^.7./V 
 
 '^ 
 
 v^.*^^ 
 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 \ 
 
 Presented by'XDr*. O .<^~^0\ \ Von . 
 
 Division 
 
 Section 
 
 ¥5 
 
THE BAMPTON LECTURES 
 
 FOR M.DCCC.LXXXIV. 
 
THE RELATIONS 
 
 7 1914 
 
 BETWEEN 
 
 EELIGION AND SCIENCE 
 
 EIGHT LECTURES 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OP OXFORD 
 IN THE YEAR 1884 
 
 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A. 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY 
 
 V BY THE BIGHT REV. 
 
 fredp:rick, lord bishop of exeter 
 
 ^rACMTLLAN AXD CO. 
 1884 
 
 [ ^1// riyhts rcsencd ] 
 
PRINTED BY HORACE HART, PRINTEK TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
EXTRACT 
 
 FROM THE LAST WILL AXD TESTAMENT 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 REV. JOHN BAMPTON, 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 " I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to 
 
 " the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the Univer- 
 " sity of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and 
 " singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and 
 " to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned ; 
 "that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice- 
 " Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time 
 " being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and 
 " profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and 
 "necessary deductions made) that he pay all the re- 
 " mainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons, to be established for ever in the said Univer- 
 " sity, and to be performed in the manner following : 
 
 " I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday 
 "in Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the 
 " Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room 
 " adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours of 
 " ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to 
 " preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year 
 " following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the com- 
 
vi Extract from Canon B amp tons Will. 
 
 " mencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the 
 " end of the third week in Act Term. 
 
 " Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity 
 " Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of 
 " the following Subjects — to confirm and establish the 
 " Christian Faith^ and to confute all heretics and 
 " schismatics — upon the divine authority of the holy 
 " Scriptures — upon the authority of the writings of the 
 " primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the 
 " primitive Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and 
 " Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy 
 " Ghost — upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as 
 " comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. 
 
 " Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity 
 " Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two 
 " months after they are preached ; and one copy shall be 
 "given to the Chancellor of the University, and one 
 " copy to the Head of every College, and one copy to 
 " the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be 
 "put into the Bodleian Library; and the expenses of 
 " printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the 
 " Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity 
 " Lecture Sermons ; and the preacher shall not be paid, 
 " nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed. 
 
 "Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be 
 " qualified to p)reach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, 
 " unless he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts 
 " at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or 
 " Cambridge ; and that the same person shall never 
 " preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice." 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 
 
 Psalm civ. 24. 
 
 Lord, hoio manifold are Thy works : in wisdom hast Thou 
 made them all ; the earth is full of Thy riches. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The subject introduced : Scientific belief. Mathe- 
 matics and Metaphysics excluded. The Postulate of 
 Science : the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account 
 of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both 
 accounts. Science traced back to observation of the 
 Humati Will. The development of Science from this 
 origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate : 
 which nevertheless can never attain to universality . i 
 
 LECTURE IL 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 
 Genesis i. 27. 
 
 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God 
 created He him. 
 
 The voice within. The objection of the alleged rela- 
 tivity of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own 
 personal identity. Failure to show this to be relative ; 
 in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral 
 Law. The command to live according to that Law ; 
 Duty. The command to believe in the supremacy of 
 that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. 
 The hope of Immortality. The personification of the 
 
viii Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Moral Law in Almighty God ; the higher Faith. 
 The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, if 
 any be made. The contrast between Religion and 
 Science ......... 35 
 
 LECTUEE III. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND 
 RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 
 
 Genesis i. 27. 
 
 So God created man in His ow7i image, in the image of God 
 created He him. 
 
 Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Unifor- 
 mity. Butler's examination of the question. Hume's 
 solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real 
 result of examination of the facts. Intei'ference of the 
 will always possible, but comparatively rare. The 
 need of a fixed nature for our self-discipline, and so 
 for our spiritual life . . . . . . -67 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE 
 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 Romans i. 20. 
 
 For the.invisible things 0/ Him from the creation of the world 
 are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are 
 made, even His eternal power and Godhead. 
 
 Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great 
 development in recent times. Objection felt by many 
 religious men. Alleged to destroy argument from 
 design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of 
 Evolution adds force to the argument, and removes 
 
Contents. ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 objections to it. Argument from progi-ess; from 
 beautyl; from unity. The conflict not real . -97 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND 
 COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNO^YLEDGE. 
 
 Hebrews i. i. 
 
 God, wlio at sundry times and in divers manners spake in 
 time past to the Fathers by the Projyhets, hath in these last 
 days S2)oken to us by His Son. 
 
 The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the 
 truth of Science. Nor of Religion. Special charac- 
 teristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it 
 is due to Revelation. All higlier Religions have 
 claimed to be Revelations. The evolution of Reli- 
 gious Knowledge in the Old Testament ; yet the 
 Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New 
 Testament. The miraculous clement in Revelation. 
 Its place and need. Harmony of this mode of evo- 
 lution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty . 125 
 
 LECTURE VL 
 
 APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE 
 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 Psalm c. 3. 
 
 Knoio ye that the Lord He is God : it is He that hath 
 made us, and not u<e oiirselves. 
 
 Evolution examined. The formation of the habit- 
 able world. The formation of the creatures which 
 inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Varia- 
 tions perpetually introduced. Natural .selection. On 
 the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. 
 
X Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Cause of variations not yet examined. INIoral Law 
 incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis 
 not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution 
 of man not inconsistent with dignity of humanity . 159 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 APPAEENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM 
 TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 
 
 St. John xiv. 1 1. 
 
 Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me : 
 or else believe Me for the very works' sake. 
 
 The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom 
 of the will. The miracles of Revelation need not be 
 miracles of Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and 
 His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in the 
 scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and 
 at the time when the Revelation was given. Miracles 
 attested by the Apostles, by our Lord's character, by 
 our Lord's power. Nature of evidence requii-ed to 
 prove miracles ; not such as to put physical above 
 spiritual evidence ; not such as to be unsuited to their 
 own day. Impossilnlity of demonstrating universal 
 uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of 
 Science . , . . . . . . .191 
 
 LECTURE VIIL 
 
 THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 
 I Corinthians xii. 3.' 
 
 No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, hut by the 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 L^nifoi-mity of nature not demonstrated, but estab- 
 lished, except in two cases ; the interference of human 
 
Contents. xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the 
 jirogress of Science. Unity to be found not in the 
 physical world, but in the physical and moral com- 
 bined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recog- 
 nition of it on our own character and choice. But we 
 expect it to show its marks in the physical world : 
 and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the 
 effects produced by Eevelation. Nevertheless a demand 
 for more physical evidence ; but the physical cannot 
 Be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to 
 believers from leaning this way : superstition ; blind- 
 ness ; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual percep- 
 tiveness : to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, 
 the heart, the will . . . . . . .223 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF 
 SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 
 
 Tlie subject introduced : Scientific belief. Mathematics 
 and Metaj)hysics excluded. The Postulate of Science : the 
 Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account of it. Kant's 
 account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science 
 traced back to observation of the Human Will. The 
 development of Science from this origin. The increasing 
 generality of the Postulate : which nevertheless can never 
 attain to universality. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF 
 SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. 
 
 ' O Lord, how manifold are Thy works : in wisdom hast 
 Thou made them all ; the earth is full of Thy riches.' 
 — Psalm civ. 24. 
 
 fTlHOSE who believe that the creation and 
 -^ government of the world are the work of 
 a Being Whom it is their duty to love with 
 all their hearts, Who loves them with a love 
 beyond all other love, to Whom they look for 
 guidance now and unending happiness hereafter, 
 have a double motive for studying the forms 
 and operations of Nature ; because over and 
 above whatever they may gain of the purest 
 and highest pleasure in the study, and whatever 
 men may gain of material comfort in a thousand 
 forms from the results of the study, they can- 
 not but have always present to their minds 
 
 B 2 
 
4 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 the thought, that all these things are revelations 
 of His character, and to know them is in a very 
 real measure to know Him. The believer in 
 God, if he have the faculty and the opportunity, 
 cannot find a more proper employment of time 
 and labour and thought than the study of the 
 ways in which God works and the things which 
 God has made. Among religious men we ought 
 to expect to find the most patient, the most 
 truth -seeking, the most courageous of men of 
 science. 
 
 We know that it is not always so ; and that 
 on the contrary Science and Eeligion seem very 
 often to be the most determined foes to each 
 other that can be found. The scientific man 
 often asserts that he cannot find God in Science; 
 and the religious man often asserts that he 
 cannot find Science in God. Each often believes 
 himself to be in possession, if not of the whole 
 truth, at any rate of all the truth that it is 
 most important to possess. Science seems to 
 despise religion ; and religion to fear and con- 
 demn Science. Eehgion, which certainly ought 
 to put truth at the highest, is charged with 
 refusing to acknowledge truth that has been 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 5 
 
 proved. And Science, which certainly ought 
 to insist on demonstrating every assertion wliich 
 it makes, is charged with giving the rein to 
 the imagination and treating the merest specu- 
 lations as well-established facts. 
 
 To propose to reconcile these opposites would 
 be a task which hardly any sane man would 
 undertake. It would imply a claim to be able 
 to rise at once above both, and see the truth 
 which included all that both could teach. But 
 it is a very useful undertaking, and not beyond 
 the reach of thoughtful inquiry by an ordinary 
 man, to examine the relations between the two, 
 and thus to help not a few to find a way for 
 themselves out of the perplexity. And this 
 inquiry may well begin by asking what is the 
 origin and nature of scientific belief on the one 
 hand and of religious belief on the other. In 
 this Lecture I propose to deal with the former. 
 
 It is not necessary to include in the Science 
 of which I am to speak either Mathematics or 
 Metaphysics. In as far as I need touch on what 
 belongs to either, it will be only for the purpose 
 of answering objections or of excluding what 
 is irrelevant. And the consequent restriction of 
 
6 Origin and Nature of [beet. 
 
 our consideration to the Science which concerns 
 itself with Nature greatly simplifies the task 
 that I have undertaken. For it will be at once 
 admitted in the present day by all but a very 
 few that the source of all scientific knowledge 
 of this kind is to be found in the observations 
 of the senses, including under that word both 
 the bodily senses which tell us all we know of 
 things external, and that internal sense by which 
 we know all or nearly all that takes place within 
 the mind itself. And so also will it be admitted 
 that the Supreme Postulate, without which 
 scientific knowledge is impossible, is the Uni- 
 formity of Nature. 
 
 Science lays claim to no revelations. No 
 voice of authority declares what substances 
 there are in the world, what are the properties 
 of those substances, what are the effects and 
 operations of those properties. No traditions 
 handed down from past ages can do anything 
 more than transmit to us observations made in 
 those times, which, so far as we can trust them, 
 we may add to the observations made in our 
 own times. The materials in short which 
 Science has to handle are obtained by experience. 
 
I.] Scientific Belief, 7 
 
 But on the other hand Science can deal with 
 these materials only on the condition that they 
 are reducible to invariable laws. If any ob- 
 servation made by the senses is not capable of 
 being brought under the laws which are found 
 to govern all other observations, it is not yet 
 brought under the dominion of Science. It is 
 not yet explained, nor understood. As far as 
 Science is concerned, it may be called as yet 
 non-existent. It is for this very reason possible 
 that the examination of it may be of the very 
 greatest importance. To explain what has 
 hitherto received no explanation constitutes the 
 very essence of scientific progress. The ob- 
 servation may be imperfect, and may at once 
 become explicable as soon as it is made com- 
 plete ; or, what is of far more value, it may be 
 an instance of tlie operation of a new law not 
 previously known, modifying and perhaps ab- 
 sorbing the law up to that time accepted. When 
 it was first noticed in Galileo's time that water 
 would not ascend in the suction pipe of a pump 
 to a greater height than 32 feet, the old law 
 that nature abhors a vacuum was modified, and 
 the reasons why and the conditions under which 
 
S Origin mid Nature of [Lect. 
 
 Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. The 
 suction of fluids was brought under the general 
 law of mechanical pressure. The doctrine that 
 Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair 
 generalization and expression of the facts of 
 this kind that up to that time had been ob- 
 served. A new fact was observed which would 
 not fall under the rule. The examination of 
 this fact led to the old rule being superseded ; 
 and Science advanced a great step at once. So 
 in our own day was the planet Neptune dis- 
 covered by the observation of certam facts which 
 could not be squared with the facts previously 
 observed unless the Law of Gravitation was to 
 be corrected. The result in this case was not 
 the discovery of a new Law but of a new 
 Planet ; and consequently a great confirmation 
 of the old Law, But in each case and in every 
 similar case the investigation of the newly ob- 
 served fact proceeds on the assumption that 
 Nature will be found uniform, and on no other 
 assumption can Science proceed at all. 
 
 Now it is this assumption which must be first 
 examined. What is its source? What is its 
 justification ? What, if any, are its limits \ 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 9 
 
 It is not an assumption that belongs to 
 Science only. It is in some form or other at 
 the bottom of all our daily life. We eat our 
 food on the assumption that it will nourish us 
 to-day as it nourished us yesterday. We deal 
 with our neighbours in the belief that we may 
 safely trust those now whom we have trusted 
 and safely trusted heretofore. We never take 
 a journey without assuming that wood and iron 
 will hold a carriage together, that wheels will 
 roll upon axles, that steam will expand and 
 drive the piston of an engine, that porters and 
 stokers and engine-drivers will do their ac- 
 customed duties. Our crops are sown in the 
 belief that the earth will work its usual chemistry, 
 that heat and light and rain will come in their 
 turn and have their usual effects, and the 
 harvest will be ready for our gathering in the 
 autumn. Look on while a man is tried for his 
 life before a jury. Every tittle of the evidence 
 is valued both by the judge and jury according 
 to its agreement or disagreement with what we 
 believe to be the laws of Nature, and if a witness 
 asserts that something happened whicli, as far 
 as we know, never happened at any other time 
 
lo Origin and Nature of [Lect, 
 
 since the world began, we set his evidence aside 
 as incredible. And the piisoner is condemned 
 if the facts before us, interpreted on the assump- 
 tion that the ordinary laws of Nature have held 
 their course, appear to prove his guilt. 
 
 What right have we to make such an assump- 
 tion as this % 
 
 The question was first clearly put by Hume, 
 and was handled by him with singular lucidity; 
 but his answer, though very near the truth, 
 was not so expressed as to set the question 
 at rest. 
 
 The main relation in which the uniformity 
 of Nature is observed is that of cause and 
 effect. Hume examines this and maintains that 
 there is absolutely nothing contained in it but 
 the notion of invariable sequence. Two phe- 
 nomena are invariably found connected toge- 
 ther; the prior is spoken of as the cause, the 
 posterior as the effect. But there is absolutely 
 nothing in the former to define its relation to 
 the latter, except that when the former is 
 observed the latter, as far as we know, invari- 
 ably follows. A ball hits another ball of equal 
 size, both being free to move. There is nothing 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 1 1 
 
 by which prior to experience we can determine 
 what will happen next. It is just as conceiv- 
 able that the moving ball should come back or 
 should come to rest, as that the ball hitherto 
 at rest should begin to move. A magnet fast- 
 ened to a piece of wood is floating on water. 
 Another magnet held in the hand is brought 
 very near one of its poles or ends. If two 
 north poles are thus brought together the float- 
 ing magnet is repelled ; if a north and a south 
 pole are brought together the floating magnet 
 is attracted. The motion of the floating magnet 
 is in each case called the effect ; the approach of 
 the magnet held in the hand is called the 
 cause. And tliis cause is, as far as we know, 
 invariably followed by this effect. But to say 
 that one is cause and the other effect is merely 
 to say that one is always followed by the 
 other ; and no other meaning, according to Hume, 
 can be attached to the words cause and effect. 
 
 Having established this interpretation of 
 these words, Hume goes on to ask : What 
 can be the ground in reason for the principle 
 universally adopted, that the law of cause and 
 effect rules phenomena, and that a cause which 
 
12 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 has been followed by an effect once will be 
 followed by the same effect always? And he 
 conckides that no rational ground can be found 
 at all, that it is the mere result of custom 
 without anything rational behind it. We are 
 accustomed to see it so, and what we have 
 been so perpetually accustomed to see we 
 believe that we shall continue to see. But 
 why what has always been hitherto should 
 always be hereafter, no reason whatever can 
 be given. The logical conclusion obviously is 
 to discredit all human faculties and to land 
 us in universal scepticism. 
 
 It was at this point that Kant took up the 
 question, avowedly in consequence of Hume's 
 reasoning. He considered that Hume had been 
 misled by turning his attention to Physics, 
 and that his own good sense w^ould have 
 saved him from his conclusion had he thought 
 rather of Mathematics, Kant's solution of the 
 problem, based mainly on the reality of Mathe- 
 matics, and especially of Geometry, is the direct 
 opposite of Hume's. 
 
 It will be most easy to give a clear account 
 of Kant's solution by using a very familiar 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 13 
 
 illustration. There is a well-known common 
 toy called a Kaleidoscope, in which bits of 
 coloured glass placed at one end are seen through 
 a small round hole at the other. The bits of 
 glass are not arranged in any order whatever, 
 and by shaking the instrument may be re- 
 arranged again and again indefinitely and stiU 
 without any order whatever. But however 
 they may be arranged in themselves they 
 always form, as seen from the other end, a 
 symmetrical pattern. The pattern indeed varies 
 with every shake of the instrument and con- 
 sequent re-arrangement of the bits of glass, 
 but it is invariably symmetrical. Now the 
 symmetry in this case is not in the bits of 
 glass ; the colours are there no doubt, but the 
 symmetrical arrangement of them is not. The 
 symmetry is entirely due to the instrument. 
 And if a competent enquirer looks into the 
 instrument and examines its construction, he 
 will be able to lay down with absolute cer- 
 tainty the laws of that symmetry which every 
 pattern as seen through the instrument must 
 obey. 
 
 Just such an instrument, according to Kant, 
 
14 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 is the human mind. Space and Time and the 
 Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the in- 
 strument. Everything that reaches the senses 
 must submit to the laws of Space and Time, 
 that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because 
 Space and Time are forms of the mind itself, 
 and, like the kaleidoscope, arrange all things 
 on their way to the senses according to a 
 pattern of their own. This pattern is as it 
 were superadded to the manifestations that 
 come from the things themselves ; and if there 
 be any manifestations of such a nature that 
 they could not submit to this addition, or, in 
 other words, could not submit to Mathematical 
 Laws, these manifestations could not affect our 
 senses at all. So too our Understanding has 
 a pattern of its own which it imposes on all 
 things that reach its power of perception. 
 What cannot be accommodated to this pattern 
 cannot be understood at all. Whatever things 
 may be in themselves, their manifestations are 
 not within the range of our intelligence, except 
 by passing through the arranging process which 
 our own mind executes upon them. 
 
 It is clear that this wonderfully ingenious 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 15 
 
 speculation rests its claims for acceptance purely 
 on the assertion that it and it alone explains 
 the facts. It cannot be proved from any prin- 
 ciple of reason. It assumes that there is a 
 demonstrative science of Mathematics quite 
 independent of experience, and that there are 
 necessary principles of Physics equally inde- 
 pendent of experience. And it accounts for 
 the existence of these. 
 
 With Mathematics we are not now concerned, 
 and I will pass them by with only one remark. 
 The ground on which Kant's theory stands is 
 not sufficient, for this simple reason. It ac- 
 counts for one fact; it does not account for 
 another fact. It accounts for the fact that we 
 attach and cannot help attaching a conviction 
 of necessity to all mathematical reasoning. We 
 not only know that two straight lines enclose 
 a space, but we know that this is so and must 
 be so in aU places and at all times, and we 
 know it without any proof whatever. This 
 fact Kant accounts for. Space is according 
 to him a part of our kaleidoscope ; you can 
 always look into it and see for yourself what 
 are the laws of it. But there is another fact. 
 
1 6 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 This space of which we are speaking is unques- 
 tionably to our minds not a thing inside of 
 us but outside of us. We are in it. We 
 cannot get rid of a sense that it is inde- 
 pendent of ourselves. We can imagine ourselves 
 non-existing, minds and all. We cannot ima- 
 gine space non-existing. If it be a part of 
 our minds, how is it that we can picture to 
 ourselves the non-existence of the mind which 
 is the whole, but not the non-existence of 
 space which, according to the hypothesis, is 
 the parf? For this fact, which we commonly 
 call the objectivity of space, Kant's theory 
 does not account. In fact Kant appears to 
 have no escape from assigning this objectivity 
 of space to delusion. But a theory which 
 requires us to call an meradicable conviction 
 of consciousness a delusion cannot be said to 
 explain aU the facts. John Stuart Mill main- 
 tains that the other fact, namely, the conviction 
 of the necessity of mathematical truth, is a 
 delusion. And his account also must be pro- 
 nounced for that reason to fail in accounting 
 for all the facts. 
 
 But our present concern is not with Mathe- 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 17 
 
 matics but with Physics. And here Kant fails 
 altogether to convince; for, taking Time and 
 the Perceptive Powers of the Understanding 
 as parts of the human mind, he shows, what 
 indeed is clearer and clearer every day, that 
 the principles (so called) of Physics are indis- 
 pensable Postulates, not indeed of observing with 
 the senses, but of comprehending with the un- 
 derstanding, whatever happens. In order to 
 give anything that can be called an explanation 
 of any event we must show that it falls under 
 the general rules which constitute the unifor- 
 mity of Nature. We have no other meaning 
 for the words understanding or explaining an 
 event. Thmking, when analysed, is found to 
 consist in bringing aU that happens under 
 universal laws, and no phenomenon can be 
 said to be explained in thought except by 
 being so related to all other phenomena. But 
 it does not by any means follow that events 
 cannot happen or cannot affect our senses 
 without being susceptible of such explanation. 
 To say that an event cannot be understood, 
 and to say either that it cannot hai)pen or 
 that it cannot be observed by the senses, are 
 
 c 
 
1 8 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 two very different things. The fact is that 
 Mathematics and Physics do not, as Kant 
 assumes, present the same problem for solution, 
 and do not therefore admit of one solution 
 applicable to both. It is not the case that 
 there is a science of abstract Physics corre- 
 sponding to the science of Mathematics and 
 sharing in the same character of necessity. In 
 Mathematics we have truths which we cannot 
 but accept, and accept as universal and neces- 
 sary : in Physics we have no such truths, nor 
 has Kant even endeavoured to prove that we 
 have. The very question therefore that we 
 are asked to solve in regard to Mathematics 
 does not present itself in Physics. I am con- 
 strained to believe that two and two are four 
 and not five ; I am not constrained to believe 
 that if one event is followed by another a great 
 many times it will be so followed always. And 
 the question is, why, without any constraint, 
 I nevertheless so far believe it that I require 
 special evidence in any given case to convince 
 me to the contrary. And Kant's answer is 
 irrelevant. He says that we cannot think the 
 sequence of events unless they fall under the 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 
 
 19 
 
 postulates of thinking, that is, the postulates 
 of science ; but this is no answer to the ques- 
 tion. Why do we believe that, unless the 
 contrary be proved, everything that is observed 
 by the senses is capable of being reduced under 
 these postulates of thinking % The sequence 
 of things cannot otherwise be explained ; but 
 why should the sequence of all things that 
 happen be capable of being explained ? The 
 question therefore still remains unanswered. 
 What right have we to assume this Uniformity 
 in Nature % or, in other words, what right have 
 we to assume that all phenomena in Nature, 
 observed by our senses, are capable of being 
 brought within the domain of Science 1 And 
 to answer this question we must approach it 
 from a different side. 
 
