• X W*^ oi ttw !!»«<%% &, %& PRINCETON, N. J. ** Shelf., BL 181 .B74 1886 Browne, Henry Llewelyn. Reason and religious belief an essay £•<*& 1 ■ ■ ■ REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF REASON RELIGIOUS BELIEF AN ESSAY H. Ll. BROWNE VICAR OF MONK SHERBORNE AND SOMETIME FELLOW OF THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 18S6 {The rights of translation and of reproduction arc reserved.) PREFACE. OBJECTIONS to the Christian religion may be divided roughly into three classes, according to the principles and hypotheses from which they severally proceed. Some objections to the truth of Christianity are based upon the alleged incompatibility of the results of modern scientific inquiry with certain funda- mental positions of the Christian faith respecting the creation of the world and the natural history of man. Some, again, purport to be based upon criticism of the historical validity of the early monuments of Christianity. A third and last class of objections is based upon the alleged a priori impossibility, incredibility, and superfluousness of a supernatural revelation at all, and upon the alleged a priori incredibility and argumentative weakness of all supernatural events, including those whose witness is claimed for Christian teaching. VI PREFACE. In the following essay I have confined myself to the third class of objections. I have endeavoured to show that there is nothing in reason antecedently fatal to the idea of a supernatural religion, nor to supernatural occurrences. In the concluding sec- tion I have added certain considerations which confirm, indeed, the general fitness of Christianity, but do not bear directly upon the main subject of the essay. They are intended to make the situation clear — to show how great an enterprise lies before those who, for whatever reason, think fit to abandon the Christian faith. I have now to acknowledge my indebtedness to the eminent writers who before me have treated the same subject. In an argument which on both sides is to a certain extent traditional, I have, as was natural and in fact necessary, had occasion to say not a little which has been in substance said before. Whether my own contributions to the argument, either in arrangement or in thought, justify the reproduction of so much that is old is for the reader to determine. H. Ll. B. CONTENTS. FAITH AND REASON. Reason used in two senses: I. Antecedent congruity ; 2. Logic — Reason m the former sense no guide — Occasionally at variance with facts — Reason in the latter sense a true guide — Eccle- siastical Christianity not contrary to reason — No real quarrel between faith and reason — Faith not supernaturally given, but in cases supernaturally assisted — A priori arguments against the facts of revelation untenable — Not so historical arguments, pp. I— 14. II. THE BURDEN OF PROOF. Christianity a practical system of great importance — Suspension of belief in it not practicable, or, if practicable, illusory — The burden of proof with the side opposed to the established belief — The & priori difficulty of miracles apparently originated with the difficulty and uncertainty of the detailed refutation of all Christian miracles — Christianity not to be abandoned except on plain and certain grounds,//. 15 — 26. Vlll CONTENTS. III. COMPETING MIRACLES. Miracles as possibly discordant alleged to be evidentially worthless — No note of truthful miracles in the moral nature — Doctrinal solidarity the note of truthful miracles — Not applicable without long and laborious research — Doctrines prove miracles — Miracles prove doctrines — Not an argument in a real circle, pp. 27-38. IV. MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. Demonstration — Hypothetical demonstration — Probability, proper to miracles, varies in degree, and with individuals, eventually practical certainty — Miracles, immediate exponents of their cause, mediately declare the contents of revelation — The divine mission of the teacher a proof to hypothetical demon- stration of the truth of the teaching, pp. 39 — 48. V. THE ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES. Hume's objection stated — Mendacity of the witnesses not proven — Unbelievable of the witnesses of the Gospel miracles — Human mendacity not a universal fact of experience — Hume's prescrip- tion impracticable — Has broken down, pp. 49 — 56. VI. MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. According to Mr. Mill, nothing contrary to a complete induction credible — The canons of induction — Complete induction asso- ciated with experiment — Miracles decided by Mill to be credible with a limitation — The supernatural not evidenced by one, but by a succession of miracles, pp. 57 — 66. CONTENTS. JX VII. MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LAW. The order of nature stated to be based upon invariable experience- In this experience no account taken of miracles, nor of meteorological nor of physiological phenomena— The order of nature an inference from an imperfect induction— Belief in the uniformity of nature not instinctive, pp. 67—75. VIII. NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. The supernatural cause of miracles said to have no analogy in nature— Human wills analogous to the cause of miracles— The will environed by law, not subject to law-A higher force than natural inferrible from the gradation of known forces— A be- ginning of life an argument for a crowning power and a pre- cedent for miracles— A bias against miracles induced by the study of the exact sciences not a valid argument against them, pp. 76— go. IX. THE ANTECEDENT FITNESS OF MIRACLES-A PERSONAL GOD. God said to be an impersonal law— In which case He does not exist — The unity and history of natural forces give to infer the existence of a supreme force-The occasional and producing cause of nature-From the latter inferences may be drawn to the former-God's personality to be further in- ferred from His wisdom-Personality not excluded by the higher condition of existence in which God may be, nor by His infinity,//. 9 i_ I0 7. CONTENTS. X. THE ANTECEDENT FITNESS OF MIRACLES — THE MISERY OF MANKIND. The misery of mankind : physical, mental, moral : evidences of it — Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory of natural amelioration — The modern theory of progress— No remedy in nature for human wretchedness — A supernatural remedy then to be expected from a personal God — Such a remedy set forth in the Christian religion, pp. 108 — 125. XI. BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. With the truth of supernatural religion is bound up (1) the truth of Christianity, (2) the existence of religion — Mahometanism — Literature and art as substitutes for religion — Lastly (3) the current morality stands or falls with Christianity— Altruism as grounded on utility as self-motived, pp. 126 — 144. REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. i. FAITH AND REASON. " The evidence must be of no uncertain character which can warrant our abandoning the guidance of reason and blindly accepting doctrines which, if not supernatural truths, must be rejected by the human intellect as monstrous delusions." Here it is implied that reason is a guide, that it does guide us, or did guide us before we accepted certain doctrines. Let us consider in what sense reason is a guide, whether it did guide us once, whether it can be said to guide us now. For this purpose we must first consider what reason is— not what it is in its inner self, but what are the general meanings attached to the word as it is ordinarily used. Reason is used in two distinct senses. B 2 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. i. It may mean the general congruity and ante- cedent likelihood of a thing, its measurableness, its capability of being analyzed and reduced to relations which the mind can appropriate. Thus the planetary orbits were in ancient astronomy supposed to describe a circle as being more self- congruous, more conformable to reason in this sense of the word, than the figure more or less elliptical which modern astronomy assigns to them. The doctrine of the most Holy Trinity is contrary to reason in this sense. It is contrary to the ante- cedent likelihood of a personal being ; it cannot be seized by the mind in one act of the imagination. The Christian doctrine of the Atonement is also contrary to reason in this sense ; the purging away of sin and the sanctification of sinners has no con- gruity, no coherence evident with the life, death, resurrection, and glorification of a Divine person. The mind cannot see, cannot grasp, how the one caused or effected the other ; there is no chain, no third term visible connecting the two. 2. Reason is used in another sense as logic — correct arguing from antecedents, whether the argument carry with it irresistible or only prob- able conviction. For instance, from the fact that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, it is reasonably and irresistibly concluded FAITH AND REASON. 3 that all equilateral triangles are equiangular. Or, again, a number of trustworthy persons witnessed the great earthquake at Lisbon, and have left an account of it behind them ; it becomes an act of reason to believe that such an earthquake did actually take place. Or, again, from impressions found on slabs of hard rock dug from a great depth under the surface of the earth, which im- pressions correspond with the fossil moulds of animals found embedded in similar rocks, we are led by reason to infer that this rock must at one time have had the consistency of soft mud or of moist sand. In which of these two senses can reason be said to exercise guidance— that is to say, a guidance which is indispensable and unerring? Certainly not reason in the sense of prejudgment and ante- cedent probability. Reason in that sense does not lead on to any new truth ; the consideration of it does not necessarily or spontaneously bring fresh facts before the mind. It is at best a gauge of truth, a mould according to which theories of facts acquired may be shaped. It turns out frequently to be a very fallacious gauge. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy, with its cycles and epicycles, was in a great measure shaped in accordance with it, and it was one of the first labours of modern 4 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. astronomy to dispel the illusions of this so-called reason. Reason, in this meaning of the word, is but another name for common sense — an excellent guide in the common things of life, but deceptive in matters beyond the limit of our experience. Reason, or common sense, is in truth nothing but the facts and the science with which the mind has been furnished by experience or instruction ab- stracted and generalized, very often unconsciously, into certain broad principles. It is thus an abstract, a reflex, of past experience ; it cannot guide to future or new experience, and when brought to deal with it cannot always adequately measure it. It is a modern form, more subtle, less naif, of the primitive analogia hominis which Bacon decried. Some of the most familiar and well-established principles of science are contrary to this reason. The law of gravitation, for instance — the general fact which it enunciates, that large bodies attract, draw to them, smaller bodies, is altogether beside reason ; nay, that an inert body should exercise force, that two bodies should meet, the one not impelled, the other not actively drawing, that is without any visible or intelligible cause of motion, is contrary to reason. And yet not the less for that contrariety to reason is the law of gravitation FAITH AND REASON. 5 a statement of a universally observed fact. Reason in this sense, as a mass of principles and modes of thought gradually and often unconsciously ab- stracted from past experience, is never a guide to, and often an unsafe criterion of, new inquiries. Indeed, it may be said that not only contrariety to reason in the sense spoken of, but even self- contradictoriness is no disproof of the possibility or existence of a fact. Some ancient philosophers denied the fact of motion ; they proved, and their proof has never been refuted, that to assert the motion of a body implied two mutually contra- dictory statements as to the place of a body ; from that they concluded that motion was unreal, a conclusion repudiated by the universal sense of mankind. So many, indeed, are the self-contra- dictions to be found in the most general facts and conceptions, that the philosophy of Hegel takes note of these contradictions, and assumes in part at least to be built upon them, and holds for universal in all things that self-contradictoriness which some have seen in supernaturally com- municated facts, and urged as a disproof of their reality. That which is an unsafe gauge of the results of palpable sensible experience, must be still more so of that which lies outside all experience. The 6 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. doctrines of ecclesiastical Christianity may be monstrous delusions, but if it be because they are contrary to reason, then they are not more so than the simplest and most fundamental propositions of natural theology. To say that God is a Spirit, that is a self-conscious power, not possessed of, nor acting through, a body, is not less irrational than to say that God is three Persons in one God. Modern Theistic objectors to Christianity seize upon the latter proposition as contrary to reason — and it certainly is incomprehensible by the human mind — while they pass by the former, namely, that God is a Spirit, which is not less incomprehensible by human reason, and is equally difficult, or rather equally impossible, for the imagination to master. This simplest and most fundamental position of natural theology needs only to be examined* to be found inconceivable. To this, its inherent in- conceivableness, must be ascribed the tardiness of its recognition and its acceptance only by the most intelligent portions of mankind ; whereas idolatry, the essence of which is a belief in a material, palpable, sensible God, the all but uni- versal belief of primitive antiquity, has an abiding vitality, actually prevails among the greater portion of mankind, and frequently reappears in places where it was supposed to be extinct. FAITH AND REASON. 7 On the other hand, reason taken to mean logic, the correct arguing from premises, whether deduc- tive or inductive, necessary or probable, is indeed a guide, the only guide, in judgment and action. No evidence, however strong, can justify our aban- doning the guidance of reason in this sense. For it is itself evidence, and that which gives cogency to all evidence ; it is the normal sequence of thought, as indispensable to the process of thought as language is to its expression. The doctrines of ecclesiastical Christianity are not contrary to reason in this sense. For the various propositions which embody these doctrines are based upon reason so far forth as they, like the propositions of science, are logically collected. They do not rest upon the self-assurance of any one individual, nor upon authority as such, nor upon any reasons private to the believer and incommunicable to others. If the doctrines of Christianity cannot be deduced logically from the facts of Christianity, then they are not true ; nor are they otherwise claimed to be true. If the facts of Christianity cannot be probably established, if they can be shown to be the fabrication of im- postors, or the dreams of fanatics, or, like other systems, to be of merely human growth, beginning and growing from earthly causes, then 8 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. "The house was builded of the earth, And shall fall again to ground." They must go the way of all things which are not objectively and substantially true. The celebrated antagonism, then, between faith and reason is no mortal enmity after all ; it is non- existent. The real quarrel is between faith and a false reason, a preconception, a prejudice dis- guised as reason, which from time to time is as much at odds with science as it is with faith. Faith is nothing but what reason has gathered in religious matter, just as science is nothing but what reason has gathered in natural matter. Faith is not a method, nor a faculty, nor a principle of knowledge peculiar to religion ; if it were, religion could not claim to be universal ; it could only challenge the obedience of peculiarly constituted minds. Faith is simply the habitual assent of the mind to con- clusions in religious matter logically conveyed to it. Some of these conclusions the mind is unable to figure to itself ; in like manner it cannot figure to itself some of the conclusions of science. But this incompetence of the mind makes neither the former nor the latter contrary to reason. They would only be contrary to or rather beside reason, if they were faultily gathered from their premises. The class of facts, indeed, of which faith takes cognizance FAITH AND REASON". 9 is not the class with which science has to deal, The function of the latter is to ascertain the ordi- nary sequences of natural causes and effects ; it deals, therefore, with the natural order of things, uninterrupted by supernatural causes. Faith, on the other hand, takes cognizance of the exceptions to the ordinary course of events, the supernatural suspensions of natural order, not exclusively, how- ever, and from them reasonably deduces the divine mission of those persons with whom these super- natural events are associated. These supernatural facts themselves are arrived at just as natural facts are by the reasons proper to the proof of all facts, that is by their evidence taken in conjunction with the antecedent presumptions for or against them. To believe in a miracle as such, apart from the grounds which make it reasonably probable, cannot obviously, on any principles, whether Christian or not, be meritorious, although, it must be confessed, some illustrious writers have used expressions which might seem to favour another view. In itself such a belief without grounds is morally colourless. To believe that which may or may not have happened without any reason for such a be- lief, except the extraordinary nature of the event, would, if such a mental state were possible, argue intellectual perversion. An assent to any pro- 10 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. position whatsoever must be necessarily an intel- lectual assent, and therefore conditioned by the laws of thought, that is, by logic ; it must imply a premise of some kind or other. The premises of assents to recorded events such as miracles, are primarily testimonial evidences. Men have doubt- less in some cases believed on insufficient evidence. To believe, however, on insufficient evidence is very different from believing independently of evidence ; yet even then such a belief on insufficient evidence as being imperfect can hardly be meritorious, for it is difficult to see how imperfection as such can be pleasing to God. The over-readiness to assent to a supernatural occurrence on insufficient evi- dence doubtless often proceeds in part from a habit of accepting miracles after due inquiry into their evidence, and seems to be regarded by some writers as a virtuous extreme of that habit. But in actuality it is as much a vicious extreme to accept miracles on insufficient evidence, as it is to reject them when the evidence in their favour preponderates. To believe too much is not better nor worse than, but as bad as, to believe too little. That the positions of faith are as much amenable to reason, or the rules of logic, as the positions of natural theology, seems plainly to result from the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews : " Sine fide FAITH AND REASON. 1 1 autem impossible est placere Deo, credere enim oportet accedentem ad Deum quia est et inqui- rentibus se, remunerator sit." 1 Faith in this passage is made to cover belief in the existence of God ; that is, in a position prior to Revelation given ultimately by reason dealing with the palpable facts of the universe. " Invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi per ea qua facta sunt intellects conspiciuntur, sempiterna quoque ejus virtus et Divinitas." 2 Faith, then, cannot be a supernaturally given power of perceiving certain truths ; it is but the ordinary logical process of the acquiring of know- ledge applied to theological matter, and assisted in certain cases, not as regards the acquiring of knowledge, but as regards the retaining and the realizing of knowledge acquired, by supernatural grace. Christianity, then, claims to be believed on its evidences ; in no other way could it or any other system be rightly accepted. The evidences on the strength of which it is received differ naturally in individuals, according to their culture, age, condi- tion, and other circumstances. Some have the leisure and ability to examine the facts for them- selves ; others— the young and ignorant — accept 1 Heb. xi. 6. 2 Rom# it 20> 12 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. them on authority, just as they would accept pro- positions in chemistry or optics ; then if so be they are verified later on by the individual reason and observation of the more advanced student. But whether they are accepted by a child or by a philo- sopher, they are accepted on reasonable grounds— the same in kind or degree as those on which, under the like circumstances, other facts, whether of his- tory, or of science, or of the arts of life, are taught and received. The general belief, then, given to the doctrines of Christianity cannot be ascribed to the following of any fundamentally false guidance. And if those doctrines be monstrous delusions, they are mon- strous delusions which have come to us in the way of reason. If we abandon them, it must be, not by denying the general principles on which we have accepted them, for they are the general indispen- sable principles of all rational inferences, but by correcting particular errors in the process which established belief. From what has preceded, it will be evident that one whole class of objections to supernatural reli- gion, namely, those deduced from preconceptions as to the Divine character, must be rejected as unten- able. These objections may advance the plea of reason, but it is that of the weak, fallible, and falla- FAITH AND REASON. 