiformity of sequence of the conduct. But in far the largest number of cases the struggle is very slight, and th^ difference between the will and the inclination is not, taken alone, of grave importance in the life. And in those instances in which the struggle m.j Science and Religion on Free-Will . 89 is severe and the resulting change is great, it is very often the case that the way has been prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet ac- cumulation of hidden forces of the strictly natural order ready to burst forth when the fit opportunity came. In the great conversions which have sometimes seemed by their sudden- ness and completeness to defy all possibiUty of reduction to natural law, there are often never- theless tokens of deep dissatisfaction with the previous life having swelled up slowly within the soul for some time, even for some long time beforehand. The inclination to go on in evil courses has been broken down at last, not merely by the action of the will, but by the working of the machinery of the soul. To this it must be added that the action of the will is such that it very often happens that, having been exerted once, it need not be exerted again for the same purpose. A custom is broken down, an exceedingly strong tempt- ation has been overpowered, and its strength so destroyed that its return is without effect. Or sometimes the act of the will takes the form of deliberately so arranging the circum- go Apparent Conflict between [Lect. stances of life that a dreaded temptation cannot return, or if it return cannot prevail ; tlie right eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut off, and the sin cannot be committed even if desired. While therefore the wiU is always free, the actual interference of the will with the life is not so frequent as to interfere with the broad general rule that the course of human conduct is practically uniform. In fact the will, though always free, only asserts its free- dom by obeying duty in spite of inclination, by disregarding the uniformity of nature in order to maintain the higher uniformity of the Moral Law. The freedom of the human will is but the assertion in particular of that uni- versal supremacy of the moral over the physical in the last resort, which is an essential part of the very essence of the Moral Law. The free- dom of the will is the Moral Law breaking into the world of phenomena, and thus behind the free-wiU of man stands the power of God. When the real claim of the will for freedom has been clearly seized by the mind, it becomes apparent that there is no real collision between what Science asserts and what Eeligion requires III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 91 us to believe. Science asserts that there is evidence to show that an exceedingly large pro- portion of human action is governed by fixed law. Eeligion requires us to believe that the will is responsible for all this action, not be- cause it does, but because it might interfere. Science is not able, and from the nature of the case never will be able to prove that the range of this fixed law is universal, and that the will never does interfere to vary the actions from what without the will they would have been. Science will never be able to prove this, because it could not be proved except by a universal induction, and a universal induction is impos- sible. At present there is no approximation to such proof Eeligion, on the other hand, does not call on us to believe that the will often interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually telling us that it does not interfere as often as it ought. Revealed religion, indeed, has always based its most earnest exhortations on the re- luctance of man to set his will to the difficult task of contending with the forces of his nature, and on the weakness of the will in the presence of those forces. 92 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. And when we pursue this thought further we see that for such creatures as we are the suh- jection of a large part of our own nature to fixed laws is as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity of external nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us. The fixity of a large part of our nature — nay, of all but the whole of it — ^is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but a superficial self-examination to discern the indications of what the profoundest research still leaves a mystery — that we are not perfect creatures of our own kind — that our nature does not spontaneously conform to the Supreme Moral Law — that our highest and best consists not in complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetual upward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispens- able condition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shall be made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the next ascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare with evil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appetites had to be carried on through life III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 93 without the possibility of making any victory complete, the formation of a perpetually higher and nobler character would be impossible ; our main hope in this life, our best offering to God would be taken away from us ; we could never give our bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God ; we could give our separate acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to form ourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the Avill is not only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature ; but discipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to be disciplined. And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply and perceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strange way infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure will capable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress ever was or could be made. The tre- mendous strain of fighting with an enemy that might be defeated again and again for ever rwithout ever suffering any change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving the slightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for 94 Apparent Conflict between [Leot. the most unearthly, the most noble, the most godlike of human wills. But wills such as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to their own best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could persevere through such a hopeless conflict. It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is. But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some sudden stroke fashioning the soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenly lineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees that the Christian believes that he shall be thus blessed. And this progress rests on the fixed rules by which his nature is governed, and which admit of the character being gradually changed by the life. The Christian knows that God has so made us that a temptation once overcome is permanently weakened, and often overcome is at last altogether expelled ; that appetites restrained are in the end subdued and cost but little effort to keep down ; that bad III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 95 thoughts perpetually put aside at last return no more ; that a clearer perception of duty and a more resolute obedience to its call makes duty itself more attractive, fills us with enthusiasm for its fulfilment, draws us as it were upwards, and ennobles the whole man. The Christian knows that the thought of the Supreme Being, the contemplation of His excellency, the recog- iiition of Him as the source of spiritual life has a strange power to transform, and ever- more to transform the whole man. In this knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights his battle. And what is this but a knowledge that he has a nature subject to fixed laws, which he can indeed interfere with, but without which his self-discipline would be of little value, and assuredly could not long continue. And if the progress of Science and the ex- amination of human nature should eventually restrict more closely than we might have sup- posed the length to which the interference of the will can go; if it should appear that the changes which we can make at any one moment in .ourselves are within a very narrow range, this, too, will be knowledge that can.be used g6 Apparent Conflict, &c. in our self-discipline and quite as much perhaps in our mutual moral aid. It is conceivable that the branch of science which treats of human nature may in the end profoundly modify our modes of education, and our hopes of what can be effected by it. But if so the knowledge wUl only add to the store of means put within our reach for the elevation of our race. And we may be sure that nothing of this sort will really affect the revelation that God has written in our souls that we are free and responsible beings, and cannot get quit of our respon- sibility. LECTUHE ly. APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN EELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution, Great develop- ment in recent times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress ; from beauty ; from unity,. The conflict not real. H LECTUEE IV. APPAEENT CONFLICT BETWEEN KELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 'For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.' Romans i. 20. rriHE regularity of nature is the first postu- -*- late of Science ; but it requires the very slightest observation to show us that, along' with this regularity, there exists a vast irregu- larity which Science can only deal with by exclusion from its province. The world as we see it is full of changes ; and these changes when patiently and perseveringly examined are found to be subject to invariable or almost in- variable laws. But the things themselves which thus change are as multifarious as the changes which they undergo. They vary infinitely in quantity, in qualities, in arrangement through- H 2 lOO Apparent Conflict between [Lect. out space, possibly in arrangement througliout time. Take a single substance such, say, as gold. How much gold there is in the whole universe, and where it is situated, we not only have no knowledge, but can hardly be said to be on the way to have knowledge. Why its qualities are what they are, and why it alone possesses all these qualities ; how long it has existed, and how long it wiU eontinue to exists these questions we are unable to answer. The exist- ence of the many forms of matter,, the properties of each form, the distribution of each r aU this Science must in the last resort assume. But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, and Science soon makes it evident that it is true, that some forms of matter grow out of other forms. There are endless, combinations. And the growth of new out of old forms is of ne- cessity a sequence, and Mis under the law of invariability of sequences, and becomes the subject-matter of Science. As in each separate case Science asserts each event of to-day to have followed by a law of invariable sequence on the events of yesterday; the earth has reached the precise point in its orbit now which was deter- IV.] Religion and the Dmtrine of Evolution. loi mined by the law of gravitation as applied to its motion at the point which it reached a moment ago ; the weather of the present hour has come by meteorological laws out of the weather of the last hour ; the crops and the flocks now found on the surface of the habitable earth are the necessary outcome of preceding harvests and preceding flocks and of all that has been done to maintain and increase them ; so, too, if we look at the universe as a whole, the present condition of that whole is, if the scientific postulate of invariable sequence be admitted, and in as far as it is admitted, the necessary outcome of its former condition ; and all the various forms of matter, whether living or inanimate, must for the same reason and with the same limitation be the necessary out- come of preceding forms of matter. This is the foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine will be, and indeed if Science be admitted at all must be, accepted by everybody. Even the Roman Church, which holds that God is per- petually interfering with the course of nature, either in the interests of religious truth or out I02 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. of lovingkindness to His creatures, yet will acknowledge that the number of such inter- ferences almost disappears in comparison of the countless millions of instances in which there is no reason to believe in any interference at aU. And if we look at the universe as a whole, the general proposition as stated above is quite unaffected by the infinitesimal exception which is to be made by a believer in frequent miracles. But when this proposition is applied in detail it at once introduces the possibility of an entirely new history of the material uni- verse. For this universe as we see it is almost entirely made up of composite and not of simple substances. We have been able to analyse all the substances that we know into a compara- tively small number of simple elements-^some usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But these simple elements are rarely found uncom- bined with others; most of those which we meet with in a pure state have been taken out of combination and reduced to simplicity by human agency. The various metals that we ordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do not generally obtain them IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 103 pure except by smelting. The air we , breathe, though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to our life is a com- pound. And, if we pass from inorganic to organic substances, aU vegetables and animals are compound, sustained by various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or all of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously cannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and be compelled to start with it as a given fact — a fact as iacapable of scien- tific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every- day ex- perience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through these processes in our bodies ; and by the same processes we .prepare much of our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time when these processes had not yet begun ? May not the starting-point of the history of the uni- I04 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. verse be a condition in whicli the simple ele- ments were still uncombined 1 If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, might we not find all the elements of material things ready indeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unite them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separate from each other? Scattered through enormous regions of space, but drawn together by the force of gravitation ; their original heat, whatever it may have been, in- creased by their mutual collision ; made to act chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown; these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper nature, may be enough to account scientifically for aU the phenomena that we observe. We do not even then get back to regularity. Why these ele- ments, and no others; why in these precise quantities ; why so distributed in space ; why endowed with these properties: still are ques- IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 105 tions whicli Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason to expect that any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know not whether it may not be asserted that the impossibility of answering one at least among these questions is capable of demonstration. For the whole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the heavenly bodies ; and without original irregu- larity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever have spontaneously arisen. And if this irregularity be thus original. Science can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin with assuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it may begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always very much what we see it now, and that composition and decom- position have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky, the same animals > on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and possibly all these changes io6 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. in one general direction, yet these changes have never amounted to what would furnish a scien- tific explanation of the forms which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand. Science inay assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our material system ; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown up tinder the action of laws and forces still at work ; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated thus: We all distinguish between the original cre- ation of the material world and the historv of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to assign to the original cre- ation a great deal that Science is now disposed to assign to the history. But the distinction between the original creation and the sub- sequent history would still remain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the one may be less, and that assigned to the IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 107 other larger, than was formerly supposed. Howdver far back Science may be able to push its 'beginning, there still mlist lie behind that beginning the original act of creation — creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in space. This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an enormous and startling expansion : so enormous and so startling that the doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by regular law out of the past is one thing ; to say that it has grown out of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made — and aU this also by regular law — that is quite another thing. And the bearings of this new application of Science deserve study. Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sense whatever antago- nistic to the teachings of Eeligion, though it io8 Appareni Conflict between [Lect. may be, and that we shall have to consider ■afterwards, to the teachings of revelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relation to revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do 1 The reason is that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence and supremacy of God exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut away, some of the main arguments for that truth. Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to prove or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not to disprove or take away the truth itself We find every day in- stances of men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground they are to take their stand. And some men succumb in the trial and lose their faith together with the argument which has hitherto supported it. But the truth stiU stands in spite of the failure of some to keep their belief in it, and in spite of IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution, tog the impossibility of supporting it by the old arguments. And when men have become accustomed to. rest their belief on new grounds the loss of the old arguments is never found to^ be a very serious matter. Belief in revelation has been shaken again and again by this very increase of know- ledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow to many in the days of Gahleo to find' that the language of the Bible in regard to the movement of the earth and sun was mot scientifically correct. It was a dreadful blaw to many in the days of the Reformation to fiiid that they had been misled by what they believed to be an in- fallible Church. Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritual convictions, and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can no longer establish by the arguments which have hitherto been to them the decisive, perhaps the sole decisive, proofs. And yet in spite of these shocks belief in revelation is strong still in men's souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world. But let us go on to consider how. far it is true no Apparent Conjlict between [Lect. that the arguments which have hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme Creator are really affected very gravely by this doctrine of Evolution. The main argument, which at first appears to be thus set aside, is that which is founded on the marks of design, and which is worked out in his own way with marvellous skUl by Paley in his Natural Theology. Paley's argument rests as is well known on the evidence of design in created things, and these evidences he chiefly finds in the frame-work of organised living creatures. He traces with much most interesting detail the many marvellous contrivances by which animals of various kinds are adapted to the circumstances in which they are to live, the mechanism which enables, them to obtain their food, to preserve their species, to escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature thus examined, and particularly all animated nature, seems full of means towards ends, and those ends invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well be supposed to have in view. And whilst there is undeniably one great objection to his whole argument, namely that the Creator is represented IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 1 1 as an Artificer rather than a Creator, as over- coming difiiculties which stood in His way rather than as an Almighty Being fashioning things according to His Will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence of design remains exceed* ingly powerful, and it has always been considered a strong corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a Grod. Now it certainly seems at first as if this argument were altogether de- stroyed. If animals were not made as we see them, but evolved by natural law, stUl more if it appear that their wonderful adaptation to their surroundings is due to the influence of those sur- roundings, it might seem as if we could no longer speak of design as exhibited in their various organs ; the organs we might say grow of themselves, some suitable, and some unsuit- able to the life of the creatures to which they belonged, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable have survived. But Paley has supplied the clue to the answer. In his well-known illustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passing traveller, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly not lessened if it be found that the 112 Apparent Conflict between [Leot. watch was so constructed that, in course of time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinking not of Evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation of animals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step further, and we may with equal justice re- mark that we should certainly not believe it a proof that the watch had come into existence without design if we found that it produced in course qf , time not merely another watch but a better.; It would become more marvellous than ever if we found provision thus made not merely for the continuance of the species but for the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essential to animal life that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances ; if besides pro- vision for such adaptation in each generation we find provision for stiU better adaptation in future generations, how can it be said that the evidences of design are diminished \ Or take any separate organ, such as the eye. It is impossible not to believe until it be disproved that the eye was intended to see with. We cannot say that light was made for the eye, because light subs^ves many other purposes besides that of enabling IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 113 eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for light there is so strong a presumption that it cannot easily be rebutted. If indeed it could be shown that eves fulfilled several other functions, or that species of animals which always lived in the dark stUl had fully -formed eyes, then we might say that the connexion between the eye of an animal and the light of heaven was acci- dental. But the contrary is notoriously the case ; so much the case that some philosophers have maintained that the eye was formed by the need for seeing, a statement which I need take no trouble to refute, just as those who make it take no trouble to establish, I will not say its truth, but even its possibility. But the fact, if it be a fact, that the eye was not originally as well adapted to see with as it is now, and that the power of perceiving Kght and of things in the light grew by degrees, does not show, nor even tend to show, that the eye was not intended for seeing with. The fact is that the doptrine of Evolution does not affect the substance of Paley's argument at all. The marks of design which he has pointed out remain marks of design stUl even if we I 114 Apparent Conflict between [Leot. accept the doctrine of Eyolution to the full. What is touched by this doctrine is not the evidence of design but the mode in which the design was executed. Paley, no doubt, wrote on the supposition (and at that time it was hardly possible to admit any other supposition) that we must take animals to have come into existence very nearly such as we now know them : and his language, on the whole, was adapted to that sup- position. But the language would rather need supplementing than changing to make it applic- able to the supposition that animals were formed by Evolution. In the one case the execution foUows the design by the efPect of a direct act of creation ; in the other case the design is worked out by a slow process. In the one case the Creator made the animals at once such as they now are ; in the other case He impressed on certain particles of matter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the his- tory of His creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in the ordinary course of time living creatures such as the present were developed. The creative power remains the same in either case ; the design with which that IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 115 creative power was exercised remains the same. He did not make the things, we may say; no, but He made them make themselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from the great argument. It seems in itself something more majestic, something more be- fitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years, thus to impress His WiU once for all on His creation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what He had previously made. It has often been ob- jected to Paley's argument, as I remarked before, that it represents the Almighty rather as an artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with somewhat intractable materials and showing marvellous skill in overcoming difficulties rather than a beneficent Being making all things in accordance with the purposes of His love. But this objection disappears when we put the argument into the shape which the doctrine of Evolution demands and look on the Almighty as creating the original elements of matter, de- termining their number and their properties, I 2 ii6 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. creating the law of gravitation whereby as seems probable the worlds have been formed, creating the various laws of chemical and physical action, by which inorganic substances have been com- bined, creating above all the law of life, the mysterious law which plainly contains such wonderful possibilities within itself, and thus providing for the ultimate development of all the many wonders of nature. What conception of foresight and purpose can rise above that which imagines all history gathered as it were into one original creative act from which the infinite variety of the Uni- verse has come and more is coming even yet \ And yet again, it is a common objection to Paley's and similar arguments that, in spite of all the tokens of intelligence and beneficence in the creation, there is so much of the contrary character. How much there is of apparently needless pain and waste ! And John Stuart Mill has urged that either we must suppose the Creator wanting in omnipotence or wanting in kindness to have left His creation so imperfect. The answer usually given is that our know- ledge is partial, and, could we see the whole, the IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 117 objection would probably disappear. But what force and clearness is given to this answer by the doctrine of Evolution which tells us that we are looking at a work which is not yet finished, and that the imperfections are a necessary part of a large design the general outlines of which we may already trace, but the ultimate issue of which, with all its details, is still beyond our perception ! The imperfections are like the im- perfections of a half-completed picture not yet ready to be seen ; they are like the bud which will presently be a beautiful flower, or the larva of a beautiful and gorgeous insect ; they are like the imperfections in the moral character of a saint who nevertheless is changing from glory to glory. To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out, and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolu- tion adds the design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animals are per- petually better adapted to the life they have to live. The very phrase which we commonly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that ii8 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. can feel. If they are fitter for their surround- ings, most certainly they will find life easier to live. And, as if to mark stOl more plainly the beneficence of the whole work, the less deve- loped creatures, as we have every reason to believe, are less sensible of pain and pleasure; so that enjoyment appears to grow with the capacity for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes as sensitivity to suffering increases. And there can be no doubt that this is in many ways the tendency of nature. Beasts of prey are diminish- ing ; fife is easier for man and easier for all animals that are under his care : many species of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that remain have far greater happiness in their lives. In fact, all the pur- poses which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures are not only fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled from age to age. And though the progress may be exceedingly slow, the nature of the progress can- not be mistaken. If the Natural Theology were now to be writ- ten, the stress of the argument would be put on a different place. Instead of insisting wholly or IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 119 mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structure of living animals and plants, we should look rather to the original properties impressed on matter from the be- ginning, and on the beneficent consequences that have flowed from those properties. We should dwell on the peculiar properties that must be inherent in the molecides of the original ele- ments to cause such results to follow from their action and reaction on one another. We should dwell on the part played in the Universe by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of the great heat-givers ; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver ; of water, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat ; of the at- mosphere and the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their subservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purpose impressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible than ever before. And we could not overlook the beauty of Nature and of all created things as part of that purpose coming in many cases out of that very I20 Apparent Conflict between [Lect survival of the fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and jet a distinct object in itself. For this beauty there is no need in the economy of nature whatever. The beauty of the starry heavens, which so impressed the mind of Kant that he put it by the side of the Moral Law as proving the existence of a Creator, is not wanted either for the evolution of the world or for the preservation of liviag creatures. Our enjoyment of it is a super-added gift cer- tainly not necessary for the existence or the continuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to the teaching of the doc- trine of Evolution, has generally grovsm out of the need which makes it good for plants to attract insects. The insects carry the pollen from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix the breed ; and this produces the stronger plants which outlive the competition of the rest. The plants, therefore, which are most conspicuous gain an advantage by attracting insects most. That successive generations of flowers should thus show brighter and brighter colours is in- telligible. But the beauty of flowers is far more than mere conspicuousness of colours even IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 2 1 thougli that be the main ingredient. "Why should the wonderful grace, and delicacy, and harmony of tint be added \ Is all this mere chance ? Is all this superfluity pervading the whole world and perpetually supplying to the highest of living creatures, and that too in a real proportion to his superiority, the most re- fined and elevating of pleasures, an accident without any purpose at all \ If Evolution has produced the world such as we see and all its endless beauty, it has bestowed on our own dwelling-place in lavish abundance and in mar- vellous perfection that on which men spend their substance without stint, that which thev value above all but downright necessities, that which they admire beyond all except the Law of Duty itself. We cannot think that this is not designed, nor that the Artist who produced it was blind to what was coming out of His work. Once more, the doctrine of Evolution restores to the science of Nature the unity which we should expect in the creation of God. Paley's argument proved design, but included the possi- bility of many designers. Not one design, but many separate designs, all no doubt of the same 122 Apparent Conflict between [Lect, character, but all worked out independently of one another, is the picture that he puts before us. But the doctrine of Evolution binds all existing things on earth into one. Every mineral, every plant, every animal has such properties that it benefits other things beside itself and de- rives benefit in turn. The insect developes the plant, and the plant the insect ; the brute aids in the evolution of the man, and the man in that of the brute. All things are embraced in one great design beginning with the very creation. He who uses the doctrine of Evolution to prove that no intelligence planned the world, is under- taking the self-contradictory task of showing that a great machine has no purpose by tracing in detail the marvellous complexity of its parts, and the still more marvellous precision with which all work together to produce a common result. To conclude, the doctrine of Evolution leaves the argument for an intelligent Creator and Go- vernor of the world stronger than it was before. There is still as much as ever the proof of an in- telligent purpose pervading all creation. The difference is that the execution of that purpose IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 123 belongs more to the original act of creation, less to acts of government since. There is more divine foresight, there is less divine interposi- tion; and whatever has been taken from the latter has been added to the former. Some scientific students of Nature may fancy they can deduce in the working out of the theory results inconsistent with religious belief ; and in a future Lecture these will have to be examined ; and it is possible that the theory may be so pre- sented as to be inconsistent with the teaching of Revelation. But whatever may be the relation of the doctrine of Evolution to Eevelation, it cannot be said that this doctrine is antagonistic to Religion in its essence. The progress of Science in this direction will assuredly end in helping men to believe with more assurance than ever that the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath He established the heavens. LECTUHE V. REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor of Religion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Reve- lation. All higher Religions have claimed to be Revela- tions. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament ; yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. The miraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this mode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty. LECTURE V. EEVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPIKG AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. ' God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son.' Hehrews i. i. rriHE doctrine of Evolution has been applied -*- not only to the formation of aU created things, but to the development of human know- ledge ; and this with perfect justice, though with some risk of misunderstanding. It is cer- tain, and, indeed, it is obvious, that knowledge grows. The ordinary experience of mankind becomes larger and clearer in the course of time, and the systematised experience which we call Science makes the same progress in still gregiter measure and with more assurance. Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past ages. New generalisations 128 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. imagined by one thinker, new crucial experi- ments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented by another, — these have been the steps by which Science has grown and established its authority and enlarged its do- minion. When or by whom the first steps were made we have no record. No mathematician that ever lived showed greater natural power of intellect than he, whoever he was, who first saw that the singular contained the universal ; but we know neither his name nor his age, nor his birth- place nor his race. But after those first steps had been taken, we know who have been the leaders in scientific advance. And we know what they have done, and what they are doing ; and we can conjecture the direction in which further advances will be made. And so we can trace the development of this kind of knowledge, and in a certain and very real sense this develop- ment may be called an evolution. But there is this difference between the evo- lution of nature and the evolution of the science of nature. The evolution of' nature results in the existence of forms which did not exist before ; the evolution of knowledge results in v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 129 the perception of laws which were already in existence. The knowledge grows, but the things known remain. The knowledge is not treated as if in- dependent of the things known or believed to be known, as a phenomenon belonging merely to the human mind, with beginnings and laws and consequences and history of its own. And, con- sequently, its having a regular growth is not used as an argument against its substantial truth. The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but no mathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects its claims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought to believe the deduc- tions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer our own question by tracing the steps ; but our conviction is not shaken that these deductions are true. And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisations of Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out of Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler ; but the proof that the knowledge of one truth 1 30 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. has been evolved out of the knowledge of an- other, and that out of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all this Science has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a natural growth of human thought. Science has grown through aU manner of mistakes — mistakes made bj the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakes which men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be no doubt laughed at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, treat scientific thought as nothing more than one of the phenomena of humanity; ways of think- ing which necessarily grew out of the conditions in which men have existed, but sufficiently ac- counted for by their origin and mode of growth having been shown, and having no solidity of their own. What has been said of Science mav be said also of Eeligion. Religion also has had its de- velopment, and in some respects a development parallel to that of Science. It is possible to trace the steps by which men have obtained an ever larger and fuller knowledge of the Supreme Law of Bight, a clearer perception of its application, of its logical v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 131 results, of its relation to life, to conduct, to belief. It has grown tlxrougli mistakes as Science has. There has been false Beligion, as there has been false Science. Unsound prin- ciples of conduct have been inculcated in Reli- gion as unsound generalisations have been set up in Science. There have been improper objects of reverence in Religion, as there have been im- possible aims proposed for scientific investiga- tion. Ezekiel rises above the doctrine that the children are punished for the sins of their parents, just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum. The parallel is all the more complete in that in many cases false reli- gions have been also false sciences. The prayer to the fetish for rain is as contrary to true religion as it is contrary to true science. Many false rehgions are most easily overthrown by scientific instruction. Many false sciences begin to totter when the believers in them are taught true religion. The ordinary superstitions which have so strong a hold on weak characters and un- instrueted minds, are as inconsistent with true faith in God as with reasonable knowledge of nature- Science grows, but the facts, whether K 2 132 Revelation the means of developing [Lect laws or instances of the operations of those laws, are not affected bj that growth. And Religion grows, but the facts of which it takes cognisance are not affected by that growth. Neither in the one case nor in the other is the fact that there has been a development any argument to show that the belief thus developed has no real foun- dation. The pure subjectivity of Keligion,to use technical language, is no more proved by this argument than the pure subjectivity of Science. But there is one most important particular in which the development of Eeligion entirely differs from the development of Science. The leaders of scientific thought, from the time that Science has been conscious of itself, have never claimed direct divine instruction. For a long time, in- deed, scientific thought rested largely on tradi- tion, and that tradition was handed on from generation to generation without any examina- tion into its foundations. The stores of past observations seemed so very much larger in quantity than any that men could add in their own day, that it was natural to give more weight to what was received than to what was newly observed. The experience of each generation in v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 133 succession seemed nothing in comparison with the accumulated experience of all preceding generations. And in many cases old traditions stopped the growth of Science by preventing the acceptance of observations inconsistent with them. But such old traditions never claimed to rest on a revelation from God ; or, if such a claim was made here and there, it never had strength enough to root itself in Science and form part of the recognised authority on which Science stood. Science, from the time when it recognised itself as Science, has owed its development to observation of nature, and long before it shook off the fetters of unexamined tradition it had dis- claimed, even for that tradition, any other basis than this. But not so KeUgion. Many religions, and among them the purer and higher religions, in proportion to their nearer approach to perfec- tion, have claimed to rest on a Divine Revelation, and to be something more than either specula- tions of philosophic observers of nature, or de- ductions from innate principles of reason or conscience. Not thinkers, but prophets, or men claiming to be prophets, have given the purest 134 Revelation the means of developing [Lect religions to their disciples among mankind. It has always been possible to bring aU religious teaching to the bar of conscience ; it has been possible to put all religious teaching to logical examination; to systematise its precepts, whether of faith or conduct; to inquire into its funda- mental principles, and to ask for the authority on which the whole teaching rests. But these applications of our intellectual faculties to Ee- ligion have always been admitted as coming after, not as preceding, the teaching to which they are made. The prophet does sometimes reason when he is deducing from principles already accepted, new precepts, or new pro- hibitions; but he does not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of his mission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it by such means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will, in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to past revelations which they have already re- ceived, and with which his new message is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his power over nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. The Hebrew v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 135 prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat the old revelation with its old un- shaken and unshakeable precepts, but he will not stop there : he will also give signs from the Lord to prove that he has a right to the title of prophet which he claims. Armed with this title,^ he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Eestorer, the Messiah ; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passed in its appointed day ; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, and the execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives. It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown up with no such claim at aU. The worship of ancestors, where it has pre- vailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams, in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of the dead who were reverenced while they lived, and cannot be readily forgotten after death. Such worship barely attains to what may be called in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, the true seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid to a sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only. 136 Revelation the means of developing [Leot. the difference that those who receive this wor- ship are supposed to reside not in a distant- capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes, of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some of the inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to be called religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, the acknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imper- ceptible by the senses ; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons. But the central idea of a rule of holiaess is either alto- gether wanting, or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developing iato ultimate supremacy. These religions do not often lay claim to a revelation from a supreme authority. And they have withered away with the growth of knowledge and with clearer per- ceptions of what Keligion must be if it is to exist at all. AU the higher religions have claimed to rest on a divine revelation, and the Christian Ke- ligion on. a series of such revelations. The Christian Eeligion does not profess (as does for instance the Mahommedan) to be wrapped v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge, i^"/ up in one divine communication made to one man and admitting thereafter of no modifica- tions. Though, resting on divine revelation it is professedly a development, and is thus in harmony with the Creator's operations in na- ture. Whfether we consider what is taught concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or con- cerning human nature and its moral and spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God and His dealings with us His creatures, it is undeniable that the teaching of the Bible is quite different at the eiid from what it is at the beginning. The New Testament considered bv itself as a body of teaching is such an advance on all that preceded it as to be quite unique in the history of the world. The ideas conveyed in the Old Testament are absorbed, transformed, completed, so as to make them as a whole entirely new; and to these are added entirely new ideas sufficient by themselves to form a whole system of doctrine. And because of this it is difficult to speak of the new teaching as having grown out of the old. But the Old Testament covers many centuries. 138 Revelation the means of developing [Leot. and within its range we can trace a steady growth, and that growth always of the same character, and always pointing towards what the Gospel finally revealed. The strength of the moral sentiment in the earlier books is always assigned to the belief in, and reverence for, Almighty God. It is evidently held to be more important to believe in God and to fear Him than to see the perfection of His hoKness. If we distinguish between Religion and Mo- rality, Religion is made the more important of the two. It is more important to recognise that the holy God exists and reigns than to see clearly in what His holiness, and indeed all holiness, consists. The sentiment of reve- rence is more important than the perception of that universality which we now know to be the essential characteristic of the Moral Law. In analysing the origin and nature of Eehgion in the second of these Lectures, it was necessarjr to follow the order of thought, and beginning with Duty to end with God. But the order of fact is not the same. In actual fact man began with God and ends with a clearer perception of Duty. Hence in all the v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 1 39 earlier stages the morality is imperfect. The profaneness of Esau is a serious oflfence. The ungenerous temper, the unfairness and dupli- city of Jacob are light in comparison. Truth is not an essential. Blood-shedding and im- purity when in horrible excess are treated as most grievous sins ; but restrained within limits are easily condoned. Women are placed below their true and natural place ; polygamy if not distinctly allowed is certainly condoned ; di- vorce is permitted on one side, not on the other. Slavery is allowed though put under regulation. But the unity and spirituality of God are guarded with the strongest sanctions, and nothing could be said against idolatry and polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language than was used then. The reverence for God required then was as great as the reverence required now. But the conception of the holi- ness which is the main object of that reverence has changed ; has in fact been purified and cleared. And the change is traceable in the Old Testament. The prophets teach a higher morality than is found in the earlier books. Cruelty is condemned as it had not been before. 140 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. The heathen are not regarded as outside God's love, and the future embraces them in His mercy even if the present does not. Con- science begins to be recognised and appealed to. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly is exposed; it is treated not only with con- demnation, but with scorn. Individual re- sponsibility is insisted on. Children are not held responsible for their fathers, though the inheritance of moral evil and of the conse- quences of moral evil is never denied. And even trust in God rises to a higher level in Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall never be shaken by any calamity that may befall him, than in the earlier belief that cala- mities would never befall those who held fast that trust. If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that it corresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working of that instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to all moral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all the pro- phetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy; justice which requires v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 141 us to recognise the rights of others side by side with our own ; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of other creatures that can feel. We are bound to recognise the claims of others to equal treatment with ourselves, and any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must be justified by a universal rule applicable to all alike. The perpetual attempt to justify exceptions in this way is sure to end in di- minishing the number of those exceptions. If we are compelled to think much of the position of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to come to Malachi's declaration that God hateth putting away. If we are compelled to think of the position of slaves, we cannot continue for ever to believe that there are some beings with consciences and free wills, who neverthe- less, because of the accidents of their lives, have no rights at all ; and we acknowledge the righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the breach of covenant when the nobles of Judah re-enslaved those whom they had solemnly emancipated. If we think of the nature of responsibility and the justification of punish- 142 Revelation the means of developing [Leot. ment, we find it impossible to believe that an innocent man shall be rightly punished for the wrong-doing of another, even if that other be his father or his mother ; and we are convinced that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he proclaims on God's behalf that 'the soul that sinneth it shall die ; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.' And once more, whatever divine purpose gave the chosen people a priority among all peoples in know- ledge of divine will and possession of divine favour, it is impossible to find any rule by which this priority shall for ever exclude all other peoples from being within the range of God's manifested love ; and conscience cannot but accept as a divine message that the Gen- tiles also shall come to the Heavenly 'Light, and their kings to the brightness of His rising.' So again, to turn from justice to mercy, we recognise that we are bound to spare pain to all creatures that can feel, and this duty can only be set aside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a higher moral end. And if we are set by our consciences to v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 143 seek for some rule of universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetually clearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments in- flicted on criminals or enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Our own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry from within compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. And the denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear them to be the voice of God. But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughout with the neces- sary working of the great moral principles implanted in the spiritual faculty, it never- theless remains true also that aU this teaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess to be working out a philo- sophical system, but who claimed to bring a message from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to be trusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority. Lbpking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in its successive stages was a development, but it always took the form of 1 44 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. a revelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possible to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and faith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of human consciences, can only be secured — has only been secured — by presenting spiritual truth in this form of a Eevelation. When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taught in the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, is related as the bud to the flower. The de- velopment, if it be indeed a development, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems diffi- cult to recognise that it is a development at all. First, the morality is in form, if not in sub- stance, absolutely new. The duty of justice and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme limits, even to the length of entire self-sur- render. The disciple has his own rights no doubt, as every other man has his ; but he is required to leave his rights in God's hands and to think of the rights of others only. The highest place is assigned to meekness in conduct and humility in spirit. The humility of the v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 145 Sermon on the Mount may possibly by careful analysis be shown to be identical at bottom with the magnanimity of Aristotle's Ethics. But the presentation of the two is so utterly opposed that in the effect on life the identity is altogether lost. And as justice and mercy, so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it can go. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an integral part of the aim set before the will, hunger and thirst for righteousness, and peni- tence for failure in keeping to it, are to fill up the believer's hopes for himself. Of inward satisfaction and peace he is often assured; but these, and these only, are the means to that peace. The disciple's hfe is to consist in bear- ing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully; in returning good for evil, and love for indifference and even for hatred ; in detaching his affections from all the pleasures to be obtained from ex- ternal things ; in fixing his trust and his love on his Eternal Father. Taken as a whole, this is quite unlike aU moral teaching that preceded it, and there is no indication that any philo- sophy could ever have evolved it. It has fastened on the human conscience from the L 146 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. day that it was uttered ; and whatever moral teaching since has not been inspired from this source has soon passed out of power and been forgotten. We find when we examine that it exactly agrees with the fundamental teaching of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is applied to such creatures as we are, and to such a God as the New Testament sets before us. But we find it impossible to assert that by any working of human thought this morality could have been obtained by the spiritual faculty unaided. On the contrary, it seems more near the truth to say that we could never have ob- tained so clear a conception of the great Moral Law, if the teaching of the New Testament had not enlightened and purified the spiritual faculty itself. And to this is to be added that the moral teaching of the New Testament re- cognises what we may now almost consider a proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic of the government of the world, that perpetual progress without which nothing human seems to keep sweet and whole- some. Perfect as the New Testament morality is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actual v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 147 precepts. It leaves questions to be solved some of which have not been solved yet. It left slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. It said nothing of patriotism. It gave no clear command concerning the right use of wealth. It laid down no principles for the government of states, though such principles must have a moral basis. There has been a perpetual growth in the understanding and in the appli- cation of this perfect teaching, and there will yet be a growth. Of no philosophical system of morals is it possible to say the same. But in the second place, the New Testament contains not only a new morality, it contains also a new account of human nature. The mystery of that discord which makes the noblest and best of human souls a scene of perpetual internal conflict is acknowledged and its counter- part in God's dealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritual faculty as- serting its due supremacy, and the lower passions and appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so de- scribed by Saint Paul that none have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And our Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence L 2 148 Revelation the means of developing [Leot. on God and helplessness without Him ; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outside Christ, 'lieth in the wicked one,' lay down the same truth. And as the mystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mystery of the remedy for that evil. In the love of Grod shown in the Cross of Christ, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross is the power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upward to spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed the truth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man's moral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they could bear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of that contradiction and the renovation of that nature. Milhons have lived and died in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the New Testament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest, the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And they all concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives has been communion with God through Christ. v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 149 Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknown the immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual body which shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant grows from the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally, anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rooted persuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testa- ment as it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Kesurrection of our Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith. How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty I have pointed out before. And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and spirit- uality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the Old Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious complexity em- braced within that unity, though darkly hinted 150 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. at in the older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth but in the latter. We may find anticipa- tions of the teaching of St, Paul and St. John, and of our Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the Prophets, in the Eabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form, and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual needs of the great mass of believers. Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no miracles how- ever overwhelmingly attested, no external evi- dence of whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 151 teaching of the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within the human soul. And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would other- wise have. For what underlies the very concep- tion of revelation is the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength but all enhghtenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties that God has given him to understand the great divine law ; but he perpetually looks to God for in- struction, and whatever else may be said of that instruction his experience tells him that his 152 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and feeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scien- tific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apo- stles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds within his own soul. And so too does it corre- spond with what he sees in others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the un- lettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciphned and well informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on intel- lectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge in every human soul. But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers unquestionably depends on its satis- fying the conscience iu every stage of its en- lightenment, it is equally certain that those who v.] and completing^ spiritual Knowledge. 153 gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. They professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers ; and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous element in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old Testa- ment stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element in it occupied compara- tively so small a place, and was so separable from the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot say this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles are embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of our Lord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart : ' I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel ; ' ' My Father worketh hitherto, and I work ; ' ' Son, thy sins be forgiven thee ; ' ' Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadduoees ; ' ' It is not 154 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by- prayer and fasting;' 'Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine 1 ' ' Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and pro- fessed to work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would often have called by that name what was in reality extra- ordinary but not miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Eesurrec- tion, for which clear and unmistakeable and suflScient evidence is given. But while the ex- clusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the exclusion of the miracu- lous element altogether is not possible without a complete surrender of the position taken by v.] oMd completing Spiritual Knowledge. 155 the first Christian teachers. As they claimedv to be inspired and-to have enlightenment which was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world. The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message,, This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for such a direct communica- tion from God to man. Men seem to need it so much that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it. AH who thus claim supernatural authority must, of course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the human conscience. , What they teach must be an advance towards, and 156 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. feally an expression of, the Supreme Moral iaw. And if they profess to have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual na- ture of man, or it would not be so invariably made" nor so largely successful. It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We believe because we find our con- sciences satisfied, and we bring up our children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without any external evidence at all.. But the first receivers of the message, to whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to re- concile that revelation with previous teaching, v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 157 how sure were they to need some other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to all it is a help to find that reasonable ground cafi be shown for holding that such evidence was originally given. Eevelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. Tq look back afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces. But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large degree satisfied 158 Revelation the means of developing, &c. our spiritual faculty. Eevelation, and revela- tion alone, has taught us ; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God which has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning He has never forgotten His children. LECTURE VI. APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN KELIGION AND THE DOCTRmE OF EVOLUTION. Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually in- troduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not inconsistent with dignity of humanity. LECTURE VI. APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN KELIGION AND THE DOCTEINE OF EVOLUTION. ' Know ye that the Lord He is God : it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' Psalm c. 3. "D ELIGION is rooted in our spiritual nature and its fundamental truths are as inde- pendent of experience for their hold on our consciences as the truths of mathematics for their hold on our reason. But as a matter of fact Religion has taken the form of a revelation. And this introduces a new contact between Eeligion and Science, and of necessity a new possibility of collision. There is not only possible opposition or apparent oppo- sition of Science in what is revealed, in what we may call the actual substance of the revelation ; but also in the accessories and evidences of the revelation, which may be no actual part of the M i62 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all ap- pearance, inseparably bound up with it. It is therefore no more than might have been ex- pected that the general postulate of the uni- formity of nature should appear to be contravened by the claim to supernatural power made on behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just at present leading scientific doctrine, the doctrine of Evolution, should be found inconsistent with parts, or what appear to be parts, of the reve- lation itself. And we have to consider the two questions. What has Eevelation to say concern- ing Evolution? and what has Science to say concerning Miracles 1 Concerning Evolution, we have first to con- sider how much in this direction has been made fairly probable, and what still remains to be determined. It cannot then be well denied that the astro- nomers and geologists have made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an ori- ginal state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases ; VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 163 that such a body as the planet Jupiter repre- sents one of the stages through which it has passed, that such a body as the moon re- presents a stage toward which it is tending ; that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank has formed the elevations which we call moun- tains, and the depressions which contain the seas and oceans ; that it has been worn by the action of heat from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action presents the appear- ance when examined below the surface of suc- cessive strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And the whole solar system may and probably did come into its present con- dition in this way. It certainly could have been so formed, and there is no reason for H 2 164 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. supposing that it was formed in any other way. Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the other end, and trace things backwards from the present, instead of forwards from the remote past, it cannot be denied that Darwin's in- vestigations have made it exceedingly probable that the vast variety of plants and animals have sprung from a much smaller number of original forms. In the first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading any great class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. Why, for instance, should the vertebrate ani- mals be formed on a common plan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species, but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamental type % If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the variations were introduced in the course of that descent, this remarkable fact is at once accounted for. But, in the second place, observation shows that slight variations ahe perpetually being in- troduced with every successive generation, and many of these variations are transmitted to the VI.] and tJie Doctrine of Evolution. 165 generations that follow. In the course of time, therefore, from any one parent stock would descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, in the third place, it be asked why this variety does not range by imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous prodigality and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures. Plants and animals produce far more descendants than ever come even to such maturity as to reproduce their kind. And this is particularly the case with the lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There is no waste lilse the waste of life that is to be seen in nature. Living creatures are destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack of means of reproduction, by accidents, by ene- mies. The inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were. One species of animal has been pre- 1 66 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. served by length of neck, which enabled it to reach high-growing fruits and leaves; another by a thicker skin, which made it difficult for enemies to devour; another by a colour which made it easier to hide. One plant has been pre-* served by a bright flower which attracted insects to carry its pollen to other flowers of its kind j another by a sweet fruit which attracted birds to scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and plants that had not these advantages perished for the lack of them. The result would be to main- tain, and perpetually, though with exceeding slowness, more and more to adapt to the con- ditions of their life, those species whose pecu- liarities gave them some advantage in the great struggle for existence. Here again we have the working of known laws of life, capable of accounting for what we see. And the high probability cannot be denied that by evolution of this kind the present races of living creatures have been formed. And to these arguments the strongest corroboration is given by the frequent occurrence, both in plants and animals, of useless parts which still remain as indications of organs that once were YL] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 167 useful and have long become useless. Animals that now live permanently in the dark have abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an ancestor with eyes that could see. Animals that never walk have abortive legs hidden under their skin, useless now but indicating what was useful once. Our knowledge no doubt in this as in any other province of nature is but the merest fraction of what may be known therein. But there is no evidence whatever to show that what we have observed is not a fair sample of the whole. And so taking it, we find that the mass of evidence in favour of the evolution of plants and animals is enormously great and increasing daily. Granting then the high probability of the two theories of Evolution, that which begins with Laplace and explains the way in which the earth was fitted to be the habitation of living creatures, and that which owes its name to Dar- win and gives an account of the formation of the living creatures now existing, we have to see what limitations and modifications are neces- sarily attached to our complete acceptance of both» 1 68 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. First, then, at the very meeting point of these two evolutions we have the important fact that all the evidence that we possess up to the pre- sent day negatives the opinion that life is a mere evolution from inorganic matter. We know perfectly well the constituents of all living substances. We know that the fundamental material of all plants and all animals is a com- pound called protoplasm, or that, in other words, organic matter in all its immense variety of forms is nothing but protoplasm variously modi- fied. And we know the constituent elements of this protoplasm, and their proportions, and the temperatures within which protoplasm as such can exist. But we are quite powerless to make it, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature in the act of making it. All the evidence we have points to one conclusion only, that life is the result of antecedent life, and is pro- ducible on no other conditions. Repeatedly have scientific observers believed that they have come on instances of spontaneous gene- ration, but furt-her examination has invariably shown that they have been mistaken. We can put the necessary elements together, but we YL] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 169 cannot supply the necessary bond by which they are to be made to live. Nay, we cannot even recall that bond when it has once been dissolved. We can take living protoplasm and we can kill it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our best chemistry can discover, but it will be dead protoplasm, and we cannot make it live again ; and as far as we know nature can no more make it live than we can. It can be used as food for living creatures, animals or plants, and so its substance can be taken up by living protoplasm and made to share in the life which thus con- sumes it ; but life of its own it cannot obtain. Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two evolutions lands us in acceptance of a miracle. The creation of life is unaccounted for. And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other inorganic sub- stances. It was part of that beginning which had to be taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain of Science alto- 1 70 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. gether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct interference in the actual history of the world. There could have been no life when the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely heated fluid. There came a time when the earth became ready for life to exist upon it. And the life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can account for its coming. As it stands this is a great miracle. And from this conclusion the only escape that has been suggested is to sup- pose that life came in on a meteoric stone from some already formed habitable world ; a sup- position which transfers the miracle to another scene, but leaves it as great a miracle as before. Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there was a purpose iu it worthy of miraculous inter- ference. For what purpose can rank side by side with the existence and development of life, the primary condition of aU moral and spiritual existence and action in this world? In the intro- duction of life was wrapped up all that we value and all that we venerate in the whole creation. The infinite superiority, not in degree only, but in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 171 a stone, justifies us in believing that the main purpose of the creation that we see was to supply a dweUing-plaoe and a scene of action for living beings. We cannot say that the dignity of the Moral Law requires that creatures to be made partakers in the knowledge of it, and even creatures of a lower nature but akin to them, must have been the results of a separate and miraculous act of creation. But we can say that there is a congriiity in such a miracle, with the moral purpose of all the world, of which we are a part, that removes all difficulty in believing it. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and can only say, ' Here is a puzzle yet unsolved.' Nor can the most religious scientific man be blamed as undutiful to religion if he persists in endeavouring to solve the puzzle. But he has no wght to insist beforehand that the puzzle is certainly soluble ; for that he cannot know, and the evidence is against him. Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at once that it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompleteness gravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawn from it, and whichj 172 Apparent Collision between Religion [Leet. indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. For the theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission of characteristics from progenitor to progeny, and the introduction of minute varia- tions in the progeny with each successive gene- ration. Now, the former of these may be said to be well established, and we recognise it as a law of life that aU plants and animals propagate their own kind. But the latter has, as yet, been hardly examined at all. Each new generation shows special slight variations. But what causes these variations'? and what determines what they shall be ? In Darwin's investigations these questions are not touched. The variations are treated as if they were quite indefinite in number and in nature. He concerns himself only with the effect of these variations after they have appeared. Some have the effect of giving the plant or animal an advantage in the struggle of life ; some give no such advantage ; some are hurtful. And hence follows the permanent pre- servation or speedy destruction of the plants and animals themselves. But we are bound to look not only to their effects but to their causes, if the theory is to be completed. And then we VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 73 cannot fail to see that these variations in the progeny cannot be due to something in the pro- genitors, or otherwise the variations would be all alike, which they certainly are not. They must, therefore, be due to external circumstances. These slight variations are produced by the action of the surroundings, by the food, by the temperature, by the various accidents of life in the progenitors. Now, when we see this, we see also how gravely it modifies the conclusions which we have to draw concerning the ancestry of any species now existing. Let us take, for instance, the great order of vertebrate animals. At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to indicate that all these animals are descended from one pair or one individual, and that their unity of construction is due to that fact ; but if we go back in thought to the time at which the special peculiarities were introduced which reaUy constituted the order and separated it from other animals, we see that it is by no means clear that it originated with one pair or with one individual, and that, on the contrary, the probabilities are the other way. Although the separation of this order from the rest must have 1 74 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. taken place very early, it cannot well have taken place until miUions of animals had al- ready come into existence. The prodigality of nature in multiplying animal life is fully ac- knowledged by Darwin, and that prodigality is apparently greatest in the lowest and most formless type of animal. There being, then, these many miUions of living creatures in exist- ence, the external siu-roundings introduce into them many variations, and among these the special variations to which the vertebrate type is due. It is quite clear that wherever the external surroundings were the same or nearly the same, the variations introduced would be the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far more probable that external surroundings should be the same or nearly the same in many places than that each spot should be absolutely unlike every other spot in these particulars. The be- ginnings of the vertebrate order would show themselves simultaneously, or at any rate inde- pendently, in many places wherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity of the plan in the vertebrata woxild be due, not to absolute unity of ancestry, but to VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 175 unity of external conditions at a particular epoch in the descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animals into orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for the most part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history of organic evolution. Of course the descendants of any one of the original vertebrata might, and probably in not a few cases did, branch off into new subdivisions and yet again into further subdivisions, and we are always justified in looking for unity of ancestry among all the species. But it is also quite possible that any species may be regularly descended, without branching off at all, from one of the originals, and that other species that re- semble it may owe the resemblance simply to very great similarity of external conditions. To find, for instance, the unity of ancestry between man and the other animals, it will certainly be necessary to go back to a point in. the history of life when living creatures were as yet formless, undeveloped — the materials, as we may call them, of the animal creation as we now see it, and not in any but a strictly scientific sense, what we mean when we ordinarily speak of 1 76 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. animals. The true settlement of such questions as these can only be obtained when long and patient study shall have completed Darwin's investigations by determining under what laws and within what limits the slight variations which characterise each individual animal or plant are congenitally introduced into its struc- ture. As things stand the probabilities certainly are that a creature with such especial character- istics as man has had a history altogether of his own, if not from the beginning of aU life upon the globe, yet from a very early period in the development of that life. He resembles certain other animals very closely in the structure of his body; but the part which external conditions had to play in the earliest stages of evolution of life must have been so exceedingly large that identity or close similarity in these external con- ditions may well account for these resemblances. And the enormous gap which separates his nature from that of all other creatures known, indicates an exceedingly early difference of origin. Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything but itself. Attempts VI.] and the Doctrine of EvohUion. 177 have been made, and many more will no doubt be made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses, that our affections should have had a history, and that their present working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very largely, and that they are also very largely due to special peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will and our own free action, it is per- fectly reasonable to find subject to laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower animals. They, too, can love ; can be angry or pleased; can put affection above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing ; can take delight in society.: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's N 178 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. faithful servants and companions, show epiotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the arts of life well com- parable to our own. If the bare animal nature is thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural forces, it is to be ex- pected that similar forces in mankind shoTild be found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we are animals, and what- ever nature has done for other animals we may expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This nature is the main in- strument, put into the grasp as it were of that spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with this instrument and what cannot ; how it has been formed in the past, and may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 79 the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such uni- versality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself, and enable Abra- ham to say, ' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right 1' The very word right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used. Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sen- timent of shame ; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns from generation. But the principle of N 2 i8o Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot conae out of any development of human nature any more than the necessity of mathe- matical truth can so come. It stands not on experience, and is its own evidence. Nor in- deed have any of the attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of universal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were an un- authorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all experience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law altogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing. Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that the two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts is different ; the spirit and character of the accounts is different ; the details are altogether different. The comparison must take note of the difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at aU. yi.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 8 1 It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentioned there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. The narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in a moment, or a pro- cess lasting through millions of years 1 The writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, and made them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knows nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances or their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their creation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people the science of the matter, he would have had to put ia 1 82 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. most serious obstacle in the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible to. believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been dead ; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance. But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to com- municate, and we can read them still. He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained, was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the formless to the formed ; from the orderless to the ordered; from the inanimate to the animate ; from the plant to the animal ; from the lower animal to the higher; from the beast to the man ; ending with the rest of the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly vi.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 183 match the doctrine of Evolution than this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired writers. The sym- bolical use of periods of time is not without example. That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to give men information upon scientific questions, is incre- dible. And, in fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,' There is no more reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth. 1 84 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would have been to tell what every physio- logist now knows of the processes by which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing and living infant. He takes men — and he could not but take, men as he sees them — with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of famUy. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so many great Christian VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 185 thinkers from the earliest age of the Church downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told ; and evolution such as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such as he is before the narrative begins. It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of evolution as would re- present him to have been an animal before he became a- man. But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and inclinations, appe- tites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own ; but at any rate i86 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. it branched off from other animals at a very early point in the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently developed ta receive it. That the body should have been first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of God, — this is a supposition which is incon- sistent neither with what the Bible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved. And to this must be added that it is out of place for us to define what is consistent or inconsistent with the dignity of man in the process or method by which he was created to be what he is. His dignity consists in his VI,] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 187 possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in the method by which he became possessed of it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and the Bible never professes to tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up in matter itself, or in that living matter of which we are made. How absolutely nothing we know of the mode by which any single soul is created ! The germ which is to become a man can be traced by the physiologist through all the changes that it has to undergo before it comes to life. Is the future soul wrapped up in it from the first, and dormant till the hour of awakening comes 1 or is it given at some moment in the develop- ment? We see in the infant how its powers expand, and we know that the spiritual faculty, the very essence of its being, has a development like the other faculties. It has in it the gift of speech, and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, and taste, and power of thought ; self-sacrifice and unswerving truth ; science and art, and spiritual understanding, all may be there in abundant measure and yet may show no sign. All this we know ; and because it is common and well known we see nothing inconsistent 1 88 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. with the dignity of our nature in this conceal- ment of all that dignity, helpless and powerless, within the form of an infant in arms. With this before us it is impossible to say that any- thing which Science has yet proved, or ever has any chance of proving, is inconsistent with the place given to man in Creation by the teaching of the Bible. In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in teaching Evolution, has yet asserted anything that is inconsistent with Eevelation, unless we assume that Revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that the writer of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the Bible, took nature as he saw it,, and expressed his teaching in lan- guage corresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of Evolution, in so far as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the declaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works ; and that my soul knoweth right well.' There is nothing in all that Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which con- VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 89 flicts with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a Revelation from a Father in Heaven, and re- sponsible to judgment by His Law. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know not how any human soul has been made since ; but we know that we are, in a sense in which no other creatures Hving with us are, the children of His special care. LECTURE VII. APPAKENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPEKNATURAL POWER. The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the •will. The miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to prove miracles ; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence ; not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of Science. LECTURE VIL APPAEENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me : or else believe Me for the very works' sake.' St. John xiv. II. SCIENCE and Religion come into apparent collision on the question of the freedom of the will. Science and. Revelation come into a similar apparent collision on the possibility of miracles. The cases are precisely parallel. In each individual man the uniformity of nature is broken to leave room for the moral force of the will to assert its independent existence. This breach of uniformity is within very narrow limits, and occurs much more rarely than ap- pears at first sight. But the demand to admit not only the possibility but the fact of this breach is imperative, and to deny it is to turn o 194 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. the command of the Moral Law as revealed in the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Keve- lation asserts its right to set aside . the uni- formity of nature to leave room for a direct communication from God to man. It is an essential part of the Divine Moral Law to claim supremacy over the physical world. Unless somehow or other the moral ultimately rules the physical, the Moral Law cannot rightly claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as given to us . maintains that this superiority has been asserted in fact here in the world of phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equi- valent to denying that any revelation has been made. In this way Eevelation asserts for God's message to the human race precisely the same breach of uniformity which every man's conscience claims for himself in regard to his own conduct. It is, however, necessary to point out that when we speak of a breach of uniformity we are never in a position to deny that the breach of uniformity may be physical only and per- haps apparent only. It may be found, it pro- bably will be found, at last that the Moral Law VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 195 has in some way always maintained its own uniformity unbroken. The Moral Law has in its essence an elasticity which the physical law has not. It often takes the form, that, given certain conduct, there will follow certain con- sequences ; and the law is kept though the conduct is free. It is further possible, and Kevelation has no interest in denying it, that the intervention which has apparently disturbed the sequence of phenomena is, after all, that of a higher physical law as yet unknown. For instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miiacle in the strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power of mind over body, a power which is undeniably not yet brought within the range of Science, and which nevertheless may be really within its domain. In other ways what seems to be miraculous may be simply unusual. And it must therefore be always remembered that Kevelation is not bound by the scientific definition of a miracle, and that if all the miraculous events recorded in the Bible happened exactly as they are told, and if Science were some day able to show that they could be accounted for by natural causes o 2 196 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. workiDg at the time in each case, this would not in any way affect their character, as regards the Eevelation which they were worked to prove or of which they form a part. Revela- tion uses these events for its own purposes. Some of these events are spoken of as evidences of a divine mission. Some of them are substan- tive facts embraced in the message delivered. And if for these purposes they have served their turn, if they have arrested attention which would not otherwise have been arrested, if they have overcome prejudices, if they have compelled belief, the fact that they are afterwards dis- covered to be no breach of the law of uniformity has no bearing at all on the Revelation to which they belong. The miracle would in that case consist in the precise coincidence in time with the purpose which they served, or in the j man- ner and degree in which they marked out the Man who wrought them from all other men, or in the foreshadowing of events which- are in the distant future. Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that our Lord's Resurrection may be found here- after to be no miracle at all in the scientific vn.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 197 sense. It foreshadows and begins the general Resurrection ; when that general Kesurrection comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural issue of physical laws always at work. There is nothing at present to indicate any- thing of the sort; but a general resurrection in itself implies not a special interference but a general rule. If, when we rise again, we find that this resurrection is and always was a part of the Divine purpose, and brought about at last by machinery precisely the same in kind as that which has been used in making and governing the world, we may also find that our Lord's Resurrection was brought about by the operation of precisely the same machinery. We may find that even in the language of strict science ' He was the first fruits of them that slept,' and that His Resurrection was not a miracle, but the first instance of the working of a law till the last day quite unknown, but on that last day operative on all that ever lived. Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction of life into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone thait I gS Apparent Collision of Science with [Lecs first introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeeded in tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle it is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believers are expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was once worked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very good reason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter to restore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men who think that the intro- duction of life was not a miracle, that it came at the fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words, that such properties are inherent in the elements of which proto- plasm is made that in certain special circum- stances these elements will not only combine but that the product of their combination will live. If this be so, it is assuredly no such veiy strange supposition that there may be such properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whether particles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certain special circumstances these particles will return to life. And if this be ao the general resurrection may vn.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 199 be no miracle, but the result of the properties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of the laws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord's Re- surrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformity of nature. But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place which our Lord's Resur- rection holds in the records of Revelation. It is not the purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature ; if such interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man can be done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any such interference would take place. Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of healing. There is no question at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great, and has never yet been thoroughly examined. We kuow almost nothing of the extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellous recoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for them except by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have been roused to interfere with the working of the 200 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. nervous system. And some men, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered by mere imaginations. Some men of note have attributed the recoveries claimed for homoeopathy to this cause. Some have assigned to this cause the extraordinarv cures that have been undeniably wrought at the shrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints. The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for a time and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, are gener- ally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the same obscure working of unknown natural laws. They have been tested by their successes and their failures. They have suc- ceeded, and for a time continued to succeed ; but at last they have ceased to work because faith in them for some reason or other has been shaken dovm. Their falsehood has thus been detected ; but nevertheless their genuine success for a time has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and that reality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body. In this region all is at present unexamined ; and all operations are tentative, and for that reason VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 20 r most are only successful for a time. Now our Lord's tairacles are never tentative ; that is not the character given to them either by friend or by foe. Nor is there any instance recorded either by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished. Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel of any instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts of the Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew. The accounts of his enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identic cal with saying that they did not believe Him. But they do not ever charge Him with failure. Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles of healing may have been the result of this power of mind over body which we are now considering. It is possible that they may be due not to an interference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in His mental power to the similar power possessed by other men. Men seem to possess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies of others in different degrees. Some can influence other men's bodies through their minds more ; some less. Possibly He may have possessed this 202 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. power absolutely where others possessed it conditionally. He may have possessed it with- out limit ; others within limits. If this were so, these acts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense. They would imply very great superiority in Him to other men. But they would be in themselves under the law of uniformity. Now it is clear that if this should turn out to be so, though these acts would not be miracles for the purposes of Science, they would still be mi]?-acles for the purposes of Eevelation. They would do their work in arresting attention, and still more in accrediting both the message and the Messenger. They would separate Him from ordinary men. They would prove Him to be possessed of cre- dentials worth examining. To the believer it would make no difference whether Science called them miracles or not. To him it would still remain the fact that here was a Messenger whom God had seen fit to endow with powers which no other man ever possessed in such degree and such completeness, though others may have possessed some touch of them greater or less. Further, it is necessary to repeat what was vir.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 203 briefly remarked in a previous Lecture, that the position which miracles take as regards us who read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessed and recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracles were the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought them had been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not an imposture; to us they, are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of the revelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are con- vinced by Paley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved by sufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion that therefore the teaching that was thus accom- panied must be divine. But most men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records in which Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence taken alone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to the substance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on the contrary, the Revelation is a whole,capableof being looked at from many sides, and found to be divine from -^hateveri side it is fieen ; and one of its aspects is this supernatural 204 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. character by which it appears to assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolute supre- macy over all the physical world. The main evi- dence of the Eevelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritual faculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come through teachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborative evidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law. That eternal law claims supremacy over the physi- cal world and actually asserts it in the freedom of the human will ; and a Revelation which comes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very law personified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actual manifestation in its approach to men. Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the mil aculous element in the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is therein presented. First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the original existence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not define God as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except as causing other things yii.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 205 ito exist He does not exist Himself. But we describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will, and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as the Eevelation tells us that He is the source of all existence, the Creator of the substance of things, so too does it assert that He gave all things their special properties and the laws of those properties, and that not only the original creation, but all the subsequent history of all things has been the outcome of His design, and that He has thus prescribed the government of the whole universe. And yet again the Eevela- tion from the beginning to the end maintains His living Presence in and over all things that He has thus formed, and denies that He has parted with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh acts of government, whenever and wherever He sees fit. For He is necessarily free and cannot be restrained by anything but His own holiness. And unless He expressly revealed to us that His own holiness prevented Him from inter- fering with His own creation, we could not put limits to what He could do. The Eevelation that He has given us says just the contrary, and 2o6 Apparent Collision of Science with [lect. from end to end implies that He is present in the government of the creation which He has made. What evidence, then, is there in the world of phenomena that He has ever thus interfered ? Putting aside as untenable all idea of a priori impossibility, admitting that God can work a miracle if He will, admitting that a miracle avowedly worked in the interest of a divine revelation stands on a totally different footing from a miracle avowedly worked in any other interest, putting the breach of the law of uni- formity made by a miracle on the same footing as the breach of the same law made bv a human will ; we have to ask what evidence can be given that any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever been worked 1 It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No such evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in the Old Testament. The times are remote ; the date and authorship of the Books not estab- lished with certainty; the mixture of poetry with history no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts ; and, if the New Testa^ vn.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 207 ment did not exist, it would be impossible to sbow such a distinct preponderance of proba- bility as would justify us in calling on any to accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true. But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have here first the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the early Christians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives as witnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidences arid as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miracles nor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. They testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it the basis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles as part of the character of His life. It is necessary to main- tain that they were mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity which we feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miracle was ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even their honesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basis of fact to rest on. No man 2o8 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. •who is not determined to uphold an opinion at aE hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed that our Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief Butj in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be said of the documents that compose the New Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord was universally believed by His disciples to have the power of working miracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regard to this ; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any disclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could work miracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him to possess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever having implied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim what was ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. ' Why callest thou Me good ? There is none good but One, that is, God,' we do |ind. But ' Why askest thou Me to do this ? VIl]. the Claim to Supernatural Power. 