 And there is the more reason for tliie because 
 it is undeniable that both the definition and 
 the universaHty of the relation of cause and 
 effect, as they were accepted by Hume and his 
 followers, are not accepted by men in general. 
 In ordinary language sometliing more is meant 
 by cause and effect than invariable sequence, 
 and the common assumption is not that all 
 
 c 2 
 
20 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 Nature obeys this rule with absolutely no 
 variation, but that the rule is sufficiently general 
 for all practical purposes. 
 
 If then we begin by asking what is the 
 process of Science in dealing with all questions 
 of causation, we find that this process when 
 reduced to its simplest elements always consists 
 in referring every event as an effect to some 
 cause which we know or believe to have pro- 
 duced some other and similar event. Newton 
 is struck by a falling apple. His first thought 
 is, * how hard the blow.' His second is wonder, 
 * how far the earth's attraction, which has caused 
 this hard blow, extends.' His third, 'why not 
 as far as the moon % ' And he proceeds to 
 assign the motion of the moon to the same 
 cause as that which produced the motion of 
 the apple. Taking this as a working hypo- 
 thesis, he examines what would be the motions 
 of all the planets if this were true. And the 
 examination ends with establishing the high 
 probability of the Law of Gravitation. 
 
 Now this being the invariable process of 
 Science, it follows that our conception of cause 
 must come originally from that cause which 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 21 
 
 we have within ourselves and with which we 
 cannot but begin, the action of the human will. 
 It is from this action that is obtained that 
 conception which underlies the ordinary con- 
 ception of cause, namely, that of force or 
 power. 
 
 This conception of force or power is derived 
 from the consciousness of our own power to 
 move our limbs, and perhaps too of passions, 
 temptations, sentiments to move or oppose our 
 wills. This power is most distinctly felt when 
 it is resisted. The effort which is necessary 
 when we choose to do what we have barely 
 strength to do, impresses on us more clearly the 
 sense of a force residing in ourselves capable 
 of overcoming resistance. Having the power 
 to move our limbs, and that too against some 
 resistance, we explain, and in no other way 
 can we explain, other motions by the suppo- 
 sition of a similar power. In so doing we 
 are following strictly the scientific instinct and 
 the scientific process. We are putting into the 
 same class the motions that we observe in other 
 things and the motions that we observe in 
 ourselves ; the latter are due to acts of our 
 
22 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 own wills, the former are assigned to similar 
 acts of other wills. Hence in infancy, and in 
 the infancy of mankind, the whole world is 
 peopled with persons because everything that 
 we observe to move is personified. A secret 
 will moves the wind, the smi, the moon, the 
 stars, and each is independent of the others. 
 
 Soon a distinction grows up between the 
 things that seem to have a spontaneous motion 
 and those that have not, and spontaneous 
 motion is taken as the sign of life. And all 
 inanimate things, of whatever kind, are held 
 to be moved, if they move at all, by a force 
 outside themselves. Their own force is limited 
 to that of resisting, and does not include that 
 of originating motion. But though they can- 
 not originate motion they are observed to be 
 capable of transmitting it. And the notion of 
 force is expanded by the recognition that it 
 can be communicated from one thing to another 
 and yet to another, and that we may have to 
 go back many steps before we arrive at the 
 will from which it originated. We began with 
 the notion of a power the action of which was 
 or appeared to be self-originated : we come to 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 23 
 
 the notion of a power the action of which is 
 nothing more than the continuance of precedino- 
 action. And the special characteristic of the 
 action of this force as thus conceived, which 
 we may call the derivative force, is seen to 
 be its regularity, just as the special character- 
 istic of the self-originating action was its spon- 
 taneity. 
 
 As experience increases the regularity of the 
 action of the derivative force is more and more 
 observable, and then arises the notion of a law 
 or rule regulating the action of every such 
 force. And a perpetually increasing number 
 of phenomena are brought under this head, 
 and are shown to be, not the immediate results 
 of self-originating action, but the more or less 
 remote results of derivative action governed 
 by laws. And even a large number of those 
 phenomena, which specially belong to life and 
 living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, the 
 self-originatmg action is to be found, are ob- 
 served to be subject to law and therefore to 
 be the issue not of self-originating but of deri- 
 vative action. And this observed regularity it 
 is found possible to trace much more widely 
 
24 Origin and Nature of [Lect, 
 
 than it is possible to trace any clear evidence 
 of what we understand by force. And so, at 
 last, we frequently use the word force as it 
 were by anticipation, not to express the cause 
 of the phenomena, which indeed we do not 
 yet know, but as a convenient abbreviation 
 for a large number of facts classed under one 
 head. And this it is which enables Hume to 
 maintain that we mean no more by a cause 
 than an event which is invariably followed by 
 another event. We discover invariability much 
 faster than we can discover causation ; and 
 having discovered invariability in any given 
 case, we presume ca-usation even when we can- 
 not yet show it, and use language in accord- 
 ance with that presumption. Thus, for instance, 
 we speak of the force of gravitation, although 
 we cannot yet prove that there is any such 
 force, and all that we know is that material 
 particles move as if such a force were acting on 
 them. 
 
 As Science advances it is seen that the 
 regularity of phenomena is far more important 
 to us than their causes. And the attention of 
 all students of Nature is fixed on that rather 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 25 
 
 than on causation. And this regularity is seen 
 to be more and more widely pervading all 
 phenomena of every class, until the mind is 
 forced to conceive the possibility that it may 
 be absolutely universal, and that even will itself 
 may come within its supreme dominion. 
 
 But to the very last the idea of causation 
 retains the traces of its origin. For in the 
 first place every step in this building up of 
 science assumes a permanence underlying all 
 phenomena. We cannot believe that the future 
 will be like the past except because we believe 
 that there is something j)ermanent which was 
 in the past and will be in the future. And 
 this assumption of something permanent in 
 things around us comes from the conscious- 
 ness of something permanent within us. We 
 know our own permanence. Whatever else we 
 know or do not know about ourselves, we are 
 sure of our own personal identity through suc- 
 cessive periods of life. And as our explanation 
 of things outside begins by classing them with 
 things inside we still continue to ascribe per- 
 manence to whatever underlies phenomena even 
 when we have long ceased to ascribe individual 
 
26 Origin and Natter e of [Lect. 
 
 wills to any except beings like ourselves. And 
 without this assumption of permanence our 
 whole science would come to the ground. 
 
 And in the second place let it be remembered 
 that we began with the will causing the motions 
 of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know, 
 no other power in us to affect external nature 
 than by setting something in motion. We can 
 move our limbs, and by so doing move other 
 things, and by so doing avail ourselves of the 
 laws of Nature to produce remoter effects. But, 
 except by originating motion, we cannot act at 
 all. And, accordingly, throughout all science 
 the attempt is made to reduce all phenomena to 
 motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action, 
 electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to 
 reduce to vibrations or undulations, that is, to 
 motion of some sort or other. The mind seems 
 to find a satisfaction when a change of whatever 
 kind is shown to be, or possibly to be, the result 
 of movement. And so too all laws of Nature 
 are then felt to be satisfactorily explained when 
 they can be traced to some force exhibited in 
 the movement of material particles. The law 
 of Gravitation has an enormous evidence in sup- 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 27 
 
 port of it considered simiDly as a fact. And yet 
 how many attempts have been made to repre- 
 sent it as the result of vortices or of particles 
 streaming in all directions and pressing any two 
 bodies together that lie in their path ! The facts 
 which establish it are enough. Why then these 
 attempts % What is felt to be yet wantiug % 
 What is felt to be wanting is something to show 
 that it is the result of some sort of general or 
 universal motion, and that it thus falls under 
 the same head as other motions, either those 
 "which originate in ourselves and are propagated 
 from our bodies to external objects, or those 
 which, springing from an unknown beginning, 
 are for ever continuing as before. 
 
 This then is the answer to the question, Why 
 do we believe in the uniformity of Nature % We 
 believe in it because we find it so. Millions on 
 millions of observations concur in exhibiting this 
 uniformity. And the longer our observation 
 of Nature goes on, the greater do we find the 
 extent of it. Things that once seemed irre- 
 gular are now known to be regular. Things that 
 seemed inexplicable on this hypothesis are now 
 explained. Every day seems to add not merely 
 
28 Origin and Nahtre of [Lect, 
 
 to the instances but to the wide-ranging classes 
 of phenomena that come under the rule. We 
 had reason long ago to hold that the quantity 
 of matter was invariable. We now have reason 
 to think that the quantity of force acting on 
 matter is invariable. And to this is to be added 
 the evidence of scientific prediction, the range 
 of which is perpetually increasing, and which 
 would, be obviously impossible if Nature were 
 not uniform. And yet again to this is to be 
 added that this uniformity does not consist in 
 a vast number of separate and independent 
 laws, but that these laws already form a system 
 with one another, and that that system is daily 
 becoming more complete. We believe in the 
 uniformity of Nature because, as far as we can 
 observe it, that is the character of Nature. 
 
 And I use the word character on purpose, 
 because it indicates better than any other word 
 that I could find at once the nature and limit- 
 ation of our belief. 
 
 For, if the origin of this belief be what I 
 have described, it is perfectly clear that, how- 
 ever vast may be the evidence to prove this 
 uniformity, the conclusion can never go beyond 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 
 
 29 
 
 the limits of this evidence, and generality can 
 never be confounded with universality. The 
 certainty that Nature is uniform is not at all, 
 and never can be, a certainty of the same kind 
 as the certainty that four times five are twenty. 
 We can assert that the general character of 
 Nature is uniformity, but we cannot go beyond 
 this. Every separate law of nature is estab- 
 lished by induction from the facts, and so too is 
 the general uniformity. Every separate law of 
 Nature is a working hypothesis. So too is the 
 uniformity of Nature a working hypothesis, and 
 it never can be more. It is true that there is 
 far more evidence for the uniformity of Nature 
 as a whole than for any one law of Nature ; 
 because a law of Nature is established by the 
 uniformity of sequences in those phenomena to 
 wliich it applies ; whereas every uniformity of 
 sequence, of whatever kind, is an evidence of 
 the general uniformity. The evidence for the 
 uniformity of nature is the accumulated evidence 
 for all the separate uniformities. But, however 
 much greater the quantity of evidence, the kind 
 ever remains the same. There is no means by 
 which we can demonstrate this uniformity. We 
 
30 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 can only make it probable. We can say that in 
 almost every case all the evidence is one way; 
 but whenever there is evidence to the contrary 
 we cannot refuse to examine it. 
 
 If a miracle were worked science could not 
 prove that it was a miracle, nor of course prove 
 that it was not a miracle. To prove it to be a 
 miracle would require not a vast range of know- 
 ledge, but absolutely universal knowledge, which 
 it is entirely beyond our faculties to attain. To 
 say that any event was a miracle would be to 
 say that we knew that there was no higher law 
 that could explain it, and this we could not say 
 unless we knew all laws : to say that it was not 
 a miracle would be ex hypotliesi to assert what 
 was false. In fact, to assert the occurrence of a 
 miracle is simply to go back to the beginning of 
 science, and to say : Here is an event which we 
 cannot assign to that derivative action to which 
 we have been led to assign the great body of 
 events ; we cannot explain it except by re- 
 ferring it to direct and spontaneous action, to 
 a will like our own will. Science has shown 
 that the vast majority of events are due to 
 derivative action regulated by laws. Here is 
 
I.] Scientific Belief. 31 
 
 an event wliicli cannot be so explained, any 
 more than the action of our own free will can 
 be so explained. Science may fairly claim to 
 have shown that miracles, if they happen at 
 all, are exceedingly rare. To demonstrate that 
 they never happen at all is impossible, from the 
 very nature of the evidence on which Science 
 rests. But for the same reason Science can 
 never in its character of Science admit that a 
 miracle has happened. Science can only admit 
 that, so far as the evidence goes, an event has 
 happened which lies outside its province. 
 
 To believers the progress of Science is a per- 
 petual instruction in the character which God 
 has impressed on His works. That He has put 
 Order in the very first place may be a surprise 
 to us ; but it can only be a surprise. In the 
 great machinery of the Universe it constantly 
 happens to us to find that that which is made 
 indispensable is nevertheless not the higliest. 
 The chosen people were not the highest in all 
 moral or even in all spiritual characteristics ; if 
 we refuse the explanation given by Goethe that 
 they were chosen for their toughness, yet we 
 have no better to give. The eternal moral law 
 
32 Origin and Nahire of [Lect. 
 
 is of all we know the highest and holiest. Yet 
 the religious instinct seems to have been more 
 indispensable for the development of humanity 
 according to the Divine purpose than the obser- 
 vance of that moral law in all its fulness. It 
 would never have occurred to us beforehand to 
 permit in Divine legislation any concession to 
 the hardness of men's hearts ; yet we know that 
 it was done. Science now tells us that Order 
 takes a rank in God's work far above where we 
 should have placed it. It is not the highest ; 
 it is far from the highest : but it appears to be 
 in some strange way the most indispensable. 
 God is teaching us that Order is far more uni- 
 versal, far more penetrating than we should 
 have supposed. But, nevertheless, it is not 
 itself God ; nor the highest revelation of God. 
 It is the stamp which, for reasons higher than 
 itself, He appears to have put on His works. 
 What is the limit to its application we do not 
 know. There may be instances where this 
 Order is apparently broken, but really main- 
 tained, because one physical law is absorbed in 
 a higher; there may be instances where the 
 physical law is superseded by a moral law. But 
 
I.] Sciaitific Belief. 
 
 we shall neither refuse to recognise that God 
 has stamped this character on His works, nor 
 let it on the other hand come between us and 
 Him. For we know still that He is greater 
 than all that He hath made, and He speaks 
 to us by another voice besides the voice of 
 Science. 
 
 D 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OP 
 RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 
 
 The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity 
 of knowledge. Absolute knowledge of our own personal 
 identity. Failure to show this to be relative ; in particular 
 by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. The command 
 to live according to that Law ; Duty. The command to 
 believe in the supremacy of that Law ; the lower Faith. 
 The Last Judgment. The hope of Immortality. The per- 
 sonification of the Moral Law in Almighty God ; the 
 higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Reve- 
 lation, if any be made. The contrast between Religion and 
 Science. 
 
 D 2 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 THE OTvIGIN AND NATURE OF 
 RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 
 
 ' So God created man in His own image, in the image of 
 God created He him.' Genesis i. 27. 
 
 FTIHE order of phenomena is not the highest 
 -*- revelation of God, nor is the voice of Science 
 the only nor the most commanding voice that 
 speaks to ns about Him. The behef in Him 
 and in the character which we assign to Him 
 does not spring from any observation of phe- 
 nomena, but from the declaration made to us 
 through the spiritual faculty. 
 
 There is witliin us a voice which tells of a 
 supreme Law unchanged throughout all space 
 and all time ; which speaks with an authority 
 entirely its own ; which finds corroboration in 
 the revelations of Science, but whicli never 
 
38 Origin and Nahwe of [Lectc 
 
 relies on those revelations as its primary or its 
 ultimate sanction ; which is no inference from 
 observations by the senses external or internal, 
 but a direct communication from the spiritual 
 kingdom, the kingdom, as philosophers call it, of 
 things in themselves ; which commands belief as 
 a duty, and by necessary consequence ever leaves 
 it possible to disbelieve ; and in listening to 
 which we are rightly said to walk not by sight 
 but by faith. 
 
 Now, before going on to say anything more 
 about the message thus given to us from the 
 spiritual world, it is necessary to consider an 
 objection that meets us on the threshold of all 
 such doctrines, namely, that it is simply im- 
 possible for us to know anything whatever of 
 things in themselves. Our knowledge, it is urged, 
 is necessarily relative to ourselves, whereas abso- 
 lute as distinct from relative knowledge is for 
 ever beyond our reach. We can speak of what 
 things appear to us to be ; we cannot speak of 
 what they are. We know or may know what- 
 ever comes under the observation of our senses 
 as phenomena ; we cannot know what underlies 
 these phenomena. And sometimes it has been 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 
 
 39 
 
 maintained that we not only cannot know what 
 it is that underlies the phenomena, but cannot 
 even know whether anything at all underlies 
 the phenomena, and that, for aught we can tell, 
 the whole world and all that exists or happens 
 in it may be nothing but a system of appearances 
 with no substance whatever. This doctrine of 
 the relativity of all knowledge is not only ap- 
 plied to things external but to our very selves. 
 We know ourselves, it is maintained, only through 
 an internal sense which can only tell us how we 
 appear to ourselves, but cannot tell us in any the 
 least degree what we really are. 
 
 Now this contention is an instance of a ten- 
 dency against which we are required to be 
 perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all 
 science and of all philosophy is to find some 
 unity or unities that shall co-ordinate the im- 
 mense complexity of the world in which we live. 
 Now there is one and only one legitimate way of 
 attaining this aim, and that is by patient, perse- 
 vering study of the facts. But the facts turn out 
 to be so numerous, so multifarious, that not one 
 life nor one generation but many lives and many 
 generations will assuredly not co-ordinate them 
 
40 07'igin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 sufficiently to bring this aim within probable 
 reach. Hence the incessant temptation, first, to 
 supply by hypothesis what cannot yet be ob- 
 tained by observation, and, secondly, to bend 
 facts to suit this hypothesis ; and, if the framing 
 of such hypotheses be legitimate, the distortion 
 of facts is clearly not legitimate. It seems too 
 long to wait for future ages to complete the task. 
 We must in some sort complete it now ; and for 
 that purpose if the facts as we observe them 
 will not suit, we must substitute other facts that 
 will. Accordingly every doctrine must be made 
 complete, and to make this doctrine of the 
 relativity of knowledge complete, we must get 
 rid of all exceptions. But there is one exception 
 that we cannot get rid of, and that is the convic- 
 tion of our own identity through all changes 
 through which we pass. Every man amongst us 
 passes through incessant changes. His body 
 changes ; he may even lose parts of it altogether ; 
 he may lose all control over some of his limbs, 
 or over them all. And there are internal as well 
 as external changes in each man. His affections 
 change, his practices, his passions, his resolutions, 
 his purposes, his judgments; everything possibly 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 41 
 
 by which he knows his own character. Bnt 
 through all these changes he is conscious of being 
 still one and the same self. And he knows this ; 
 and knows it, not as an inference from any 
 observation of sense external or internal, but 
 directly and intuitively. All other knowledge 
 may conceivably be relative, a knowledge of 
 things as they appear, not of things in them- 
 selves. But this is not ; it is a knowledge of a 
 thing as it is in itself; for amidst all changes in 
 the phenomena of each man's nature, this still 
 remains absolutely unchanged. We do speak of 
 sameness in application to phenomena ; we say 
 this is the same colour as that ; this is the same 
 musical note as that ; this is the same sensation 
 as that. But here we mean a different thing by 
 the word same. We mean indistinguishability. 
 We mean that we cannot distinguish between 
 the two colours, the two notes, the two sensa- 
 tions. And this no doubt is a relative knowledge, 
 not a knowledge of things in themselves. But 
 we do not mean incapacity of being distinguished 
 when we speak of our own personal identity. 
 WHien a man thinks to-day of his life of yester- 
 day, and regards himself as the same being 
 
42 Origin and Nahire of [Lect. 
 
 through all the time, he does not simply mean 
 that he cannot distinguish between the being 
 that existed yesterday according to his memory 
 and the being that exists to-day according to his 
 present consciousness : he means that the being 
 is one and the same absolutely and in itself. 
 
 And this conviction of personal identity will 
 presently be found to fall in with the revelation 
 of the Moral Law, which is my subject in this 
 Lecture. For it is by virtue of this personal 
 identity that I become responsible for my actions. 
 I am not merely the same thinking subject, I am 
 the same moral agent all through my life. If I 
 changed as fast as the phenomena of my being 
 changed, my responsibility for any evil deed 
 would cease the moment the deed was done. No 
 punishment would be just, because it would not 
 be just to punish one being for the faults of a 
 totally different being. The Moral Law in its 
 application to man requires as a basis the per- 
 sonal identity of each man with himself. 
 
 If corroboration were needed of the directness 
 of the intuition by which we get this idea of 
 our own personal identity, it would be found in 
 the entire failure of all attempts to derive that 
 
II.] Religions Belief. 43 
 
 idea from any other source. Comte, the founder 
 of the Positive School, can do nothing with this 
 idea but suggest that it is probably the result of 
 some obscure s}' nergy or co-operation of the facul- 
 ties. John Stuart Mill passes it by altogether as 
 lying outside the scope of his enquiries and of 
 his doctrine. Mr. Herbert Spencer deals with it 
 in a very weak chapter^ of his remarkable 
 volume of First Principles. He divides all the 
 manifestations made to our consciousness, or, as 
 we commonly say, all our sensations, into two 
 great classes. He selects as the main but not 
 universal characteristic of the one class, vivid- 
 ness ; of the other class, faintness ; a distinction 
 first insisted on, though somewhat differently 
 applied, by Hume. He adds various other 
 characteristics of each class, some of them im- 
 plying very questionable propositions. And we 
 come finally to- the following astonishing result. 
 Sensations are divided mto two classes ; each 
 has seven main characteristics which distinguish 
 it from the other. One of these classes make up 
 the subject, that which I mean when I use the 
 words I myself; the other the object or that 
 ' The Data of Philosophy. 
 
44 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 which is not I. But there is absolutely nothing 
 to determine which is which, which class is the 
 subject and which is the object, which is I my- 
 self, and which is not I myself. Vividness and 
 faintness plainly have nothing in them by which 
 we can assign the one to that which is I, the 
 other to that which is not I. If we were to 
 conjecture, we should be disposed to say that 
 surely the most vivid sensations must be the 
 nearest and therefore must be part of that which 
 is I ; but we find it is quite the other way. 
 The faint sensations are characteristic of that 
 which is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. 
 And the same remark applies to each pair of 
 characteristics in succession. The fact is that 
 Mr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to 
 complete his argument ; he has not shown, nor 
 endeavoured to show, nor even thought of show- 
 ing, how out of his seven characteristics of the 
 subject the conception of a subject has grown. 
 It is quite plain that he not only makes his 
 classes first and finds his characteristics after- 
 wards, which we may admit to have been 
 inevitable ; but he fails altogether to show how 
 that by which we know the classes apart has 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 45 
 
 grown out of the characteristics that he has 
 given us. The characteristics which he assigns 
 to that which is I, all added together, do not in 
 the slightest degree account for that sense of 
 permanent existence in spite of changes which 
 lies at the root of my distinction of myself from 
 other things. The very word same, in the sense in 
 which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be 
 defined except by reference to my own sameness 
 with myself. It is a simple idea incapable of 
 analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my 
 last Lecture, tlie root of the character of per- 
 manence which we assign to things external. To 
 say that this conception has been evolved from 
 the characteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumer- 
 ated is Hke saying that a cat has been evolved 
 without any intermediate stages from a fish, or a 
 smell from a colour. 
 