1 3 cious reason, not of the unerring and indispensable guide. Some of these objections have not even the colour of either kind of reason. It is mere trifling to argue against the idea of miraculous suspension of law as implying an " unworthy concep- tion of a God." As to whether suspension of law be or be not unworthy of the Most High, is matter of the merest opinion, in which, moreover, most voices, and with them the best, are against the objector. It is very obvious, moreover, that we cannot with logical propriety argue against the particular con- tents of a revelation from data supplied by the revelation itself, for that would be to accept and reject the revelation in the same train of argument. Moreover, the matter of the argument is such that a contradictory cannot be established. No conclu- sive argument, therefore, can possibly be drawn from the data of revelation against the fact of a revelation or against the contents of it. On the other hand, fresh arguments ab extra against the evidences of supernatural religion must be met and refuted in detail, if the facts which the evidences established are to remain objects of belief. Supernatural facts and occurrences are, as has been remarked, like other facts and occurrences, to the extent that they can only be believed on probable evidence. Of late it has been advanced 14 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. that miraculous facts are not like other facts, but are altogether incredible, not to be accepted on any evidence however strong. But the validity of this new canon of evidence bearing exclusively upon supernatural events will be more conveniently dealt with when certain other points of cognate import shall have been raised and, as far as may be, disposed of. II. THE BURDEN OF PROOF. There is, then, no real question of abandoning the guidance of reason ; no reason that could be at issue with the doctrines of supernatural religion was ever a guide of inquiry. Such a reason was at best a gauge of conceptions, a gauge often fallacious and untrustworthy, not safely applicable to conceptions taken from beyond the sphere of common experience, that is, to supernatural facts. Whereas the reason which does guide, namely, the rules and procedure of logic, have not been aban- doned by those who accept the evidences of Chris- tianity — at least, not consciously ; indeed, reason in that sense could not be abandoned, as long as the believers in Christianity are rational beings, and as long as Christianity is the Christianity of history and not an emotional mysticism. The statement, then, implied in the quotation with which the preceding section commenced, that while wc l6 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. were following the guidance of reason Christianity appeared with its monstrous delusions and caused us to err from reason, is inexact, and the practical inference which was intended to be drawn from this implied statement, namely, that we should cease to believe in Christianity until it has been proved to be true, falls through. Yet a question remains which may appropriately and conveniently, in reference to the subject before us, be called that of the burden of proof. Upon whose shoulders, we may ask, does the burden of proof or of disproof in this matter rightfully rest ? In merely speculative matters it can rarely be of serious importance as to who is called upon to prove or disprove a theory. In opinions or theories which involve practice it is otherwise. In those cases it is the general rule that principles and hypotheses in possession, as it were, should be held to be true until they are positively disproved. The rule is but a reasonable one; it secures a certain continuity and consistency of action, which would be entirely destroyed if action were suspended at every appearance of doubt as to the principles on which it was being conducted. To the case of Christianity this rule eminently applies. The Christian religion is in intimate and working rela- tion to the daily conduct of its adherents. It is a THE BURDEN OF PROOF. 1 7 moral code as well as a religion. It is not like a theory of the courses of the stars, or of the fructifi- cation of plants, which may be discussed at leisure, dismissed or resumed, without affecting in the slightest degree the pulse, as it were, of the moral life. It is a theory of life and its duties; it is the sole culture, the breath of the moral life, of great masses of men. If it be not true, then the current notions of right and wrong must be greatly altered, if not reversed. To suspend belief in it pending the result of what may be a tedious and lengthened inquiry would, if practicable itself, in the case of many individuals amount to a suspension of moral action. But it is not practicable. To cease to believe in one set of moral principles without believing in another set, is plainly impossible for those who are called upon almost every minute to act upon some principle or other. Habits, even when formed, cannot maintain themselves without a root of principle ; they cannot even be formed unless they start from a principle. Here it may be relevant to observe that the possession of moral principles does not consist in a speculative admiration of the acts which proceed from them. The mere fact of witnessing and ad- miring the actions of Christians does not, as some seem to think, communicate Christian principles. C 1 8 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. Christian principles are only held by those who believe that acts of Christian morality are com- manded by God, and that reward and punishment respectively await those who do them and those who leave them undone. Impulses of benevolence and utility may, and often do, accompany such actions, but they are not their source, nor that which supports and renews them. Such support and renewal could only come from the Christian belief, with its corresponding motive, which originally prompted their performance. It is, therefore, by a confusion of thought that acts of generosity, pity, forgiveness, on the part of heathen and others ignorant of Christianity are sometimes called Christian actions. They are as much and as little Christian actions as accidental homicide is murder, or as photography is high art. The question generally, however, as to how far Christian conduct may be expected to survive the disintegration of Christian principles will be further touched upon in our concluding section. Suspension of judgment, therefore, as regards the truth of Christianity on the part of the great majority of Christians is obviously impracticable ; their circumstances are such that they have no alternative between absolute acceptance and abso- lute rejection. They cannot reject that which they THE BURDEN OF PROOF. I<) have, for whatever reasons, held to be true, until it is proved to be false. Besides being impracticable, a suspension of judgment would be manifestly illusory; there are intellectual as well as moral habits, and neither the one nor the other can be laid aside and taken up again at pleasure. The burden of proof, or, more strictly speaking, of dis- proof, then, in this matter legitimately rests upon the shoulders of the opponents of Christianity. Here the question may most conveniently be raised as to the amount and kind of evidence on which we should be justified in abandoning the Christian religion, although in discussing it we shall have to anticipate one or two points to be considered hereafter. Christianity, it is very clear, is in possession of the field ; it is accepted by the great mass of men with whom we have to do on much the same grounds as those on which they accept other facts, historical and geographical, which do not come under their own immediate observation. Upon what kind of evidence ought that acceptance to be annulled ? Let us consider the fundamental ideas or pro- positions which underlie all Christian belief. They are — that there are two worlds, the visible and the invisible, the natural and the supernatural, and that from time to time the invisible world has 20 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. broken upon the visible, has acted and made itself felt in it, and in a degree revealed itself in it These propositions underlie not only the Christian, but every religion which claims to be of super- natural origin. If, therefore, it could be proved that, while of the supernatural world we know nothing, whether it is or is not, at no time has there been any break in the order of the natural world, and no modification of its phenomena brought about by causes different in kind from those known and knowable by the purely scien- tific reason, then not only Christianity, but all supernatural religion, would be proved to be false. This proof could only be effected by the examina- tion and refutation in detail of every supernatural manifestation alleged. To disprove the Christian religion, it would be sufficient to refute those supernatural occurrences only which are alleged in support of Christian teaching. Such a detailed refutation, in order to be convincing, should fairly exhaust the sum of Christian miracles. One miracle disproved does not in many cases involve the dis- proof of other miracles ; but one miracle fully authenticated would at once shatter for ever the whole fabric of unbelief; nay, one miracle probably established would render the whole of Christianity probable, and suffice to bring it within the province THE BURDEN OF PROOF. 2 I of reasonable belief. It is evident that such a refutation of miracles in detail as implying an examination and a sifting of the evidences of a great number of events said to have happened in so many different places and at so many different dates within the last six thousand years, and very possibly more, would be a very arduous task — a task, it is needless to say, which has never actually been attempted. To give due weight in the esti- mation of evidence to the times, the places, the personalities, of those by whom such evidence was given, would be beyond the capacity of any one individual. Moreover, such a refutation, even were it accomplished with success, would not leave upon the mind absolute certainty as to the truth of its result. Such certainty as it would induce would be that of many accumulated probabilities — a cer- tainty which at its highest would leave room for a suspicion that the right interpretation had not been given to all the cases examined, and with it a lingering doubt as to the validity of the whole result. To this shadow of uncertainty — for, on the hypothesis that all miracles had been examined and found wanting, it would be but a shadowy uncertainty — would be added another source of uncertainty, in the doubts which would be ever hovering, as it were, over the exhaustiveness of the 22 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. refutation ; for, after the most minute investigation, it would always be possible that some hitherto unnoticed miracles might present themselves, each of which might possibly require a separate refu- tation. This refutation in detail would, in fact, be well-nigh endless, ever approaching but never reaching completion, never absolutely convincing. The difficulty and the weakness of this method of refutation have not escaped the notice of the more eminent of the opponents of Christianity. They have felt that such a refutation, difficult almost to impossibility as it is of execution, would not at best amount to a more than highly probable disproof. And they cannot have been strangers to the instinctive feeling, common, doubtless, yet unacknowledged, to which the very heat and animosity of some anti-Christian controversialists give strong but unwilling testimony, that in this matter nothing or little short of absolute certainty can be satisfactory. And possibly they have felt in some instances that the so-called explanations of miracles which have been propounded, however satisfactory to themselves, do not appeal with the same force to ordinary intelligences. Moved ac- cordingly, consciously or unconsciously, by these considerations, the opponents of revealed religion have endeavoured to recommend their objections THE BURDEN OF PROOF. 23 by substituting for the detailed a posteriori refuta- tion of miracles an a priori difficulty, which attaches to all miracles alike, and is level with the most ordinary understanding. Such a difficulty they believe to have found in what may be called a new canon of fact, almost amounting to a canon of thought, which affirms the absolute unvarying uni- formity of the order of nature, and the consequent impossibility and incredibility of miraculous ex- ceptions to it. How far such a new canon and its alleged consequences may have been successfully estab- lished, will be considered further on. But the prin- ciple to which the attempt at its establishment witnesses is undoubtedly sound. No reasons which fall short of inducing certainty can justify the rejection of Christianity by those who have once come to believe in it. As has been intimated before, the fundamental principles of morality are in the minds of most persons associated, if not identified, with Christianity ; to abandon the latter might not be necessarily to abandon the former, but with very many that would be the actual result. Such an abandonment could not be justified except for plain and certain reasons — reasons in themselves as apparent and as convincing as those which demon- strate the proposition that the angles at the base 24 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. of arf isosceles triangle are equal, if not quite in the same degree, and with the same precision, then nearly so. To the preceding may be added a further con- sideration peculiarly proper to the subject in hand. This is not an academical discussion about things in the distant past or in the distant future, or in the earth beneath or in the sky above us, bearing but remotely upon our present selves ; but it directly concerns our present and most vital in- terests. For what purpose did we come into being ? Is there another world beside and beyond this world? What is the law of it? How is it with the dead ? Is there a judgment to come ? Such, and the like of them, are the questions to which Christianity professes to give a right answer, and challenges the assent of each person to whom that answer has come on pain of great and lasting loss. Where so much, then, is staked upon the rejection of Christianity, it is but reasonable and prudent that the grounds which induce that rejection should be clear, strong, and irrefragable. The foregoing consideration has not been intro- duced by any means with a view to prejudge the inquiry, but to bring out its seriousness and im- portance. The greatness of the is^ies of an inquiry, their close relation to the vital interests THE BURDEN OF PROOF. 2$ of the inquirers, need be no bar upon their thorough- ness and impartiality. In medical science analogous inquiries bearing upon life and death are every day being adequately conducted by persons simi- larly interested in their issues. Where there is leisure and capacity, there is all that is needed for the conduct of any inquiry. To a serious inquiry into the grounds of Christianity no rational Chris- tian could object. On the contrary, serious inquiry conducted by those who have the necessary leisure and equipment for the task should rather be wel- comed by those who hold supernatural religion to be true. Doubt has its evil side; principles of conduct, that which guides life, that which is set before life as its end, may not be lightly touched ; but truth re-established if so be, nay, some truth of whatever kind established, as it cannot fail to be by honest inquiry, more than counterbalances the evil. But that which the Christian Church has ever most earnestly deprecated for the sake of its members, has been that butterfly doubt, as it were, which can ask all questions and answer none — which flits unceasingly about, whether in gilded saloons or in crowded workshops, and, addressing itself to those who have neither the leisure, nor the capacity; nor the will for a serious study of the question, leaves them neither believing wholly nor 26 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. wholly unbelieving, votaries of an intermittent faith and of an intermittent unbelief, with wills hopelessly- paralyzed, without lasting motives and without definite purpose. III. COMPETING MIRACLES. Supernatural religion cannot, by universal con- sent, be evidenced otherwise than by miracles. But miracles, it is said, have an uncertain evidential value, for that some of them have been said to have been wrought in proof of mutually opposing doctrines ; although, in fact, no such miracles can be alleged as recorded in Holy Scripture. We are told, indeed, that a lying spirit was put into the mouth of the false prophets of Ahab, but we are not told that these prophets were endowed with the power of working miracles to attest their de- ceiving message. The message, moreover, had it been attested by miracles, had no doctrinal import ; it related only to the issue of an action morally indifferent. Yet, although Scripture does not con- tain any actual record of a miracle wrought in support of false doctrine, it admits in sundry places the possibility of such miracles being 1 wrought so 28 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. as to deceive, if possible, even the elect. By what note, it may be asked, shall we know whether the power which works the miracle is from above, or is deceiving? It is plain that such a note cannot be found in the approval or disapproval of our moral nature bestowed upon the doctrine which it is sought to establish by the miracle. The moral nature of man is a quality or quantity which varies much in different countries and individuals. It would seem to bear a constant witness to but one or two facts of natural religion, as that there is an Almighty God, and that He punishes and rewards men according to their deserts. So great have been the variations of the moral judgments of men, that some thinkers have seen in these variations evidences of growth or progression, and thus made changeableness, in a sense, a law of the moral nature. It is a law which is very far from having been demonstrated as yet ; but whether there be such a law or not, it is clear that that which is inconstant and variable can be no valid or trust- worthy test of permanent objective truth. More- over, the propositions which are given in natural religion, such as those respecting the unity and the power of God, and His justice as a Rewarder and Punisher, are vague and edgeless ; they lack COMPETING MIRACLES. 29 that definiteness which can alone fit conceptions to be the measures and notes of other conceptions. Again, the fact that the determinations of the moral nature by itself cannot be precisely ascer- tained, still further disqualifies it from acting as arbiter of supernaturally attested doctrines. The judgment in matters of morals of any given person are coloured by a thousand influences — some proper to the individual, to his age, station, religion, edu- cation, habits ; some proper to his country, and to the state of contemporary thought. These influences act upon different men in many different ways, and are mostly unperceived by those who are subject to them. Such being the case, it is obvious how difficult, even to impossibility, it would be to disentangle in any given moral judgment that which is the expression of the primitive un- assisted moral sense of him who pronounces it from that which is the expression of the superadded influences. Lastly, the jurisdiction, so to speak, of the moral nature is limited ; it can only judge within its own sphere, which is that of morals. Whereas the questions raised in supernatural religion are, or may be in the main, essentially physical, or rather metaphysical. The doctrine of the incarnation of the everlasting Son, for instance, although in the belief of Christians it has 30 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. effected the potential regeneration of the moral nature, is in itself a metaphysical statement. The moral nature could not be other than mute before it. If, then, our moral sense fails us, where, we may ask again, shall we find a note of miracles which shall vouch for their having come from God ? Let us consider how miracles are said actually to have occurred, and what was their bearing upon doctrine. Some apologists and their opponents have spoken as though miracles were wrought ex- pressly to prove doctrine ; as though a doctrine were proclaimed, then challenged, and a miracle were worked in answer to the challenge to prove the doctrine. It is a way of putting the case em- ployed with bona fides on both sides for the con- venience of argument, but which does not express what actually occurred. The actual miracles we read of in the New Testament were not experi- ments, nor answers to a challenge. They were phenomena seen in conjunction with certain teachers, wrought by them as the needs of those about them required, not to satisfy the exigencies of debate. Then upon those who saw the miracles and heard the teaching the conviction was wrought that the teachers were divinely inspired. We have here, then, no case of mutually opposing doctrines propped by corresponding miracles. Miracles as COMPETING MIRACLES. 3 I they actually occurred are the accompaniments of doctrines, not their direct proof; they vouch for what is taught only in so far as they vouch for the teacher. This, however, moves the difficulty ; it does not solve it. Given two teachers, both according to testimony endowed with the power of working miracles, the one contradicting the other, how shall we discern the true from the false ? The objection thus stated brings before us the great question of false religions. The religion of Zoroaster, Greek Paganism, Indian Brahminism, are, as Christians believe, false religions. They appeal to miracles either at their foundation or in their ordinary economy ; what, it may be asked, are the marks of the falsehood of those miracles ? Let us consider for a moment the historical enunciation of Chris- tian doctrines as attested by miracles. These doc- trines did not in their entirety emanate from a single teacher. They were unfolded gradually by a series of teachers in the course of many cen- turies. The first recorded teacher was Abraham ; then follow his immediate descendants ; then Moses, then Joshua, then David and Solomon, then Elijah and his successors, the prophets specially so named ; then, after a longer interval, our Lord Jesus Christ and His apostles and followers. These all have in 32 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. successive ages appeared as religious teachers, and from time to time, from the days of Abraham to the institution of the Christian Church, have set the seal of miracles upon their teaching. Why, to repeat the question with which we started in another form, has belief been paid to them and not to Jannes and Jambres, Zoroaster, Apollonius of Tyana, who are said to have been wonder-working teachers ? What is the note which distinguishes the former, the absence of which justifies our rejecting the latter, even supposing that they really did that which they pretended to do, namely, work miracles ? The answer to this must be that the note of truth, so to speak, which distinguishes Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and the Christian teachers, is their doctrinal solidarity. These men, succeeding one another at various intervals of time, form a chain of teachers who in different ages taught all along what was essentially the same doctrine. This doctrine was from age to age amplified and made more definite by added, not by contradictory teach- ing, the basis of it throughout continuing the same, namely, the unity and holiness of God. Each successive teacher took up the doctrine as it was left him by his predecessors, and, divinely inspired as we believe, added to it an increment of fresh doc- trine, or accentuated some particular portion of it, COMPETING MIRACLES. 33 or drew from it some timely practical inference. Of the primitive doctrine and the successive incre- ments made to . it, the whole body of Christian doctrine is the sum. It is believed because it is attested by miracles, and because it is at unity and in harmony with previous supernatural teaching from the beginning. Christians, therefore, do not believe in Mahometanism, not merely because it is apart from former teaching, but because it is con- tradictory to it ; not adding to, but rather subtract- ing from, that which was before taught. For a similar reason, still more strongly emphasized, Christians reject the teaching of Zoroaster and Brahminism, for both these systems of religion are apart from or opposed to the tradition of miracu- lous doctrine. If an angel from heaven proclaimed them, they would have to be rejected as other gospels. Thus, while the miracle proves the doc- trine, the doctrine once proved by miracles controls and measures subsequent doctrine enunciated by subsequent wonder-working teachers. Doctrine, then, previously received on sufficient evidence, not moral consciousness, nor subjective probability, is the true test of doctrine confirmed by miracles. It need hardly be stated that the above is but an answer in the barest outline to the difficulties implied in the alleged miracles of false religions. D 34 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF To set forth at length the reasons why we should not be fire-worshippers, or devotees of Vishnu, or Mormons, would be obviously beyond the compass of this work, and possibly involve more labour than any one student could command. As con- cerns the newer religions, such as Mahometanism or Mormonism, the incompatibility of their teach- ing with that of Christianity, which they profess to accept and to supplement, would seem a deci- sive argument against them. As regards the older religions, before such an objection could be brought to bear upon them, many points, involving labo- rious research respecting die antiquity of their teaching and the original form in which it was cast, would have first to be settled. Some writers insist strongly upon the duty, according to them, incumbent upon each person of personally investigating the grounds of his reli- gious belief. They profess contempt for an here- ditary belief, that is, a belief accepted on authority alone. If such an investigation be a duty, it is for most people an obviously impossible one ; they have neither the leisure nor the capacity for it. The vast majority of those who have learnt and accepted on authority that they ought to be true and just in their dealings with others, to keep their bodies in temperance and chastity, to control their COMPETING MIRACLES. 