209 There is none that can do this but One, that is God/ we do NOT find. It is plain that He accepted the belief that assigned Him powers above those of other men — ^^powers given Him by His Father in heaven — and never discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles were removed. And if He claimed' to possess and exercise this power, the evidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom we cannot disbelieve. And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted by His disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form but similar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, and has ever since con- tinued to exert on all succeeding generations. The first disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christ and not them- 2 lo Apparent Collision of Science with [Leet. selves. They referred everything to Him, and professed to have no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous power of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to be everything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but com- mitted His Kevelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. But they are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosophers succeeding a philosopher ; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one of them does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him. St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be giving by our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his own inferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority as belongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on all subjects. And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. There is no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the majority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Such too has been the pro- cedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ ; stake VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Poiver. 1 1 1 your happiness on Him ; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritual aspirations on Him ; stake your power of winning the victory over tempta- tion on Him — this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, and saint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. The Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strange superstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort rivals to Him as teachers or as examples ; but here there is no rival even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a living P 2 212 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. present power, able to give strength and victory in the conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times of spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely, a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been falsified. The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief in His supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was no gradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in the convictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of our Lord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbeheve His claims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations of believers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistent evidence of eighteen centuries. vil.] the Claim to Supernizfural Power, 213 Against this evidence what is to be said 1 It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming that nothins can set it aside. And further it is said, that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidence sufficient for the purpose has yet been produced. Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is the nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the in- quirer does not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredly no evidence win ever be sufficient to convince him that God has worked a miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and, not by sight. It will be a hopeless task to convince men that 214 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. there is a God by pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But if a man do believe there is a God, what -kind of evidence ought he to expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the creation ? In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that is the miraculous evidence, for Eevelation should be of such a character as to stand above the spiritual evi- dence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty and visible pur- pose of the creation are secondary — corrobora- tive not demonstrative — so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the vil.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 215 souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Eevelation made to us if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a con- tradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Eevelation were the scientific faculty. And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it was never ci oss-examined. No such precau- tions surrounded the evidence as would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events. The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught ; but there was no one to scrutinise what thev asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to tlie tejst of Searching questions. But 2i6 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. to make such objections as these is to make ■what is on the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific processes of the nineteenth centurj should have been anticipated in the first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revela- tion which they were worked to introduce. Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we possess concerning the life of our Lord. The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said. Nor has anything yet been said or writtea to shake Paley's argument on this point. Yll.] the Claim to Supernatural Power, 217 But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion an instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of nature is so indis- pensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be by stepping out- side of his science for the time and conceiving the possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate in- vestigations which Science makes into pheno- mena; it attends Science as a whole. And it 2i8 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature itself. The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been steadily extending without a check ; that instance after instance of apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its province ; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial and has never yet been found to fail ; that no one who has so tried it has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vast- ness of nature, the claim to extend the induc- tion from generality to universality is seen to VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 219 be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed. Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This dpes not affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on external nature. Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be per- petually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe^ 220 Apparent Collision of Science with [Leot can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all E-evelation on that ac- count. The belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science ; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is every- thing; and believers in Eevelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revela- tion is everything ; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method of Eevelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that Eevelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students pf nature will certainly learn that Science has VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. ii\ nothing to fear from the teaching of Eevelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God; 'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork ; His law is perfect, converting the soul ; His testimony is sure, making wise the simple.' LECTUEE VIIT. THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two cases ; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical world : and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence ; but the physical cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from leaning this way : superstition ; blindness ; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness : to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. LECTURE VIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. ' No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' I Cor. xii. 3. TT is now the proper time to review the argu- ment of these Lectures, and to endeavour' to trace, if possible, the source of the estrange- ment which just at present separates Keligion and Science. The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses observe. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed for some time it is instinctively used as a work- ing hypothesis. So used it accumulates per- petually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we except two great classes of facts, we never 226 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. find any instance of its failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the physical. To complete the iuduction and to deprive the denial of universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postu- late was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its favour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientific belief would then still rank below mathematical behef, it would nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would not thereby gain in power of progress, in practical accept- ance, or in utiUty to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Science could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in nothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this completeness until every attempt to Vin.3 The Conclusion of the Argument. 227 question it is resented. I have seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical problems ; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it. And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not under the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world which thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we are concerned ; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any time before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and the sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the scientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense of responsibility is a rock which no Q 2 228 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. demand for completeness in Science can crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an imbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know that they will for ever fail. If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert the unbroken uniformity of all nature ; if it could be said that any uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or misleading lights thus held up to draw in- quirers from the true path, it would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiouslv, whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly at variance Avith each other, the scientific faculty imposing on us one belief, and the spiritual faculty an- other, and the two practically irreconcileabla But there is no reason whatever for thinking this. Newton's investigations were unquestion- ably pursued, as aU true scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth VIIT.] The Conclusion of the Argument . 229 of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expressly acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting this uniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. The believer who asserts the universality of a law except when God works a miracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in comparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with no qualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, and ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be taken into account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that the freedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowly and slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends on human conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations when nothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet in nature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressed nor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content with approximations, and we know how to use them 230 The Conclusion of tlie Argument. [Lect. in Science. Many chemical properties can only be so expressed ; many primary facts, such as the distances, the volumes, the weights of hea- venly bodies ; and yet the approximations serve our purpose. And so too, if there be a reserve still uncovered by the scientific postulate, that will not in any degree affect our investigation of what is so covered. In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking will be found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical and spiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which is the expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in na- ture, taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together. And this Science ought to recognise. Let us turn from the physical to the spi- ritual. The voice within ns which demands our ac- ceptance of religion makes no direct appeal to the evidence supplied by the senses. We are called on to believe in a supreme law of duty on pain of being lowered before our own con- sciences. And this law of dutj' . goes on to VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 231 assert its own supremacy over all things that exist, and that not as an accidental fact, but as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy cannot be other than an accidental fact unless it be not only actual but intended. And intention implies personality; and the law thus shows itself to be a Supreme Being, claiming our reverence, and asserting Himself to be the Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things that are. And this same voice within us asserts that we are responsible to Him for all our conduct, and are ^capable of that responsibility because free to choose what that conduct shall be. We are to believe not because the truth of this voice is proved independently of itself, but i simply because we are commanded. Corrobora- tive evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but the main, the primary evidence is within the souL Hence the strength of this belief depends on ourselves and on our own character. To every man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt in proportion to the spirituality of each who hears. Its acceptance is bound up in some way- with our own wills. How far it is a matter of 232 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. choice to believe or to disbelieve it is not pos^ sible to define. The will lies hidden as it were behind the emotions, the affections, the nobler impulses. The conscience shades off into the other faculties, and we cannot always isolate it from the rest. But though, it be impossible to say precisely how the wiU is concerned in the spiritual belief, there can be no doubt that it always takes its part in such belief. It is the keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved to its depths by the conscience, that grasp most strongly the certainty of the law of duty. It is the man with the strongest and noblest aspirar tions, the man who sees the beauty of humility, the man who feels most strongly the deep peace of self-sacrifice, that is the man who finds the voice within most irresistible. It is not by any means always the man who lives the most cor- rect life; correctness of life may be due to natural and not to spiritual causes. And the man whom we should find faultless in point of morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, and not have as yet, and perhaps may not have to the last, the spiritual faculty strong within him. But the man, even if he have many and Vlll.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 233 grievous faults, who nevertheless is keenly^ sus- ceptible of higher things, is the one to whom the voice within speaks with authority not to be gainsaid, and to him that voice is final.. It is this fact that the perception of things spiritual varies from man to man, and depends on character, and involves action of the will, that makes it always possible to represent our knowledge of the law of duty as in itself standing on a less sure foundation than our knowledge of scientific truth. Whether a man has or has not the necessary power of mind to comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with comparative ease. And if he have that power, the reasoning is certain in course of time to be understood, and when it is understood it com- pels assent so long as it keeps within its own proper domain. But the perception of spiritual truth depends on a faculty whose power or weakness it is far more diflScult to test ; and it involves the wiU which may be exerted on either side. And for this reason men sometimes dis- miss this truth as being no more than an imagination, needed by some men to satisfy an emotional nature, but having no substance that 234 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect can be brought to an external test. The be- liever in God knows that the truth which lie holds is as certain as the axioms of mathe- matics ; but he cannot make others know this whose spiritual faculty is not awake ; and he is liable to be asked for proof not of the spiritual but of the physical kind. Now this much must be acknowledged, that we cannot but expect the claim to supremacy over all things to show itself in some way in the creation which has come from Him who makes that claim. It would, no doubt,^ be a serious difficulty if things physical and things spiritual were cut off from one another by an absolute gulf; if we were required to believe that God had created and now ruled everything, and yet we could trace not the slightest evi- dence of His hand either in the creation or in the history of the world. There are then two ways in whicb we are able to recognise Him even in this world of phe- nomena. For in the first place, the creation in its order and its beauty and its marvellous adaptation of means to ends, confirms the as- sertion of the spiritual faculty that it owes its VIII.] The Conchtsion of the Argument. 