 But, if we now go a step further, and ask in 
 what form this personal identity presents itself 
 m the world of phenomena, the answer is clear : 
 our personality while bound up with all our 
 other faculties, so that we can speak of our 
 understanding, our affections, our powers of per- 
 ception and sensation, as parts of ourselves, yet 
 
46 Origin mid NatiLre of [Lect. 
 
 is centred in one faculty which we call the 
 will. ' If there be aught spiritual in man,' says 
 Coleridge, ' the will must be such. If there be a 
 will, there must be a spirituality in man.' The 
 will is the man. It is the will that makes us 
 responsible beings. It is for the action of our 
 will, or the consent of our will, that we come 
 to be called in question. It is by the will that 
 we assert ourselves amidst the existences around 
 us; and as the will is the man in relation to 
 phenomena, so on the other side the will is the 
 one and only force among the forces of this 
 world wdiich takes cognizance of principles and 
 is capable of acting in pursuit of an aim not to 
 be found among phenomena at all. The will 
 is not the whole spiritual faculty. Besides the 
 power of willing we have the power of recognis- 
 ing spiritual truth. And this power or faculty 
 we commonly call the conscience. But the con- 
 science is not a force. It has no power of acting 
 except through the wiU. It receives and trans- 
 mits the voice from the spiritual world, and the 
 will is responsible so far as the conscience 
 enlightens it. It is the will whereby the man 
 takes his place in the world of phenomena. 
 
II.] Religions Belief. 47 
 
 It is then to the man, thus capable of appre- 
 ciating a law superior in its nature to all j:)he- 
 nomena and bearing within himself the convic- 
 tion of a personal identity underlying all the 
 changes that may be encountered and endured, 
 that is revealed from within the command to 
 live for a moral purpose and believe in the 
 ultimate supremacy of the moral over the 
 physical. The voice within gives this com- 
 mand in two forms ; it commands our duty 
 and it commands our faith. The voice gives 
 no proof, appeals to no evidence, but speaks 
 as having a right to command, and requires 
 our obedience by virtue of its own inherent 
 superiority. 
 
 Its first command we call duty. The voice 
 within awakes a peculiar sentiment which, 
 except towards its command, is never felt in 
 our souls, the sentiment of reverence. And it 
 commands the pursuit of that, whatever it may 
 be, to which this sentiment of reverence attaches. 
 This is the positive test by which we are to 
 know what is ever to be our higliest aim. And 
 along with this there is a negative test by 
 which we are perpetually to correct the other, 
 
48 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 namely, the test of universality. The moral 
 law in its own nature admits of no exceptions. 
 If a principle of action be derived from this 
 law it has nothing to do with time, or place, 
 or circumstances; it must hold good in the 
 distant future, in planets or stars utterly 
 remote, as fully as it holds good now and 
 here. 
 
 This duty we can subdivide under four heads, 
 accordingly as we apply it to our dealings with 
 ourselves, with other moral and spiritual beings, 
 with other creatures that can feel pleasure and 
 pain, with things that are incapable of either. 
 If we are thinking of ourselves only, duty con- 
 sists in the pursuit of holiness, that is, in the 
 absolute subjection of what does not demand 
 reverence to that which does. It is plain that 
 what deserves reverence in us is that which 
 approaches most nearly to the moral law in 
 character. The appetites, the affections, the 
 passions, have each their own separate objects. 
 They may be useful in the highest degree, but 
 they cannot in themselves deserve reverence, 
 for their objects are not the moral law; they 
 must therefore be absolutely subordinated to 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 49 
 
 the will and the conscience which have for 
 their objects the very law itself. Holiness con- 
 sists in the subjection of the whole being, not 
 in act alone, but in feeling and desire as well, 
 to the authority of conscience. 
 
 If we are thinking of other moral agents, 
 duty prescribes strict and unfailing justice ; and 
 justice in its highest and purest form is love, 
 the unfailing recognition of the fullest claims 
 that can be made on us by all who share our 
 own divine superiority : to love God above all 
 else, and to love all spiritual beings as we love 
 ourselves, this is duty in relation to other spiri- 
 tual beings. 
 
 If we are thinking of creatures which, whether 
 moral agents or not, are capable of pain and 
 pleasure, our duty takes the form of goodness 
 or tenderness. We have no right to inflict pain 
 or even refuse pleasure unless, if the circum- 
 stances were reversed, we should be bound in 
 conscience to be ready in our turn to bear the 
 same infliction or refusal. The precept, Do as 
 you would be done by, is here supreme, and it 
 is to this class of duties that that precept ap- 
 plies, and the limits of our riglit to inflict pain 
 
 E 
 
50 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 on other creatures, whether rational or irrational, 
 will be determined by this rule. 
 
 And, lower still, our duty to things that are 
 incapable of all feeling is summed up in 
 that knowledge of them and that use of them 
 which makes them the fittest instruments of a 
 moral life. 
 
 The sentiment of reverence is our guide in 
 determining our duty, and the test of univer- 
 sality perpetually comes in to correct the com- 
 mands of this sentiment and to clear and so to 
 refine the sentiment itself. 
 
 As is the case in a certain degree with every 
 other kind of knowledge or belief, so in a very 
 special degree the Moral Law finds its place even 
 in minds that have very little of thought or of 
 cultivation. The most untutored is not insensi- 
 ble to the claim made on our respect by acts of 
 courage, self-sacrifice, generosity, truth; or to the 
 call upon us for reprobation at the sight of acts of 
 falsehood, of meanness, of cruelty, of profligacy. 
 Even in the most untutored there is a sense 
 that these sentiments of respect and reprobation 
 are quite different in kind from the other senti- 
 ments which stir the soul. And this is even more 
 
II.] Religions Belief. 51 
 
 clear in condemnation than in approval. How- 
 ever perverted the conscience (the seat of these 
 sentiments) may be, yet the pain of remorse, 
 which is self-reprobation for having broken the 
 moral law, is always, as has been well said, 
 * quite unlike any other pain we know,' and is 
 felt in some form and measure by every soul that 
 lives. And as the sentiment thus holds a special 
 place in the most untutored, so too does the 
 sense of universality by which we instinctively 
 and m variably correct or defend that sentiment 
 if it be challenged. The moment we are per- 
 plexed in regard to what we ought to do or 
 what judgment we ought to pass on something 
 already done, we instinctively, almost involun- 
 tarily, endeavour to disentangle the act from 
 all attendant circumstances and to see whether 
 our sentiment of approval or disapproval would 
 still hold good in quite other surroundings. 
 We try to get at the principle involved and to 
 ascertain whether that principle possesses the 
 universality which is the sure characteristic of 
 the Moral Law. 
 
 It will be matter of consideration in a future 
 Lecture how our knowledge of the Eternal Law 
 
 E 2 
 
52 Origm and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 of the holy, the just, the good, and the right, 
 is thus purified in the individual and in the race. 
 At present it will be enough to have indicated 
 the general principle of what may be called the 
 evolution of the knowledge of morals. 
 
 But I now go on from the Moral Law as a 
 duty to the Moral Law as a faith. For the inner 
 voice is not content with commanding a course 
 of conduct and requiring obedience of that kind. 
 This is its first utterance, and the man who 
 hears and obeys unquestionably has within him 
 the true seed of all religion. But though the 
 first utterance it is not the last. For the same 
 voice goes on to require us to believe that this 
 Moral Law which claims obedience from us, 
 equally claims obedience from all else that exists. 
 It is absolutely supreme or it is nothing. 
 
 Its title to our obedience is its supremacy, and 
 it has no other title. If it depended on pro- 
 mises of reward or threats of punishment ad- 
 dressed to us, it might be considered as a law 
 for us, but could be no law for others. It would 
 in that case, indeed, be a mere physical law. 
 Things are so arranged for you, and as far as 
 you know for you only, that terrible pain will 
 
II-] Religious Belief. 53 
 
 come to you if you disobey, and wonderful plea- 
 sure if you obey. Such a law as that might 
 proceed from a tyrant possessed of absolute 
 power over us and the things that concern us, 
 and might be either good or bad as should 
 happen. But such a law would not be able to 
 claim our reverence. Nay, rather, as is the case 
 with all merely physical laws, it might be our 
 duty to disobey it. In claiming our reverence 
 as well as our obedience, in making its sanction 
 consist in nothing but the fact of its own inhe- 
 rent majesty, the Moral Law calls on us to be- 
 lieve in its supremacy. It claims that it is the 
 last and highest of all laws. The world before 
 us is governed by uniformities as far as we can 
 judge, but above and behind all these unifor- 
 mities is the supreme uniformity, the eternal 
 law of right and wrong, and all other laws, of 
 whatever kind, must ultimately be harmonised 
 by it alone. The Moral Law would be itself 
 unjust if it bade us disregard all physical laws, 
 and yet was itself subordinate to those pliysical 
 laws. It has a right to require us to disregard 
 everything but itself, if it be itself supreme ; if 
 not, its claim would be unjust. We see here in 
 
54 Origin and N attire of [Lect. 
 
 things around us no demonstrative proof that it 
 is supreme, except what may be summed up in 
 saying that there is a power that makes for 
 righteousness. EnHghtened by the Moral Law 
 we can see strongly marked traces of its working 
 in all things. The beauty, the order, the general 
 tendency of all creation accords with the supre- 
 macy of the Moral Law over it all. But that is 
 by no means all. We see, and we know that we 
 see, but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. 
 And the result of this partial vision is that, while 
 there is much in things around us which asserts, 
 there is also much which seems to deny alto- 
 gether any supremacy whatever in the Moral 
 Law. The universe, as we see it, is not holy, 
 nor just, nor good, nor right. The music of 
 creation is full of discords as yet altogether un- 
 resolved. And if we look to phenomena alone, 
 there is no solution of the great riddle. But in 
 spite of all imperfections and contradictions, the 
 voice within, without vouchsafing to give us any 
 solution of the perplexity, or any sanction but 
 its own authoritative command, imperatively 
 requires us to believe that holiness is supreme 
 over unholiness, and justice over injustice, and 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 55 
 
 goodness over evil, and righteousness over un- 
 righteousness. To obey this command and to 
 beheve this truth is Faith. 
 
 This is the Faith which is perpetually pre- 
 senting to the believer's mind the vision of a 
 world in which all the inequalities of this pre- 
 sent world shall be redressed, in which truth, 
 justice, and love shall visibly reign, in which 
 temptations shall cease and sin shall cease also ; 
 in which the upward strivings of noble souls 
 shall find their end, and holiness shall supersede 
 penitence, and hearts shall be pure of all defile- 
 ment. This is the Faith which holds to the sure 
 conviction that all things shall one day come to 
 judgment ; and whether by sudden catastrophe 
 or by sure development, the physical system 
 shall surrender to the moral. This is the Faith 
 which supplies perpetual strength to the hope 
 of immortality; for though it cannot be said 
 that the immortality of the individual soul is of 
 necessity involved in a belief in the supremacy 
 of the Moral Law, yet there is a sense, never 
 without witness in the soul, that all would not 
 be according to justice if a being to whom the 
 Moral Law has been revealed from within is 
 
56 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 nevertheless in no degree to share in the final 
 revelation of the superiority of that Moral Law 
 over what is without. We cannot say that it is 
 a necessary part of the supremacy of the Moral 
 Law that every one of those who know it should 
 partake of its immortal nature. We cannot even 
 say that it is a necessary part of the ultimate 
 redressing of all injustice and resolution of all 
 the discords of life that the hope of it should 
 prove true in the individual as it will certainly 
 prove true in the universe. For we are unable 
 to weigh individual merit or demerit, and cannot 
 assert for certain that the balance of justice is 
 not maintained even in this present life. But 
 nevertheless the hope that it must and will be 
 so is inextinguishable, and Faith in an Eternal 
 Law of Morals is inextricably bound up with 
 hope of immortality for the being that is en- 
 dowed with a moral and responsible nature. 
 
 Faith in the absolute supremacy of the Moral 
 Law is the first, but this again is not the last 
 step upwards in Faith. We are called upon, 
 and still by the same imperative voice within, 
 to carry our Faith still further, and to believe 
 something yet higher. 
 
II.] Religions Belief. 57 
 
 For the supremacy of the Moral Law must 
 be a moral, not merely a physical supremacy. 
 In claiming supremacy at all the Moral Law- 
 does not assert that somehow by a happy acci- 
 dent, as it were, all things turn out at last in 
 accordance with what is in' the highest sense 
 moral. The supremacy of the moral over the 
 physical involves in its very nature an intention 
 to be supreme. It is not the supremacy of 
 justice, if justice is done as the blind result of 
 the working of machinery, even if that be the 
 machinery of the universe. In our very concep- 
 tion of a moral supremacy is involved the con- 
 ception of an intended supremacy. And the 
 Moral Law in its government of the world re- 
 veals itself as possessing the distinctive mark of 
 personality, that is, a purpose and a will. And 
 thus, as we ponder it, this Eternal Law is shown 
 to be the very Eternal Himself, the Almighty 
 God. There is a sense in which we cannot 
 ascribe personality to the Unknown Absolute 
 Being ; for our personahty is of necessity com- 
 passed with limitations, and from these limita- 
 tions we find it impossible to separate our con- 
 ception of a person. And it will ever remain 
 
58 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 true that our highest conceptions of God must 
 fall altogether short of His true nature. When 
 we speak of Him as infinite, we are but denying 
 that He is restrained by limits of time and 
 space as we are. When we speak of Him as 
 absolute, we are but denying that He is subject 
 to conditions as we are. So when we speak of 
 Him as a person, we cannot but acknowledge 
 that His personality far transcends our concej^- 
 tions. But it still remains the truth that these 
 descriptions of Him are the nearest that we can 
 get, and that for all the moral purposes of life 
 we can argue from these as if they were the full 
 truth. If to deny personality to Him is to 
 assimilate Him to a blind and dead rule, we 
 cannot but repudiate such denial altogether. If 
 to deny personality to Him is to assert His 
 incomprehensibility, we are ready at once to ac- 
 knowledge our weakness and incapacity. But 
 we dare not let go the truth that the holiness, 
 the justice, the goodness, the righteousness, which 
 the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a 
 supreme command, are identical in essential sub- 
 stance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the 
 more we keep before us the true character of 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 59 
 
 that law, the more clearly do we see that the 
 Moral Law is not His command but His nature. 
 He does not make that law. He is that law. 
 Almighty God and tlie Moral Law are different 
 aspects of what is in itself one and the same. 
 To hold fast to this is the fullest form of Faith. 
 To live by duty is in itself rudimentary religion. 
 To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over 
 all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. 
 To believe in Almighty God is the last and 
 highest. 
 
 It will be seen at once by those who have 
 followed me that I am in this Lecture only 
 working out to its logical conclusion what was 
 said long ago by Bishop Butler in England and 
 by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the spiritual 
 faculty whose commands to us I have been 
 examining by the name of conscience : Kant 
 calls it the practical reason. But both alike 
 insist on the ultimate basis of morality being 
 found in the voice within the soul and not in 
 the phenomena observed by the senses. Science 
 by searching cannot find out God. To reduce 
 all the phenomena of the universe to order will 
 not, even if it could ever be completely done, 
 
6o Origin and Nahire of [Lect. 
 
 tell us the highest truth that we can attain to 
 concerning spiritual things. 
 
 Science may examine all the phases through 
 which religions have passed and treating human 
 beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can 
 give us a history of religion or of religions. 
 But there is something underlying them all 
 which it cannot treat, and which perpetually 
 evades all attempts to bring it under physical 
 laws. For just as all attempts to explain away 
 our conviction of our own personal identity 
 have invariably failed and will for ever fail 
 to satisfy human consciousness, so too the 
 strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot 
 be got out of phenomena at all. No analysis 
 succeeds in obliterating the fundamental dis- 
 tinction between moral and physical law ; or 
 in enabling us to escape the ever increasing 
 sense of the dignity of the former, or in shutting 
 our ears to the still small voice which is totally 
 unlike every other voice within or without. To 
 bring the Moral Law under the dominion of 
 Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing 
 more than one of the phenomena of human 
 nature, it is necessary to treat the sentiment of 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 6i 
 
 reverence which it excites, the remorse which 
 follows on disobedience to its commands, the 
 sense of its supremacy, as delusions. It is 
 always possible so to treat these things ; but 
 only at the cost of standing lower m the scale 
 of being. 
 
 But we have one step further to take. For 
 as the spiritual faculty is the recipient directly 
 or indirectly of that original revelation which 
 God has made of Himself to His rational crea- 
 tures, so too this appears to be the only faculty 
 which can take cognizance of any fresh reve- 
 lation that it might please Him to make. If 
 He commands still further duties than those 
 commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He 
 bids us believe what our reason cannot deduce 
 from the primal belief in that Law and in 
 Himself, it is to that faculty that the command 
 is issued. If over and above the original re- 
 ligion as we may call it there is a revealed 
 religion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone 
 accept it. Such a revelation may be confirmed 
 by signs or proofs in the world of phenomena. 
 He who is absolute over all nature may compel 
 nature to bear witness to His teaching. The 
 
62 Origin and Naticre of [Lect. 
 
 spiritual may burst through the natural on oc- 
 casion, and that supremacy, which underlies all 
 nature and which is necessarily visible to in- 
 telligences that are capable of seeing things as 
 they are in themselves, may force itself into the 
 world of phenomena and show itself in that 
 manner to us. But this always is and must be 
 secondary. The spiritual faculty alone can re- 
 ceive and judge of spiritual truth, and if that 
 faculty be not reached a truly religious belief is 
 not yet attained. 
 
 External evidences of revealed religion must 
 have a high place but cannot have the highest. 
 A revealed religion must depend for its per- 
 manent hold on our obedience and our duty 
 on its fastening upon our spiritual nature, and 
 if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain it 
 m its place. 
 
 This account of the fundamental beliefs of 
 Eeligion when compared with the fundamental 
 postulates of Science shows that the two begin 
 with the same part of our nature but proceed by 
 opposite methods. Both begin with the human 
 will as possessing a permanent identity and 
 exerting a force of its own. But from this point 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 6 
 
 J 
 
 they separate. Science rests on phenomena 
 observed by the senses ; KeHgion on the voice 
 that speaks directly from the other world. 
 Science postulates uniformity and is excluded 
 wherever uniformity can be denied, but compels 
 conviction within the range of its own postulate. 
 Eeligion demands the submission of a free con- 
 science, and uses no compulsion but that im- 
 posed by its own inherent dignity. Science 
 gives warnings, and if you are capable of 
 understanding scientific argument, you will be 
 incapable of disbelieving the warnings. Certain 
 things will poison you ; certain neglects will 
 ruin your health ; disregard of scientific con- 
 struction will bring your roof down on your 
 head ; to enter a burning building will risk 
 your life ; some of these things you may learn 
 by ordinary experience, some of them by that 
 combination of experience which is called Science. 
 But if you are capable of the necessary reasoning 
 you cannot doubt, however much you may wish 
 to do so. And yet to defy these warnings and 
 take the inevitable consequences of that defiance 
 may be your highest glory. Eeligion also gives 
 warnings; it assures you that the Eternal Moral 
 
64 Origin and Nature of [Lect. 
 
 Law is supreme ; that, sooner or later, those who 
 disobey will find their disobedience is exactly 
 and justly punished ; that no appearance to the 
 contrary presented by experience can be trusted. 
 But Keligion will not compel you to believe any 
 more than Science will compel you to obey. 
 Disbelieve if you choose and Religion will do 
 nothing but perpetually repeat its warnings and 
 add that your disbelief has lowered you in the 
 scale of being. So too Science gives promises ; 
 it promises, to the race rather than to the 
 individual, Hfe on easier conditions, and of 
 greater length ; fewer pains, fewer diseases ; 
 perpetually increasing comforts ; perpetually 
 increasing power over nature. And Science is 
 sure to keep the promises. And yet we may 
 refuse to accept the promises, and it is con- 
 ceivable that the refusal may be far nobler than 
 the acceptance. And Religion promises also. 
 It promises stainless purity in the soul ; and 
 truth and justice and unfailing love ; and tender- 
 ness to every creature that can feel ; and a 
 government of all that is under our dominion 
 with a single eye to the service of God. And 
 we may refuse to believe these promises or 
 
II.] Religious Belief. 65 
 
 to care whether they arc kept or not. But 
 the refusal or j)ursuit of such aims as these 
 determines our position in the judgment of 
 the Supreme and in the court of our own 
 conscience. 
 
 God has made man in His own image : that 
 is, He has given man power to understand His 
 works and to acknowledge Himself. And it is 
 in acknowledging God that man finds himself 
 divine. He is a partaker of the divine nature 
 in proportion as he recognises the Supreme Law 
 and makes it the law of his own will. And 
 therefore has his will been made free as well 
 as his mind rational : he has the power to choose 
 as well as the power to know. And our choice 
 lays hold on God Himself and makes us one 
 with Him. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN 
 SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FilEE-WILL. 
 
 Contradiction of Free-Will to cloctriuc of Uniformity. 
 Butler's examination of tlie question. Hume's solution. 
 Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examina- 
 tion of the facts. Interference of the will always poi-sihle, 
 but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed natuie for 
 our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life. 
 
 F 2 
 
LECTUEE III. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN 
 SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL. 
 
 * So God created man in His own image, in the image of 
 God created He him.' Genesis i. 27. 
 
 TJELIGION and Science both begin with 
 -*-*^ the human will. The will is to Science 
 the first example of power, the origin of the 
 conception of cause ; the bodily effort made by 
 the will lies at the root of the conception of 
 force. It is by comparing other forces with 
 that force that Science begins its march. And 
 the will is to religion the recipient of the 
 Divine command. To the will the inner voice 
 addresses itself, bidding it act and believe. It 
 is because we have a wiU that we are respon- 
 sible. In a world in which there were no 
 creatures endowed with a will, there could be 
 no right-doing or wrong-doing ; no approval 
 
70 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 by COD science and no disapproval ; no duty and 
 no faith. 
 
 Here is the first possibility of collision be- 
 tween Science and Eeligion. Science postulates 
 uniformity ; Religion postulates liberty. Science 
 cannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to 
 unity if a whole class of phenomena, all those 
 that belong to the action of human will, are to 
 be exchided from the postulate of invariable 
 sequence. The action of the will is in this 
 case for ever left outside. The evidence for 
 the absolute uniformity of nature seems to be 
 shaken, when it is found that there is so im- 
 portant a part of phenomena to which this law 
 of uniformity cannot be applied. If a human 
 will can thus interfere with the law of uni- 
 formity, there enters the possibility that behind 
 some phenomena may lurk the interference of 
 some other will. Eeligion, on the other hand, 
 tells every man that he is responsible, and how 
 can he be responsible if he is not free ? If his 
 action be determined by something which is 
 not himself, how can the moral burden of it be 
 put on him \ To tell a man that he is to 
 answer for it if he does something which he 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free -Will. 71 
 
 is tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he lias no 
 power to prevent himself from doing it. 
 
 But this is not all. For besides the sense 
 of responsibility we have a direct consciousness 
 of being free, a consciousness which no reason- 
 ing appears to extinguish. We sharply dis- 
 tino'uish between that which o-oes on within us 
 
 o o 
 
 in re2;ard to which we are free and that in 
 regard to which we are not free. We cannot 
 help being angry, but we can control our anger. 
 We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain 
 our indulgence or our pursuit of them. We 
 cannot directly determine our affections, but we 
 can cherish or discourage them. There are 
 extreme cases in which our wills seem power- 
 less, but even here we are conscious of our 
 power to straggle for self-assertion and self- 
 control. There is very much in us which is 
 not free ; nay, there is much in us which impels 
 us to action which is not free. But we never 
 confound this with our wills, and when our 
 wills are overpowered by passion or appetite, 
 we call the act no longer a perfectly free act, 
 and do not consider the responsibility for it to 
 be quite the same. 
 