35 tongues and their thoughts, have other things to do than personally to inquire into the validity of these precepts. This duty, said to be indispensable to every human being, would, in the present state of human knowledge, be impossible of fulfilment even by those who can afford to spend their life- times in their libraries in the endeavour to perform it. For, to be adequate, the inquiry must be exhaustive, and to be exhaustive it would involve researches into as yet unexplored realms of history and thought, upon which the intellectual activity of the present day and the labours of past students can throw little or no helping light. The very materials upon which a judgment could be formed as to the date, reality, and import of the alleged miracles of the ancient religions of the East are as yet uncollected. But this need trouble none but those who teach and think that this vast universal inquiry is a practical duty binding upon all. The question of the truth or falsehood of Brahminism or of the religion of Zoroaster is not a practical one to the European or Englishman of to-day. The practical question for us of to-day is the truth or falsehood of the Christian religion, and that alone involves an inquiry beyond the resources of few save professional scholars. We may say, then, that in the first instance the 36 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. miracle authenticates, proves the teacher, and that where there is doubt, not of the supernaturalism of the miracle, but of its divinity, then the doctrine proves the miracle. If this seems fallacious in expression, the fallacy is purely a verbal one. The miracle which proves the doctrine and the miracle which is proved by the doctrine are not the same. The argument does not move in a real circle. It is a process of argumentation often used, and per- fectly valid in practical thinking. In the solution of a cipher, for instance, the characters first dis- covered prove or indicate the value of those that are undiscovered, and those that are thus discovered in their turn prove or ratify the value attached to the characters first discovered. To pursue the analogy still further, false and deceiving miracles may be compared to superfluous and unmeaning characters inserted among the true and significant characters on purpose to mislead and keep unsolved the secret of the cipher ; they would at first be put aside for future solution, and then on repeated scrutiny be found again and again to be insoluble ; then it would be observed that on their omission the other characters would give a continuous mean- ing. This would occur several times, let us sup- pose, and the true bearing of the misleading and at first mysterious characters would be ascertained COMPETING MIRACLES. and settled. In the processes involved in such an elucidation of a cipher we have first the character elucidated giving the sense, and then the sense elucidating the character. There is no fallacy, deception, sophistry in this ; the conclusions are perfectly legitimate, verified nearly at every step ; but there is that intricacy, that complexity, that Protean unseizableness, which belongs to the prac- tical activity of thought. Through a process of this sort, not the same but analogous, we may imagine a mind to pass which should be confronted with two hostile wonder- working teachers. The false teacher and his wonders would at first be regarded as difficulties ; then by degrees, as it was found that his teaching- made no sense, as it were, with former and contem- porary admitted true teaching, his right position would be assigned to him. Such a process, however, is entirely imaginary ; we do not know that as yet any person has had occasion actually to pass through it, for the diffi- culty we have been considering is entirely imagi- nary, has only a future reality. It may be confi- dently asserted that no single person at the present time is perplexed by the difficulty of competing miracles, and uncertain in consequence which teacher to follow. In the mouths of some recent objectors 38 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. who have alleged this difficulty of competing miracles, it is almost professedly rhetorical and unreal. They do not believe in the supernatural at all, and therefore less, if possible, in two competing supernaturals. Whatever they advance on the assumption of the supernatural cannot be other than hypothetical ; competing miracles with them, therefore, are things hypothetical placed in an hypothetical conjuncture. We have, therefore, been discussing, not a real difficulty, but the phantom of one, posted in front, as it were, to cow us and make us less fit to meet the real difficulty which is being brought up behind it. For \i we can be brought to consider miracles worthless, we shall naturally be less concerned to uphold their reality. Still, as rhetoric is closely akin to logic in most minds, and as imagination is constantly moulding and colouring our judgments, possibly the time spent in dealing with a difficulty to so great an extent rhetorical and imaginary may not have been altogether wasted. IV. MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. Miracles are said to prove, that is to make evident to others, the Divine mission of those who work them. It is purposed in the present section to consider in what sense, admitting their reality, they do this. To that end some of the different ways and degrees in which things may be proved must be stated. The inquiry will be seen to throw some light on other points raised in this discussion. The highest degree of proof is irresistible ; when the proof is presented the mind can do no other than assent to the thing proved. Such a kind of proof is known as demonstrative ; demonstration is the name given to the process. It will be evident that such a degree of proof is not applicable to a very large sphere of conclusions. Demonstration does not apply to the occurrences of the past, for the past can only be known on the reports of others or on one's own memory, both of which are liable to 40 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. error and deception. Demonstration or demonstra- tive proof is only possible in matters which can immediately be brought before the mind without the intervention of testimony written or spoken. The truths of numbers can be demonstrated, because they can always be referred to evidence immediately present. The proposition, for instance, that two and two make four can be demonstrated, for it can always be referred to any two couples present either to the senses or to the imagination. Other proposi- tions respecting the qualities of individual things can only be demonstrated by pointing them out or showing them present. I can only, for instance, demonstrate the blackness of the ink with which I am writing by showing it or pointing it out, which is what " demonstration " strictly means. It is clear that, taking proof in this sense, miracles cannot be said to prove the Divine mission of those who worked them. To those who witnessed them they were demonstrations of extraordinary power so far as they went. To us who have heard of them they cannot be demonstrations even of the power, for the report we have heard of them may be false or erroneous. Nor even to those who witnessed them, and to whom they were demonstrations of an extraordinary power, were they demonstrations, that is, irresistible and unanswerable proofs, of the Divine MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. 4 1 mission of the teachers who wrought them, even though those teachers appealed to their evidence ; for the miracles might have been but the pulsations of some unknown unexampled law set in motion by some peculiar conjuncture of circumstances, and only accidentally coinciding with the voice and gestures of those who with an imaginary mission assumed and seemed to work them. If they were not, then, demonstrations of a Divine mission to the original witnesses, still less are they demonstrations of the kind to us who have received them at second hand. When, then, Spinosa argued that from miracles the existence of God could not be concluded, because that miracles, being finite effects, cannot prove an infinite power as their cause, he argued correctly, taking conclusion in the sense of necessary infer- ence. He might have added that, using the word in the same meaning, miracles were not singular in this respect ; that whereas all the works of nature, whether taken separately or jointly, are finite, they also labour under the same disability to demon- strate an infinite power as their cause ; that nothing, in fine, can demonstrate an infinite God but an infinite God Himself in evidence. There is another kind of demonstrative proof, perfect in its kind, but not possessing the reality of mathematical demonstration as relating to abstrac- 42 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. tions fashioned by the imagination, which do not answer exactly to actual realities, or to generaliza- tions drawn from experience for whose accuracy and completeness we have no constant and assured guarantee. Such are the reasonings in Euclid. The abstractions with which they are concerned, lines, angles, points, do not exist ; things like them exist, so like, that what holds good of the imaginary lines and angles holds good also practically of actually existing lines and angles. Supposing such things as lines, points, and circles to exist as they are defined in Euclid, then Euclid's reasonings about them are irresistible — they are proved to demonstra- tion; but this demonstration is hypothetical, not absolute, because it has for its subject-matter things which cannot be proved to exist. Such also are syllogisms in whatever matter which satisfy all the requirements of formal logic. In them the premises demonstrate the conclusion, which follows from them irresistibly and inevitably ; but the demon- stration is generally hypothetical because the premises generally, as drawn from experience, are only hypothetically, not absolutely true. Miracles have no such hypothetically demonstrative power ; from them, as has been already implied, the Divine mission of their workers cannot be necessarily or ex vi terminorum deduced. MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. 43 Below demonstration comes probability, which varies in strength from the slightest presumption to practical certainty. This is the probability which, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life ; it is the kind of proof with which we must be content in the conduct of life ; it is the kind of proof which miracles give of the Divine mission of their workers. It is the kind of proof which miracles as historical events can at the utmost claim for themselves. Probability differs in degree ; in some cases it is practical certainty, in others it is likelihood shading off into the merest possibility. With what degree of probability do miracles prove the Divine mission of their workers? To this question naturally no general answer can be given which shall hold good of any individual with regard to any miracles, for the strength of all prob- able evidence varies with the individuals to whom it is addressed. To a person prepared beforehand by a belief in a personal God willing and able to work miracles, one miracle would suffice to prove with practical certainty the Divine mission of its worker ; although even then the decision would be subject to revision when the contents of the message so attested should come to be examined. To a person, on the other hand, destitute of the belief in a personal God, and penetrated with the 44 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. notion of the absolute uniformity of natural events, a miracle would at first prove hardly more than an hallucination in the witnesses of it. But if the number of credible and veracious witnesses should be very great, or if the circumstances of the case made such a cause of delusion very unlikely, the hypothesis of hallucination would have to be abandoned. Hallucination, for example, would be clearly inadequate to explain the case of a man known to a large circle of acquaintances sickening for a time, dead and buried, and then four days after, the corpse having begun to putrefy, being raised to life from the grave before a concourse of people at the bidding of a man who went to the spot for the purpose, and declared Himself to be possessed of the power of giving life and of re- storing it to the dead. The most obvious expla- nation in such a case would be that of imposture, which for the present is excluded. Failing that, the miracle would be attributed to the accidental coincidence in time and place of the operation of some remote, unknown, hitherto unexampled law with the words and actions of the pretended prophet. But the case of miracles is not that of a single wonderful and inexplicable occurrence, but of a series of such associated with a succession of MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. 45 teachers. The hypothesis of the accidental con- currence of unknown law might solve the difficulty of one well-attested miracle, it might possibly even solve the difficulty of a second ; but upon a third the solvent would act with sensibly diminished power, and with each succeeding miracle the acci- dental nature of the occurrence would become less and less credible, and the Divine mission of the miracle-workers in the same degree more and more developed until it reached practical certainty. It has been here assumed that the miracles which thus induce belief are well attested. As to whether particular miracles are well attested or not, must be determined by historical criticism ; the question does not enter into this discussion, except in so far as it is involved in the general question of the credibility of miracles on any evidence whatever. It has been asserted that miracles are sensible events merely, which may or may not prove the supernatural ; that the latter cannot be deduced directly from miracles, but can only be somewhat uncertainly inferred from them. This does not completely represent the facts. Miracles are not portents, strange phenomena standing by them- selves ; they are not simple effects, only as effects, declaring their cause, but they are ever associated 46 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. with the persons by whom they are produced, and who are the exponents of their meaning. Thus they are effects which declare their cause im- mediately, so as to call forth no process of infer- ence, but rather one of simple apprehension solely. Thus it is conceivable that one who does not at first believe in a personal God at all may, by the evidence of miracles and their workers, be brought over to such a belief. It is universally admitted that the existence of a Divine person may be established by general arguments of providence and design. It is difficult to see why the same existence would not be still more solidly estab- lished by the more particular instances of per- sonal intervention evidenced by miracles. While miracles thus immediately declare the existence of the supernatural and the Divine mission of their workers, they only mediately prove the contents or matter of supernatural religion, that is through the medium of their workers. Miracles, as said before, are not events which stand by themselves ; the doctrines of super- natural religion are not written on them or in them plainly for all to read. The function of miracles is not so much to declare the doctrine as to authenticate the teacher by testifying to his supernatural mission. So the phenomena of nature MIRACLES AS ARGUMENTS. 47 only mediately prove the laws of nature, that is through the medium of scientific inquirers and students. The laws of nature are not written in unmistakable type on the phenomena of nature ; these latter must be abstracted, arranged, inter- preted, before even the most general of the former can be spelt out of them. From the Divine mission of the teacher the truth of his teaching necessarily follows. It follows not with the practical certainty of a very high probability, but with the certainty of hypothetical demonstration. As surely and inevitably as the reasonings in Euclid follow from the definitions and axioms, or as the conclusion in Barbara follows from the premises, so surely and inevi- tably does the objective truth of the doctrines follow from the Divine authority of the teacher. This certainty, this demonstrativeness, belonging to the whole teaching, ever remains, however hypothetical, limited by the "if" which governs the antecedent. If the teacher be from God, then the doctrine is true. The link between antecedent and consequent is here so close, that practically they stand or fall together ; the one is as true or as false as the other. Thus, for instance, the Godhead of the Founder of Christianity is as true or as false as His Divine mission. If He was not God, then He 48 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. was not divinely sent, for He said in that case what was untrue. If He was divinely sent, then He was God, for He Himself declared it. From the further application of this consideration to the facts of Christianity, a conclusion may be drawn which seems to be gradually dawning upon the general sense of men, namely, that there is no logical alternative between unreserved acceptance of Chris- tianity as it has been actually taught and received, and absolute rejection of it. V. THE ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES. MIRACLES, then, render probable the existence of a personal God and the Divine mission of the prophets who have claimed to work them. But, it has been contended, miracles are in themselves improbable, not believable on any evidence ; nay, they are impossible. For the present it will be more convenient to deal with the antecedent improbability of miracles. Their impossibility is closely allied to their improbability, but for the sake of greater clearness the two objections will be considered as far as possible separately, and the antecedent impossibility of miracles will be con- sidered when their improbability shall as far as may be have been disposed of. The objection to miracles on the ground of their improbability is substantially the objection raised by Hume, and was much to this effect A miracle is E 50 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. acknowledged on all hands to be a most improbable, unusual event ; it comes to us on the authority of witnesses ; it is neither improbable nor unusual for such witnesses to be deceived, or to say what is not true, especially, Hume asserts, in the case of miracles ; " violations of truth," he says, " being more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles than in that concerning any other matter of fact." In estimating, therefore, the truth of a miracle, two probabilities have to be balanced. On the one hand, there is the probability or improbability of a miracle ; on the other hand, there is the probability or improb- ability of the testimony to the miracle being false or erroneous. If we think it more probable that the witnesses of a miracle should lie or be deceived than that the miracle which they profess to have witnessed should have happened, then we are bound, by the plain laws of the human under- standing, to reject the miracle ; if, on the other hand, the veracity and the infallibility under the circum- stances of the witnesses should be so known to us as to make their mendacity or error in regard to the miracle a greater miracle than the miracle itself, then we must accept the miracle. But this acceptance will not be like the acceptance we give to other non-miraculous events ; it will be faint and undecided, as being measured by the degree in ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES. 5 I which the improbability of the testimony being false or erroneous exceeds the improbability native to the miracle. The general result of the above argument is that miracles must be rejected. All men are fallible ; most men who witness miracles, according to Hume, are liars. When, then, we are told of a most unusual and improbable event on evidence always fallible and often mendacious, we are not justified in giving credence to such an event. Some exception might fairly be taken to Hume's assumption or insinuation, which is really the cardinal point of his argument, that most wit- nesses to miracles are liars. Hume was not singular among his contemporaries in this respect ; imposture was the solution of miracles accepted generally in the eighteenth century by the oppo- nents of Christianity. Their successors of to-day show better breeding, but at the expense some- times, it is to be feared, of their common sense. It would be interesting to get accurate statistics as to how many alleged miracles have been proved to have been the creations of imposture. Many alleged miracles are, indeed, publicly discredited and suspected of imposture — a fact which gives some colour to Hume's assumption ; but to suspect imposture and to prove imposture are different things. Much of the discredit attaching to certain 52 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. classes of miracles has no justification in reason. Those miracles may or may not be impostures or delusions, but they cannot be summarily rejected by consistent believers in other miracles except upon their evidence. For if there be no canon of thought or fact making against miracles in general, it is plain that there can be no such canon making against the miracles of a particular age or country. Hume, moreover, in qualifying the general evi- dence of mankind as untrustworthy, has omitted to notice that the credibility of individual witnesses is not the average credibility of the human race, but that it is sometimes higher, sometimes lower, than the average. The credibility of each indi- vidual varies with his antecedents, his known probity and veracity ; it is certainly not without relation to his interest in that which his testimony declares, but that relation will be in inverse proportion to his probity and veracity. In other words, evidence has to be weighed as well as counted, and the weight of it is generally more important than its number. This has an important bearing upon, among others, the cardinal miracles of the Christian religion recorded in the New Testament. The true vouchers for these miraculous facts are not ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES. S3 the numbers of the believers, but the characters of their witnesses. Take, for instance, the latter events recorded in the Gospel of S. John — on the face of it the work of a bystander and eye- witness. There, after reading a circumstantial account of the reappearance alive, the words and gestures of a Man who some time before was publicly executed, dead, and buried, we come across these words : " Haec autem scripta sunt ut credatis, quia Jesus est Christus, Alius Dei, et ut credentes vitam habeatis in nomine ejus." 1 He who wrote this either told a lie or told the truth ; other alternative is impossible. If a lie, then a most gratuitous and infamous lie, not easily believable, if at all, of the writer of the touching and noble narrative in which these words occur. Nor, again, is the assumption on which Hume's argument rests, namely, that men are more prone to mendacity than to veracity, to be gathered from ordinary experience. Most men, as a matter of fact, tell the truth — the truth of their impressions. The normal explanation of the discrepancy of testimony is not the mendacity of the witnesses, but the individuality of their impressions and the inaccuracy of their memory. To put it broadly, most men do not tell lies, were it for no other 1 Joann. xx. 31. 