235 origin to an intelligent and benevolent purpose, exhibited in the form in which purpose is always exhibited. It works towards ends which we should expect a holy and benevolent Creator to have in view, and it aecomplishes those ends in so large a proportion that, making allowance for the limited range of our knowledge, the general aim of the whole is seen with sufficient clearness. The argument is not strong enough to compel assent froni those who have no ears for the inward spiritual voice, but it is abund- antly sufficient to answer those who argue that there cannot be a Creator because they cannot trace His action. And the scientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away the force of this argument, is found on ex- amination to confirm it and expand it. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with, whatever design the world was formed, that design was entertained at the verj beginning and impressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearances of failure are not only to be ac- counted for by the limitation of our knowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the work before it has been completed. 236 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. And in the second place, while the creation, the more closely it is examined the more dis- tinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator, so the history of the world exhibits in the Eevelation made to man clear proofs of that heavenly love which cor- responds to the character of Him who has .put love at the head of all the requirements of His law. The Eevelation given to us has undeni- ably made a real mark on the world. It has upheld millions of men in a holiness of life corresponding in a very real degree to the holiness required by the law of duty. It has perpetually more and more cleared up the true teaching of that law. It is still continuing the same process, and generation after generation is better able to understand that teaching. Its fruits have been a harvest of saints and martyrs, some known and reverenced, some quite un- noticed. It has leavened all literature and all legislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changing them. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of the development of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Kuler, we have a right to ask VTll.] The Conclusion of the Argument. i^'j what then could be the source of such a de- velopment, and how is it that so great a power should always, have worked in the name of God and should have always referred everything to His commands That fanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so is intelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice and purity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law, should be the fruit of believing a lie 1 If there be a God, it is to be expected that He would communicate with His creatures if those crea- tures were capable of receiving the communi- cation ; and if He did communicate with His creatures it is to be expected that His communi- cation would be such as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it, the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation contained in it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in the con- science. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on human history is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exerted on the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not a demonstration 238 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. of His existence ; but it is a full answer to those who say, ' If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of His hand in its course 1 ' And thirdly, this Eevelation has not merely taken the form of a message or a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of a person who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conception formed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divine law. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and all the more because human faculties had not first framed the con- ception which He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and our conception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes in Himself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power of the Eevelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christ can bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul. Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship and to reverence, shown Himself in the world of phenomena. And He has given proofs of His existence and Vin.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 239 His character precisely corresponding to the conception which He has enabled, and indeed commanded, us to form of Him, And it is because the proofs that He has given are of this nature that we are tempted to ask for more proofs of a different kind. For it is undeniable that believers and un- believers alike are perpetually asking for proofs that shall have more of. the scientific and less of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctly appeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for external support to their faith ; unbelievers have refused to believe un- less supplied with more physical evidence. Be- lievers shrink from being thrown inwards on themselves; they fear -the wavering of their own faith ; they are alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief being taken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual evidence, if they can first find much physical evidence. They wish (to use the Apostle's words) to walk by sight and not by faith. And unbelievers want a tangible proof that shall compel their understanding before it awakes their conscience. Thev demand a Revelation, 240 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. not only confirmed by miracles at the time, but confirmed again and again by repeated miracles to . eveiy succeeding generation. They want miracles in every age adapted to the science of the age, miracles which no hardness of heart would be able to deny, which would convince the scientific man through his Science inde- pendently of his having any will to make holi- ness his aim when he had been convinced. This kind of evidence it has not pleased God to give. It is not the scientific man that God seeks as such, any more than it is the ignorant man that He seeks as such. And the proofs that He gives are plainly in all cases conditioned by the rule that the spiritually minded shall most easily and most keenly perceive their force. And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need be said except to teU them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is by another way that they must look to find God, and not by the waj'^ that they insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need to be warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith which makes too much of things not spiritual. VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 241 For, first, there is a real and great danger that the spiritual may be altogether obscured by the literal and the physical. We look back with astonishment on the Rabbinical interpre- tations of the Old Testament, and all the more because of the really great and true thoughts that are sometimes to be found in the midst of their fanciful conceits. We can trace the mis- chief they did to true Religion by the perverted reverence with which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the very shapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Their perversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements of interpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleading com- ments and inferences, all certainly tended to en- courage the hypocrisy which our Lord rebuked,, and against which St. Paul contended. But we still see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain a verbal and even hteral inspiration of the whole Bible, filling it not with the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with minute details of doctrine, and precept often questionable, and, whenever separated fi:om the principles of the eternal law, valueless or even R 242 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect, miscliievous. God's Word, instead of leading us to Him, is made to stand between and hide His face. Bat, secondly, there is a serious risk that if the mind be fastened on things external in some way connected with, but yet distinct from the substance of Revelation, it may turn out that these external things cannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to be given up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up long before. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of the strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only the buttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctly the fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once a great contest be- tween the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since been a great contest between the Bible and Geology, that there is stUl a great contest between the Bible and Evolution. In no one of these cases was the Revelation contained in the Bible in danger, but only the interpretation commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long afterwards to condemn the opponents of Galileo VIII. J The Conclusion of the Argument. 243 and speak of their treatment of him and his teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such condemnation has not unfrequently been heard from the very lips that nevertheless denounced the teaching of the geologists. But in all these cases the principle has been the same, and believers have insisted that the Bible itself was gone unless their interpretation of it was up- held. And the mischief is double. For many believers, and more especially unlearned be- lievers, instead of gently helping one another to form the necessary modification of their view of the Bible teaching, instead of endeavouring to find the way out of the perplexity and to disentangle the true spiritual lesson from the accessories which are no part of itself, insisted that it must be all or nothing, and prepared for themselves a very severe trial. There was no doctrine involved whatever; there was no- thing at stake on which the spiritual life de- pended. The duty to be patient, to enquire carefuUy, to study the other side, to wait for light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all this was forgotten in a somewhat unreasoning irppulse to resist an assault on the faith. And R 2 244 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect, there cannot be a doubt that on all these occasions many believers have been seriously shaken by slowly finding out that the position they have taken is untenable. When men have to give up in such circumstances they generally give up far more than they need, and in some cases an unreasonable resistance has been fol- lowed by an equally unreasonable surrender. And while beHevers have thus prepared a stumblingblock for themselves they have put quite as great a stumblingblock before others. For students of Science, informed bv instant voices all around that they must choose between their Science and the Bible, knowing as they did that their Science was true, and supposing that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best knew what its teaching was, had no choice as honest men but to hold the truth as far as they possessed . it and to give up the Bible in order to maintain their Science. It was a grievous injury inflicted on them ; and though some among them might deserve no sympathy, there were some whom it was a great loss to lose. But in the third place, the result of this VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 245 clinging to externals is to shut out Science and all its correlative branches of knowledge from their proper office of making perpetually clearer the true and full meaning of the Eevelation itself. It is intended that Religion should use the aid of Science in clearing her own con- ceptions. It is intended that as men advance in knowledge of God's works and in power of handling that knowledge, they should find themselves better able to interpret the message which they have received. from their Father in Heaven. Our knowledge of the true meaning of the Bible has gained, and it was intended that it should gain, by the increase of other know- ledge. Science makes clearer than anything else could have made it the higher level on which the Bible puts what is spiritual over what is material. I do not hesitate to ascribe to Science a clearer knowledge of the true in- terpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and to scientific history a truer knowledge of the great historical ptophets. The advance of se- cular studies, as they are called, clears up much in the Psalms, and much in the other poetical Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt that this 246 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. was intended from the beginning, and that as Science has already done genuine service to Religion in this way, so will it do still better service with process of time. On this side also, as on the scientific side, the teaching of the spiritual faculty and the teaching of Kevelation indicate that the physical and the spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither is complete without the other. Science enters into Eeligion, and is its counterpart, and has its share to take in the conduct of life and in the formation of opinion. And the believer is bound to recognise its value and make use of its services. In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism between Science and E,eligion arises much more from a difference of spirit and temper in the students of each than from any inherent op- position between the two. The man of Science is inclined to shut out from consideration a whole body of evidence, the moral and spiritual ; the believer is inclined to shut out the physical. And each, from long looking at that evi- dence alone which properly belongs to his own subject, is inclined to hold the other cheap. VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 247 and to charge on those who adduce it either blindness of understanding or wilful refusal to accept the truth. And when such a conflict arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is Faith and not Science that is likely to suffer. For the physical evidence is tangible, and the perception of it not much affected by the cha- racter of the man who studies it ; the spiritual evidence stands unshaken in itself, but it is hid from eyes that have no spiritual perception, and that perception necessarily varies with the man. By what means then can a man keep his spiritual perception in full activity? And is there any test by which a man may know whether his spiritual faculty is in contact with the source of aU spiritual life and is deriving from that source the full flow of spiritual power? Kevelation, if it tells us anything, ought to tell us this. And the answer which Revelation makes is expressed in the words of St. Paul, ' No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' This doctrine runs through the New Testament, and it im- plies that one main purpose of our Lord's ap- 248 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. pearance among men was to give them in His life, His character, His example. His teaching, at once a touchstone by which they could al- ways try their own spirits, and judge of the real condition of their own spiritual faculty, and also a vivid presentation of the supreme spiritual law by which they could for ever more and more elevate and purify and strengthen their own spiritual power and knowledge. Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him put before his conscience the teaching that Jesus gives j the picture drawn of our Father in Heaven whose holuiess cannot aUow a stain upon a single soul, and whose tender- ness cannot endure that a single soul should perish ; Who ruleth aU the universe, and yet without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground ; the picture drawn of the ideal human life, the humility, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, the purity ; the picture drawn of human need, the help- lessness, the hopelessness of man without God. Let him ponder on aU this and on the many touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the force, the superhuman sweetness and gentleness VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 249 with, which all is presented. And if his con- science bows before it,, and can say without reserve and in unalloyed sincerity, * This is my Lord ; He shall be my teacher ; here I recognise the fulness of the eternal law ; at His feet will I henceforth sit and learn ; through Him will I drink of the well-springs of eternal truth ; His voice will I trust to the very utmost ;' then may that man be sure that his conscience is in contact with the Father of spirits, and that his study will guide him into fuller and clearer knowledge, and more certain conviction that he is grasping the truth of God. Let a man put before his liewrt our Lord's own character. Let him think of the life of privation without complaint, of service to His kind without a thought of self; of His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy, of His tenderness to the penitent; of His royal simplicity and humility ; of His unwearied per- severance in the face of angry opposition ; of His deep affection for the friends of His choice even when they deserted Him in His hour of darkness; of His death on the Cross and the unearthly love that breathed in every word He 250 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. uttered and everytlung He did. Let him read all this many times ; and if his heart goes out to the Man whom he is thus beholding, if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord ; here is the supreme object of my affection ; Him will I love with all my strength ; from Him I will never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve ; no other do I know more worthy to be loved ; no other will I keep more steadily before my eyes ; no other will I more earnestly desire to imitate ; no other shall be my example, my trust, my strength, my Saviour ; if a man can say this, it is certain that his heart is touched by God, and the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul. Let a man put before his vdU the Lord's commands ; the aims, the self-restraints, the aspirations that the Lord required in His dis- ciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly courage in spite of all that earth can inflict or can take away; the call to take up the Cross and follbw Him that was crucified ; the warnings and the promises, the precepts and the prohibitions ; let him think of the Leader who never flinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid His own law; let him think on the nobleness VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 251 of tlie aims to whicli He pointed ; of the pro- mise of inward peace made to those who sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord and re-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual being ; let him think of the sure help promised in return for absolute trust, tried by millions of saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man put this before his wiU, and if he can say with all his soul. 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