72 Apparent Conflict betiueen [Lect. 
 
 This question of the freedom of the will was 
 considered by Bishop Butler in the Analogy. 
 He contented himself with proving that, make 
 what theory we would concerning the necessity 
 of human action, all men in practice acted on 
 the theory of human freedom. We promise ; 
 we accept promises ; we punish ; we reward ; 
 we estimate character ; we admire ; we shun ; 
 we deal with ourselves ; we deal with others ; 
 as if we and all others were free. And this was 
 enough for his purpose. For he had to reconcile 
 a Divine system of rewards and punishments 
 with our sense of justice. And if he could 
 show, as he did, that rewards and punishments 
 were plainly not inconsistent with that sense 
 of justice in our dealings with one another, it 
 was impossible to call them inconsistent with 
 that sense of justice in God's deahngs with us. 
 
 But the purpose of these Lectures requires 
 something more, and that for two reasons. For, 
 in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was 
 most often in Bishop Butler's days derived from 
 a conception of a Divine foreknowledge arrang- 
 ing everything by supreme Will, not from the 
 conception of a blind mechanical rule holding 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 73 
 
 all in its unrelaxing grasp. And though to the 
 cold reason it may make no difference how the 
 will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the 
 two kinds of compulsion differ as life and death. 
 To have no liberty because of being absolutely 
 in the hands of Almighty God is quite another 
 thing from having no liberty, as being under 
 the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems 
 possible to accept the one and call it an un- 
 fathomable mystery; but to accept the other 
 is to call life a delusion and the moral law a 
 dream. And in the second place, the doctrine 
 of necessity advanced as a theory and based on 
 arguments not resting on facts, is a very dif- 
 ferent antagonist from the same doctrine ad- 
 vanced as a conclusion of science, and as 
 deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observa- 
 tions. We may dismiss the mere theory after 
 showing that it has not substance enough to 
 hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so 
 treat what claims to be a scientific inference. 
 
 The modern examination of the question 
 beo-ins with Hume, who maintains that the 
 doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are 
 both true and of course compatible with each 
 
74 Apparent Conflict detwee?i [Lect. 
 
 other. But his arguments touch only the broad 
 question whether they are true for practical 
 purposes, not whether either is true in the 
 strict sense and without exception or modifi- 
 cation. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it 
 was essential that both doctrines should be true 
 in the strictest sense. Holding that invariable 
 sequence was a law of Nature known indepen- 
 dently of experience and applicable to all phe- 
 nomena in the minutest detail, he could not 
 allow that any act of the human will lay out- 
 side the range of this law. Such an act being 
 a phenomenon must, in his view, be subject to 
 the law which the constitution of our minds 
 imposed on all phenomena apparent to us. And 
 yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternal 
 Moral Law made us responsible for all our acts, 
 he could not but maintain that in the doing 
 of those acts we must be free. His mode of 
 reconciling the two opposites amounted to this, 
 that our action throughout life considered as 
 a whole is free, but that each separate act 
 considered by itself is bound to the preceding 
 acts by the law of invariable sequence. We 
 may illustrate this by the familiar instance of 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 75 
 
 a prism acting on a ray of light. Tlie ray has 
 or may have a colour of its own before it passes 
 through the prism. Tlie prism spreads it out 
 and shows a series of colours. The order in 
 which this series is arranged is determined by 
 the character of the prism acting on the nature 
 of the ray. The colours when combined give the 
 colour of the ray; when separated by the prism 
 each has its own distinct character, and the order 
 of the colours is determined, and invariably deter- 
 mined, by the prism. So too in Kant's view the 
 character of a man in itself may be free, but 
 when it passes through the prism of time into 
 the world of phenomena and is spread over 
 many years it shows a number of separate 
 actions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits 
 the man, though all put together are the true 
 representation of him to human perception. 
 The man is free. His life represents his free 
 choice. But his separate acts are what that 
 free choice becomes when translated into a 
 series of phenomena, and are bound each to 
 the preceding by the law of invariable sequence. 
 It is plain at once that this does not satisfy 
 our consciousness. We are not conscious of 
 
76 Apparent Confiict between [Lect. 
 
 freedom as regards our life as a whole ; we are 
 conscious of freedom as regards our separate 
 actions. Our life as a whole embraces our past 
 which is absolutely unchangeable, and our 
 future which is not yet within our reach ; we 
 are conscious of no present power over either. 
 Our separate acts are perceptibly subject to our 
 own control ; nay, it is by the use of our free- 
 will in our separate acts that we are able to 
 change the character of our life or to preserve 
 it from change ; and with this corresponds our 
 responsibility. We hold ourselves responsible 
 for each act as it is done ; we hold ourselves 
 responsible for the character of our lives only so 
 far as we might have changed it by our acts. 
 The solution leaves the difficulty where it was. 
 
 It is now customary with the advocates of 
 the doctrine of necessity to express it by a dif- 
 ferent word, and call it the doctrine of deter- 
 minism. The purpose of changing the word 
 is to get rid of all associations with the idea 
 of compulsion ; just so in Science it is thought 
 better to get rid of the words cause and effect, 
 and substitute invariable sequence, in order to 
 get rid of the notion of some compulsion recogn 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 77 
 
 nisable by us in the cause to produce the effect. 
 Determinism does not say to a man * you will 
 be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you 
 will assuredly do so.' There will be no com- 
 pulsion ; but the action is absolutely certain. 
 Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse 
 the sun, so in given circumstances you will 
 do the precise thing which it is your character 
 in such circumstances to do. And your sense 
 of freedom is simply the sense that the action 
 proceeds from yourself and not from any force 
 put upon you from without. 
 
 But this too does not solve the problem. It 
 is true that in regard to a very large proportion 
 of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be 
 no more than negative. We do what it is our 
 custom, our inclination, our character to do. 
 We are not conscious of any force being put 
 upon us ; but neither are we conscious of using 
 any force ourselves. We float as it were down 
 the stream, or hurry along with a determined 
 aim, but having no desire nor purpose to the 
 contrary, the question of freedom or necessity 
 never seems to arise. It is even possible and 
 common for us not to know ourselves as well 
 
"jS Apparent Conjiict between [Lect. 
 
 as others know us, and to do many things 
 which an observer would predict as sure to be 
 our actions, but which we ourselves fancy to 
 be by no means certain. Even in tliese cases 
 we sometimes awake to the fact that what we 
 are thus allowing in our lives is not consistent 
 with the law of duty, and, do what we may, 
 we cannot then escape the conviction that we 
 are to blame, and that we had power to act 
 otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the 
 power. But it is when a conflict arises be- 
 tween duty and inclination that our inner cer- 
 tainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear 
 and unconquerable. In the great conflicts of 
 the soul between the call of duty and the 
 power of temptation there are two forces at 
 work upon us. We are never for a moment 
 in doubt which is ourselves and which is not 
 ourselves ; which is the free agent and which 
 is the blind force ; which is responsible for the 
 issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. 
 There is in this case a real sense of compulsion 
 from without, and a real sense of resistance to 
 that compulsion from within. It is impossible 
 in this case to account for the sense of being a 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 79 
 
 free agent, by saying that this merely means 
 that we are conscious of no external force. We 
 are conscious of an external force and we are 
 conscious that this will of ours which struggles 
 against it is not an external force, but our very 
 selves, and this distinction between the will 
 and the forces against which the will is striv- 
 ing is ineffaceable from our minds. That the 
 will is often weak and on that account over- 
 powered, and that after a hard struggle our 
 actions are often determined, not by our wills 
 but by our passions or our appetites, is unques- 
 tionable. Often has the beUever to pray to God 
 for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and 
 often will he feel that without that strength 
 he must inevitably fall. But he knows that 
 whatever source may supply the strength, it is 
 he that will have to use it, and he that will be 
 responsible for using it or neglecting to do so. 
 
 The advocates of determinism urge that every 
 action must have a motive, and that the man 
 always acts on that motive which is the stronger. 
 The first proposition may be granted at once. 
 The freedom of the will is certainly not shown 
 iu acting without any motive at all. If there 
 
8o Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 be any human action which appears to be with- 
 out any motive, it is not in such action that we 
 find human freedom. Such action, if possible at 
 all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who 
 is acting from mere caprice is even more com- 
 pletely at the mercy of passing inchnation than 
 one who is acting from passion or from over- 
 powering temptation. The freedom of the will 
 is not shown in acting without motive, but in 
 choosing between motives. But when it is 
 further said that a man always acts from the 
 stronger motive, the question immediately fol- 
 lows, what determines which is the stronger 
 motive ? It cannot be anything in the motives 
 themselves, or all men would act alike in the 
 same circumstances ; and it is clear that they do 
 not. It must be therefore something in the 
 man. And if it be something in the man, it 
 must be either his will acting at the moment, 
 which in that case is free, or his character. But 
 if it be his character, then follows the further 
 question, what determines his character ? If we 
 are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we 
 must answer by assigning the determination to 
 the sum total of surrounding and preceding 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 81 
 
 circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of 
 uniformity but this ; that, given such and such 
 parents, such and such circumstances of birth 
 and life, there must be such a character and no 
 other. At what point is there room in this case 
 for any responsibility % I did not on this sup- 
 position make my character; it was made for 
 me ; any one else born in my stead, and living 
 in my stead, would of necessity have acted 
 exactly as I have done; would have felt the 
 same, and aimed at the same, and won the same 
 moral victories, and suffered the same moral 
 defeats. How can I be held responsible for what 
 is the pure result of the circumstances in which 
 I was born ? But if, on the other hand, it be 
 said that our character is not the mere fruit of 
 our antecedents and surroundings, the law of 
 uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has 
 come into the world, namely, my character, 
 which has not come out of the antecedents and 
 surroundings according to any fixed law. The 
 antecedents and surroundings might have been 
 quite the same for any one else, and yet I should 
 have my character and he his, and our lives 
 would have altogether differed. 
 
 G 
 
82 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 It is clear that determinism does not get us 
 out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to 
 the necessary truths of mathematics, and in re- 
 gard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the 
 theory has purchased completeness by the cheap 
 expedient of calling one of the facts to be ac- 
 counted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot 
 be accepted. In spite of all attempts to explain 
 it away, the fact that we think ourselves free 
 and hold ourselves responsible remains, and 
 remains unaffected. 
 
 But let us examine how far the difference be- 
 tween the scientific view and the religious view 
 of human action extends. 
 
 Observation certainly shows that a very large 
 proportion of human action, much even of that 
 which appears at first sight to be more especially 
 independent of all law, is really as much regu- 
 lated by laws of nature as the movements of the 
 planets. I have already pointed out how often 
 an observer can predict a man's actions better 
 than the man himself, and how often the will is 
 certainly passive and consents instead of acting. 
 In these cases there is no reason whatever to 
 deny that nature and not the will is producing 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 83 
 
 the conduct. And not only so, but that wliich 
 seems most irregular, the kind of action that we 
 call caprice, there is very often just as little 
 reason to call free, as to assign free-will as the 
 cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But 
 it is not in observing individuals so much as in 
 observing masses of men that we get convincing 
 proof that men possess a common nature, and 
 that their conduct is largely regulated by the 
 laws of that nature. That amongst a given 
 large number of men living on the whole in the 
 same conditions from year to year, there should 
 be every year a given number of suicides, of 
 murderers, of thieves and criminals of various 
 kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way 
 than by the hypothesis that like circumstances 
 will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way 
 only can we account for such a fact as the 
 steadiness in the projjortion of men who enter 
 any given profession, of men who quit their 
 country for another, of men who remain un- 
 married all their lives, of men who enter a 
 university, of men who make any particular 
 choice (such as these) which can be tested by 
 figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable 
 
 G 2 
 
84 Apparent Cofiflict between [Lect. 
 
 as far as it goes ; but it succeeds, like all the 
 other arguments for the uniformity of nature, in 
 establishing the generality, and not at all the 
 universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls 
 far short of proving as much uniformity in 
 human action as is proved in the action of in- 
 animate things. The induction which proves 
 the uniformity of the laws of mechanics, of 
 chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the 
 induction which proves the uniformity of human 
 conduct, that it is hardly possible to put the 
 two side by side. When we turn from abstract 
 arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is 
 unquestionably unproven. 
 
 And this agrees with the result of a careful 
 examination of the facts of human consciousness 
 from the opposite point of view. We cannot but 
 acknowledge that when we look very closely we 
 find a very large proportion of our own actions 
 to be by no means the result of an interference 
 by the will. A large proportion is due to 
 custom ; a large proportion to inclination, of 
 which the will takes no special notice, and is not 
 called on by the conscience to notice ; a large 
 proportion to inclinations which we know that 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 85 
 
 we ought to resist, but we do not resist ; a much 
 smaller proportion, but still some, to passions 
 and appetites against which we have striven in 
 vain ; only a very small proportion to deliberate 
 choice. There is, in fact, no irresistible reason 
 for claiming freedom for human action except 
 when that action turns on the question of right 
 or wrong. There is no reason to call action free 
 that flows from inclination or custom, or passion, 
 or a desire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain 
 pleasure. The will claims to be free in all these 
 cases, but it is free in the sense that it might be 
 exerted ; and so, since it is not exerted, the 
 action is not free. But when, at the call of duty, 
 in whatever form, the will directly interferes, 
 then and then only are we conscious not only 
 that the will is free, but that it has asserted its 
 freedom, and that the action has been free also. 
 
 The relation of the will to the conduct falls, 
 under four distinct heads : for sometimes the 
 will simply concurs with the inchnation ; some- 
 times it neither concurs nor opposes ; sometimes 
 it opposes but is overpowered ; sometimes it 
 opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclina- 
 tion of some kind or other prompts tlie man to 
 
86 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 action. The inclination, whether set up by an 
 external object of desire or by an internal im- 
 pulse of restlessness or blind craving or the like, 
 comes clearly from the nature, and is not free 
 choice. There is no reason to believe that it is 
 not in most cases, possibly in all cases, under 
 the dominion of fixed law. It may be as com- 
 pletely the product of what has preceded it as 
 the eclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs 
 in the inclination, it is needless to discuss the 
 question whether the will acts or not. The con- 
 duct is the same whether the will adds force to 
 the inclination or is simply passive. The freedom 
 of the will may in this case be considered as 
 negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will 
 be considered negative in the second case, which 
 is that of the will neither concurring with incli- 
 nation nor opposing it. In this case there may 
 be a distinct consciousness of freedom in the form 
 of a sense of responsibility for what inclination 
 is permitted to do. A man in this case knows 
 that he is free, perhaps knows that he ought to 
 interfere and control the conduct. But as he 
 does not interfere, the freedom of the will is not 
 asserted in act. And it is possible that, as far 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 87 
 
 as all external phenomena are concerned, there 
 may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. 
 This, however, can hardly be in the third case, 
 which is when the will and the inclination are 
 opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although 
 the inclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is 
 an event of the most important kind, and is 
 sure to leave traces on the character, and to be 
 followed by consequences. In this case we are 
 distinctly conscious of a power to add force to 
 that one of the contending opposites which is 
 most identified with our very selves, and we 
 know whether we have added that force or not. 
 And not only may we add this force directly 
 from within ; we may and we often do go out- 
 side of ourselves to seek for aids to add still 
 more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose 
 what we should not do otherwise. We dwell m 
 thought on the higher aims which are the proper 
 object of will ; we read what sets forth those 
 higher aims in their full beauty; we seek the 
 words, the company, the sympathy of men who 
 will, we are sure, encourage us in this the 
 higher path. Aud, on the other hand, we turn 
 away from the temptation which gives strength 
 
88 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 to the evil inclination, and if we cannot escape 
 from its presence we endeavour to drive the 
 thought of it from our minds. All this action 
 is not for the sake of anything thus done, but 
 for the sake of its indirect effect on the struggle 
 in which we are engaged. Whenever there is 
 a struggle, we are not only conscious that the 
 will is free, but that it is asserting its freedom. 
 Tn these struggles there is not a mere contest 
 between two inclinations. We are distinctly 
 conscious that one of the combatants is our very 
 selves in a sense in which the other is not. But, 
 nevertheless, when all has been said, it still re- 
 mains in this case that the will is beaten and 
 inclination prevails, and the conduct in the main 
 is determined by the inclination, which is under 
 the dominion of the law of uniformity, and not 
 by the will, which claims to be free. The fourth 
 case in which the will prevails may, of course, 
 make a momentous breach in the uniformity of 
 sequence of the conduct. But in far the largest 
 number of cases the struggle is very slight, and 
 the difference between the will and the inclination 
 is not, taken alone, of grave importance in the 
 life. And in those instances in which the struggle 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free- Will. 89 
 
 is severe and the resulting change is great, 
 it is very often the case that the way has been 
 prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet ac- 
 cumulation of hidden forces of the strictly 
 natural order ready to burst forth when the fit 
 opportunity came. In the great conversions 
 which have sometimes seemed by their sudden- 
 ness and completeness to defy all possibility of 
 reduction to natural law, there are often never- 
 theless tokens of deep dissatisfaction with the 
 previous life having swelled up slowly within 
 the soul for some time, even for some long time 
 beforehand. The inclination to go on in evil 
 courses has been broken down at last, not 
 merely by the action of the will, but by the 
 working of the machinery of the soul. 
 
 To this it must be added that the action of 
 the will is such that it very often happens 
 that, having been exerted once, it need not be 
 exerted again for the same purpose. A custom 
 is broken down, an exceedingly strong tempt- 
 ation has been overpowered, and its strength 
 so destroyed that its return is without effect. 
 Or sometimes the act of the will takes the 
 form of deliberately so arranging the circum- 
 
90 Apparent Conjiict betzueen [Lect. 
 
 stances of life tliat a dreaded temptation cannot 
 return, or if it return cannot prevail ; the right 
 eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut 
 off, and the sin cannot be committed even if 
 desired. While therefore the will is always 
 free, the actual interference of the will with 
 the life is not so frequent as to interfere with 
 the broad general rule that the course of human 
 conduct is practically uniform. In fact the 
 will, though always free, only asserts its free- 
 dom by obeying duty in spite of inclination, 
 by disregarding the uniformity of nature in 
 order to maintain the higher uniformity of the 
 Moral Law. The freedom of the human will 
 is but the assertion in particular of that uni- 
 versal supremacy of the moral over the physical 
 in the last resort, which is an essential part of 
 the very essence of the Moral Law. The free- 
 dom of the will is the Moral Law breaking 
 into the world of jDhenomena, and thus behind 
 the free-will of man stands the power of God. 
 
 When the real claim of the will for freedom 
 has been clearly seized by the mind, it becomes 
 apparent that there is no real collision between 
 what Science asserts and what Keligion requires 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 91 
 
 us to believe. Science asserts that there is 
 evidence to show that an exceedingly large pro- 
 portion of human action is governed by fixed 
 law. Eeligion requires us to believe that the 
 will is responsible for all this action, not be- 
 cause it does, but because it might interfere. 
 Science is not able, and from the nature of the 
 case never will be able to prove that the range 
 of this fixed law is universal, and that the will 
 never does interfere to vary the actions from 
 what without the will they would have been. 
 Science will never be able to prove this, because 
 it could not be proved except by a universal 
 induction, and a universal induction is impos- 
 sible. At present there is no approximation to 
 such proof Religion, on the other hand, does 
 not call on us to believe that the will often 
 interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually 
 telling us that it does not interfere as often as 
 it ought. Revealed religion, indeed, has always 
 based its most earnest exhortations on the re- 
 luctance of man to set his will to the difficult 
 task of contending with the forces of his nature, 
 and on the w^eakness of the will in the presence 
 of those forces. 
 
92 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 And when we pursue this thought further we 
 see that for such creatures as we are the sub- 
 jection of a large part of our own nature to 
 fixed laws is as necessary for our dominion over 
 ourselves as the fixity of external nature is 
 necessary for our dominion over the world 
 around us. The fixity of a large part of our 
 nature — nay, of all but the whole of it — is a 
 moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires 
 but a superficial self-examination to discern the 
 indications of what the profoundest research 
 still leaves a mystery — that we are not perfect 
 creatures of our own kind — that our nature 
 does not spontaneously conform to the Supreme 
 Moial Law — that our highest and best consists 
 not in complete obedience to which we cannot 
 attain, but in a perpetual upward struggle. 
 Now such a struggle demands for its indispens- 
 able condition something fixed in our nature 
 by which each step upwards shall be made 
 good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing 
 for the next ascent. If there were nothing in 
 us fixed and firm, if the warfare with evil 
 impulses, wayward affections, overmastering 
 appetites had to be carried on through life 
 
III.] Science and Religion on Free-Will. 93 
 
 without the possibility of making any victory 
 complete, the formation of a perpetually higher 
 and nobler character would be impossible ; our 
 main hope in this Kfe, our best offering to God 
 would be taken away from us ; we could never 
 give our bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy, 
 acceptable to God ; we could give our separate 
 acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly 
 unable to form ourselves into fitness for such 
 a purpose. The task given to the will is not 
 only to govern the actions but to discipline the 
 nature ; but discipline is impossible where there 
 is no fixity in the thing to be disciplined. 
 
 And this becomes still more important when 
 we search more deeply and perceive that not 
 the nature only but the will itself is in some 
 strange way infected with evil. We can hardly 
 imagine even a perfectly pure will capable of 
 continuing to the end a conflict in which no 
 progress ever was or could be made. The tre- 
 mendous strain of fighting with an enemy that 
 might be defeated again and again for ever 
 without ever suffering any change or relaxing 
 the violence of any attack or giving the slightest 
 hope of any relief, would seem too much for 
 
94 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 the most unearthly, the most noble, the most 
 godlike of human wills. But wills such as 
 ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with 
 treachery to their own best aspirations, how 
 utterly impossible that they could persevere 
 through such a hopeless conflict. 
 
 It is the sustaining hope of the Christian 
 that he shall be changed from glory to glory 
 into the image or likeness of His Lord, and 
 that when all is over for this life he shall be 
 indeed hke Him and see Him as He is. But 
 that hope is never presented as one to be 
 realized by some sudden stroke fashioning the 
 soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenly 
 lineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees 
 that the Christian believes that he shall be 
 thus blessed. And this progress rests on the 
 fixed rules by which his nature is governed, 
 and which admit of the character being gradually 
 changed by the life. The Christian knows that 
 God has so made us that a temptation once 
 overcome is permanently weakened, and often 
 overcome is at last altogether expelled ; that 
 appetites restrained are in the end subdued and 
 cost but little effort to keep down ; that bad 
 
III.] Science and Religio7i on Free-Will. 95 
 
 thoughts perpetually put aside at last return 
 no more ; that a clearer perception of duty and 
 a more resolute obedience to its call makes duty 
 itself more attractive, fills iis with enthusiasm 
 for its fulfilment, draws us as it were upwards, 
 and ennobles the whole man. The Christian 
 knows that the thought of the Supreme Being, 
 the contemplation of His excellency, the recog- 
 nition of Him as the source of spiritual life 
 has a strange power to transform, and ever- 
 more to transform the whole man. In this 
 knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights 
 his battle. And what is this but a knowledge 
 that he has a nature subject to fixed laws, 
 which he can indeed interfere with, but without 
 which his self-discipline would be of little 
 value, and assuredly could not long continue. 
 