54 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. reason than that most men have not the wit to tell lies, have not the wit to devise and then to tell. So that in most cases, the more astounding and unusual the circumstance witnessed, the less likely, if it be told in seriousness and simplicity, is it to be a fable. Which is precisely the principle contained in the paradox credo quia impossibile. Nor, when astounding and unusual statements are made, does the mind proceed to weigh in the balance of abstract reasoning the various prob- abilities and improbabilities involved in them. Instead of that, the credibility of the speaker is considered on its proper concrete grounds, and upon that his statement is accepted or rejected. Statements have been made by competent and credible witnesses respecting the feats of Indian jugglers, which on Hume's principles ought to be universally rejected as mendacious, but which nevertheless are accepted by intelligent and reasonable men. The process of thus weighing probabilities is certainly not practised by the average mind. It may be even doubted whether in the present constitution of things, it is practi- cable. The process would apply, not to miracles alone, but to all strange and as yet unexperienced and unknown events. Probabilities would have first to be exhaustively ascertained, and when ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES. 55 ascertained would need nice and delicate weighing, whereas the facts to be decided upon, whether conveyed by oral or written testimony, in the daily intercourse of life are many, succeed one another rapidly, and often demand prompt deci- sion. Hume's " wise man," if he were to follow Hume's prescription, would need a lifetime ten times as long as that of average humanity, and even then his wisdom would possibly be more remarkable for its method than for its matter. Nor, when such extraordinary statements are accepted on the credibility of the witnesses, is that acceptance limited or weakened by the inherent improbabilities of their statements. When once a statement is accepted, if it is really accepted, not merely touched, handled, discussed, with more or less favour, it must be accepted in toto. A perfectly credible trustworthy witness, on whose word we would accept miracles, could not receive a doubtful assent. Where in a process of reasoning a con- clusion is reached, it is the conclusion which in most cases remains in the mind and is acted upon, not the process, that is, the various considerations which helped to the forming of the conclusion. Such a rule, based on the one hand on an exag- gerated estimate of the improbability of miracles — for with Hume, it must be remembered, the in- 56 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. credibility of miracles consisted in their unusualness, not, as with modern objectors, in their scientific irregularity— and on the other hand in an exag- gerated and distorted estimate of the mendacity of testimony, could not in practice fail to break down, as it has actually done. Events which anti- Christian controversialists of a former generation rejected in obedience to Hume's prescription, have been universally accepted by a later generation. What has discredited Hume's anti-miraculous canon, as it were, has enhanced the credit of those authorities whose veracity in deference to that canon was impugned. The hypothesis of imposture has been abandoned by almost all respectable objectors to Christianity. It was, indeed, felt to be monstrous, far surpassing even miracles in wonder, that those teachers with whom all that is elevating and ennobling in the morality of Western civilization has indisputably originated, should have been personally the basest and most criminal of men. VI. MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. The objection of Hume has been restated by Mr. John Stuart Mill with the clearness and modera- tion which uniformly mark the arguments of that distinguished and estimable thinker. He states, in the second volume of his " Logic," that Hume's doctrine is merely the proposition that "whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is in- credible." But it may be said this cannot affect miracles ; they cannot be contradictory to a com- plete induction ; the very fact that they are sup- ported by credible evidence destroys that hypothesis. No induction can be complete when facts can be brought against it for which there is credible evidence. To this Mr. Mill replies, "that we have a right to declare an induction complete, even while facts supported by credible evidence present themselves in opposition to it." We have it, he says, "whenever the scientific canons of induction 58 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. give it to us ; " " whenever the induction can be complete ; " " we have it, for example, in a case of causation in which there has been an experimentum cruris." 1 But what, it may be asked, are these so-called scientific canons of induction ? What is their validity ? What is their authority ? Are they deductions from any known or universal law of the human mind ? If they were so, then the canons of induction would be the same in all sciences, whereas they notoriously vary. That, for instance, which would be a good argument in chemistry would not hold in philology or in politics. More- over, all inductive processes contain an element, a very small one sometimes, of the contingent, are arbitrary in the results obtained, and depend in a great degree upon the genius and experience of the individual inquirer. Such processes may be scien- tific, for science is enlarged by them, but rigorous in the sense of fixed proceeding by rules, things which are so shifting, variable, and individual cannot be. The canons of induction are but inductions, skilfully drawn, let us admit, but, like all inductions, arbitrary in their degree, of but probable validity, antecedently weaker, more arbitrary, than the in- ductions, crude and unscientific, from which they 1 Mill's " Logic," 4th edit., vol. ii. p. 157. MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. 59 have been drawn. The whole argument for the absolute validity of inductive reasoning labours in a circle. What gives validity to an induction? Answer — The canons of induction. What is the source of the canons of induction ? Answer — Induction. Out of this circle a posteriori reasoning cannot emerge. It is not intended to deny that great probability may belong to these canons of induction. All that is meant is that probability in its degree is the utmost that can be claimed for them, and that consequently their authority is not such as to justify the rejection of any well-attested fact. As a matter of fact, Mr. Mill does not absolutely claim the authority of a complete induction against miracles. He makes use of saving clauses, namely, " whenever the induction can be complete," " in a case of causation where there has been an experi- mentam cruris." What such cases are we must find out by consulting previous passages of the " Logic." In no one passage does Mr. Mill give a formal enumeration of the notes of a complete induction. We can only ascertain his conception of a complete induction by comparing together different passages which occur in that portion of the " Logic " which treats of induction. From a passage in the chapter on observation and experiment, it appears that 60 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. he holds an induction to be complete which is pre- ceded by an artificial experiment. There he says that if we can produce artificially an antecedent previously observed, and if when we do so the effect also previously observed follows, the induc- tion is complete, that antecedent is the cause of the consequent — not, however, without a reservation, but which is immaterial to the purposes of our inquiry. Again, in the chapter treating of the plurality of causes, we read that when the method of differences is employed which involves experiment, two in- stances — the one positive, the other negative — are sufficient for the most complete and rigorous induc- tion. From these two passages we may infer that, in Mr. Mill's opinion, a complete induction may be obtained wherever the method of differences, that is to say experiment, can be used with the proper scientific safeguards. There are other methods of scientific inquiry, besides the method of differences, productive of results more or less probable ; but it is apparently with this method alone that he asso- ciates the idea of a complete induction. But it is obvious that the sphere of experiment, and conse- quently of complete induction, is limited. In astro- nomy, for instance, it is impossible ; in mental science, social science, and physiology it has a very limited range. "In these sciences," Mr. Mill says, MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. 6 1 " induction from direct experience is practised at a disadvantage in most cases equivalent to impracti- cability." 1 Again, in the chapter on the deductive method, speaking of the backward state of the science of physiology, he says that the insufficiency of the inductive resources, especially experiment available for ascertaining the laws of the causes at work in it, is glaring, and in consequence " we can neither explain nor could, without specific experi- ence, have predicted many of the facts which are certified to us by the most ordinary observation." 2 Most of the recorded miracles of Scripture belong to this sphere of physiology, in which complete inductions are, as we have seen, in great part or wholly impracticable. " Cseci vident, claudi ambu- lant, leprosi mundantur, surdi audiunt, mortui resurgunt." 3 In our very incomplete knowledge of the laws of life in their entirety, it would be impos- sible to say that operations such as these are viola- tions of complete inductions grounded on experi- ment. Take, for instance, the most startling of them, the raising of the dead ; as we do not know the conditions of the permanence of death, we cannot ascertain by experiment whether their con- ditions are liable to counteraction or not. We know, 1 Mill's " Logic," 4th edit., vol. i. p. 414. 8 Ibid., p. 495. 3 Luc. vii. 22, 62 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. indeed that occasionally, in cases of drowning, actual death has been followed by artificial resuscitation. But of the laws of the causes of such resuscitations we are ignorant ; that is, we cannot tell what par- ticular cause in the process brings about what particular effect. But, it may be said, although most miracles, at least most of those recorded in Scripture, are viola- tions of physiological generalizations from direct observation, there are other miracles recorded in Scripture which are breaches of undoubted scientific laws. The Ascension, for instance, as a plain violation of mechanical laws, is evidently contra- dictory to a complete induction. But the Ascension is contradictory to a complete induction no more and no less than some of the commonest occur- rences. A heavy body mounting into the air appears during its upward course to be violating the law of gravitation. But that law is not being violated ; it is in force all along ; it is merely being counter- acted. Inductions even the most universal can give but a limited power of forecasting -actual occur- rences, for most actual occurrences are the products of several concurring effects ; whereas induction, scientifically speaking, only attaches effects to their proper causes ; it cannot anticipate any counteracting cause which may arise. The law of gravitation, for MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. 63 instance, is not a statement that all heavy bodies are actually brought together, but that they have a certain tendency, to conjunction, which tendency, it is evident from experience, may be overcome by some superior force. This seems to be the view of the objection to the a priori credibility of miracles adopted by Mr. Mill himself. He decides that miracles are credible to those who believe in the existence of a power will- ing and able to counteract the operation of natural causes as they appear to be counteracted in miracles. The credibility of miracles is thus admitted by Mr. Mill, but it is at the same time limited to those who antecedently believe in the existence of a Divine power competent to effect the miracles, and with whose character miraculous interference is not inconsistent. Mr. Mill proceeds to observe that, without a previous belief in the supernatural, a miracle could not prove its existence. Taking " prove" in the sense of " demonstrate," it must be admitted that no number of miracles, much less one single one, could demonstrate the existence of the supernatural ; but taking " prove " in the sense of " render probable," we may with propriety say, not of one miracle indeed by itself, but of a succession of miracles, that in virtue of their twofold character, as was formerly remarked, according to which they 64 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. differ from other phenomena in being through the teachers who work them self-declaratory, they could prove the existence of a supernatural power even to those previously ignorant of it, just as repeated electrical phenomena have proved to those who have known of them the existence of electrical force, with this difference, that the electrical force had to be collected from simple observation of the phenomena themselves, and was not announced otherwise. Supposing miracles had from the first been subjected to scientific examination, the early miracles would have been referred to ordinary causes ; but as miracles were repeated, accompanied in each case by the declaration of each successive wonder-worker of a higher unseen personal power which enabled him to work the miracles, then the naturalistic explanation would be deemed less probable, until at last it reached the extreme of improbability. In the order of fact, miracles long preceded science, else perhaps the above hypothesis might have been actually realized. Miracles on their first occurrence were accepted for what they were, namely, supernatural effects of supernatural causes ; it has been reserved for a later age to call in question, first the actuality of miracles, and then their legitimate interpretation. When, then, the author of " Supernatural Re- MIRACLES AND COMPLETE INDUCTIONS. 65 ligion " contends that the limitation put by Mr. Mill upon the credibility of miracles, namely, to those who previously believe in the existence of a power able and likely to work them, is futile, in that it virtually overthrows the entire credibility of miracles, because that no such power is capable of proof, we may answer that no such power can be logically demonstrated, but that it can by a variety of reasons, not least by miraculous interpositions, be shown to be exceedingly probable, and that, therefore, the limitation is nottruly contradictory tothe proposition. The incredibility of a miracle, even in the case of those who, according to Mr. Mill, are justified in their incredulity, can only with reason attach to the miraculous nature of the event. A well-attested event must be supposed to have taken place, whether a scientific explanation of it can be given or not. If it be established on evidence that a man has risen from the ground without visible conveyance, and then at a great height has disappeared in the distance, science cannot control or annul such a fact. Facts, it is needless to say, cannot be annulled. Science may explain it away, may demonstrate it to be a phenomenon of natural causation, or science may fail to do so, and the event may remain an unexplained portent, or a strong probability may assign it to supernatural causation. Such a phe- F 66 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. nomenon would require very strong affirmative evi- dence. To say that no evidence could establish such a phenomenon, would be to assert the right of science to control facts, whereas science is the handmaid and interpreter of facts ; it would be to assert that nothing should be believed to which we could not assign some adequate and known natural cause— an assertion which would have been fatal to the beginnings of some sciences, and which is con- tradicted by the daily experience of chemistry, where effects are constantly being witnessed which are assignable to no known causes, and yet not for that accounted hallucinations. From the foregoing, it will be evident that if we accept Mr. Mill's dictum that no miracle could prove the existence of supernatural agencies to those who do not already believe in them, we can only accept it in the sense that one swallow does not make a summer. No one miracle can prove the supernatural to one previously without cogni- zance of it. So the first observed electrical phe- nomena did not prove the electric force to Thales. That force has been proved by many subsequent phenomena. So a succession of miracles proceed- ing from a school of teachers is sufficient to prove the supernatural, and in combination with other premises has proved it to the satisfaction of the more civilized portion of mankind. VII. MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LAW. In the two preceding sections what may be called the subjective objection to miracles has been dis- cussed. In the present and succeeding section it is purposed to deal with their a priori objective possibility or alleged impossibility. By the sub- jective objection to miracles we may understand the, so to speak, domestic difficulties which the mind experiences in accepting such unusual occur- rences as miracles. By the alleged objective im- possibility of miracles we may understand the difficulties besetting the belief in miracles which are grounded, not upon the nature or the furniture of the mind itself, but upon the nature and the order of nature of the world without us, in which miracles have their setting. The subjective probability and the a priori objective possibility of miracles are doubtless very closely allied ; the annihilation of the latter would 68 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. involve the eventual annihilation of the former. While that which is known to be possible must always be subjectively probable, it does not neces- sarily follow that what is subjectively improbable is impossible. For what was once subjectively im- probable has, in the actual course of the history of thought, by its ascertained possibility, become prob- able. Such a process may have been, for what we know, often exemplified, and much of the present working furniture of the mind may have been once outer unknown fact, and perhaps what is now outer possibility may in time become an insepar- able part of the mind's machinery. But whatever may be the ultimate relations of outer possibility and inner probability to each other, whether they may become eventually convertible terms or not, it is clear that in the present they are distinct. Within its own court, so to speak, and from its own material, the mind delivers one judgment ; out of its own court, taking into view things outside of and hitherto foreign to it, another judgment may result. Within its own court, for instance, the mind once determined antipodes to be antecedently improbable ; they were contradictory to a very broad induction. Since then, taking into considera- tion a series of outer and theretofore foreign facts, the mind has decided antipodes to be actual. In MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LAW. 69 this, then, and in the succeeding section, the ob- jection to miracles will be considered which is grounded upon their supposed incompatibility with the order of nature. This objection to the possibility of miracles has been stated, and indeed restated many times with great variety and great force by the author of "Supernatural Religion." Out of many, perhaps the following may be taken as the clearest and most typical statement of the objection : "What- ever is contradictory to universal and invariable experience is antecedently incredible, and as the sequence of phenomena which is called the order of nature is established by and in accordance with universal experience, miracles or alleged violations of that order, by whatever name they may be called, or whatever definition may be given of their characteristics or objects, are antecedently in- credible." * In answer to this, it may be said that what is contrary to " universal and invariable experience " cannot have happened, for, if it had, the experience would not have been universal. To ground, then, an objection to miracles on the supposed existence of an order of nature established by universal experience is tantamount to arguing that miracles 1 " Supernatural Religion," complete edit., vol. i. p. 78. 