 And if the progress of Science and the ex- 
 amination of human nature should eventually 
 restrict more closely than we might have sup- 
 posed the length to which the interference of 
 the will can go ; if it should appear that the 
 changes which we can make at any one moment 
 ill ourselves are within a very narrow range, 
 this, too, will be knowledge that can be used 
 
96 Apparent Conflict, &c. 
 
 in our self-discii^line and quite as much perhaps 
 in our mutual moral aid. It is conceivable that 
 the branch of science which treats of human 
 nature may in the end profoundly modify our 
 modes of education, and our hopes of what can 
 be effected by it. But if so the knowledge 
 will only add to the store of means put within 
 our reach for the elevation of our race. And we 
 may be sure that nothing of this sort will really 
 affect the revelation that God has written in 
 our souls that we are free and responsible 
 beings, and cannot get quit of our respon- 
 sibility. 
 
LECTURE lY. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN 
 RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great develop- 
 ment in recent times. Objection felt by many religious 
 men. Alleged to destroy argument from design. Paley'a 
 argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force to 
 the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument 
 from progress ; from beauty ; from unity. The conflict not 
 real. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN 
 RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 * For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the 
 world are clearly seen, being understood by the things 
 that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.' 
 Romans i. 20. 
 
 npHE regularity of nature is the first postu- 
 -*- late of Science ; but it requires the very 
 slightest observation to show us that, along 
 with tliis regularity, there exists a vast irregu- 
 larity which Science can only deal with by 
 exclusion from its province. The world as we 
 see it is full of changes ; and these changes 
 when patiently and perseveringly examined are 
 found to be subject to invariable or almost m- 
 variable laws. But the things themselves which 
 thus change are as multifarious as the changes 
 which they undergo. They vary infinitely in 
 quantity, in qualities, in arrangement through- 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 out space, possibly in arrangement throughout 
 time. Take a single substance such, saj, as 
 gold. How much gold there is in the whole 
 universe, and where it is situated, we not only 
 have no knowledge, but can hardly be said to be 
 on the way to have knowledge. Why its qualities 
 are what they are, and why it alone possesses 
 all these qualities ; how long it has existed, 
 and how long it will continue to exist, these 
 questions we are unable to answer. The exist- 
 ence of the many forms of matter, the properties 
 of each form, the distribution of each : all this 
 Science must in the last resort assume. 
 
 But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, 
 and Science soon makes it evident that it is true, 
 that some forms of matter grow out of other 
 forms. There are endless combinations. And 
 the growth of new out of old forms is of ne- 
 cessity a sequence, and falls under the law of 
 invariability of sequences, and becomes the 
 subject-matter of Science. As in each separate 
 case Science asserts each event of to-day to have 
 followed by a law of invariable sequence on the 
 events of yesterday; the earth has reached the 
 precise point in its orbit now which was deter- 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. loi 
 
 mined by the law of gravitation as applied to 
 its motion at the point which it reached a 
 moment ago ; the weather of the present hour 
 has come by meteorological laws out of the 
 weather of the last hour ; the crops and the 
 flocks now found on the surface of the habitable 
 earth are the necessary outcome of preceding 
 harvests and preceding flocks and of all that 
 has been done to maintain and increase them ; 
 so, too, if we look at the universe as a whole, 
 the present condition of that whole is, if the 
 scientific postulate of invariable sequence be 
 admitted, and in as far as it is admitted, the 
 necessary outcome of its former condition ; and 
 all the various forms of matter, whether living 
 or inanimate, must for the same reason and 
 with the same limitation be the necessary out- 
 come of preceding forms of matter. This is the 
 foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. 
 
 Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine 
 will be, and indeed if Science be admitted at all 
 must be, accepted by everybody. Even the 
 Eoman Church, which holds that God is per- 
 petually interfering with the course of nature, 
 either in the interests of religious truth or out 
 
I02 Appai'-ent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 of lovingkindness to His creatures, yet will 
 acknowledge that the number of such inter- 
 ferences almost disappears in comparison of the 
 countless millions of instances in which there 
 is no reason to believe in any interference at 
 all. And if we look at the universe as a whole, 
 the general proposition as stated above is quite 
 unaffected by the infinitesimal exception which 
 is to be made by a believer in frequent 
 miracles. But when this proposition is appHed 
 in detail it at once introduces the possibility 
 of an entirely new history of the material uni- 
 verse. For this universe as we see it is almost 
 entirely made up of composite and not of simple 
 substances. We have been able to analyse all 
 the substances that we know into a compara- 
 tively small number of simple elements — some 
 usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But 
 these simple elements are rarely found uncom- 
 bined with others; most of those which we 
 meet with in a pure state have been taken 
 out of combination and reduced to simplicity 
 by human agency. The various metals that 
 we ordinarily use are mostly found in a state 
 of ore, and we do not generally obtain them 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 103 
 
 pure except by smelting. The air we breathe, 
 though not a compound, is a mixture. The 
 water which is essential to our life is a com- 
 pound. And, if we pass from inorganic to 
 organic substances, all vegetables and animals 
 are compound, sustained by various articles of 
 food which go to make up their frames. Now, 
 how have these compounds been formed ? It 
 is quite possible that some of them, or all of 
 them to some extent, may have been formed 
 from the first. If Science could go back to 
 the beginning of all things, whicli it obviously 
 cannot, it might find the composition already 
 accomplished, and be compelled to start with 
 it as a given fact — a fact as incapable of scien- 
 tific explanation as the existence of matter at 
 all. But, on the other hand, composition and 
 decomposition is a matter of every- day ex- 
 perience. Our very food could not nourish us 
 except by passing through these processes in 
 our bodies ; and by the same processes we 
 prepare much of our food before consuming it. 
 May not Science go back to the time when 
 these processes had not yet begun? May not 
 the starting-point of the history of the uni- 
 
I04 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 verse be a condition in which the simple ele- 
 ments were still uncombined \ If Science could 
 go back to the beginning of all things, might 
 we not find all the elements of material things 
 ready indeed for the action of the inherent 
 forces which would presently unite them 
 in an infinite variety of combinations, but as 
 yet still separate from each other? Scattered 
 through enormous regions of space, but drawn 
 together by the force of gravitation ; their 
 original heat, whatever it may have been, in- 
 creased by their mutual collision ; made to 
 act chemically on one another by such increase 
 or by subsequent decrease of temperature ; 
 perpetually approaching nearer to the forms 
 into which, by the incessant action of the same 
 forces, the present universe has grown ; these 
 elements, and the working of the several 
 laws of their own proper nature, may be 
 enough to account scientifically for all the 
 phenomena that we observe. We do not even 
 then get back to regularity. Why these ele- 
 ments, and no others ; why in these precise 
 quantities ; why so distributed in space ; why 
 endowed with these properties : still are ques- 
 
IV.] Religion and tJie Doctrine of Evohition. 105 
 
 tious which Science cannot answer, and there 
 seems no reason to expect that any scientific 
 answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know 
 not whether it may not be asserted that the 
 impossibility of answering one at least among 
 these questions is capable of demonstration. 
 For the whole system of things, as far as we 
 know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the 
 heavenly bodies ; and without original irregu- 
 larity in the distribution of matter no motion 
 of rotation could ever have spontaneously arisen. 
 And if this irregularity be thus original, Science 
 can give no account of it. Science, therefore, 
 will have to begin with assuming certain facts 
 for which it can never hope to account. But 
 it mmj begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, 
 the universe was always very much what we 
 see it now, and that composition and decom- 
 position have always nearly balanced each other, 
 and that there have been from the beginning 
 the same sun and moon and planets and stars 
 in the sky, the same animals on the earth and 
 in the seas, the same vegetation, the same 
 minerals; and that though there have been 
 incessant changes, and possibly all these changes 
 
io6 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 in one general direction, yet these changes have 
 never amounted to what would furnish a scien- 
 tific explanation of the forms which matter has 
 assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science maij 
 assert the jDOSsibility of going back to a far 
 earlier condition of our material system ; may 
 assert that all the forms of matter have grown 
 up under the action of laws and forces still at 
 w^ork ; may take as the initial state of our 
 universe one or many enormous clouds of 
 gaseous matter, and endeavour to trace with 
 more or less exactness how these gradually 
 formed themselves into what we see. Science 
 has lately leaned to the latter alternative. To 
 a believer the alternative may be stated thus : 
 We all distinguish between the original cre- 
 ation of tlie material world and the history of 
 it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, 
 been accustomed to assign to the original cre- 
 ation a great deal that Science is now disposed 
 to assign to the history. But the distinction 
 between the original creation and the sub- 
 sequent history would still remain, and for 
 ever remain, although the portion assigned to 
 the one may be less, and that assigned to the 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution, loj 
 
 other larger, than was formerly supposed. 
 However far back Science may be able to push 
 its beginning, there still must lie behind that 
 beginning the original act of creation — creation 
 not of matter only, but of the various kinds 
 of matter, and of the laws governing all and 
 each of those kinds, and of the distribution of 
 this matter in space. 
 
 This apphcation of the abstract doctrine of 
 Evolution gives it an enormous and startling 
 expansion : so enormous and so startling that 
 the doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To 
 say that the present grows by regular law out 
 of the past is one thing ; to say that it has 
 grown out of a distant past in which as yet 
 the present forms of life upon the earth, the 
 present vegetation, the seas and islands and 
 continents, the very planet itself, the sun and 
 moon, were not yet made — and all this also 
 by regular law — that is quite another thing. 
 And the bearings of this new apphcation of 
 Science deserve study. 
 
 Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine 
 of Evolution is in no sense whatever antago- 
 nistic to the teachings of Religion, though it 
 
io8 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 may be, and that we shall have to consider 
 afterwards, to the teachings of revelation. Why 
 then should religious men independently of its 
 relation to revelation shrink from it, as very 
 many unquestionably do 1 The reason is that, 
 whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the 
 existence and supremacy of God exactly where 
 it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut away, 
 some of the main arguments for that truth. 
 
 Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we 
 have been accustomed to prove or to corroborate 
 the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain 
 that, to take these arguments away or to make it 
 impossible to use them, is not to disprove or take 
 away the truth itself. We find every day in- 
 stances of men resting their faith in a truth on 
 some grounds which we know to be untenable, and 
 we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when 
 they find out that this is so, and know not as 
 yet on what other ground they are to take 
 their stand. And some men succumb in the 
 trial and lose their faith together with the 
 argument which has hitherto supported it. But 
 the truth still stands in spite of the failure of 
 some to keep their belief in it, and in spite of 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 109 
 
 the impossibility of supporting it by the old 
 arguments. 
 
 And when men have become accustomed to 
 rest their beUef on new grounds the loss of the 
 old arguments is never found to be a very serious 
 matter. Belief in revelation has been shaken 
 again and again by this very increase of know- 
 ledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow 
 to many in the days of Galileo to find that the 
 language of the Bible in regard to the movement 
 of the earth and sun was not scientifically 
 correct. It was a dreadful blow to many in the 
 days of the Reformation to find that they had 
 been misled by what they believed to be an in- 
 fallible Church. 
 
 Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's 
 moral and spiritual convictions, and they often 
 refuse altogether to hold what they can no longer 
 estabhsh by the arguments which have hitherto 
 been to them the decisive, perhaps the sole 
 decisive, proofs. 
 
 And yet in spite of these shocks beUef in 
 revelation is strong still in men's souls, and is 
 clearly not yet going to quit the world. 
 
 But let us go on to consider how far it is true 
 
1 1 o Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 that the arguments which have hitherto been 
 regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme 
 Creator are really affected very gravely by this 
 doctrine of Evolution. 
 
 The main argument, which at first appears to 
 be thus set aside, is that which is founded on the 
 marks of design, and which is worked out in his 
 own way with marvellous skill by Paley in his 
 Natural Theology. Paley 's argument rests as is 
 well known on the evidence of design in created 
 things, and these evidences he chiefly finds in the 
 frame-work of organised living creatures. He 
 traces with much most interesting detail the 
 many marvellous contrivances by which animals 
 of various kinds are adapted to the circumstances 
 in which they are to live, the mechanism which 
 enables them to obtain their food, to preserve 
 their species, to escape their enemies, to remove 
 discomforts. All nature thus examined, and 
 particularly all animated nature, seems full of 
 means towards ends, and those ends invariably 
 such as a beneficent Creator might well be 
 supposed to have in view. And whilst there is 
 undeniably one great objection to his whole 
 argument, namely that the Creator is represented 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 1 1 
 
 as an Artificer rather than a Creator, as over- 
 coming difficulties which stood in His way rather 
 than as an Ahnighty Being fashioning things 
 according to His Will, yet the argument thus 
 drawn from evidence of design remains exceed- 
 ingly powerful, and it has always been considered 
 a strong corroboration of the voice within whicli 
 bids us believe in a God. Now it certainly seems 
 at first as if this arojuraent were altogether de- 
 stroyed. If animals were not made as we see 
 them, but evolved by natural law, still more if it 
 appear that their wonderful adaptation to their 
 surroundings is due to the influence of those sur- 
 roundings, it might seem as if we could no 
 longer speak of design as exhibited in their 
 various organs ; the organs we might say grow 
 of themselves, some suitable, and some unsuit- 
 able to the life of the creatures to which they 
 belonged, and the unsuitable have perished and 
 the suitable have survived. 
 
 But Paley has supplied the clue to the answer. 
 In his well-known illustration of the watch 
 picked up on the heath by tlie passing traveller, 
 he points out that the evidence of design is 
 certainly not lessened if it be found that the 
 
112 Apparent Conjlict behveen [Lect. 
 
 watcli was so constructed that, in course of time, 
 it produced another watch like itself. He was 
 thinking not of Evolution, but of the ordinary 
 production of each generation of animals from 
 the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a 
 step further, and we may with equal justice re- 
 mark that we should certainly not believe it a 
 proof that the watch had come into existence 
 without design if we found that it produced in 
 course of time not merely another watch but 
 a better. It would become more marvellous 
 than ever if we found provision thus made not 
 merely for the continuance of the species but for 
 the perpetual improvement of the species. It 
 is essential to animal life that the animal should 
 be adapted to its circumstances ; if besides pro- 
 vision for such adaptation in each generation we 
 find provision for still better adaptation in future 
 generations, how can it be said that the evidences 
 of design are diminished \ Or take any separate 
 organ, such as the eye. It is impossible not to 
 believe until it be disproved that the eye was 
 intended to see with. We cannot say that light 
 was made for the eye, because light subserves 
 many other purposes besides that of enabling 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution, i i 3 
 
 eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for 
 light there is so strong a presumption that it 
 cannot easily be rebutted. If indeed it could be 
 shown that eyes fulfilled several other functions, 
 or that species of animals which always lived in 
 the dark still had fully -formed eyes, then we 
 might say that the connexion between the eye 
 of an animal and the light of heaven was acci- 
 dental. But the contrary is notoriously the case ; 
 so much the case that some philosophers have 
 maintained that the eye was formed by the need 
 for seeing, a statement which I need take no 
 trouble to refute, just as those who make it take 
 no trouble to establish, I will not say its truth, 
 but even its possibility. But the fact, if it be 
 a fact, that the eye was not originally as well 
 adapted to see with as it is now, and that the 
 power of perceiving light and of things in the 
 light grew by degrees, does not show, nor even 
 tend to show, that the eye was not intended for 
 aeeinpf with. 
 
 o 
 
 The fact is that the doctrine of Evolution does 
 not affect the substance of Paley's argument at 
 all. The marks of design which he has pointed 
 out remain marks of design still even if we 
 
 I 
 
1 1 4 Apparent Confiict between [Lect. 
 
 accept the doctrine of Evolution to the full. 
 What is touched by this doctrine is not the 
 evidence of design but the mode in which the 
 design was executed. Paley, no doubt, wrote on 
 the supposition (and at that time it was hardly 
 possible to admit any other supposition) that we 
 must take animals to have come into existence 
 very nearly such as we now know them : and his 
 language, on the whole, was adapted to that sup- 
 position. But the language would rather need 
 supplementing than changing to make it applic- 
 able to tlie supposition that animals were formed 
 by Evolution. In the one case the execution 
 follows the design by the effect of a direct act 
 of creation ; in the other case the design is 
 worked out by a slow process. In the one case 
 the Creator made the animals at once such as 
 they now are ; in the other case He impressed 
 on certain particles of matter which, either at 
 the beginning or at some point in the his- 
 tory of His creation He endowed with life, such 
 inherent powers that in the ordinary course of 
 time living creatures such as the present were 
 developed. The creative power remains the 
 same in either case ; the design with which that 
 
IV.] Religion aiui the Doctrine of Hvolution. 1 1 5 
 
 creative power was exercised remains the same. 
 He did not make the things, we may say ; no, 
 but Pie made them make themselves. And 
 surely this rather adds than withdraws force 
 from the great argument. It seems in itself 
 something more majestic, something more be- 
 fitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as 
 one day and one day as a thousand years, thus to 
 impress His Will once for all on His creation, 
 and provide for all its countless variety by this 
 one original impress, than by special acts of 
 creation to be perpetually modifying what He 
 had previously made. It has often been ob- 
 jected to Paley's argument, as I remarked before, 
 that it represents the Almighty rather as an 
 artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with 
 somewhat intractable materials and showing 
 marvellous skill in overcoming difficulties rather 
 than a beneficent Being making all things in 
 accordance with the purposes of His love. But 
 this objection disappears when we put the 
 argument into the shape which the doctrine 
 of Evolution demands and look on the Almighty 
 as creating the original elements of matter, de- 
 termining their number and their properties, 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 Apparent Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 creating the law of gravitation whereby as seems 
 probable the worlds have been formed, creating 
 the various laws of chemical and physical action, 
 by w^hicli inorganic substances have been com- 
 bined, creating above all the law of life, the 
 mysterious law which plainly contains such 
 wonderful possibilities within itself, and thus 
 providing for the ultimate development of all 
 the many wonders of nature. 
 
 What conception of foresight and purpose 
 can rise above that which imagines all history 
 gathered as it were into one original creative 
 act from which the infinite variety of the Uni- 
 verse has come and more is coming even yet % 
 
 And yet again, it is a common objection to 
 Paley's and similar arguments that, in spite of 
 all the tokens of intelligence and beneficence 
 in the creation, there is so much of the contrary 
 character. How much there is of apparently 
 needless pain and waste ! And John Stuart 
 Mill has urged that either we must suppose the 
 Creator wanting in omnipotence or wanting in 
 kindness to have left His creation so imperfect. 
 The answer usually given is that our know- 
 ledge is partial, and, could we see the whole, the 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 1 7 
 
 objection would probably disappear. But what 
 force and clearness is given to this answer by 
 the doctrine of Evolution which tells us that we 
 are looking at a work which is not yet finished, 
 and that the imperfections are a necessary part 
 of a large design the general outlines of which 
 we may already trace, but the ultimate issue of 
 which, with all its details, is still beyond our 
 perception ! The imperfections are like the im- 
 perfections of a half-completed picture not yet 
 ready to be seen ; they are like the bud which 
 will presently be a beautiful flower, or the larva 
 of a beautiful and gorgeous insect ; they are like 
 the imperfections in the moral character of a saint 
 who nevertheless is changing from glory to glory. 
 To the many partial designs which Paley's 
 Natural Theology points out, and which still 
 remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolu- 
 tion adds the design of a perpetual progress. 
 Things are so arranged that animals are per- 
 petually better adapted to the life they have 
 to live. The very phrase which we commonly 
 use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of 
 the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain 
 and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that 
 
Ii8 Apparent Conflict betzueen [Lect. 
 
 can feel. If they are fitter for tlieir surround- 
 ings, most certainly tliey will find life easier to 
 live. And, as if to mark still more plainly the 
 beneficence of the whole work, the less deve- 
 loped creatures, as we have every reason to 
 believe, are less sensible of pain and pleasure ; 
 so that enjoyment appears to grow with the 
 capacity for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes 
 as sensitivity to suffering increases. And there 
 can be no doubt that this is in many ways the 
 tendency of nature. Beasts of prey are diminish- 
 ing ; life is easier for man and easier for all 
 animals that are under his care : many species 
 of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the 
 globe, but those that remain have far greater 
 happiness in their lives. In fact, all the pur- 
 poses which Paley traces in the formation of 
 living creatures are not only fulfilled by what 
 the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled from 
 age to age. And though the progress may be 
 exceedingly slow, the nature of the progress can- 
 not be mistaken. 
 
 If the Natural Theology were now^ to be writ- 
 ten, the stress of the argument would be put on 
 a difierent place. Instead of insisting wholly or 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of EvoliUion. 1 19 
 
 mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means 
 to ends in the structure of living animals and 
 plants, we should look rather to the original 
 properties impressed on matter from the be- 
 ginning, and on the beneficent consequences that 
 have flowed from those properties. We should 
 dwell on the peculiar properties that must be 
 inherent in the molecules of the original ele- 
 ments to cause such results to follow from their 
 action and reaction on one another. We should 
 dwell on the part played in the Universe by the 
 properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one 
 of the great heat-givers ; of carbon, the chief 
 light-giver and heat-giver ; of water, the great 
 solvent and the storehouse of heat ; of the at- 
 mosphere and the vapours in it, the protector 
 of the earth which it surrounds. We should 
 trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure 
 in their subservience to the purification of life. 
 The marks of a purpose impressed from the first 
 on all creation would be even more visible than 
 ever before. 
 
 And we could not overlook tlie beauty of 
 Nature and of all created things as part of that 
 purpose conjing in many cases out of that very 
 
1 20 Apparent Conflict bctiu^een [Lect. 
 
 survival of the fittest of which Darwin has 
 spoken, and yet a distinct object in itself For 
 this beauty there is no need in the economy of 
 nature whatever. The beauty of the starry 
 heavens, which so impressed the mind of Kant 
 that he put it by the side of the Moral Law 
 as proving the existence of a Creator, is not 
 wanted either for the evolution of the world 
 or for the preservation of living creatures. 
 Our enjoyment of it is a super-added gift cer- 
 tainly not necessary for the existence or the 
 continuance of our species. The beauty of 
 flowers, according to the teaching of the doc- 
 trine of Evolution, has generally grown out of 
 the need which makes it good for plants to 
 attract insects. The insects carry the pollen 
 from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix 
 the breed ; and this produces the stronger plants 
 which outlive the competition of the rest. The 
 plants, therefore, which are most conspicuous 
 gain an advantage by attracting insects most. 
 That successive generations of flowers should 
 thus show brighter and brighter colours is in- 
 telligible. But the beauty of flowers is far 
 more than mere conspicuousness of colours even 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evohition. 1 2 1 
 
 though that be the main ingredient. Why 
 should tlie wonderful grace, and delicacy, and 
 harmony of tint be added ? Is all this mere 
 chance % Is all this superfluity pervading the 
 whole world and perpetually supplying to the 
 highest of living creatures, and that too in a 
 real proportion to his superiority, the most re- 
 fined and elevating of pleasures, an accident 
 without any purjDose at all ? If Evolution has 
 produced the world such as we see and all its 
 endless beauty, it has bestowed on our own 
 dwelling-place in lavish abundance and in mar- 
 vellous perfection that on which men spend 
 their substance without stint, that which they 
 value above all but downright necessities, that 
 which they admire beyond all except the Law of 
 Duty itself. We cannot think that this is not 
 designed, nor that the Artist who produced it 
 was blind to what was coming out of His work. 
 Once more, the doctrine of Evolution restores 
 to the science of Nature the unity which we 
 should expect in the creation of God. Paley's 
 argument proved design, but included the possi- 
 bility of many designers. Not one design, but 
 many separate designs, all no doubt of the same 
 
122 Appare7it Conflict between [Lect. 
 
 character, but all worked out independently of 
 one another, is the picture that he puts before 
 us. But the doctrine of Evolution binds all 
 existing things on earth into one. Every mineral, 
 every plant, every animal has such properties 
 that it benefits other things beside itself and de- 
 rives benefit in turn. The insect developes the 
 plant, and the plant the insect ; the brute aids 
 in the evolution of the man, and the man in that 
 of the brute. All things are embraced in one 
 great design beginning with the very creation. 
 He who uses the doctrine of Evolution to prove 
 that no intelligence planned the world, is under- 
 taking the self-contradictory task of showing that 
 a great machine has no purpose by tracing in 
 detail the marvellous complexity of its parts, 
 and the still more marvellous precision with 
 which all work together to produce a common 
 result. 
 