70 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. have not happened because they have never hap- pened, which is none other than the known fallacy of begging the question. The question is whether miracles as facts are admissible elements of ex- perience ; it is not answered by assuming that experience excludes miracles, for that is the point at issue. Experience may or may not exclude miracles, but that can only be ascertained by individual interrogations of experience, by sifting the evidence produced for every alleged miracle. Experience itself, not mere assertions, however veiled, must decide what is in experience. Certain events are declared by some to be real facts of experience, by others this is denied. The argument is at a dead lock unless appeal can be made to some common measure of facts. For the purposes of this dispute, there is but one such common measure, which is the evidence of the facts alleged. Miracles are not the only facts disregarded in this so-called universal and invariable experience, on which this rigorous and undeviating order of nature is set up. There are realms of nature within sight of indeed, but not yet penetrated, in great measure doubtless impenetrable, by scientific in- quiry. It is a belief of old time that the sequences of winds and rains and storms, of all those phenomena which constitute the weather have MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LA IV. J I from time to time been modified by a supernatural power ; that belief has not yet, at all events, been scientifically refuted. The sequences of those phenomena are only conjecturally, and in great part must remain only conjecturally, known, if known at all. The sequences of the phenomena of animal life, again, which form the subject of physiology, are only known in small part, and by common admission can never be scientifically ascertained to within measurable distance of com- pleteness. The phenomena which form the subject of these two branches of inquiry, meteorology and physiology, form a not inconsiderable part of the experience of everyday life, but they have not as yet, nor are likely to be, subordinated to any known order of nature. So, when it is said that the uniformity of nature or the omnipresence of law in it is established on universal and invariable experience, that universality and invariableness must be taken, miracles apart, with considerable abatements, so far, at least, as our present know- ledge of nature goes, and these abatements must consequently leave room for the possibility of exceptions to that order which has been grounded expressly on the universality and invariableness of its premise. The order of nature, as it is called, is in reality J 2 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. the result of an imperfect induction, the induction per enumerationem simplicem. That kind of in- duction is, indeed, the basis of all the more scientific processes of induction, which must therefore, how- ever correctly drawn and valid within their own domain, partake of the weakness of their founda- tion. Strictly speaking, the order of nature, or, as Mr. Mill expresses it, the axiom that everything 1 must have a cause, that is, a constant and uncon- ditional antecedent, is only an empirical law which may at any time be upset by a single contrary example. This is practically admitted by Mr. Mill. He adduces counter-considerations, which make, indeed, for the actual validity of the axiom, but do not diminish its scientific weakness. Mr. Mill has with justice contended that the belief in the uniformity of nature is not instinctive ; that ancient philosophers, for example, reckoned chance among the acting causes of things. There are axioms and beliefs which are instinctive. No one, for instance, has contended that two straight lines can enclose a space. Such a proposition is instinctively and without further deliberation re- jected by the mind. The converse proposition, that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, receives from the mind a similarly instinctive assent. The instinctive character of the assent MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LAW. 73 given to this and to kindred propositions is at- tributed by a school of philosophers, which reckons Mr. Mill in its number, to the universality of the experience, conscious and unconscious, upon which it is grounded. According to these philosophers the human mind is but a microcosm of the observed order of nature. From the past and present ex- periences of this and preceding generations of human beings — from experience, and only from experience — has, according to them, the treasury of the brain been gathered together. These ex- periences are combined by the mind in acts of memory and of imagination. In acts of imagination the mind has a power of combining impressions of experiences at will ; but the power is limited. Some of the experiences the mind is utterly unable to associate together. It cannot, for instance, to recur to a former example, combine the impression of two straight lines with that of a space enclosed by them so as to make a definite picture. If the mind attempts to do so, it finds a break in the enclosure, or a curve, or a deviation from straightness in the lines. This limitation of the power of the imagina- tion, the instinctive character of the belief accorded to the proposition that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, and to other propositions similarly compelling assent, the maintainers of the experi- 74 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. mental or experiencial constitution of the human mind explain by a theory of the association of ideas. They argue that, although we do not see the straight lines themselves — for that would be impossible — yet that, from our births, and even before our births, in the mental constitution which we have inherited from our parents, we have been conversant with straight lines and spaces in ex- tended things, and that, never having seen two straight lines enclosing a space, we have by a sort of atrophied habit become incapable of conceiving two straight lines as enclosing a space, and of combining the two ideas in an act of the imagina- tion. If, then, the instinctive character of a mental judgment is a witness to the observed universality and invariableness of the corresponding fact, which has been, as it were, unconsciously and therefore impartially registered by the mind, it might be fairly argued, that where there is no such instinctive acceptance, there is a lack of universality and invariableness in the experience of the correspond- ing fact, and that therefore the uniformity of nature, embracing, as it does, all phenomenal sequences, the most familiar and the most constant, is grounded on something less than universal and invariable experience, because the belief accorded to it is not instinctive. This is an argument valid only in the MIRACLES AND UNIFORM NATURAL LAW. 7$ case of certain thinkers. As a deduction from their own principles, it is valid against the reason- ings of most modern objectors to miracles, not of all. It seems entitled to the notice of all those who would deduce the whole of the mind's furni- ture from its individual and inherited impressions. But it is not intended by the use of such an argument to express any opinion on the philoso- phical basis of it. But there is no real antagonism between the uniformity of nature and the possibility of miracles, even supposing that uniformity to be as rigorous and as completely established as the author of " Supernatural Religion " asserts that it is. The uniformity of nature seems to be identified by Mr. Mill with the law of universal causation. The truth that every beginning has a cause is, he says, perhaps somewhat hastily, coextensive with human experience. To this truth it is evident miracles are no exceptions. They are not causeless ; their chief function is to declare their cause, which, how- ever, is admittedly mysterious and extraordinary. Thus a miracle is no transgression of the funda- mental axiom implied in the uniformity of nature. VIII. NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. If, then, Mr. Mill's view of the uniformity of nature be correct, miracles enter into that uniformity — do not break it, but comply with it. Like other phenomena, they are effects preceded by an antece- dent or cause ; but their cause differs from that of most natural phenomena in that it is an invisible supernatural power. At this point objectors to miracles urge that the cause to which miracles are attributed may indeed exist, but nowhere manifests His existence in any way analogous or similar to the manifestation of Him in miracles. That there is nothing in the world around us analogous to the alleged cause of miracles ; no hint of it, as it were. That we are every- where encompassed by physical laws, where ante- cedent and consequent are joined together by in- variable sequences. Whether we look high or look low, into matter or into living organisms, we every- NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. yj where see the realm of law, material causes working- out material effects ; nowhere do we see any agency at work which can be compared with, or is at all suggestive of, the supernatural cause or causes alleged to be in operation in the working of miracles. The forces we see at work in nature are general forces ; their operation is everywhere and everywhen ; it is not confined to particular localities and times. Beneath these operations, it is true, there may work the force which is said to work miracles, but as God always works by general laws, as evidenced by the universal experience of mankind, extended not only to the remotest epoch of history, but to the millions of years further back, which have left their impress in the geological record, it is impossible that He should interpolate, as it were, into this vast series of uniform sequences a set of particular isolated events, exceptions to any known law of material sequence limited to par- ticular populations and to particular times. The sum and substance of the objections thus stated above, which are very much a repetition from a different standpoint of objections already considered, is that no forces are admissible and entitled to credence which have nothing analogous or similar to them in forces already known. That statement is by itself its own sufficient refutation. 78 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. It assumes that our present knowledge of the forces at work in nature is complete and exhaustive. Had the principle by which it is thus attempted to upset the possibility of miracles been applied at the beginning to electrical phenomena, the science of electricity would never have existed. To the first inquirers into electrical phenomena there was nothing analogous, nothing similar to the electrical force in the then known forces, and on the principle of the objection to miracles we are now con- sidering the hypothesis of an electric force 1 would have been dismissed as impossible. This objection not only assumes an exhaustive knowledge of ex- isting forces which we certainly do not possess ; it assumes also that all great classes of effects have been satisfactorily traced to their causes. It has been seen that certain great classes of effects have not been, and are not likely to be, traced to their causes. Another class may here be mentioned which are in certain respects analogous to miracles. Volcanoes and earthquakes are, like miracles, circumscribed to a certain extent in respect of place and time ; their phenomena are well known, but their physical antecedents are and promise to remain unknown. If, then, there were no known analogies to the force and to the relation between cause and effect NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 79 which are exemplified in miracles, that would be no valid reason why miracles should be impossible. There is, however, a force or forces in nature ana- logous to the force which underlies a miracle, and the mode of working of these natural forces is analogous to that of the miraculous force. And while the gradation of forces observable in nature leads us on to the probability of a higher than those ordinarily working and capable of counter- acting them, recent scientific results make it prob- able that an event or events analogous to miracles must have of necessity occurred once at least, possibly oftener, in the development of the primeval world into its present condition. These forces or powers in nature which are analogous to that which works miracles are human wills. The human will in each case that it moves the body becomes an immaterial cause of a mate- rial effect. Such an effect is, from the nature of the case, a suspension or violation of a physical law. The act of throwing a stone has been in- stanced as an example of the violation of the commonest physical laws. The antecedent of that violation is an immaterial act of will ; it makes no difference to the argument that the immediate antecedent of the muscular action of the arm is a modification of the nerve which communicates 80 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. between the muscles and the brain. The material modification of a nerve by an act of will is quite as much to the point of this argument as would be the direct contraction of the muscles by the same cause. To this it has been replied that the will of man itself produces no disturbance of physical laws, that it is as much a part of nature and as normal as a crystal or a plant. That the will is wholly circum- scribed by law, has its being and existence from the cradle to the grave subject to law. That it can learn nothing and teach nothing except on material conditions, without which it languishes. Such are some of the arguments adduced against the posi- tion that the human will is analogous to the Divine will which works miracles. These arguments con- tain much that is true. It is very clear that the will is encompassed by the laws of matter, and that it cannot effect any permanent violation of those laws. But, on the other hand, its every action upon matter is a momentary violation of such laws, although that action may in each case be controlled, modified, and finally extinguished by such laws. In every such action there is an immaterial cause or antecedent, the human will, and a material effect or consequent, a conjunction which is precisely analogous to a miracle. It is not claimed either NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 8 1 for miracles In all cases, or for acts of human will, that they effect permanent violations or suspensions of natural laws. The stone thrown by the uplifted arm mounts in the air indirect contravention of the law of gravitation. The muscular force of the arm propels the stone ; something unseen and immate- rial, the human will, puts into exertion the mus- cular force. The putrid corpse was quickened by the same unknown cause. The stone's nature was to rest, the corpse's to decay, that of the muscles of the arm to remain uncontracted ; but the unknown something in each case stirred them, or made to stir them, to violation of nature, and in each case nature reasserted its sway — the stone fell to the earth, the arm relaxed, Lazarus in due course died again. The will is indeed a part of nature, that is, it is one of the many forces which work around and about us ; it may be as common as a crystal or a plant, but its being as usual as a crystal or a plant does not bring it under the same laws. Crystals and plants are not subject to caprice ; given causes produce upon them certain effects which can be predicted with unerring certainty. It is not so with the will ; it is absolutely subject to no laws; it is within itself free, self-determinant. To argue about it as if it were material, and subject to G 82 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. invariable sequences, lands us in conclusions directly contradictory to the evidence of conscious- ness, for it is on the direct evidence of conscious- ness that we affirm the will to be free. In its rela- tions to matter it is limited by the laws of its material environment ; these relations are affected, limited, destroyed, by that which affects or disables the latter, But we have no reason to argue that the will itself, apart from its relations to matter, is affected or destroyed by that which affects or destroys its environment We might, indeed, so argue were it not so distinct from its environment. As it is, it disappears ; it is a thing unique in its kind, not subject to the laws of visible, audible, or sensible things ; we cannot tell that it ceases to be. The mists of morning are dispersed by the midday sun, but the moisture still remains in the heated atmosphere. Thus, in the operation of the human will, we have an analogy of the unseen will which works miracles. We have besides, in the present con- stitution of nature, other analogies and hints, which point to the existence of a power higher than that of human will and inconceivable to the human understanding, competent to work effects beyond the utmost reach of known existing laws. There is in nature a gradation or hierarchy of forces, in NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 83 which the lower are from time to time suspended by the higher. Mechanical laws, for instance, are continually being suspended by chemical laws, and both mechanical and chemical laws by the higher laws of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life. In this hierarchy each step upwards is an entirely new departure; it cannot be inferred, combined, or expanded from the data of the step below. To one acquainted only with mechanical laws, chemical combinations and reactions are incon- ceivable ; they could not from such a platform of knowledge have been anticipated. So, from the data of chemical and mechanical laws, the laws of life, the mode of being of a living organism is inconceivable and inexplicable. Mechanical and chemical laws have their part in the laws of life, but there is a new element superadded to them, foreign and indefinable, which appropriates them, suspends them, and finally succumbs to them. From the existence of such a hierarchy of forces, from the cession and subordination of the lower forces to the higher, the possibility has been in- ferred of a crowning force, higher than all known natural forces, capable of suspending them, and as inconceivable and as indefinable in relation to the at present known forces of the world as the forces of life would have been inconceivable and inde- 84 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. finable from the point of reason of an experience limited only to mechanical and chemical phe- nomena. To the argument which likens the suspensions and violations of natural laws in miracles to the suspensions and counteractions of lower natural laws by higher, which are of constant occurrence, it has been replied that the cases are not strictly ana- logous. The lower laws, it is said, are suspended, not violated ; they act all along ; their action is neutralized, not annihilated ; that a living organism, for instance, is as much under the influence of gravitation as a stone, and that that influence, if not at first sight apparent, is only suspended for a time, just as it might be only suspended for a time by any other existing law or force, such as magnetism. But, on the other hand, the inter- ference of higher with lower natural laws is not always transient and accidental ; it is very often a fundamental and lengthened modification of them. Chemical combination and reaction are different in kind from mechanical combination and separation ; they cannot, as intimated before, be reduced to the latter. Such a difference in kind implies a more than accidental suspension of the lower laws by the higher ; it implies a suspension which may be partial, but which must be necessary. That is, under NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 85 certain circumstances and within certain limits, the operation of chemical laws necessarily excludes the operation of mechanical laws. The activity of chemical laws is not less persistent, less enduring, than that of mechanical laws, and upon liberated matter, that is, matter equally sensitive to the influence of chemical and mechanical laws, the activity of those laws, to which in the hierarchy of natural forces the higher place has been assigned, is the more potent. Thus a crystal may come into being and be maintained in being by the operation of chemical and in direct contravention of me- chanical laws, and potentially there may be no limit to its duration. To say that the whole mass of the crystal is still subject to the law of gravitation, is no relevant answer to the statement that the component elements of the crystal were at first compacted and remain compacted in defiance of that law. Life, again, from vegetable life up to the highest form of animal life, is different in kind from chemical and mechanical forces, and to a certain extent necessarily excludes them. The growth of an oak tree, for example, or the loco- motion of an animal, is a suspension, a violation in part at least, of the most universal mechanical laws. What is suspended in part may be suspended altogether, and what is suspended for years may 86 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. be suspended for longer. Thus, in the most ordi- nary facts of science and of daily experience, we have precedents for and analogies of those super- natural conditions of body such as the Ascension, and the present session of Jesus at the Divine right hand, to which supernatural religion witnesses, but which, as not being wholly verifying miracles, do not come strictly within the purview of the present discussion. The argument from the hierarchy of natural forces to a crowning supreme force as capable of overcoming and suspending all lower forces, as the higher among the latter are of suspending the forces below them, is strengthened by one result at least of modern scientific inquiry into the history of natural life. Whatever result that inquiry may be considered to have established or not, it has without doubt established this, that the present forms of life are of comparatively late appearance. Whether we accept the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection or not, it is clear that the further back we go in the history of life, the more simple do we find the forms of life. If we go back but a very short stage, we fail to find any trace of men. If we go still further back, we find no traces of mammals ; if still further, no traces of animal life ; if further still, no traces of vegetable NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 8/ life. Thus science brings us face to face with a beginning of life. How was it effected ? Assuming for the occasion that the lower forms of animal life were evolved according to natural laws from forms of vegetable life, no such solution applies to the beginning of vegetable life. That was not developed out of dead matter, subject only to the influence of chemical and mechanical laws. Life implies a struggle of some kind— competition, effort, growth— between which and the lower laws of matter there is an impassable gulf. There was a time, then, in the far remote history of the world, when a living thing first made its appear- ance ; it must have been analogous to a miracle, for there were no natural causes in existence adequate to produce it. What cause, then, did produce it? There can be only one satisfactory answer. That higher force supreme above natural forces, suggested to us by the hierarchy of natural forces, and postulated by the existence of the impassable interval in the order of nature which separates dead matter from living things. The appearance of the first living thing was a violation of law. It was as much an innovation upon the forces then acting upon matter, as the multiplying of the loaves and the changing of water into wine were at a later time, and would have been 88 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. equally open to the objection of being unusual and without example. If we are to trust science, on whose behalf objections of the kind are pro- fessedly made, it must have taken place, and thus it stands a scientific precedent for miracles, and a necessary argument for their Author. Thus there is not only no valid generalization which excludes miracles from the category of possible facts, but the survey of nature itself presents to our view the high probability of events which we may call precedents for miracles, and causes analogous to their causes effecting ana- logous suspensions of natural sequences. It is possible, indeed, that those who have made simple and ascertained natural sequences the objects of long and special attention may find it difficult to assent to the fact of the miraculous suspensions of natural laws, which to them have presented the same unvaried succession, or a succession rarely modified, and that by the sole operation of natural and familiar causes ; and they are within their right in requiring sufficient evidence of the fact of such miraculous sus- pensions. Whether the mind, in its instinctive assents and dissents, be or be not the creature of its experiences, it is certainly greatly moulded by them. Hence the study of the exact sciences, NATURAL PRECEDENTS FOR MIRACLES. 