 To conclude, the doctrine of Evolution leaves 
 the argument for an intelligent Creator and Go- 
 vernor of the world stronger than it was before. 
 There is still as much as ever the proof of an in- 
 telligent purpose pervading all creation. The 
 diffeience is that the execution of that purj'ose 
 
IV.] Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution. 123 
 
 belongs more to the original act of creation, 
 less to acts of government since. There is more 
 divine foresight, there is less divine interposi- 
 tion ; and whatever has been taken from tlie 
 latter has been added to the former. 
 
 Some scientific students of Nature may fancy 
 they can deduce in the working out of the theory 
 results inconsistent with religious belief; and in 
 a future Lecture these will have to be examined ; 
 and it is possible that the theory may be so pre- 
 sented as to be inconsistent with the teaching of 
 Revelation. But whatever may be the relation 
 of the doctrine of Evolution to Eevelation, it 
 cannot be said that this doctrine is antagonistic 
 to Religion in its essence. The progress of Science 
 in this direction will assuredly end in helping 
 men to believe with more assurance than ever 
 that the Lord by wisdom hath founded the 
 earth, by understanding hath He established the 
 heavens. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND 
 COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 The evolution of Knowledge. Does not aiFect the truth 
 of Science. Nor of Religion. Special characteristic of 
 evolution of Religious Knowledge, that it is due to Reve- 
 lation. All higher Religions have claimed to be Revela- 
 tions. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old 
 Testament ; yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still 
 more the New Testament. The miraculous element in 
 Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this mode 
 of evolution with the teaching of the Sjiiritual Faculty. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 REVELATION" THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND 
 COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 ' God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake 
 in time past to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in 
 these last days spoken to us by His Son.' Hebrews i. i. 
 
 ri^HE doctrine of Evolution has been applied 
 -* not only to the formation of all created 
 things, but to the development of human know- 
 ledge ; and this with perfect justice, though 
 with some risk of misunderstanding. It is cer- 
 tain, and, indeed, it is obvious, that knowledge 
 grows. Tlie ordinary experience of mankind 
 becomes larger and clearer in the course of time, 
 and the systematised experience which we call 
 Science makes the same progress in still greater 
 measure and with more assurance. 
 
 Our Science has been built on the labours of 
 scientific men in past ages. New generalisations 
 
128 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 imagined by one thinker, new crucial experi- 
 ments devised by another, new instruments of 
 observation invented by another, — these have 
 been the steps by which Science has grown and 
 established its authority and enlarged its do- 
 minion. When or by whom the first steps were 
 made we have no record. No mathematician 
 that ever lived showed greater natural power of 
 intellect than he, whoever he was, who first saw 
 that the singular contained the universal ; but we 
 know neither his name nor his age, nor his birth- 
 place nor his race. But after those first steps 
 had been taken, we know who have been the 
 leaders in scientific advance. And we know 
 what they have done, and what they are doing ; 
 and we can conjecture the direction in which 
 further advances will be made. And so we can 
 trace the development of this kind of knowledge, 
 and in a certain and very real sense this develop- 
 ment may be called an evolution. 
 
 But there is this difference between the evo- 
 lution of nature and the evolution of the science 
 of nature. The evolution of nature results in 
 the existence of forms which did not exist 
 before ; the evolution of knowledge results in 
 
v.] and completin^^ spiritual Knowledge. 129 
 
 the perception of laws which were already in 
 existence. 
 
 The knowledge grows, but the things known 
 remain. The knowledge is not treated as if in- 
 dependent of the things known or believed to 
 be known, as a phenomenon belonging merely to 
 the human mind, with beginnings and laws and 
 consequences and history of its own. And, con- 
 sequently, its having a regular growth is not 
 used as an argument against its substantial 
 truth. 
 
 The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has 
 a history; but no mathematician will admit that 
 the fact that it has a history affects its claims 
 to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how 
 men have been brouo-lit to believe the deduc- 
 
 o 
 
 tions of the higher mathematics, and we may 
 answer our own question by tracing the steps ; 
 but our conviction is not shaken that these 
 deductions are true. 
 
 And so, too, we can trace the steps by which 
 the great generaUsations of Science have been 
 reached, and we may show that Kepler grew 
 out of Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler ; 
 but the proof that the knowledge of one truth 
 
 K 
 
1 30 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 has been evolved out of the knowledge of an- 
 other, and that out of the knowledge of another, 
 is not used to show that all this Science has 
 nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a 
 natural growth of human thought. Science has 
 grown through all manner of mistakes — mistakes 
 made by the greatest thinkers and observers, 
 mistakes which men ignorantly laugh at now, 
 as their own mistakes will be no doubt laughed 
 at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, 
 treat scientific thought as nothing more than one 
 of the phenomena of humanity; ways of think- 
 ing which necessarily grew out of the conditions 
 in which men have existed, but sufficiently ac- 
 counted for by their origin and mode of growth 
 having been shown, and having no solidity of 
 their own. 
 
 What has been said of Science mav be said 
 also of Eeligion. Keligion also has had its de- 
 velopment, and in some respects a development 
 parallel to that of Science. 
 
 It is possible to trace the steps by which 
 men have obtained an ever larger and fuller 
 knowledge of the Supreme Law of Rigljt, a 
 clearer perception of its application, of its logical 
 
v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 131 
 
 results, of its relation to life, to conduct, to 
 belief. It has grown through mistakes as 
 Science has. There has been false Religion, as 
 there has been false Science. Unsound prin- 
 ciples of conduct have been inculcated in Reli- 
 gion as unsound generalisations have been set up 
 in Science. There have been improper objects 
 of reverence in Religion, as there have been im- 
 possible aims proposed for scientific investiga- 
 tion. Ezekiel rises above the doctrine that the 
 children are punished for the sins of their parents, 
 just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that 
 nature abhors a vacuum. The parallel is all the 
 more complete in that in many cases false reli- 
 gions have been also false sciences. The prayer to 
 the fetish for rain is as contrary to true religion 
 as it is contrary to true science. Many false 
 religions are most easily overthrown by scientific 
 instruction. Many false sciences begin to totter 
 when the believers in them are tauofht true 
 religion. The ordinary superstitions which have 
 so strong a hold on weak characters and un- 
 instructed minds, are as inconsistent with true 
 faith in God as with reasonable knowledo^e of 
 nature. Science grows, but the facts, whether 
 
 K 2 
 
132 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 laws or instances of the operations of those laws, 
 are not affected by that growtli. And Religion 
 grows, but the facts of which it takes cognisance 
 are not affected by that growth. Neither in the 
 one case nor in the other is the fact that there 
 has been a development any argument to show 
 that the belief thus developed has no real foun- 
 dation. The pure subjectivity of Religion, to use 
 technical language, is no more proved by this 
 argument than the pure subjectivity of Science. 
 But there is one most important particular in 
 which the development of Religion entirely differs 
 from the development of Science. The leaders 
 of scientific thought, from the time that Science 
 has been conscious of itself, have never claimed 
 direct divine instruction. For a long time, in- 
 deed, scientific thought rested largely on tradi- 
 tion, and that tradition was handed on from 
 generation to generation without any examina- 
 tion into its foundations. The stores of past 
 observations seemed so very much larger in 
 quantity than any that men could add in their 
 own day, that it was natural to give more weight 
 to what was received than to what was newly 
 observed. The experience of each generation in 
 
v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 133 
 
 succession seemed nothing in comparison witli 
 the accumulated experience of all pi-eceding 
 generations. And in many cases old traditions 
 stopped the growth of Science by preventing the 
 acceptance of observations inconsistent with 
 them. But such old traditions never claimed to 
 rest on a revelation from God ; or, if such a 
 claim was made here and there, it never had 
 strength enough to root itself in Science and 
 form part of the recognised authority on which 
 Science stood. 
 
 Science, from the time when it recognised 
 itself as Science, has owed its development to 
 observation of nature, and long before it shook 
 off the fetters of unexamined tradition it had dis- 
 claimed, even for that tradition, any other basis 
 than this. But not so Keligion. Many religions, 
 and among them the purer and higher religions, 
 in proportion to their nearer approach to perfec- 
 tion, have claimed to rest on a Divine Revelation, 
 and to be something more than either specula- 
 tions of philosophic observers of nature, or de- 
 ductions from innate principles of reason or 
 conscience. Not thinkers, but prophets, or men 
 claiming to be prophets, have given the purest 
 
1 34 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 religions to their disciples among mankind. It 
 has always been possible to bring all religious 
 teaching to the bar of conscience ; it has been 
 possible to put all religious teaching to logical 
 examination ; to systematise its precepts, whether 
 of faith or conduct ; to inquire into its funda- 
 mental principles, and to ask for the authority 
 on which the whole teaching rests. But these 
 applications of our intellectual faculties to Ee- 
 ligion have always been admitted as coming- 
 after, not as preceding, the teaching to which 
 they are made. The prophet does sometimes 
 reason when he is deducing from principles 
 already accepted, new precepts, or new pro- 
 hibitions ; but he does not confine himself to 
 such reasonino: in the fulfilment of his mission. 
 He professes to have a message to give. He will 
 accredit it by such means as He supplies Who has 
 sent him with this message. He will, in order 
 to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to 
 past revelations which they have already re- 
 ceived, and with which his new message is in 
 thorough harmony; but he often appeals also 
 to his power over nature to bear witness that 
 the Lord of nature has sent liim. The Hebrew 
 
v.] and completing spiritual Knowledge. 135 
 
 prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, 
 will repeat the old revelation with its old un- 
 shaken and unshakeable precepts, but he will 
 not stop there : he will also give signs from the 
 Lord, to prove that he has a right to the title of 
 prophet which he claims. Armed with this title, 
 he will go on to predict the coming of the Great 
 Eestorer, the Messiah ; he will insist on the 
 judgment of all things, sure to be passed in its 
 appointed day ; he will hint at the immortality 
 of the soul, and the execution of 'the Almighty 
 justice on every man that lives. 
 
 It is probable enough that many of the inferior 
 religions have grown up with no such' claim at 
 al]. The worship of ancestors, where it has pre- 
 vailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, 
 grown out of dreams, in which loving memory 
 has brought back in sleep vivid images of the 
 dead who were reverenced while they lived, and 
 cannot be readily forgotten after death. Such 
 worship barely attains to what may be called 
 in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the 
 spiritual faculty, the true seat of religion, is weak 
 and vague. It is like the honour paid to a 
 sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only 
 
136 Revelation the fneans of developing [Lect. 
 
 the difference that those who receive this wor- 
 ship are supposed to reside not in a distant 
 capital, but in another world. So, too, the 
 worship of fetishes, of trees, of serpents, of the 
 heavenly bodies, while they have some of the 
 inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly 
 deserve to be called religions. There is in them 
 the sentiment of fear, the acknowledgment of 
 persons or some resemblance of persons imper- 
 ceptible by the senses ; the acknowledgment of 
 powers possessed by these persons. But the 
 central idea of a rule of holiness is either alto- 
 gether wanting, or so very feeble and indistinct 
 as to contain no promise of developing into 
 ultimate supremacy. These religions do not 
 often lay claim to a revelation from a supreme 
 authority. And they have withered away with 
 the growth of knowledge and with clearer per- 
 ceptions of what Religion must be if it is to exist 
 at all. 
 
 All the higher religions have claimed to rest 
 on a divine revelation, and the Christian Re- 
 ligion on a series of such revelations. The 
 Christian Religion does not profess (as does 
 for instance the Mahommedan) to be wrapped 
 
v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 137 
 
 up in one divine communication made to one 
 man and admitting thereafter of no modifica- 
 tions. Though resting on divine revelation it 
 is professedly a development, and is thus in 
 harmony with the Creator's operations in na- 
 ture. Whether we consider what is taught 
 concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or con- 
 cerning human nature and its moral and 
 spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God 
 and His dealings with us His creatures, it is 
 undeniable that the teaching of the Bible is 
 quite different at the end from what it is at 
 the beginning. 
 
 The New Testament considered by itself as 
 a body of teaching is such an advance on all 
 that preceded it as to be quite unique in the 
 history of the world. The ideas conveyed in 
 the Old Testament are absorbed, transformed, 
 completed, so as to make them as a whole 
 entirely new ; and to these are added entirely 
 new ideas sufficient by themselves to form a 
 whole system of doctrine. And because of 
 this it is difficult to speak of the new teaching 
 as having grown out of the old. 
 
 But the Old Testament covers many centuries, 
 
J 
 
 8 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 and within its range we can trace a steady 
 growth, and that growth always of the same 
 character, and always pointing towards what 
 the Gospel finally revealed. The strength of 
 the moral sentiment in the earlier books is 
 always assigned to the belief in, and reverence 
 for, Almighty God. It is evidently held to be 
 more important to believe in God and to fear 
 Him than to see the perfection of His holiness. 
 If we distinguish between Religion and Mo- 
 rality, Religion is made the more important 
 of the two. It is more important to recognise 
 that the holy God exists and reigns than to 
 see clearly in what His holiness, and indeed 
 all holiness, consists. The sentiment of reve- 
 rence is more important than the perception 
 of that universality which we now know to 
 be the essential characteristic of the Moral 
 Law. In analysing the origin and nature of 
 Religion in the second of these Lectures, it 
 was necessary to follow the order of thought, 
 and beginning with Duty to end with God. 
 But the order of fact is not the same. In 
 actual fact man began with God and ends with 
 a clearer perception of Duty. Hence in all the 
 
v.] and completing Spirihial Knowledge. 1 39 
 
 earlier stages the morality is imperfect. The 
 profaneness of Esau is a serious offence. The 
 ungenerous temper, the unfairness and dupli- 
 city of Jacob are light in comparison. Truth 
 is not an essential. Blood-shedding and im- 
 purity when in horrible excess are treated as 
 most grievous sins ; but restrained within limits 
 are easily condoned. Women are placed below 
 their true and natural place ; polygamy if not 
 distinctly allowed is certainly condoned ; di- 
 vorce is permitted on one side, not on the 
 other. Slavery is allowed though put under 
 regulation. But the unity and spirituality of 
 God are guarded with the strongest sanctions, 
 and nothing could be said against idolatry and 
 polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language 
 than was used then. The reverence for God 
 required then was as great as the reverence 
 required now. But the conception of the holi- 
 ness which is the mam object of that reverence 
 has changed ; has in fact been purified and 
 cleared. And the change is traceable in the 
 Old Testament. The prophets teach a higher 
 morality than is found in the earlier books. 
 Cruelty is condemned as it had not been before. 
 
140 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 The heathen are not regarded as outside God's 
 love, and the future embraces them in His 
 mercy even if the present does not. Con- 
 science begins to be recognised and appealed 
 to. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly 
 is exposed ; it is treated not only with con- 
 demnation, but with scorn. Individual re- 
 sponsibility is insisted on. Children are not 
 held responsible for their fathers, though the 
 inheritance of moral evil and of the conse- 
 quences of moral evil is never denied. And 
 even trust in God rises to a higher level in 
 Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall 
 never be shaken by any calamity that may 
 befall him, than in the earlier belief that cala- 
 mities would never befall those who held fast 
 that trust. 
 
 If we review this progress in moral teaching 
 we recognise that it corresponds to the natural 
 and for the most part unconscious working of 
 that instinctive test which, as was pointed out 
 before, we apply to all moral questions, the 
 test of universality. The pivots of all the pro- 
 phetical teaching are the incessant inculcation 
 of justice and mercy; justice which requires 
 
v.] and completing Spiritual Kjiowledge. 1 4 1 
 
 us to recognise the rights of others side by- 
 side with our own ; mercy which demands our 
 sympathy with the feelings of other creatures 
 that can feeh 
 
 We are bound to recognise the claims of 
 others to equal treatment with ourselves, and 
 any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must 
 be justified by a universal rule applicable to 
 all alike. The perpetual attempt to justify 
 exceptions in this way is sure to end m di- 
 minishing the number of those exceptions. If 
 we are compelled to think much of the position 
 of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to 
 come to Malachi's declaration that God hateth 
 putting away. If we are compelled to think 
 of the position of slaves, we cannot continue 
 for ever to believe that there are some beings 
 with consciences and free wills, who neverthe- 
 less, because of the accidents of their lives, have 
 no rights at all ; and we acknowledge the 
 righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the 
 breach of covenant when the nobles of Judah 
 re-enslaved those whom they had solemnly 
 emancipated. If we think of the nature of 
 responsibility and the justification of punish- 
 
142 Revelation ike fneajis of developing [Lect. 
 
 ment, we find it impossible to believe that an 
 innocent man shall be rightly punished for the 
 wrong-doing of another, even if that other be 
 his father or his mother ; and we are convinced 
 that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he 
 proclaims on God's behalf that ' the soul that 
 sinneth it shall die ; the son shall not bear 
 the iniquity of the father, neither shall the 
 father bear the iniquity of the son.' And once 
 more, whatever divine purpose gave the chosen 
 people a priority among all peoples in know- 
 ledge of divine will and possession of divine 
 favour, it is impossible to find any rule by 
 which this priority shall for ever exclude all 
 other peoples from being within the range of 
 God's manifested love ; and conscience cannot 
 but accept as a divine message that the Gen- 
 tiles also shall come to the Heavenly ' Light, 
 and their kings to the brightness of His rising.' 
 So again, to turn from justice to mercy, we 
 recognise that we are bound to spare pain to 
 all creatures that can feel, and this duty can 
 only be set aside by some higher duty which 
 makes that pain the means to a higher moral 
 end. And if we are set by our consciences to 
 
Y.J a7id covipleting Spiritual Kriow ledge. 143 
 
 seek for some rule of universal application for 
 this purpose, it becomes perpetually clearer 
 that nothing can excuse cruel punishments in- 
 flicted on criminals or enemies, or haid-hearted 
 indiifference to the poor and the weak. Our 
 own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, 
 and that very cry from within compels our 
 consciences to listen to the cry from without. 
 And the denunciations of cruelty and oppression 
 we recoo'nise as we hear them to be the voice 
 
 o 
 
 of God. 
 
 But however true it be that this progress 
 corresponds exactly throughout with the neces- 
 sary working of the great moral principles 
 implanted in the spiritual faculty, it never- 
 theless remains true also that all this teaching 
 in its successive stages is given by men who 
 did not profess to be working out a philo- 
 sophical system, but who claimed to bring a 
 message from God, to speak by His authority, 
 and in many cases to be trusted with special 
 powers in proof of possessing that authority. 
 Looking back over it afterwards we can see 
 that the teaching in its successive stages was 
 a development, but it always took the form of 
 
1 44 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 a revelation. And its life was due to that 
 fact. As far as it is possible to judge, that 
 union between Morality and Keligion, between 
 duty and faith, without which both religion and 
 morality soon wither out of human consciences, 
 can only be secured — has only been secured — 
 by presenting spiritual truth in this form of a 
 Kevelation. 
 
 When we pass to the New Testament, all that 
 has previously been taught in the Old, in so 
 far as it is related to the new teaching at all, 
 is related as the bud to the flower. The de- 
 velopment, if it be indeed a development, is so 
 great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems diffi- 
 cult to recognise that it is a development at all. 
 
 First, the morality is in form, if not in sub- 
 stance, absolutely new. The duty of justice 
 and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme 
 limits, even to • the length of entire self-sur- 
 render. The disciple has his own rights no 
 doubt, as every other man has his ; but he is 
 required to leave his rights in God's hands and 
 to think of the rights of others only. The 
 highest place is assigned to meekness in conduct 
 and humility in spirit. The humility of the 
 
v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 145 
 
 Sermon on the Mount may possibly by careful 
 analysis be shown to be identical at bottom 
 with the magnanimity of Aristotle's Ethics. 
 But the presentation of the two is so utterly 
 opposed that in the effect on life the identity 
 is altogether lost. And as justice and mercy, 
 so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it can 
 go. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an 
 integral part of the aim set before the will, 
 hunger and thirst for righteousness, and peni- 
 tence for failure in keeping to it, are to fill 
 up the believer's hopes for himself. Of inward 
 satisfaction and peace he is often assured ; but 
 these, and these only, are the means to that 
 peace. The disciple's Hfe is to consist in bear- 
 ing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully ; in 
 returning good for evil, and love for indifference 
 and even for hatred ; in detaching his affections 
 from all the pleasures to be obtained from ex- 
 ternal things ; in fixing his trust and his love 
 on his Eternal Father. Taken as a whole, this 
 is quite unlike all moral teaching that preceded 
 it, and there is no indication that any philo- 
 sophy could ever have evolved it. It has 
 fastened on the human conscience from the 
 
 L 
 
146 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 day that it was uttered ; and whatever moral 
 teachmg since has not been inspired from this 
 source has soon passed out of power and been 
 forgotten. We find when we examine that it 
 exactly agrees with the fundamental teaching 
 of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is 
 applied to such creatures as we are, and to such 
 a God as the New Testament sets before us. 
 But we find it impossible to assert that by any 
 working of human thought this morality could 
 have been obtained by the spiritual faculty 
 unaided. On the contrary, it seems more near 
 the truth to say that we could never have ob- 
 tained so clear a conception of the great Moral 
 Law, if the teaching of the New Testament 
 had not enlightened and purified the spiritual 
 faculty itself. And to this is to be added that 
 the moral teaching of the New Testament re- 
 cognises what we may now almost consider a 
 proved necessity of our nature, or at least a 
 sure characteristic of the government of the 
 world, that perpetual progress without which 
 nothing human seems to keep sweet and whole- 
 some. Perfect as the New Testament morality 
 is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actual 
 
v.] and completi7ig SpiriHial Knowledge. 147 
 
 precepts. It leaves questions to be solved some 
 of which have not been solved yet. It left 
 slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. 
 It said nothing of patriotism. It gave no clear 
 command concerning the right use of wealth. 
 It laid down no principles for the government 
 of states, though such principles must have a 
 moral basis. There has been a perpetual 
 growth in the understanding and in the appli- 
 cation of this perfect teaching, and there will 
 yet be a growth. Of no philosophical system 
 of morals is it possible to say the same. 
 