89 the study of all natural sequences in which effects follow closely and clearly upon their causes, has been observed in cases to give a bias, a warp, as it were, to the mind of the student. In estimating, therefore, the possibility of miracles, that warp where its existence may antecedently be expected should be allowed for ; it no more reasonably dis- penses with belief than does blindness or deafness excuse in the blind or deaf a disbelief in the existence of colour or sound. Such a warp thus acquired doubtless explains the deep-seatedness of the reluctance evinced by some minds to the ac- ceptance of miracles. In it, in all probability, is to be found the real objection to miracles, of which other objections may possibly be but reasoned expressions. Such a warp is a mental habit gradually and imperceptibly acquired. Arguments affect it but faintly, for it is difficult to refute a habit. Men cannot believe in miracles because they cannot imagine them happening, and they cannot imagine them happening because they have never in their experience seen the like happening. The impotence of the imagination in this respect is, of course, figurative, not absolute ; it is rather the difficulty, part sluggishness, part stiffness, which often attends an unusual and uncongenial task. Some minds experience a similar difficulty 90 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. in realizing the great historical events and per- sonages of the past. Some minds, and they are probably not a few, experience a difficulty in realizing all the facts involved in the existence of foreign languages, until the difficulty is over- come by the actual experience of foreign travel. It is needless to say that the difficulty, neither in the cases just given nor in that of miracles, has the slightest logical cogency. Its scientific validity is even less, for in science theories are accepted, such as that of gravitation, or the received hypothesis of the luminiferous ether, which the imagination is absolutely unable to combine. Habits may not be refuted, but they may be corrected, and a patent remedy for a habit of con- tracted views of the possible, equally acceptable to all conscientious inquirers, whether Christian or otherwise, will be found in a broader and more comprehensive survey of nature. It is an obvious inference that an enlarged experience must also give a correspondingly enlarged view of the limits of possibility. Hence, perhaps, by reason of its infinitely wider range of vision, the human race has in its corporate judgments accepted many things which scientists of genius, conversant only with the narrow fields of their special studies, have rejected as impossible. IX. THE ANTECEDENT FITNESS OF MIRACLES— A PERSONAL GOD. Had there been no record of miracles, had no re- velation been granted authenticated by them, still, if we believe in a personal God and consider the condition of mankind, there are reasons which would justify us in expecting and looking forward to some miraculous interposition. It is purposed in this and the next section briefly to suggest some of these reasons. They will, of course, in propor- tion to their validity, add to the credibility of miracles. And supernatural religion will acquire, in addition to its evidential probability, some of the probability which reasonably belongs to a working hypothesis ; it will be seen to fit in with the ac- knowledged facts of human life and nature, to supply what is wanting in them, and to set right what is anomalous. For a supernatural interposition there is required, 92 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. first, the existence of a competent agent ; second, that of an adequate motive. Such a competent agent is an Almighty Divine Person, and such an adequate motive would be the general and helpless misery of mankind. From the fact of the general misery of men, combined with that of the existence of a Divine Person, we should be led to expect a remedy of some kind, natural or supernatural. But if the misery were such that no remedy for it could be procured from the order of nature ; if the misery itself were a necessary element of, a working force in that order, then we should expect a supernatural remedy, for no other were possible. What may be called, then, the antecedent fitness of miracles rests upon two facts — the personal existence of God, and the general and, by other than supernatural means, incurable and irremediable misery of man- kind. There are, however, doubts and difficulties respecting these two facts which demand an attempt at elucidation. The existence of God is here taken for granted ; the discussion of it would lead us far beyond the scope of these pages. Nor, indeed, do the majority of those who reject miracles professedly maintain that there is no God. On the contrary, they argue against supernatural religion from the standpoint of a Theism. But while atheism is ostensibly re- A PERSONAL GOD. 93 jected, a view of the mode of God's existence is held by some thinkers which would make miracles as impossible as if there were no God. God, we are told, is not personal ; to affirm that He is a person is an " unwarranted assumption." He or rather It is a law, a principle, an influence, a '* stream of tendency which makes for righteous- ness." At the outset such expressions seem to in- volve a verbal impropriety, in that the word "God" is applied to that of which supreme excellence cannot be predicated. Conscious life is held to be more perfect than unconscious life ; the uncon- scious embryo in the scale of being is lower than the mature organism. But if God be an imper- sonal, unconscious law, influence, or tendency, then some, indeed many, of what are considered His creatures will be higher than He. The word " God," then, cannot with propriety stand for the subject of these propositions. Two diametrically different things cannot with verbal propriety be denoted by the same word. Further, if God be nothing more than a law or tendency, the inference is inevitable that God is not. Unvarying sequences are called laws ; they were called so originally because, on the hypothesis of supernatural religion, they were the laws which the Maker and Ruler of the universe imposed upon 94 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. His creatures. Modern science ignores that view, and deals simply with phenomena, not with their occult metaphysical causes; but it has retained the name of laws for certain great classes of pheno- mena. The old transcendent meaning of the word " law," however, survives apparently in the use made of it by certain modern writers who are probably unaware of the survival. The author of " Super- natural Religion," for instance, speaks of laws meaning invariable sequences, as though they were august independent existences, modern forms of the ancient fates. But this independent existence given them by our author and by others exists only in the minds of those who so express themselves. These so-called laws are, scientifically speaking, only names for generalizations. They are as much and as little realities as the ideas of Plato, or as the substances of the Peripatetics. There is no such thing as a law of gravitation ; the expression is used to set forth distinctly and vividly the general fact that bodies are drawn to each other with velocities varying in certain proportions. This general fact, it is needless to say, never happens ; it is an abstrac- tion made by the mind to symbolize a great number of events of a certain character ; it has no more actuality than goodness has apart from individual good things. This so-called law of gravitation A PERSONAL GOD. 95 may be derived from some other, as the phrase is, higher law, just as the law of floating bodies in fluids is derived from the law of gravitation ; but the greater universality of a sequence, its high position, as it were, in the hierarchy of generalizations, does not make it more self-existent ; it makes it less self- existent, for the broader a generalization, the more remote it is from actual fact, the more subjective it must be, and therefore the less real. So, if there be a law that all things work together for righteous- ness, God cannot be such a law, for the word " law " or " tendency" in that case is but a name for all the many events from which good is evolved ; God cannot be the events. He cannot be that which would in ordinary discourse be called the quality common to these events, namely, working together for righteousness; for qualities have no independent objective existence, and what are called common are, strictly speaking, similar qualities. It is very far from intended in the above argument to express or even to bint any opinion as to the personal belief of the distinguished men who are responsible for the propositions which have been criticized. Those propositions have to be taken with their context, and may very well be statements, minimized for the occasion, of a belief fuller than what the words literally express ; the argument that God must be g6 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. non-existent if He be a law, or a stream of tendency, or the like, only holds good if He be that and nothing more. The laws of nature, then, strictly speaking, do not exist and cannot be God. But beneath the particular occurrences which are classified as laws, necessarily to be inferred from them, are the forces which produce them and are their causes. Further, in the many various laws which make up the shift- ing phenomena of nature, there is clearly observable a unity of purpose and of direction. Just as the various functions of a living organism subserve the purpose of keeping that organism alive, so the various laws of nature, mechanical, chemical, meteorological, physiological, and the rest, subserve the unity and continuity of nature. The forces which underlie these laws are themselves singly unintelligent ; wherever the conditions of their operation exist, there they invariably act — blindly, apparently, and without choice ; but the total result of the operations of all of them together is a har- mony. Singly, each is opposed to the other, but taken together they make a unity ; as a whole, they do not merely work side by side, but they co-operate in serving and perpetuating the life of nature. From this unity of purpose traceable in the con- joined operation of the many diverse, singly A PERSONAL GOD. 97 unintelligent forces of nature, the existence has almost necessarily been inferred of one supreme intelligent force apart from them, their guider and regulator. And as there was a time when these forces did not exist, the theory of development itself postulates such a time; indeed, on any possible theory which would make the present condition of the world the result of successive changes in the past, given unlimited time and a limited possibility of change, a time must have been when change began ; we may infer that the Supreme force is the cause of all other forces. Assuming the existence of God, the Supreme force must be God, or the minister and creature of God. It makes no material difference to the present argument whether the supreme force in nature be God or only His subor- dinate ; for the sake of brevity the supreme force will be spoken of as identical with God. God, then, we may say, is the one Supreme force and the Cause of all other forces. The above statement needs further definition, for the word " cause " is one of ambiguous import ; it may be taken in one or both of two senses. A cause may be that which sets a force in motion, or it may be the force itself which is moved and effects a sequence. Let us, for the sake of clearness, call the former the occasional cause, the latter the H 98 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. producing cause or causes of the effect. Thus the hand which drops a heavy body is the occasional cause, gravitation the producing cause of the fall of that body to the earth. From the fall of a heavy body by itself, no certain inference can be made as to the occasional cause which set it falling ; it may have been dropped from a hand or fallen from a height to which it had been thrown, or have been detached from some other heavy body by the operation of some unknown force. But from the circumstances of the fall an inference may be made as to its producing cause, and if the body is ob- served to move in a certain direction and with a proportional velocity, the inference is certain or practically so. Thus the impressions of the mo- ment are from time to time the occasional causes of a man's actions, of which his character is the producing cause, and from the actions the character may to a great extent be legitimately inferred. Thus, when it is said that God is the Cause of all natural forces, He must be understood to be both their producing and occasional Cause, their Creator and their Mover. The unity of nature, the order and design, to which the pronounced use of the word " law" in reference to the phenomena of nature in certain quarters is an unconscious witness, points certainly to a more than mere occasion A PERSONAL GOD. 99 which set in motion forces inherent in matter. At the same time, science, so far as it is acquainted with the history of this earth, declares that the appearance of some of the natural forces was successive. Had the powers of nature been mere primitive potentialities made actual by an occasion, just as certain crystals are said to form themselves when a shock is given to the liquid which holds them, we should have expected their appearance to have been simultaneous or nearly so. The successive appearance, then, of forces on the scene of nature would indicate that they were not immanent eternal qualities, but created ; and if created in a certain order, then with some purpose or design on the part of their Creator. Hume asserted that from the fact of God being the cause of the universe no further inferences as to His being could be made. If God could be shown to be the mere occasion which set the universe in motion, Hume's assertion would be correct. Even assuming that it was a hand which dropped the stone, from the dropping stone itself we cannot learn what manner of hand dropped it. But God is, as we have seen, more than the occasional cause; He is also the producing cause of the universe and the forces which move in it, and from them, within certain limits, we are justified in making inferences 100 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. as to His being. From the produced we may argue to the producer according to the analogies given in experience. From the traces of purpose we may infer that thought is with God, and infer it with certainty. And because the producer is ever, according to the data within our reach, higher than the produced, we may infer, but with less certainty, that God is higher than thought. By a similar process, from the fact that God made the conditions of personal existence, we may infer that personal existence is with Him, and that He may be higher than personal existence. Personal intellectual ex- istence is the highest condition of being known to us. God cannot be in a condition of being lower than that of His creatures ; He must be at least in as high a condition of being as His highest creatures ; He may be also in a higher. We may, then, with strong probability conclude that God is a personal as well as an intellectual being. The question as to whether the higher unknown condition of being, in which it is con- ceivable that God may exist, excludes His person- ality, will be raised presently ; let it suffice in the mean while to have shown that there is some kind of warrant for the so-called unwarranted assump- tion of God's personality. Other inferences as to he being of God may be made from a survey of A PERSONAL GOD. 10 1 the natural world. The data are multifarious in character. Thus from the works of nature we may reasonably infer the benevolence of God, but not to the exclusion of other moral qualities equally inferrible from the data. If nature holds forth God as loving, it also holds Him forth as steadfast of purpose. Other and sterner attributes are hinted at by the data. Modern objections to certain portions of Christian teaching, purporting to be based on moral considerations, may have their justification ; they have no justification in the analogy of nature. There is gloom as well as joy in nature, storm as well as sunshine. Vernal showers are of God's devising ; so is consuming fire. The various inferences, then, which we may draw from nature will be found mutually to check and control each other. All such inferences will, moreover, inherit the defect which attaches to nature as a record of God. Even supposing the universe were an adequate reflex of God, the world of nature which is within our ken is an infinitesimal portion of that universe. Only general and indeterminate inferences, therefore, respecting the moral character of its Author can be logically drawn from it. The proof of God's personality does not depend solely upon the fact that personality proceeds from God. If there were no persons in nature, if there 102 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. were nothing in it higher in the scale of being than plants and animals, we should still be justified in believing its Author to be a personal being. Personality is the individual existence of a thinking being. But thinking in its very notion is individual. It is the referring an object or objects to a conscious subject, that is, an individual. We may say then, generally, that thinking is a note of personality. The simplest act of thought is that of self-consciousness, in which the subject and the object are the same ; the most developed act of thought is but the expansion of this process. The thinking which proceeds from the known to the unknown is but a comparison of two objects within or without the subject, and the reporting upon them to the subject. Acts of intelligent preference and of choice imply personality in a marked degree, for they imply the conscious comparison of present states of consciousness with other past or possible states, and comparison necessarily postu- lates that the subject, the intelligent centre of these states of consciousness, should be one and the same. But a permanent intelligent centre of past or future and present impressions and ex- periences can be none other than a person. When- ever, then, we have reason to believe that a com- parison has been made, a choice exercised between A PERSONAL GOD. 103 things good and bad, simple and intricate, fair and foul, there we may say has been the work of a person. Now, one attribute of God, deducible from nature, which is admitted by all who believe in God at all, is His wisdom. It is admitted even by those who deny His personality. It is admitted, apparently, by the author of " Supernatural Re- ligion," when he says, " If we recognize in the universe the operation of infinite wisdom and power, it is in the immutable order and regularity of all phenomena and in the eternal prevalence of law that we see their highest manifestation." x This writer seemingly allows the wisdom of God, but thinks that its chiefest exercise lies in the main- tenance of immutable law. Yet what is wisdom but the exercise of choice as to means and ends ? And granted even that the highest manifestation of God's power and wisdom is in the eternal preva- lence of law ; then, if God was wise in choosing to act by law, it follows, taking wisdom in the usual sense of the word as applicable only to free agents, that He might, had He chosen, have acted without law, or by universal laws here and there interrupted for a special purpose, and akin to what we know of the Divine nature. In any case He made choice ; He did what a person, and only a person, can do. 1 "Supernatural Religion," complete edit., vol. i. p. 75. 104 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. When it was argued that God, as the producing cause of personal existence, the highest known mode of existence, must Himself be personal, or possibly, in some higher condition of existence, unknown and inconceivable to us, the objection that this latter mode of existence might exclude personal existence was reserved for after-con- sideration. It will be convenient to consider it now. It is possibly akin to another difficulty, the consideration of which will immediately follow. Of this higher unknown mode of existence, experience, of course, tells us nothing ; it is suggested to us by God's excellence, and rendered probable by the grades of life exemplified in nature. It may be possibly shadowed forth in the Christian doctrine of the most holy Trinity, in which case it is by no means incompatible with God's personality. In nature the only datum we have for determining whether this higher condition of being, which may be attributed to God, excludes or includes His personality, is the analogy from which this Divine prerogative, as it were, was originally inferred. Natural life is in a series of degrees. First come lifeless or inanimate things, then things endowed with vegetable life, then those possessed of animal life ; lastly, things having a conscious intellectual life. But no two successive steps of this series A PERSONAL GOD. 10$ imply attributes mutually exclusive. Vegetable life is but an arrangement of lifeless things ; it in a measure coexists with animal life; animal life, again, coexists with intellectual. The higher mode of life is an addition made to the lower, not a nega- tion nor an exclusion of it. Hence we may reason- ably infer that the higher existence, which we presume belongs to God, includes all other modes of existence, personality among them, which are consistent with His immateriality. God is, then, we may conclude, a person, and at the same time something higher — more, not lower or less — than a person. An objection has been made to the personal existence of God on the ground of His infinity. Personality is always, as far as human experience goes, associated with limitation of some sort ; but, it is said, there can be no limitation in an infinite being. To this it may be replied that the word " infinite," as applied to God, is but a description, an expression of the human imagination in its striving to realize Him, not a defining attribute from which inferences as to His nature can be drawn. In- finity, as applied to God, may mean that higher, unknown condition of existence which has just been discussed, and shown to be not incompatible with His personality. Or it may symbolize His 106 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. immensity, His incommeasurability with the furthest reach of human experience — a quality which, as being in no relation to personality, does not neces- sarily exclude it. All negation is limitation ; it marks off the subject to which the negative is applied from subjects to which it is not. Infinity is itself a negative attribute, and as such self-contra- dxtory ; to say that God is infinite is to limit Him from things finite. The absolutely infinite, it need scarcely be remarked, is purely a figment of meta- physics ; it is not given in experience. What it is cannot be even imagined ; that it is can only be surmised. There are those who hold God to be the infinite substratum of all phenomena, therefore absolutely identical in each one of them. In which case His personality would be inconceivable and irrelevant to us ; for then He would be the only existing person ; He would be an absolutely infinite person, that is, not a person at all. Such a view is at direct variance with the testimony of con- sciousness and experience, which tells us that there are many persons. Moreover, an absolutely infinite being cannot be wise, or omnipotent, or omniscient, for all these attributes apply a limitation, a dis- tinction between subject and object ; nor, indeed, can any of the attributes usually associated with God be applied to it. But a being of whom we A PERSONAL GOD. 107 can only say that it is infinite, of which we may not say that it is one, all-knowing, all-mighty, holy, immortal, is in no sense God. God is an intellectual being. There are other intellectual beings, such as men and angels ; by their existence God's existence is limited. So far, then, as God is not identical with other spirits, He is finite, limited, and personal. X. THE ANTECEDENT FITNESS OF MIRACLES — THE MISERY OF MANKIND. We may, then, conclude that God is a person, if there be a God at all, of infinite, that is, immeasur- able power, wisdom, and love, and as such One who would take pity on the misery and ignorance of His creatures, One who would have the will and the power to relieve and enlighten them. The question now before us is whether such helpless, irremediable ignorance and misery exist among men as would call forth a supernatural interference. . That great misery does exist is undeniable. It is the one fact in which all Theistic systems, how- ever otherwise opposed, agree. It is the funda- mental fact upon which the ascetic atheism of Buddhism is built. It is the commonplace of all writers, ancient and modern, who have touched upon human life. To dwell upon it would be to repeat a many times repeated tale. For the pur- THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 109 poses of the present argument it will suffice to give an epitomized catalogue of its principal manifesta- tions. First of all, there is the widely spread physical misery of mankind — all the material pain and dis- tress which follow want, disease, and decay, and which are much keener, have a wider sway, and make a greater encroachment upon each individual life in the case of man than in that of the lower animals. Then there is the misery which is in a way an intellectual reflex of the physical misery of mankind, and which has no parallel among the lower animals. Men have certain notions, how obtained it does not now concern us to inquire, of justice and right. But the phenomena of the physical misery of mankind are in a great degree contrary to these notions of justice and right. That virtue should suffer, that vice should prosper, that innocence should be afflicted, that guilt should escape punishment, are facts of very frequent ex- perience. They are contrary to the notions of just and right of every age ; too common to be accidental, they were regarded by the ancients as due to the operation of an unknown perverse law, as capricious as fortune and as pitiless as fate. If there be such a thing as mental distress, if moral uncertainty and perplexity, if doubt alternating with utter darkness 110 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. as to the end of man, if sorrow without resource for unmerited suffering, if indignation without power at unmerited and unrighteous prosperity be painful and not pleasurable feelings, then these blindnesses, injustices, unreasons, anomalies, which the course of the world daily presents, form no inconsiderable item in the sum of human misery. In any case, they cast the shadow of an unsatisfied problem upon the very threshold of life and ethics. Lastly, there is the moral infirmity of man, with its con- sequent miseries, mental and physical. Moral prin- ciples by themselves are as often as not powerless in the face of imperious natural instincts. This feeble- ness of reason as against passion is a point upon which moralists of all ages and of all creeds are agreed. Under certain aspects it was as well known to Voltaire as it was to S. Paul. Moreover, to these powerful instincts man, in common with other animals, is subject ; but man alone has proved himself capable of vicious excess and abuse in the satisfaction of them. Under the head of moral distress must also be classed the state of feeling- known by the name of satiety — the unrest and dissatisfaction which wait upon fully enjoyed plea- sures, and make abiding happiness impossible. If witnesses in so plain a case as that of the moral infirmity of man were wanted, it would be sufficient THE MISERY OF MANKIND. I I I to mention that phase of literature and thought to which the name of cynicism is usually applied. Cynicism, in some form or other, has existed ever since the beginnings of literature. It is not like classicism or romanticism, a transient phase of thought and expression ; for while its expression perpetually varies, the underlying thought, that of the moral infirmity of man, is constant and per- manent, which it could not be in so great a length of time and in so great a number and variety of writers, did it not appeal to permanent facts of human nature. To the general fact of the misery of mankind the witness of Buddhism has been mentioned. That remarkable system, which reckons a greater number of adherents than can be claimed by any one reli- gious creed, lays the misery of life at the founda- tion of its moral teaching ; and the problem which it proceeds to solve is, not what to do and how to do it, but bow not to be. There is yet another and still more unanswerable witness to the unhappiness of man, and that is the phenomenon of suicide. Man is the only animal who on occasion commits suicide ; that is, he is the only animal whose con- dition in cases is such that its misery overpowers the instinct of self-preservation — the first and strongest of all instincts implanted in us by Nature. 112 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. Mr. Herbert Spencer, as quoted by the author of " Supernatural Religion," argues that this misery will disappear ; that a time will come when, through the operation of natural causes, this world will become to man the best of all possible worlds. It is very much doubted, and with great apparent reason, by some even of those who hold the doc- trine of evolution by natural selection, whether that doctrine applies to civilized man. If man be finally perfectible by the working of purely natural laws, it is surely a pertinent question to ask why man has not been perfected already. The causes which are said to work to perfection have ex hypothesi always existed ; the human race, in the opinion of evolutionists, has existed for countless ages. How comes it that, under the rule of the same laws, the lower animals are perfect in their kind, and man is imperfect? Moreover, according to the doctrine of evolution, there was no separate creation of the human species ; man passed imper- ceptibly or by slow degrees from the condition of some lower animal into that of man. Man is now confessedly imperfect ; it is argued that, under natural laws, he will eventually become more per- fect. The gradual working of these natural laws has, it is maintained, brought man to what degree of perfection he actually possesses. It follows, there- THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 113 fore, that the further back we go in time, the more imperfect man must have been and the nearer to the lower animals. When, then, some animal species became by development the human species, it must have exchanged a condition of comparative perfec- tion for one of great imperfection; one of adjustment to the conditions of life for one needing long and laborious readjustment to those conditions. There must in that instance have been a reversal of the law of evolution which the law of evolution cannot explain. There is thus in the natural his- tory of man, according to the theory of develop- ment under natural influences, a stage which cannot be made coherent with the stage preceding. The Christian doctrines of the fall of man and of the existence of evil spirits may be anthropomorphic ; they are statements which otherwise would have been hardly intelligible to those to whom they were first addressed ; but, taken with the doctrine of the freedom of the human will, they do explain the phe- nomena. According to the doctrines just mentioned, God gave man the power of sinning or of not sinning. It was impossible that He should con- strain what He had ordained to be free. The fall of man, therefore, does not in the least derogate from the wisdom and beneficence of the Creator. Lastly, on the whole argument, which, as advanced I 114 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. in " Supernatural Religion," is an argument from authority, it may be said that while Mr. Spencer is a distinguished thinker, he is only one among many; another equally distinguished as he, Scho- penhauer, argued with at least equal cogency for the pessimistic view of human progress. Many in the present day, who are perfectly willing to admit the general misery of mankind in the past, nevertheless seem inclined to hold with Mr. Spencer, for reasons taken from the his- tory of mankind which Mr. Spencer himself does not consider to be sufficient, that this misery will be remedied in the future by the sole operation of natural causes. They believe in progress, as it is called — in infinite progress in the future — and with it in an infinite abatement of human misery. This opinion, amiable as it is, rests merely upon local and temporal grounds. It is a belief known only to a few of the nations of the world, held only by a few individuals belonging to them. It is of purely modern growth. It is diametrically opposed to the belief of the greater number of past gene- rations. At certain periods of the world's history — to the generations, for instance, which witnessed the fall of the Roman empire — such an opinion would have seemed a manifest absurdity ; not the progress of human affairs, but their decadence, was THE MISERY OF MANKIND. I I 5 then the universal belief. From all which it J seems fair to infer that the modern belief in progress is not a logical belief, grounded on universal facts of human experience, but, so to say, an accidental belief, grounded upon the present circumstances of certain favoured nations. From the history of civilization, however, a fact may be clearly gathered which is fatal to the theory of indefinite progress in the future. That fact is the discontinuity, so to speak, of civilization. There is no record of a civilization continuous from its rise to the present day. Civilizations have arisen and then have faded away. To this rule there has been no exception. Civilization has been carried on by a series of reinforcements or new births. New nations have ever taken up the work of civilization, which languished in the hands which had carried it on for a stage. The fresh hands have in their turn become enfeebled, and in their turn given place to others. Civilization seems to be ever advancing, and on the other hand ever decaying. It advances when taken up by rigorous barbarism, and it decays and becomes stagnant when it is left for a time in the same hands. The constant influence of a high civilization is eventually to enfeeble and to lower the moral fibre. Thus high civilizations— so high, like that of Egypt, for Il6 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. example, that in some respects they have never since been excelled — have invariably succumbed to vigorous barbarisms or to less advanced civilizations. Civilization is thus in a sense its own disease ; its growth is but a chain of disasters. The very con- dition of its growth seems to be the presence of barbarism. In time, as civilization spreads over a wider and wider area — and henceforth, with greatly improved means of communication, its spread will be more rapid than heretofore — barbarisms, that is, great barbarous populations, strange to the ideas of contemporary civilization, and consequently the more ready, when once they have grasped them, to take them up with unblunted vigour — such popula- tions as have in the past infused fresh vigour into decaying civilizations, and perpetuated while they seemed to overturn them, will cease to be. All populations will become more or less civilized, with an increasing tendency to the same level of civili- zation. As in times past, civilization will generally become effete, but there will no longer, as in times past, be vigorous races uncloyed by civilization and capable of putting barbaric vigour into civilized institutions. And it is difficult to see from whence the fresh energy, which, judging from the past, is a necessary condition of progressive civilization, is at such a stage to be recruited. Briefly stated, the THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 117 argument is this. The progress of civilization requires the inexhausted vigour of savage races both to renew civilization and to maintain it ; but, as civilization itself extends, the savage races will diminish, and in the end disappear, and with them the vitality and further progress of civilization, and of the happiness and material well-being which civilization is supposed to imply. There is yet another and more substantial obstacle to the indefinite progress of civilization, or at all events to the indefinite decrease of the physical misery of mankind. That obstacle is the steady increase of the population of the world. In uncivilized populations that increase has been counterbalanced by the ravages of war and pesti- lence. The tendency of civilization is to mitigate, and finally to eliminate, wars and pestilences, and thus to remove the natural checks upon over- population. Contemporary history will furnish an illustration. British India has in all probability been in a more civilized condition during the last twenty years than at any former period of its history ; it has suffered from neither war nor pestilence to any appreciable extent; the popula- tion has, consequently, greatly increased. It cannot be said, however, that the civilization of India has taken away from the misery of the Hindoos. It Il8 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. would be truer to say that it has added to their misery. The over-population induced by the civilized state of British India has called forth a grimmer and more terrible check than either war or pestilence, namely, famine. It seems to be generally admitted that, under the present administration of India, famines may be periodically expected. The present administration of India is reputed to be the most beneficent government of a dependent people ever seen. Yet this very beneficence is the indirect cause of the greatest, the most deso- lating, the most demoralizing calamity that can befall a population. There is nothing to prevent that which is now the rule in India becoming the rule over a still greater area as civilization extends. Whatever additions, if any, new modes of cultivation may make to the fertility of our food-resources, they must ever be outstripped by the steady increase of a civilized population. So far, then, as we can judge from our past and present experiences,, an extended and heightened civilization, even if it be realized, will bring no lasting remedy to the miseries of mankind. Wars may cease, pestilences may become unknown, but their disappearance will only open a wider gate to famine, will add to the frequency of its inroads, and to the number and defencelessness of its THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 119 victims. Attempts have, indeed, been made to stay the increase of the population in certain countries by artificial means, and that with partial success, but at a moral expense more costly in the sequel to the welfare of a people than periodical scarcity of food. For the physical miseries of mankind, then, there is no remedy in nature ; some of them come in the way of nature, some are the consequences of moral infirmity, and some, if we are to believe modern naturalists, are part of the order of nature, instru- ments indispensable to its working. The distress of want, for instance, is, according to recent theories, a very important factor in natural history ; it regulates within certain limits the habitat of animals, man included. In all animals it is the preponderating motive which compels to efforts at readjustment to the conditions of life, and so mediately brings about modification of structure and habits. Under the stress of want, mainly, we are told, man became man ; and if evolutionists expect man to become better and happier than he is, they look to the misery of want, and, in the special case of man, to other miseries besides, to supply the motive for the effort which is to effect the desired amelioration. No stage in evolution is final. Distress or misery, in some shape or other, is the propeller of evolution ; 120 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. misery must be therefore constant, if the theory of evolution truly interprets natural facts. If there be no remedy in nature for the physical misery of mankind, it logically follows that there can be no similar remedy for the misery which is in part a reflex of the physical misery in that it arises from the apparent contradictoriness of the order of nature, especially as concerns the physical misery of mankind, to the current notions of justice and right. It might be said, indeed, that the obvious remedy for this reflex or contemplative misery would be to discard the notions of justice and right, which are necessary elements of it, This, however, cannot be done without entailing other and possibly greater miseries. The con- dition of man is such, that in the order of nature but insufficient indications of positive morality are given, except in so far, indeed, that transgressions of positive morality are attended by misery. Nor can the order of nature supply us with facts beyond itself interpreting and compensating for the material misery and many moral anomalies which it seemingly presents. Nature cannot speak but of itself ; it speaks, indeed, of the existence of God, of a First Cause from which it came at the beginning, and which maintains it now — some- thing invisible, almighty, wise, broadly beneficent. THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 121 Further in that direction it throws no light. As to how evil coexists with almighty good, it is inexorably mute. It is antecedently very evident that nature can supply no remedy for the moral infirmity of man- kind, for that infirmity is in a way a product of nature ; it is the weakness of the human will before the strength of instincts implanted and fostered by nature. These instincts by common admission, all scientific theories apart, are indispensable parts of the machinery of nature ; without them the work of nature would stand still, and human life at least cease to be. Counterbalancing motives may, in- deed, be gathered from nature ; but these motives, which are chiefly prudential, as appealing to that which is unseen, distant, contingent, cannot, in the case of most men not otherwise reinforced, but succumb to that which to a present acutely felt craving proffers an immediate satisfaction. Coun- terbalancing motives, feeble as they are, can, how- ever, only in the case of certain instincts, be gathered from nature. In the case of others, if a motive apart from the impulse of the instinct can be gathered at all, it is a motive which favours rather than checks the free course of the instinct. The self-denying virtues have but few precedents in nature, and few, if any, motives which favour 122 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. them can be drawn from it. The last word of nature, according to modern naturalists, is the survival of the fittest, which means, on explanation, the strongest, and from that no other moral con- clusion can be drawn than the duty of selfishness, more or less refined or disguised. That which is most elevated, in the prevalent moral teaching of the civilized world, derives its currency, not from nature, but by the admission of friend and foe alike from supernatural religion. Given, then, the two facts which it has been attempted to illustrate in the present and preced- ing sections, the existence of a personal benevolent God, and great widespread and incurable misery among men created by God, it is inconceivable that He should omit, sooner or later, to give some remedy for this evil. If every miracle, hitherto alleged, were disproved to be supernatural, still the circum- stances are such that we should be justified in expecting at some time to come a relief or a con- solation from a Being of immeasurable knowledge, goodness, and power. Such a relief or consolation could not be other than miraculous, for, as we have seen, the order of nature as it stands cannot give it. We may, then, conclude it to be fit, natural in its widest sense, in accordance with the nature of God and man, that what has been THE MISERY OF MANKIND. 1 23 denied by natural means should be granted by supernatural. It is the belief of Christians that such a relief has been potentially granted and is being gradu- ally wrought out. According to that belief, the moral miseries of men have been met by the promulgation of a moral code, with sanctions of punishments and rewards, and authenticated by miracles. In this moral code the end of man is stated to be God Himself; that is, that all human actions should have as their ultimate aim the conforming of the nature of the agent to what has naturally and supernaturally been revealed of the nature of God. Accordingly, the pheno- menon of satiety, and inexplicable dissatisfaction which so commonly awaits the highest earthly pleasures and the most solid earthly successes, is on this principle but the expression of a nature which has missed its highest purpose, and is empty as it were of that which can alone truly fill it. The native and acquired weakness of the will in the face of the various natural instincts and of the artificial cupidities which are evolved from them in civilized communities, and under certain circumstances take their place, is met, according to Christian belief, by supernatural grace or assistance. This supernatural grace, held to be 124 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. dispensed in measure according to the particular need, " gratiam in auxilio opportuno," x and sufficient to quell the strongest desire, by whatever channel it may come to the individual, has to be appro- priated by the will. And when grace fails it is held that there has been, for whatever cause, a failure of the will in the appropriating effort. God might by an act of His Almighty will have at once and for ever abolished all moral ill, but this would have implied the annihilation of the freedom of man's will. The will is an essential part of man's nature, and is inconceivable except as free. Had the will, then, been abolished, the resultant would have been another creature, neither angel nor man ; man, in fact, would have been abolished. Thus the Christian doctrine of supernatural grace as the remedy for moral infirmity has the merit of being consistent with other Christian doctrines ; the evil is met, and at the same time man remains in all essential respects what he was designed to be at creation — a free corporeal, intellectual being. Lastly, the physical miseries of mankind, and the mental distresses which are in a way a reflex of them, are, according to Christian doctrine, met by compensating facts. The anomalies and injus- 1 Heb. iv. 1 6. THE MISERY OF MANKIND. \2$ tices to be seen in the course of the world are the dispensations of a Divine Providence, who rules and overrules events, and by means of them submits each individual human being to a course of probation and training ; they are thus pro- visional and not final awards ; all that is truly wrong in them will be set right after death, when a just sentence of reward or punishment will be pronounced upon each individual as he has done well or ill, and is responsible for what he has done. It was above inferred with practical certainty, from the nature of God and the condition of man, that from man to God some supernatural relief might be expected. In the Christian religion advice is given of the granting of such super- natural relief; it is a relief in no way inconsistent with the nature of God and with the nature of man, so far as we know them ; it takes within its range every kind of misery, offering to each its appropriate remedy ; it tallies with all the facts. No other such has come within the knowledge of men. The inference, then, is all but irresistible that in the Christian religion has been actually given the relief which we had reason to expect. XL BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. THERE can be generally but one adequate motive for retaining a belief, and that is its truth. Untrue beliefs may be convenient, but their convenience can never be a sufficient reason for maintaining them. They can never be really expedient. For beliefs held and taught only or chiefly for the sake of their supposed beneficial influences speedily cease to be really believed, and so, losing to a great extent their coercive and stimulating powers, miss the object for which they are retained. On the other hand, while they still retain their positions as beliefs, however vague and unreal, they tend to obscure the necessity of new fixed principles, and to discourage the search after them. Thus, useless or nearly useless themselves as beliefs, they stand in the way of new beliefs. Hence it is very far from the purpose of the present section to suggest any reason of convenience BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 12/ for retaining the belief in the supernatural elements of the Christian faith. But it may be convenient, for the purpose of setting the discussion in the proper light, and of securing for it the due sobriety of treatment and attention, to mention some of the more important points involved in its settlement. First of all, in the question of the supernatural as evidenced by miracles, is involved the whole truth of Christianity. If miracles be impossible, then by a plain consequence the incarnation of Jesus Christ becomes impossible ; the crucifixion loses its supernatural and all-embracing import ; there could have been no resurrection and no ascension ; there can be no session at the right hand of God, and no perpetual intercession. Take away miracles, and the whole of that august structure called historical Christianity — that is, the doctrines associated with the Christian Church, on the belief of which count- less saints have fashioned and staked their lives — would inevitably crumble away. Ultimately the memory of it would alone survive. At first in the choicest minds there might linger a habit of formal obedience to its traditions, then it would live a little longer as a sentiment, a reminiscence of out- worn ideas, but after a while it would live only in books and in its historical monuments. These consequences are so obvious that it is needless to 128 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. dwell upon them ; they are further demonstrated by the actual and speedy disintegration of all Christian belief in those who have abandoned the super- natural. Such a rapid disintegration was not expected, least of all desired ; but logic is stronger and more persistent than individual preferences, and in the long result men believe or disbelieve what they must, not what they will. Some of those who have renounced Christianity in actual fact still claim the name of Christians, so on the universal abandonment of Christianity it is possible that its name would for a time be claimed for feelings and practices outwardly similar to those of Christians. Such a survival would be purely nominal; the thing called Christianity would be as much and as little the Christianity of history as it would be the Buddhism of history. Next it may be remarked that with the truth of miracles, and by implication of Christianity, stands or falls the very being of religion. A religion with- out miracles is not a religion at all ; if its grounds of credibility be solely natural, it would more appro- priately be called a philosophy. Philosophy and religion are to a great extent conversant with the same object-matter, but they are themselves very different habits of mind. The difference between them is, indeed, so manifold and of so essential a BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 1 29 nature, that it can be more conveniently illustrated than detailed. We may say, then, that religion and philosophy differ as much as, and in the same way as, the Book of Psalms differs from Aristotle's Metaphysics. The points of view are different, the trains of thought are different, the resulting con- victions are different. Religion is intelligible to all ; it is strong, where it is strong, indifferently in the school, as it were, and in the market-place ; while philosophy speaks only to a limited circle — spends what strength it has within that circle, and is weak outside of it. Mahometanism has been alleged as an instance of a religion unaccredited by miracles. Mahomet certainly did not appeal to miracles of his own working, but he did appeal to miraculous events of the past. And the actual believers in Mahometanism, at all events, firmly believe in the miraculous powers of its saints and first teachers. The miraculous forms as large an element of Mahometan as it does of Christian belief. It may be added that the miraculous element of the two religions is to a certain extent identical ; for Mahometanism, as expounded by its founder, was a continuation of the Jewish and Christian revela- tions. Some distinguished men seem to be of opinion that a substitute for religion, or rather a religion K 130 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. itself, could be found in literature and art. Such an opinion surely implies a very inadequate estimate of the functions of religion. Religion is a state- ment or scheme of objective facts ; these facts, when accepted, are productive of, among other things, certain emotions of hope, or fear, or consolation, or distress, with corresponding tendencies to action, according to the individual character and circum- stances of the person who accepts them. The facts are essentially the religion, not the emotions nor the motives which they produce, which emotions and motives are produced, not so much by the style and manner of the statements, as by its matter and its objective truth. It is in virtue of this objective truth that religion, in the modern sense of the word, lays claim to the obedience of every living human being. Now, literature and art are views of things real and imaginative ; they do not enunciate facts otherwise unknown. The facts which are presented by literature and art are obtained from other sources — some from history, some from science, some from contemporary and personal observation of men and things, and some from religion. The facts thus presented are coloured and stamped by the imagination and power of the individual artist or poet. These presentations produce, in those who by education BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. I 3 I and culture are impressionable by them, emotions and satisfactions analogous to those produced by religion. They may be said to interpret life, for they put forward individual and novel views of men and things ; but this interpretation is acci- dental, relative. We see life and men through the poet's eyes, as it were. The Sphinx is seen under new arrangements of light and shade, but its enigma remains unanswered still. Fine artistic expression is also productive of feelings of strength, of com- fort, of serenity, in those to whom that expression speaks. But these feelings are only transitory ; they come with their producing causes, and in most cases go with them, and are in their truth but phases of the pleasure which waits upon beautiful things. They leave behind them no abiding purpose. To be strong is not to feel strong for a moment, but to act strongly and hold to a steadfast purpose against opposition from without and weakness from within. Such a strength can only be supplied from a permanent source, and no such permanent source can be found except in principles manifestly grounded on objective facts. Art and literature confessedly do not create principles ; they evoke evanescent pleasurable emotions chiefly by giving passion and colour to principles already existing. Nor yet from them, 132 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. as the expressions of diverse ages and cultures, can any consistent body of principles be logically drawn. Much has been made of the seriousness of high art, possibly with an unconscious feeling that in this evident characteristic of the best poetry some compensation may be found for its lack of uni- versal constraining principles. But this gravity of manner, and this exalted state of feeling upon which such stress is laid, cannot of themselves impart the abiding motives and tempers which can alone influence conduct ; for they were themselves the issues, in the poets who display them, of a belief in objective facts. That which inspired the " high seriousness " of Dante and Milton, for instance, was a belief in the objective truth of the religion they respectively held, while that which gave distinction and force to their diction was their individual genius. The same holds true of all great masters of expression hitherto known. Wherever there is natural unfeigned seriousness, it is grounded on a deep-seated conviction of the absolute truth of certain universal facts and principles. As this seriousness owed its very existence to such a ground of belief, it is only reasonable to suppose that, when the belief shall have passed away, the moral force of the seriousness, if, indeed, there were BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 1 33 moral force, will also have collapsed. This serious- ness will continue to possess great dramatic beauty, further enhanced by perfect expression. It will be a factor of and an ingredient in the choicest of distractions ; but it will lay down no law, for it can appeal to no ultimate principles, and for the same reason can persuade to no lasting obedience. The view that art and literature may take the place of religion seems grounded, as has been sug- gested above, upon an inadequate notion of the functions of the latter ; it assumes that religion is mainly a distraction. If that estimate were a true one ; if religion were only an amusement of unoccupied and wearied minds — a high and transporting amusement, indeed, but still, after all, only an amusement ; if it served only to divert the mind from the discomforts of temporal distress and bodily disease ; if tranquil moods and pleasing reveries were the sole product of its influences ; then it must be confessed that its place might be taken by art and literature. In the case of the great majority of mankind, indeed, who from want of culture are, and in all likelihood must remain, inaccessible to the soothing influences of artistic expression, a more simple, less painfully acquired, and possibly more efficient substitute for such a religion might be found, nay, has been found, in 134 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. the use of narcotics. But if religion be taken in the sense in which men have actually believed in and practised it, no such substitute as has been sug- gested can be adequate ; for the religions of history gave interpretations of life and nature absolute and final in their sphere, and with such interpretations they held forth motives truly binding, and enunciated a morality truly obliging. The Christian religion, for instance, with which we are at present particu- larly concerned, claims to give strength and comfort ; it is the strength of a fortified will and the comfort of unseen certainties ; it supplies a moral tonic, so to speak, not a moral anodyne. The Christian religion, indeed, may not be true ; but if it be not true, then that which shall fill its place, which shall offer motives and strength, light and comfort, to all men, cultured and uncultured alike, has yet to be discovered. Lastly, if miracles be impossible or incredible, and by consequence the Christian religion of history be untrue, then the current morality has no logical basis ; it must be revised, and in great measure eventually disappear. This process may be said in certain quarters to have actually commenced. A large and flourishing school of French writers, for instance, seems to have discarded the Christian point of view of the virtue BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 135 of purity. The phenomenon presented by modern French novelists is not without precedent in the literary history of Christendom, in which it has hitherto invariably coincided with a loosening of Christian belief. The same tendency is observable also in certain chapters of modern legislation. At the same time, it may be remarked that while the ascetic virtues have lost in a measure their power to bind they have not lost the power to charm. Their moral power is ignored, but so much the more possibly is their dramatic beauty acknow- ledged. The age which has witnessed the adoles- cence of the school of modern French novelists has also witnessed a renascence of medievalism. What- ever may have been the individual causes which respectively prompted the two movements, the movements themselves have now become the recog- nized expression and phases of the same culture. The bearing of this upon the present argument will shortly appear. In that department of morals which deals with the relations of man to man, new disorder threatens to take the place of the old order. Utilitarianism and political economy have left us but shreds of the Christian virtue of justice. That there is such a thing as justice between man and man, apart from contract and express stipulation, seems to be in process of being forgotten when not 136 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. openly denied. If such be the consequences of a partial and hesitating deviation from Christianity, we may justly expect a still more fundamental reversal of Christian morality from a systematic and resolute abandonment of the supernatural elements on which Christianity, and with it Christian morals, rest. Here it may be said with while Christian morality will necessarily be modified when historical Chris- tianity shall have been criticized away, yet many of its maxims will still retain their force ; that the founder of Comtism, while rejecting Christianity, still retained as a fundamental rule of his new religion the Christian virtue of charity under the secular name of altruism. Without the general recognition of the duty of charity under whatever name, the combining and uniting forces of society would hardly make head against the forces which rend and separate, and states would with difficulty cohere within themselves. But the necessity of such a rule does not, on other than Christian principles, certainly not on the principles of Comtism, establish its moral obligation, if only for the simple reason that Comtism does not recognize any centre of moral authority. It is not implied here that Comtism is a system destitute of moral teaching ; on the contrary, it is willingly BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 1 37 admitted that there is much that is high and beautiful in its morality. What is contended for is that this teaching is not authoritative ; that it speaks with uncertain voice, and appeals to no sufficient motive. Further consideration will throw a clearer light upon the moral weakness and insufficiency of altruism. Altruism may be regarded as based upon expedience or general utility, or upon some inherent power of its own. Let us first consider it as grounded upon utility. Acts of altruism are to be done, then, let us suppose, because they are expedient ; but that which is expedient is a matter of individual judg- ment, for no possible generalization can cover in- stances which have not occurred, and no moral authority can here be logically recognized. Each act, then, must be decided upon as the occasion arises ; but that which may be decided upon in this way or in that way can but feebly constrain. The uncertainty of the premises in practical ethics will pass on to the conclusion ; the decision, possibly, will not seldom be undecided. Not only will the rule of expedience be some- what uncertain in its application, and therefore feeble in its relations to action, but under it a whole class of actions which have been hitherto 138 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. associated with Christian charity must be omitted as useless, if not harmful. The hopelessly insane, born idiots and imbeciles, the incurably diseased, are of no conceivable use or profit to the com- munity or to the race. To care for them, to minister to them, to lighten their sufferings, can only serve to prolong existences which are useless and may be dangerous, and, on the principle of general utility, should be omitted or rather forbidden. The list of those who ought thus to be outcasts, as it were, from altruism might be indefinitely increased ; for it is doubtful whether, from the point of view of merely secular utility, the welfare of any persons but those who are healthy-bodied and healthy-minded would be of advantage to the state or to the race. But the fundamental defect of altruism as de- duced from utilitarianism lies in the essential weak- ness of the motive to which it appeals. There is no instinct in human nature which bids me love my neighbour as myself; nay, there are instincts which from time to time bid me do the very re- verse. It is not my known interest so to love him ; why, then, should I do it ? To this question no adequate answer from other than a Christian stand- point has yet been given. From the utilitarian standpoint the only conceivable reply would be that I must do so because my welfare is bound up BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. I 39 in the welfare of the community, indeed of the race to which I belong, and that by loving my neighbour as myself, and by acting accordingly, I shall be promoting that general welfare in which I am myself interested. There are thus supposed to be two motives at issue — the selfish motive, so to speak, prompting me to an act of self-gratification, say to the theft of food under the stress of extreme hunger; and the social motive, restraining from such theft on the ground of the injury which would result to the community from it, and thence even- tually to myself. In this case the restraining motive has absolutely no force, for I have obviously no interest in a society out of which I am perishing by hunger. The case assumed is an extreme one, but it is a typical one ; it is typical of all cases in which the satisfaction of a primitive instinct is opposed to the interests of the community. The instinct speaks clearly and from near, the social motive doubtfully and from afar; the instinct, indeed, is part of that individual existence for the pro- tection of which secular communities are supposed to exist, and the suppression of it, however jus- tified, is in a measure the suppression of that in- terest upon which utilitarianism finally rests. It is very true that the controlling of an instinct in the present may ensure the fuller satisfaction of it in 140 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. the future ; but the present satisfaction is certain, the future is contingent, and therefore as a motive weaker than the former. That altruism, as based upon utility, can exercise no constraining moral force is further shown by- experience. Public taxes undeniably serve the general utility, but legal process is constantly re- quired for their collection, and their evasion is commonly regarded as merely a trifling breach of patriotism ; by a few it may be censured as a breach of moral law, but that law is Christian, not natural. So, again, had the principle of utility but moderate constraining power, smuggling, as it was once practised amongst ourselves, as it is practised now in certain countries, would have been com- paratively unknown ; its modern disuse among our- selves is due to no growing sense of its moral wrongfulness, but to the diminished profits and increased risks which now attend it. But, it may be said, altruism does not rest upon utilitarianism, it does not bind by any motive of self-interest, but it compels obedience to itself by its own inherent attractiveness, and in virtue of that attractiveness it will, as a living power, survive the decay of all Christian belief. It is thus argued that the attractiveness, the beauty of a practice or of a disposition of mind, will ensure its continued BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 141 existence and cultivation. It is not an uncommon assumption among those who are disposed to doubt the truth of the Christian religion, that the his- torical parts of it, which are the objects of Christian faith, are, as it were, a scaffolding from which the moral part of it was built, and that now, the build- ing being fully completed, the unsightly and de- funct scaffolding may with safety be removed, and the building seen to greater advantage. The truer view would be, perhaps, that the facts of historical Christianity are the roots from which Christian morals grow as a plant, and that we learn, by a very early experience of plants and flowers put into the ground without roots, that they wither and die. But, however it may be, illustrations are not argu- ments. The proper reply to this assumption must be, that it is contrary to the teaching of universal experience. The supernatural facts of the Chris- tian religion are, under certain conditions, the reasons of Christian actions ; to do things without reasons is unreasonable and eventually impracticable. But, it may be said, the beauty of the things is a reason why they should be done. It may be ; but if man- kind continue to be what they are now, and have been, not a sufficient reason, when the things to be done involve pain, or trouble, or loss to the agents. The physical beauty with which the an- 142 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. cient Greeks are credited is said to have been the result of well-directed conscious study of beauty for beauty's sake. But from that fact, even assum- ing its accuracy, no solid argument as to the future efficacy of the moral beauty of altruism can be drawn. For it may be doubted whether, of the self-denying virtues which are the most important constituents of altruism, beauty can be predicated even by metaphor, in which case that which is relied upon to give continued vitality to altruism will to a great extent be non-existent. In any case, moral and physical beauty are entirely dif- ferent. The former is not like the latter, appreciated when witnessed ; nor, when obtained, a palpable possession in continual evidence. History certainly contains no record of the achievement of a high moral average motived solely or chiefly by the desire of moral beauty, analogous to the reputed achievement of high physical beauty by the an- cient Greeks, Aristotle, indeed, in the true spirit of a Greek, made the beautiful the standard and motive of moral conduct, in which, according to his and contemporary opinion, the self-denying virtues had no or very little part ; but the moral history of his countrymen showed how inefficient a motive it was, even in those who antecedently might have been expected to be especially susceptible of its BEARINGS OF THE QUESTION. 1 43 influences. Nor does history contain the record of the prevalent practice and elaboration of a single moral virtue due solely or chiefly to its ethical beauty. Asceticism has a beauty of its own, but it has never been practised for the sake of that beauty alone. There has been of late, as has been said, a revival of medievalism ; there has been no corre- sponding revival of mediaeval virtues, except perhaps among a select few. What may influence the select few cannot be relied upon to influence the great mass of suffering, struggling, straitened mankind." As a matter of fact, altruism may be said to have failed to influence even the select few by the power of its attractiveness alone. The international affairs of states are under the direct management or at the disposal of the cultured classes. There are, besides, strong material interests which make for international altruism. In international affairs, then, if anywhere, we might expect to see the in- herent power of altruism developed. The facts show the very reverse. It seems to have become an almost generally recognized principle that states are under no moral obligations ; an assumption to that effect pervades some of the best historical work of the present day. The modern right to territory is avowedly and literally the might to retain it. Solemn treaties are violated or set aside 144 REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. whenever that can be done with advantage or safety. It is significant that the word " perfidy " is no longer in use as a term of international reproach, not because treaties have ceased to be violated, but because their violation has ceased to be considered criminal. Thus the inherent power of altruism has failed to command even nominal respect in a sphere which ought, if any, to be peculiarly subject to its influences. "Video meliora proboque, de- teriora sequor." It is a very old and well-worn truism, that approbation and sympathy by them- selves have little or no power upon the subject who feels them. Taught by modern international history, we may go further, and say that approbation and sympathy, unless they be quickened by some sterner and more substantial motive, will speedily cease even to exist ; that men will, on the whole, cease to approve of that which they do not feel constrained to practise. If, then, Christianity be abandoned, either the current morality must be abandoned, or some new hitherto unknown ground of obligation to it must be discovered. PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. A LIST OF KEG AN PAUL, TRENCH & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. to. 85 A List of BALLLN, Ada S. and F. L.—A Hebrew Grammar. With Exercises selected from the Bible. Crown 8vo, *js. 6d. BARCLAY, Edgar.— Mountain Life in Algeria. With numerous Illustrations by Photogravure. Crown 4to, 16s. BARLOW, James If.— The Ultimatum of Pessimism. An Ethical Study. Demy Svo, 6s. BARNES, William.— Outlines of Redecraft (Logic). With English Wording. Crown Svo, ^s. 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