 But in the second place, the New Testament 
 contains not only a new morality, it contains 
 also a new account of human nature. The 
 mystery of that discord which makes the noblest 
 and best of human souls a scene of perpetual 
 internal conflict is acknowledged and its counter- 
 part in God's dealings with mankind is set forth. 
 The struggle between the spiritual faculty as- 
 serting its due supremacy, and the lower jjassions 
 and appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so de- 
 scribed by Saint Paul that none have ever since 
 questioned his description with any effect. And 
 our Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence 
 
 L 2 
 
148 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 on God and helplessness without Him ; and Saint 
 John's teaching that the whole world, outside 
 Christ, ' lieth in the wicked one,' lay down 
 the same truth. And as the mystery of moral 
 evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the 
 mystery of the remedy for that evil. In the 
 love of God shown in the Cross of Christ, in our 
 union with God through that same Death upon 
 the Cross is the power which conquers evil in 
 the soul and carries a man ever upward to 
 spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers 
 have confessed the truth of the account thus 
 given of the internal contradiction of man's 
 moral nature, so have all believers borne witness 
 (and only they could bear witness) to the account 
 thus given of the solution of that contradiction 
 and the renovation of that nature. Millions 
 have lived and died in the Christian faith since 
 the teaching recorded in the New Testament was 
 given, and among them have been the purest, 
 the justest, the most self-sacrificing, the most 
 heavenly-minded of mankind. And they all 
 concur in saying that the one stay of all their 
 spiritual lives has been communion with God 
 through Christ. 
 
v.] and completmg Spiritual Knowledge. 1 49 
 
 Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a 
 clearness previously unknown the immortality 
 of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual 
 body which shall in some way spring from the 
 natural body as the plant grows from the seed. 
 There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally, 
 anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger 
 and more deeply-rooted persuasion that it must 
 be true. But it is revealed in the New Testa- 
 ment as it is taught nowhere else, and it is 
 sealed by the Kesurrection of our Lord, ever 
 since then the historical centre of the Christian 
 Faith. How exactly it harmonises with the 
 teaching of the spiritual faculty I have pointed 
 out before. 
 
 And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells 
 us what never was told before of man's nature 
 as a spiritual being and of his destiny hereafter; 
 it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the 
 nature of God and of the relations between Him 
 and His creature man. The unity and spirit- 
 uality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on 
 in the Old Testament, is no less insisted on in 
 the New. But the mysterious complexity em- 
 braced within that unity, though darkly hinted 
 
1 50 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 at in the older teaching, is nowhere clearly set 
 fortli but in the latter. We may find anticipa- 
 tions of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, 
 and of our Lord Himself as recorded by St, John, 
 in the Book of Proverbs, in the ProjDhets, in the 
 Eabbinical writers between the Prophets and 
 the New Testament, and we can see in Philo to 
 what this finally came unaided by Revelation. 
 But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature 
 and on the Incarnation is distinct from all this. 
 And it is in the Christian form, and only in that 
 form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual 
 needs of the great mass of believers. 
 
 Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold 
 which this teaching has had upon mankind has 
 depended entirely on the extraordinary degree 
 in which the teaching of the Bible has satisfied 
 the conscience. Without that no miracles how- 
 ever overwhelmingly attested, no external evi- 
 dence of whatever kind, could have compelled 
 intellects of the highest rank, side by side with 
 the most uncultivated and the most barren, to 
 accept it as divine, nor could anything else have 
 so often rekindled its old fire at times when 
 faith in it had apparently withered aw^ay. The 
 
V.J and completing Spirittial Knowledge. 151 
 
 teaching of the Bible has always found and must 
 always find its main evidence within the human 
 soul. 
 
 And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, 
 thouo;li when examined afterwards it turns out 
 to be development or evolution, yet was always 
 given at the time as a revelation, so far from 
 diminishing the force of this internal evidence 
 adds to it still more force than it would other- 
 wise have. For what underlies the very concep- 
 tion of revelation is the doctrine that all progress 
 in higher spiritual knowledge is bound uj) with 
 conscious communion with God. Now it is an 
 experience common to all believers that in that 
 communion is to be found not only all strength 
 but all enlightenment also. The believer knows 
 that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he 
 refers his life to God's judgment, prays to God 
 for clearer vision of what is duty and what is 
 right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do 
 God's will. He uses all the faculties that God 
 has given him to understand the great divine 
 law ; but he perpetually looks to God for in- 
 struction, and whatever else may be said of that 
 instruction his experience tells him that his 
 
1 5 2 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion 
 to his nearness in thought and feeling to God 
 Himself. That the progress of the human race 
 in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scien- 
 tific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers 
 intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apo- 
 stles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds 
 with what the spiritually-minded man finds 
 witliin his own soul. And so too does it corre- 
 spond with what he sees in others. Often and 
 often the unlearned and untrained by sheer 
 goodness of life attain to wonderful perception 
 of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the un- 
 lettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law 
 of right conduct in circumstances which perplex 
 the disciplined and well informed. As the 
 human race has learnt the highest spiritual 
 truth by direct communication from God, so too 
 on communion with God far more than on intel- 
 lectual power, depends the progress of spiritual 
 knowledge in every human soul. 
 
 But though the hold of the Bible on the faith 
 of believers unquestionably depends on its satis- 
 fying the conscience in every stage of its en- 
 lightenment, it is equally certain that those who 
 
v.] and completing Spiritual Knowledge. 153 
 
 gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed 
 something more as proof of their authority than 
 the approval of the conscience of their hearers. 
 They professed to prove their mission by the 
 evidence of supernatural powers ; and the 
 teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from 
 tlie miraculous element in it which is connected 
 with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old Testa- 
 ment stood alone we might acknowledge that 
 the miraculous element in it occupied compara- 
 tively so small a place, and was so separable 
 from the rest, and the evidence for it was so 
 rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might 
 be left out of count. But we cannot say this of 
 the New Testament, nor in particular of the 
 account that has reached us of the sayings and 
 doings of our Lord. The miracles are embedded 
 in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. 
 Many of our Lord's most characteristic sayings 
 are so associated with narratives of miracles that 
 the two cannot be torn apart : ' I have not seen 
 so great faith, no, not in Israel ; ' ' My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work ; ' * Son, thy sins 
 be foro;iven thee : ' ' Beware of the leaven of 
 the Pharisees and the Sadducees ; ' ' It is not 
 
154 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 meet to take the children's bread and cast it 
 to dogs ; ' ' This kind goeth not out but by 
 prayer and fasting ; ' ' Were there not ten 
 cleansed, but where are the nine 1 ' ' Sin no more, 
 lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, 
 there can be no real doubt that our Lord 
 believed that He could work miracles, and pro- 
 fessed to work tliem, and that His disciples 
 believed that He worked many, and included 
 that fact in their meaning when they spoke of 
 Him as going about doiDg good. And these 
 disciples professed to work miracles themselves 
 and beheved that they did work them. It is of 
 course true that they had no strictly scientific 
 conception of a miracle, and would often have 
 called by that name what was in reality extra- 
 ordinary but not miraculous. And it is true 
 too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there 
 is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Eesurrec- 
 tion, for which clear and unmistakeable and 
 sufficient evidence is given. But while the ex- 
 clusion of any one miracle as insufficiently 
 attested is possible, the exclusion of the miracu- 
 lous element altogether is not possible without 
 a complete surrender of the position taken by 
 
v.] cind completing SpiriHcal Knowledge. 155 
 
 the first Christian teachers. As they claimed 
 to be inspired and to have enlightenment which 
 was not shared by mankind at large, so did they 
 claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for 
 our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, 
 power to step out of the ordinary course of 
 natural events, and, whether by virtue of sonie 
 higher law operative only in rare instances, or 
 by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove 
 a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is 
 an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral 
 Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical 
 world. 
 
 The teachers of other religions besides the 
 Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and 
 have professed to give a supernatural message. 
 This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need 
 in the human soul for such a direct communica- 
 tion from God to man. Men seem to need it so 
 much that without it they are unable to accept 
 the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it. 
 All who thus claim supernatural authority must, 
 of course, justify their claim. They must justify 
 their message to the human conscience. What 
 they teach must be an advance towards, and 
 
156 Revelation the means of developing [Lect. 
 
 finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral 
 Law. And if they profess to have miraculous 
 power they must give reasonable evidence that 
 such power is really theirs. But if they fail 
 in this, still the fact remains that tlieir very claim 
 must answer to something in the spiritual na- 
 ture of man, or it would not be so invariably 
 made nor so largely successful. 
 
 It seems as if, whatever may be the ground 
 of belief when once revelation has penetrated 
 into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power 
 was needed to procure that access in the first 
 instance. We believe because we find our con- 
 sciences satisfied, and we bring up our children 
 in such discipline of conscience tliat they too 
 shall have sufiicient training to recognise and 
 hold fast divine truth. And if we had lived 
 at the time and could have had our eyes opened 
 to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, 
 we might have believed without any external 
 evidence at all. But the first receivers of the 
 message, to whom the revelation was new, and, 
 as must have often happened and we actually 
 know did happen, to whom it was hard to re- 
 concile that revelation with previous teaching. 
 
v.] a7id completing Spiritual Knowledge. 1 5 7 
 
 how sure were they to need some other and 
 outer evidence that it really came from God. 
 The supernatural in the form of miracles can 
 never be the highest kind of evidence, can never 
 stand alone as evidence ; but it seems to have 
 been needed for the first reception. And there 
 seem to be minds that need it still, and to all 
 it is a help to find that reasonable ground can 
 be shown for holding that such evidence was 
 originally given. 
 
 Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than 
 belongs to all other teaching, and except for its 
 having taken that higher stand it does not 
 appear that the highest teaching would have 
 been possible. To look back afterwards and say 
 that we find a development or an evolution is 
 easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, 
 being an evolution, it may well be no more than 
 the outcome of the working of the natural forces. 
 But look closer and you see the undeniable fact 
 that all these developments by the working of 
 natural forces have perished. Not Socrates, nor 
 Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo 
 have been able to lay hold of mankind, nor have 
 their moral systems in any large degree satisfied 
 
158 Revelation the means of developing, &c. 
 
 our spiritual faculty. Eevelation, and revela- 
 tion alone, has taught us ; and it is from the 
 teaching of revelation that men have obtained 
 the very knowledge which some now use to 
 show that there was no need of revelation. 
 That altruism which is now^ to displace the 
 command of God is nothing but the teaching 
 of the Sermon on the Mount robbed of its 
 heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine 
 which underlies the whole sermon. For that 
 doctrine is the Fatherhood of God which has 
 been shown most especially in this, that from 
 the beginning He has never forgotten His 
 children. 
 
LECTURE Vr. 
 
 APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN EELIGION AND 
 THE DOCTPJNE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable 
 world. The formation of the creatures which inhabit it. 
 Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually in- 
 troduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not 
 yet accovmted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not 
 yet examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. 
 Account given in Genesis not at variance with doctrine 
 of Evolution. Evolution of man not inconsistent with 
 dignity of humanity. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 APPAEENT COLLISION BETWEEN EELIGION AND 
 THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 
 
 ' Know ye that the Lord He is God : it is He that hath 
 made us, and not we ourselves.' Psalm c. 3. 
 
 IP ELIGION is rooted in our spiritual nature 
 and its fundamental truths are as inde- 
 pendent of experience for their hold on our 
 consciences as the truths of mathematics for 
 their hold on our reason. 
 
 But as a matter of fact Religion has taken 
 the form of a revelation. And this introduces 
 a new contact between Religion and Science, and 
 of necessity a new possibility of collision. There 
 is not only possible opposition or apparent oppo- 
 sition of Science in what is revealed, in what we 
 may call the actual substance of the revelation ; 
 but also in the accessories and evidences of the 
 revelation, which may be no actual part of the 
 
 M 
 
i62 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all ap- 
 pearance, inseparably bound up with it. It is 
 therefore no more than might have been ex- 
 pected that the general postulate of the uni- 
 formity of nature should appear to be contravened 
 by the claim to supernatural power made on 
 behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just 
 at present leading scientific doctrine, the doctrine 
 of Evolution, should be found inconsistent with 
 parts, or what appear to be parts, of the reve- 
 lation itself. And we have to consider the two 
 questions, What has Eevelation to say concern- 
 ing Evolution? and what has Science to say 
 concerning Miracles % 
 
 Concerning Evolution, we have first to con- 
 sider how much in this direction has been made 
 fairly probable, and what still remains to be 
 determined. 
 
 It cannot then be well denied that the astro- 
 nomers and geologists have made it exceedingly 
 probable that this earth on which we live has 
 been brought to its present condition by passing 
 through a succession of changes from an ori- 
 ginal state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps 
 even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases ; 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of EvoltUion. 1 6 
 
 o 
 
 that such a body as the planet Jupiter repre- 
 sents one of the stages through which it has 
 passed, that sucli a body as the moon re- 
 presents a stage toward which it is tending ; 
 that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank 
 has formed the elevations which we call moun- 
 tains, and the depressions which contain the seas 
 and oceans ; that it has been worn by the action 
 of heat from within and water from without, and 
 in consequence of this action presents the appear- 
 ance when examined below the surface of suc- 
 cessive strata or layers ; that different kinds of 
 animal and vegetable life have followed one 
 another on the surface, and that some of their 
 remains are found in these strata now ; and that 
 all this has taken enormous periods of time. 
 All this is exceedingly probable, because it is 
 the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, 
 under well-established scientific laws of matter, 
 particularly the law of gravitation and the law of 
 the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would 
 necessarily change. And the whole solar system 
 may and probably did come into its present con- 
 dition in this way. It certainly could have 
 been so formed, and there is no reiison for 
 
 M 2 
 
164 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 supposing that it was formed in any other 
 way. 
 
 Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the 
 other end, and trace things backwards from the 
 present, instead of forwards from the remote 
 past, it cannot be denied that Darwin's in- 
 vestigations have made it exceedingly probable 
 that the vast variety of plants and animals 
 have sprung from a much smaller number of 
 original forms. 
 
 In the first place, the unity of plan which can 
 be found pervading any great class of animals 
 or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. 
 Why, for instance, should the vertebrate ani- 
 mals be formed on a common plan, the parts 
 of the framework being varied from species to 
 species, but the framework as a whole always 
 exhibiting the same fundamental type % If they 
 all descended from a common ancestor, and the 
 variations were introduced in the course of that 
 descent, this remarkable fact is at once accounted 
 for. But, in the second place, observation shows 
 that slight variations are perpetually being in- 
 troduced with every successive generation, and 
 many of these variations are transmitted to the 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 165 
 
 generations that follow. In the course of time, 
 therefore, from any one parent stock would 
 descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, 
 in the third place, it be asked why this variety 
 does not range by imperceptible degrees from 
 extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms 
 in the other, the answer is to be found in the 
 enormous prodigality and the equally enormous 
 waste of life and living creatures. Plants and 
 animals produce far more descendants than ever 
 come even to such maturity as to reproduce their 
 kind. And this is particularly the case with the 
 lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs 
 are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but 
 still enormous proportion are the young that 
 come from those that have not been destroyed. 
 There is no waste like the waste of life that 
 is to be seen in nature. Living creatures are 
 destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack 
 of means of reproduction, by accidents, by ene- 
 mies. The inevitable operation of this waste, 
 as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to 
 destroy all those varieties which were not well 
 fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those 
 that were. One species of animal has been pre- 
 
1 66 Apparent Collision detween Religion [Lect. 
 
 served by length of neck, which enabled it to 
 reach high-growing fruits and leaves ; another 
 by a thicker skin, which made it difficult for 
 enemies to devour ; another by a colour which 
 made it easier to hide. One plant has been pre- 
 served by a bright flower which attracted insects 
 to carry its pollen to other flowers of its kind ; 
 another by a sweet fruit which attracted birds to 
 scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and 
 plants that had not these advantages j)erished for 
 the lack of them. The result would be to main- 
 tain, and perpetually, though with exceeding 
 slowness, more and more to adapt to the con- 
 ditions of their life, those species whose pecu- 
 liarities gave them some advantage in the great 
 struggle for existence. 
 
 Here again we have the working of known 
 laws of life, capable of accounting for what we 
 see. And the high probability cannot be denied 
 that by evolution of this kind the present races 
 of living creatures have been formed. And to 
 these arguments the strongest corroboration 
 is given by the frequent occurrence, both in 
 plants and animals, of useless parts which still 
 remain as indications of organs that once were 
 
Vl] and the Dodrme of Evolution. 167 
 
 useful and have long become useless. Animals 
 that now live permanently in the dark have 
 abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an 
 ancestor with eyes that could see. Animals that 
 never walk have abortive legs hidden under their 
 skin, useless now but indicating what was useful 
 once. Our knowledge no doubt in this as in 
 any other province of nature is but the merest 
 fraction of what may be known therein. But 
 there is no evidence whatever to show that what 
 we have observed is not a fair samj^le of the 
 whole. And so taking it, we find that the mass 
 of evidence in favour of the evolution of plants 
 and animals is enormously great and increasing 
 daily. 
 
 Granting then the high probability of the two 
 theories of Evolution, that which begins with 
 Laplace and explains the way in which the 
 earth was fitted to be the habitation of living 
 creatures, and that which owes its name to Dar- 
 win and gives an account of the formation of the 
 living creatures now existing, we have to see 
 what limitations and modifications are neces- 
 sarily attached to our complete acceptance of 
 both. 
 
1 68 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 First, then, at the very meeting point of these 
 two evolutions we have the important fact that 
 all the evidence that we possess up to the pre- 
 sent day negatives the opinion that life is a 
 mere evolution from inorganic matter. We 
 know perfectly well the constituents of all living 
 substance?. We know that the fundamental 
 material of all plants and all animals is a com- 
 pound called protoplasm, or that, in other words, 
 organic matter in all its immense variety of 
 forms is nothing but protoplasm variously modi- 
 fied. And we know the constituent elements of 
 this protoplasm, and their proportions, and the 
 temperatures within which protoplasm as such 
 can exist. But we are quite powerless to make 
 it, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature 
 in the act of making it. All the evidence we 
 have points to one conclusion only, that life 
 is the result of antecedent Ufe, and is pro- 
 ducible on no other conditions. Repeatedly 
 have scientific observers believed that they 
 have come on iustances of spontaneous gene- 
 ration, but further examination has invariably 
 shown that they have been mistaken. We can 
 put the necessary elements together, but we 
 
Yi.] and the Doctrine of EvohUio7i. 169 
 
 cannot supply the necessary bond by which they 
 are to be made to hve. Nay, we cannot even 
 recall that bond when it has once been dissolved. 
 We can take living protoplasm and we can kill 
 it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our 
 best chemistry can discover, but it will be dead 
 protoplasm, and we cannot make it live again ; 
 and as far as we know nature can no more make 
 it live than we can. It can be used as food for 
 living creatures, animals or plants, and so its 
 substance can be taken up by living protoplasm 
 and made to share in the life which thus con- 
 sumes it ; but life of its own it cannot obtain. 
 Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two 
 evolutions lands us in acceptance of a miracle. 
 The creation of life is unaccounted for. And it 
 much more exactly answers to what we mean by 
 a miracle than it did under the old theory of 
 creation before Evolution was made a scientific 
 doctrine. For under that old theory the creation 
 of living creatures stood on the same footing as 
 the creation of metals or other inorganic sub- 
 stances. It was part of that beginning which 
 had to be taken for granted, and which for that 
 reason lay outside of the domain of Science alto- 
 
1 70 Apparent Collisioft between Religion [Lect. 
 
 gether. But if we accept the two evolutions, 
 the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents 
 itself as a direct interference in the actual history 
 of the world. There could have been no life when 
 the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely 
 heated fluid. There came a time when the earth 
 became ready for life to exist upon it. And the 
 life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can 
 account for its coming. As it stands this is 
 a great miracle. And from this conclusion the 
 only escape that has been suggested is to sup- 
 pose that life came in on a meteoric stone from 
 some already formed habitable world ; a sup- 
 position which transfers the miracle to another 
 scene, but leaves it as great a miracle as before. 
 Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there 
 was a purpose in it worthy of miraculous inter- 
 ference. For what purpose can rank side by 
 side with the existence and development of life, 
 the primary condition of all moral and spiritual 
 existence and action in this worlds In the intro- 
 duction of life was wrapped up all that we value 
 and all that we venerate in the whole creation. 
 The infinite superiority, not in degree only, but 
 in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to 
 
VI.] and the Docti'ine of EvohUion. i 7 1 
 
 a stone, justifies us in believing that the main 
 purpose of the creation that we see was to 
 supply a dwelling-place and a scene of action for 
 living beings. We cannot say that the dignity 
 of the Moral Law requires that creatures to be 
 made partakers in the knowledge of it, and even 
 creatures of a lower nature but akin to them, 
 must have been the results of a separate and 
 miraculous act of creation. But we can say that 
 there is a congruity in such a miracle, with the 
 moral purpose of all the world, of which we are 
 a part, that removes all difficulty in believing 
 it. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and 
 can only say, ' Here is a puzzle yet unsolved.' 
 Nor can the most religious scientific man bo 
 blamed as undtitiful to religion if he persists in 
 endeavouring to solve the puzzle. But he has 
 no right to insist beforehand that the puzzle is 
 certainly soluble ; for that he cannot know, and 
 the evidence is against him. 
 
 Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory 
 by itself, we see at once that it is incomplete, 
 and the consideration of this incompleteness 
 gravely modifies the conclusion which would 
 otherwise be rightly drawn from it, and which, 
 
172 Apparent Collision behucen Religion [Lect. 
 
 indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. 
 For the theory rests on two main pillars, the 
 transmission of characteristics from progenitor 
 to progeny, and the introduction of minute varia- 
 tions in the progeny with each successive gene- 
 ration. Now, the former of these may be said 
 to be well established, and we recognise it as a 
 law of life that all plants and animals propagate 
 their own kind. But the latter has, as yet, been 
 hardly examined at all. Each new generation 
 shows special slight variations. But wdiat 
 causes these variations % and what determines 
 what they shall be \ In Darwin's investigations 
 these questions are not touched. The variations 
 are treated as if they were quite indefinite in 
 number and in nature. He concerns himself 
 only with the effect of these variations after they 
 have appeared. Some have the effect of giving 
 the plant or animal an advantage in the struggle 
 of hfe ; some give no such advantage ; some are 
 hurtful. And hence follows the permanent pre- 
 servation or speedy destruction of the plants and 
 animals themselves. But we are bound to look 
 not only to their effects but to their causes, if 
 tlie theory is to be completed. And then we 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evohition. 173 
 
 cannot fail to see that these variations in the 
 progeny cannot be due to something in the pro- 
 genitors, or otherwise the variations would be 
 all alike, which they certainly are not. They 
 must, therefore, be due to external circumstances. 
 These slight variations are produced by the 
 action of the surroundings, by the food, by the 
 temperature, by the various accidents of life in 
 the progenitors. Now, when we see this, we 
 see also how gravely it modifies the conclusions 
 which we have to draw concerning the ancestry 
 of any species now existing. Let us take, for 
 instance, the great order of vertebrate animals. 
 At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to 
 indicate that all these animals are descended 
 from one pair or one individual, and that their 
 unity of construction is due to that fact ; but if 
 we go back in thought to the time at which the 
 special peculiarities were introduced which really 
 constituted the order and separated it from 
 other animals, we see that it is by no means 
 clear that it origmated with one pair or with 
 one individual, and that, on the contrary, the 
 probabilities are the other way. Although the 
 separation of this order from the rest must have 
 
1 74 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 taken place very early, it cannot well have 
 taken place until millions of animals had al- 
 ready come into existence. The prodigality of 
 nature in multiplying animal life is fully ac- 
 knowledged by Darwin, and that prodigality is 
 apparently greatest in the lowest and most 
 formless type of animal. There being, then, 
 these many millions of living creatures in exist- 
 ence, the external surroundings introduce into 
 them many variations, and among these the 
 special variations to which the vertebrate type 
 is due. It is quite clear that wherever the 
 external surroundings were the same or nearly 
 the same, the variations introduced would be 
 the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far 
 more probable that external surroundings should 
 be the same or nearly the same in many places 
 than that each spot should be absolutely unlike 
 every other spot in these particulars. The be- 
 ginnings of the vertebrate order would show 
 themselves simultaneously, or at any rate inde- 
 pendently, in many places wherever external 
 conditions were sufficiently similar. And the 
 unity of the plan in the vertebrata would be 
 due, not to absolute unity of ancestry, but to 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evohition. 1 75 
 
 unity of external conditions at a particular 
 epoch in the descent of life. Hence it follows 
 that the separation of animals into orders and 
 genera and even into species took place, if not 
 for the most part yet very largely, at a very 
 early period in the history of organic evolution. 
 Of course the descendants of any one of the 
 original vertebrata might, and probably in not a 
 few cases did, branch off into new subdivisions 
 and yet again into further subdivisions, and we 
 are always justified in looking for unity of 
 ancestry among all the species. But it is also 
 quite possible that any species may be regularly 
 descended, without branching off at all, from one 
 of the originals, and that other species that re- 
 semble it may owe the resemblance simply to 
 very great similarity of external conditions. To 
 find, for instance, the unity of ancestry between 
 man and the other animals, it will certainly be 
 necessary to go back to a point in the history of 
 hfe when living creatures were as yet formless, 
 undeveloped — the materials, as we may call 
 them, of the animal creation as we now see it, 
 and not in any but a strictly scientific sense, 
 what we mean when we ordinarily speak of 
 
1 76 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 animals. Tlie true settlement of such questions 
 as these can only be obtained when long and 
 patient study shall have completed Darwin's 
 investigations by determining under what laws 
 and within what limits the slio-ht variations 
 which characterise each individual animal or 
 plant are congenitally introduced into its struc- 
 ture. As things stand the probabilities certainly 
 are that a creature with such especial character- 
 istics as man has had a history altogether of his 
 own, if not from the beginning of all life upon 
 the globe, yet from a very early period in the 
 development of that life. He resembles certain 
 other animals very closely in the structure of 
 his body ; but the part which external conditions 
 had to play in the earliest stages of evolution of 
 life must have been so exceedingly large that 
 identity or close similarity in these external con- 
 ditions may well account for these resemblances. 
 And the enormous gap which separates his 
 nature from that of all other creatures known, 
 indicates an exceedingly early difference of 
 origin. 
 
 Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the 
 Moral Law out of anything but itself. Attempts 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evohition. 177 
 
 have been made, and many more will no doubt 
 be made, to trace the origin of the spiritual 
 faculty to a development of the other faculties. 
 And it is to be expected that great success will 
 ultimately attend the endeavours to show the 
 growth of all the subordinate powers of the soul. 
 That our emotions, that our impulses, that our 
 affections should have had a history, and that 
 their present working should be the result of 
 that history, has nothing in it improbable. There 
 can be no question that we inherit these things 
 very largely, and that they are also very largely 
 due to special peculiarities of constitution in 
 each individual. That large part of us which is 
 rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from 
 our own will and our own free action, it is per- 
 fectly reasonable to find subject to laws of 
 Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we 
 share with the lower animals. They, too, can 
 love ; can be angry or pleased; can put affection 
 above appetite; can show generosity and nobility 
 of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, 
 self-sacrificing ; can take delight in society : and 
 some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind 
 of civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's 
 
 N 
 
178 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 faithful servants and companions, show emotions 
 and affections rising as far as mere emotions and 
 affections can rise to the human level. Ants 
 show an advance in the arts of life well com- 
 parable to our own. If the bare animal nature 
 is thus capable of such high attainments by the 
 mere working of natural forces, it is to be ex- 
 pected that similar forces in mankind should be 
 found to work under similar laws. We are not 
 spiritual beings only, we are animals, and what- 
 ever nature has done for other animals we may 
 expect it to have done and to be doing for us. 
 And if their nature is cajDable of evoKition, so 
 too should ours be. And the study of such 
 evolution of our own nature is likely to be of 
 the greatest value. This nature is the main in- 
 strument, put into the grasp as it were of that 
 spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to 
 be used in making our whole life an offering to 
 God. It is good to know what can be done 
 with this instrument and what cannot ; how it 
 has been formed in the past, and may be still 
 further formed for the future. It is good to 
 study the evolution of liumanity. But all this 
 does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 179 
 
 the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to 
 us. The essence of that law is its universality; 
 and out of all this development, when carried to 
 its very perfection, the conception of such uni- 
 versality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this 
 evolution ever rises to the height of a law which 
 shall bind even God Himself, and enable Abra- 
 ham to say, ' Shall not the Judge of all the 
 earth do right % ' The very word right in this, 
 its fulness of meaning, cannot be used. 
 
 Evolution may lead the creature to say what 
 is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful 
 and what is delightful, what is to be feared 
 and what is to be sought ; it may develope 
 the sentiment which comes nearest of all to 
 the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sen- 
 timent of shame ; but it cannot reveal the 
 eternal character of the distinction between 
 right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was 
 pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution 
 in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just 
 as there is an evolution in our knowledge of 
 mathematics. The fulness of its meaning can 
 become clearer and ever clearer as generation 
 learns from generation. But the principle of 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, 
 cannot come out of any development of human 
 nature any more than the necessity of mathe- 
 matical truth can so come. It stands not on 
 experience, and is its own evidence. Nor in- 
 deed have any of the attempts to show that 
 everything in man (religion included) is the 
 product of Evolution ever touched the question 
 how this conception of vmiversal supremacy 
 comes in. It is treated as if it were an un- 
 authorised extension from our own experience 
 to what lies beyond all experience. This, 
 however, is to deny the essence of the Moral 
 Law altogether: that Law is universal or it 
 is nothing. 
 
 Now, when we compare the account of the 
 creation and of man given by the doctrine of 
 Evolution with that given in the Bible, we 
 see at once that the two are in different 
 regions. The purpose of giving the accounts 
 is different ; the spirit and character of the 
 accounts is different ; the details are altogether 
 different. The comparison must take note of 
 the difference of spirit and aim before it can 
 proceed at all. 
 
Yi.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 1 8 1 
 
 It is then quite certain, and even those who 
 contend for the Hteral interpretation of this 
 part of the Bible will generally admit, that 
 the purpose of the revelation is not to teach 
 ScieDce at all. It is to teach great spiritual 
 and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of 
 nature as they appear to ordinary people. 
 When the creation of man is mentioned there 
 is clearly no intention to say by what processes 
 this creation was effected, or how much time 
 it took to work out those j^^ocesses. The 
 narrative is not touched by the question, Was 
 this a single act done in a moment, or a pro- 
 cess lasting through millions of years % The 
 writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth 
 peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of 
 plants and animals. He asserts that God made 
 them all, and made them resemble each other 
 and differ from each other. He knows nothing 
 and says nothing of the means used to produce 
 their resemblances or their differences. Ho 
 takes them as he sees them, and speaks of 
 their creation as God's work. Had he been 
 commissioned to teach his people the science 
 of the matter, he would have had to put a 
 
1 82 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 most serious obstacle in the way of their faith. 
 They would have found it almost impossible 
 to believe in a process of creation so utterly 
 unlike all their own experience. And it would 
 have been quite useless to them besides, since 
 their science was not in such a condition as to 
 enable them to (Coordinate this doctrine wnth 
 any other. As ' science it would have been 
 dead ; and as spiritual truth it would have 
 been a hindrance. 
 
 But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to com- 
 municate, and we can read them still. 
 
 He had to teach that the world as we see 
 it, and all therein contained, was created out 
 of nothing ; and that the spiritual, and not 
 the material, was the source of all existence. 
 He had to teach that the creation was not 
 merely orderly, but progressive ; going from 
 the formless to the formed; from the orderless 
 to the ordered; from the inanimate to the 
 animate ; from the plant to the animal ; from 
 the lower animal to the higher ; from the 
 beast to the man ; ending with the rest of the 
 Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, 
 life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly 
 
VI.] arid the Doctrine of Evolution. 183 
 
 match the doctrine of Evolution than this. It 
 is, in fact, the same thing said from a different 
 point of view. All this is done by casting the 
 account into the form of a week of work with 
 the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing 
 his account, the writer made use of a mode of 
 teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. 
 The symbolical use of the number seven is 
 common in other inspired writers. The sym- 
 bolical use of periods of time is not without 
 example. That the purpose of the account 
 was not to teach great truths, but to give men 
 information upon scientific questions, is incre- 
 dible. And, in fact, if we look in this account 
 for literal history, it becomes very difficult to 
 give any meaning to what is said of the 
 seventh day, or to reconcile the interpretation 
 of it with our Lord's words concerning the 
 Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and 
 I work.' There is no more reason for setting 
 aside Geology, because it does not agree in 
 detail with Genesis, than there is for setting 
 aside Astronomy because all through the Old 
 Testament the sun is spoken of as going round 
 the earth. 
 
184 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 And when the writer of Genesis passes from 
 creation in general to man in particular, it is 
 still clear that he has no mission to tell those 
 for whom he was writing by what processes 
 man was formed, or how long those processes 
 lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as 
 it would have been to tell what every physio- 
 logist now knows of the processes by Avhich 
 every individual man is developed from a small 
 germ to a breathing and living infant. He 
 takes men — and he could not but take men as 
 he sees them — with their sinful nature, with 
 their moral and spiritual capacity, with their 
 relations of sex, with their relations of family. 
 He has to teach the essential supremacy of 
 man among creatures, the subordination in 
 position but equality in nature of woman to 
 man, the original declension of man's will from 
 the divine path, the dim and distant but sure 
 hope of man's restoration. These are not, and 
 cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked 
 out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. 
 But in this allegory there is nothing whatever 
 that crosses the path of science, nor is it for 
 reasons of science that so many great Christian 
 
VI.] and the Doctrine of Evolution. 185 
 
 thinkers from the earHest age of the Church 
 downwards have pronounced it an allegory. 
 The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly 
 the purpose for which it is told ; and evolution 
 such as science has rendered probable had done 
 its work in forming man such as he is before 
 the narrative begins. 
 
 It may be said that it seems inconsistent 
 with the dignity of man's nature as described 
 in the Bible to believe that his formation was 
 effected by any process of evolution, still more 
 by any such process of evolution as would re- 
 present him to have been an animal before he 
 became a man. 
 
 But, in the first place, it is to be observed 
 that Science does not yet assert, and there is 
 no reason to believe that it ever will assert, 
 that man became a fully developed animal, 
 with the brute instincts and inclinations, appe- 
 tites and passions, fully formed, an animal such 
 as we see other animals now, before he passed 
 on into a man such as man is now. His body 
 may have been developed according to the 
 theory of Evolution, yet along a parallel but 
 independent line of its own ; but at any rate 
 
1 86 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 it branched off from other animals at a very 
 early point in the descent of animal life. And, 
 further, as Science cannot yet assert that life 
 was not introduced into the world when made 
 habitable by a direct creative act, so too 
 Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably 
 certain will never assert, that the higher and 
 added life, the spiritual faculty, which is man's 
 characteristic prerogative, was not given to 
 man by a direct creative act as soon as the body 
 which was to be the seat and the instrument 
 of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently 
 developed to receive it. That the body shoidd 
 have been first prepared, and that when it was 
 prepared the soul should either have been then 
 given, or then first made to hve in the image 
 of God, — this is a supposition which is incon- 
 sistent neither with what the Bible tells 
 nor with what Science has up to this time 
 proved. 
 
 And to this must be added that it is out of 
 place for us to define what is consistent or 
 inconsistent with the dignity of man in the 
 process or method by which he was created to 
 be what he is. His dignity consists in his 
 
VI.] cind the Doctrine of Evolution. 187 
 
 possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in 
 the method by which he became possessed of 
 it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and the 
 Bible never professes to tell, what powers or 
 gifts are wrapped up in matter itself, or in 
 that living matter of which we are made. 
 How absolutely nothing we know of the mode 
 by which any single soul is created ! The germ 
 which is to become a man can be traced by the 
 physiologist through all the changes that it has 
 to undergo before it comes to life. Is the 
 future soul wrapped up in it from the first, 
 and dormant till the hour of awakening comes 1 
 or is it given at some moment in the develop- 
 ment % We see in the infant how its powers 
 expand, and we know that the spiritual faculty, 
 the very essence of its being, has a development 
 like the other faculties. It has in it the gift 
 of speech, and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, 
 and taste, and power of thought ; self-sacrifice 
 and unswerving truth ; science and art, and 
 spiritual understanding, all may be there in 
 abundant measure and yet may show no sign. 
 All this we know ; and because it is common 
 and well known we see nothing inconsistent 
 
1 88 Apparent Collision between Religion [Lect. 
 
 with the dignity of our nature in tliis conceal- 
 ment of all that dignity, helpless and powerless, 
 within the form of an infant in arms. With 
 this before us it is impossible to say that any- 
 thing which Science has yet proved, or ever 
 has any chance of proving, is inconsistent with 
 the place given to man in Creation by the 
 teaching of the Bible. 
 
 In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in 
 teaching Evolution, has yet asserted anythiug 
 that is inconsistent with Kevelation, unless we 
 assume that Revelation was intended not to 
 teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth 
 also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find 
 that the writer of the Book of Genesis, like all 
 the other writers in the Bible, took nature as 
 he saw it, and expressed his teaching in lan- 
 guage corresponding to what he saw. And 
 the doctrine of Evolution, in so far as it has 
 been shown to be true, does but fill out in 
 detail the declaration that we are ' fearfully 
 and wonderfully made ; marvellous are Thy 
 works ; and that my soul knoweth right well.' 
 There is nothing in all that Science has yet 
 taught, or is on the way to teach, which con- 
 
VI.] a7id the Doctrine of Evohition. 189 
 
 flicts with the doctiine that we are made in 
 the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around 
 us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a 
 Kevelation from a Father in Heaven, and re- 
 sponsible to judgment by His Law. We know 
 not how the first human soul was made, just 
 as w^e know not how any human soul has been 
 made since ; but we know that we are, in a 
 sense in which no other creatures living with 
 us are, the children of His special care. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE 
 CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 
 
 The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the 
 will. The miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of 
 Science. Our Lord's Resurrection, and His miracles of 
 healing, possibly not miraculous in the scientific sense. 
 Different aspect of miracles now and at the time when the 
 Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, 
 by our Lord's character, by our Lord's i^ower. Nature of 
 evidence requii-ed to prove miracles ; not such as to put 
 physical above spiritual evidence ; not such as to be unsuited 
 to their own day. Impossibility of demonstrating universal 
 uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the progress of 
 Science. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE 
 CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER. 
 
 ' Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in 
 Me : or else believe Me for the very works' sake.* 
 St. John xiv. I r . 
 
 SCIENCE and Religion come into apparent 
 collision on the question of the freedom 
 of the will. Science and Revelation come into 
 a similar apparent collision on the possibility 
 of miracles. The cases are precisely parallel. 
 In each individual man the uniformity of nature 
 is broken to leave room for the moral force of 
 the will to assert its independent existence. 
 This breach of uniformity is within very narrow 
 limits, and occurs much more rarely than ap- 
 pears at first sight. But the demand to admit 
 not only the possibility but the fact of this 
 breach is imperative, and to deny it is to turn 
 
1 94 Appare7it Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 the command of the Moral Law as ^-evealed in 
 the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Eeve- 
 lation asserts its right to set aside the uni- 
 formity of nature to leave room for a direct 
 communication from God to man. It is an 
 essential part of the Divine Moral Law to claim 
 supremacy over the physical world. Unless 
 somehow or other the moral ultimately rules 
 the physical, the Moral Law cannot rightly 
 claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as 
 given to us maintains that this superiority has 
 been asserted in fact here in the world of 
 phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equi- 
 valent to denying that any revelation has been 
 made. In this way Eevelation asserts for 
 God's message to the human race precisely the 
 same breach of uniformity which every man's 
 conscience claims for himself in reo^ard to his 
 own conduct. 
 
 It is, however, necessary to point out that 
 when we speak of a breach of uniformity we 
 are never in a position to deny that the breach 
 of uniformity may be physical only and per- 
 haps apparent only. It may be found, it pro- 
 bably will be found, at last that the Moral Law 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 195 
 
 has in some way always maintained its own 
 uniformity unbroken. The Moral Law has in 
 its essence an elasticity which the physical law 
 has not. It often takes the form, that, given 
 certain conduct, there will follow certain con- 
 sequences ; and the law is kept though the 
 conduct is free. It is further possible, and 
 Revelation has no interest in denying it, that 
 the intervention which has apparently disturbed 
 the sequence of phenomena is, after all, that of 
 a higher physical law as yet unknown. For 
 instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may 
 be no miracle in the strictest sense at all. It 
 may be but an instance of the power of mind 
 over body, a power which is undeniably not yet 
 brought within the range of Science, and which 
 nevertheless may be really within its domain. 
 In other ways what seems to be miraculous 
 may be simply unusual. And it must therefore 
 be always remembered that Revelation is not 
 bound by the scientific definition of a miracle, 
 and that if all the miraculous events recorded 
 in the Bible happened exactly as they are told, 
 and if Science were some day able to show that 
 they could be accounted for by natural causes 
 
 2 
 
196 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 working at the time in each ease, this would 
 not in any way affect their character, as regards 
 the Eevelation which they were worked to 
 prove or of which they form a part. Revela- 
 tion uses these events for its own purposes. 
 Some of these events are spoken of as evidences 
 of a divine mission. Some of them are substan- 
 tive facts embraced in the message delivered. 
 And if for these purposes they have served 
 their turn, if tliey have arrested attention which 
 would not otherwise have been arrested, if they 
 have overcome prejudices, if they have compelled 
 belief, the fact that they are afterwards dis- 
 covered to be no breach of the law of uniformity 
 has no bearing at all on the E-evelation to which 
 they belong. The miracle would in that case 
 consist in the precise coincidence in time with 
 the purpose which they served, or in the man- 
 ner and degree in which they marked out the 
 Man who wrought them from all other men, or 
 in the foreshadowing of events which are in 
 the distant future. 
 
 Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that 
 our Lord's Resurrection may be found here- 
 after to be no miracle at all in the scientific 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 197 
 
 sense. It foreshadows and begins the general 
 Resurrection ; when that general Eesurrection 
 comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural 
 issue of physical laws always at work. 
 
 There is nothing at present to indicate any- 
 thing of the sort ; but a general resurrection 
 in itself implies not a special interference but 
 a general rule. If, when we rise again, we 
 find that this resurrection is and always was a 
 part of the Divine purpose, and brought about 
 at last by machinery precisely the same in kind 
 as that which has been used in making and 
 governing the w^orld, we may also find that our 
 Lord's Resurrection was brought about by the 
 operation of precisely the same machinery. We 
 may find that even in the language of strict 
 science ' He was the first fruits of them that 
 slept,' and that His Resurrection was not a 
 miracle, but the first instance of the working 
 of a law till the last day quite unknown, but 
 on that last day operative on all that ever 
 lived. 
 
 Let us compare the general resurrection with 
 the first introduction of life into the world. 
 As far as scientific observation has yet gone that 
 
198 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 first introduction of life was a miracle. No 
 one has ever yet succeeded in tracing it to the 
 operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle 
 it is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the 
 miracle which believers are expecting at the 
 last day. And assuredly if a miracle was 
 once worked to introduce life into this habitable 
 world, there is very good reason to expect that 
 another miracle will be worked hereafter to 
 restore life to those that have lived. But there 
 are scientific men who think that the intro- 
 duction of life was not a miracle, that it came 
 at the fitting moment by the working of natural 
 laws ; or, in other words, that such properties 
 are inherent in the elements of which proto- 
 plasm is made that in certain special circum- 
 stances these elements will not only combine 
 but that the product of their combination will 
 live. If this be so, it is assuredly no such very 
 strange supposition that there may be such 
 properties inherent in our bodies or in certain 
 particles, whether particles of matter or not, 
 belonging to our bodies, that in certain special 
 circumstances these particles will return to life. 
 And if this be so the general resurrection mny 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 199 
 
 be no miracle, but the result of the properties 
 originally inherent in our bodies and of the 
 working of the laws of those properties. And 
 as the general resurrection so our Lord's Be- 
 surrection may in this way turn out to be no 
 breach of the uniformity of nature. 
 
 But this new discovery, if then made, would 
 not affect the place which our Lord's Resur- 
 rection holds in the records of Bevelation. It 
 is not the purpose of Revelation to interfere 
 with the course of nature ; if such interference 
 be needless, and the work of revealing God to 
 man can be done without it, there is no reason 
 whatever to beheve that any such interference 
 would take place. 
 
 Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of 
 healing. There is no question at all that the 
 power of mind over body is exceedingly great, 
 and has never yet been thoroughly examined. 
 We know almost nothing of the extent of this 
 power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellous 
 recoveries often astonish, the physician, and he 
 cannot account for them except by supposing 
 that in some way the powers of the mind have 
 been roused to interfere with the working of the 
 
200 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 nervous system. And some men, on the other 
 hand, have died or their health has been shattered 
 by mere imaginations. Some men of note have 
 attributed the recoveries claimed for homoeopathy 
 to this cause. Some have assigned to this 
 cause the extraordinary cures that have been 
 undeniably wrought at the shrines, or on sight 
 or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints. 
 The different impostures that have on many 
 occasions prevailed for a time and then lost their 
 reputation and passed out of fashion, are gener- 
 ally supposed to have owed their short-lived 
 success to the same obscure working of unknown 
 natural laws. They have been tested by their 
 successes and their failures. They have suc- 
 ceeded, and for a time continued to succeed ; but 
 at last they have ceased to work because faith in 
 them for some reason or other has been shaken 
 down. Their falsehood has thus been detected ; 
 but nevertheless their genuine success for a time 
 has been enough to show that they rested on a 
 reality, and that reality seems to have consisted 
 in the strange power of mind over body. In 
 this region all is at present unexamined; and 
 all operations are tentative, and for that reason 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 201 
 
 most are only successful for a time. Now our 
 Lord's miracles are never tentative ; that is not 
 the character given to them either by friend or 
 by foe. Nor is there any instance recorded either 
 by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not 
 accomplished. Nowhere is there any record 
 given us by the assailants of the Gospel of any 
 instance of His action parallel to the record 
 given in the Acts of the Apostles of the seven 
 sons of Sceva the Jew, The accounts of his 
 enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identi- 
 cal with saying that they did not believe Him. 
 But they do not ever charge Him with failure. 
 Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of 
 His miracles of healing may have been the result 
 of this power of mind over body which we are 
 now considering. It is possible that they may 
 be due not to an interference with the uniformity 
 of nature, but to a superiority in His mental 
 power to the similar power possessed by other 
 men. Men seem to possess this power both over 
 their own bodies and over the bodies of others in 
 different degrees. Some can influence other 
 men's bodies through their minds more ; some 
 less. Possibly He may have possessed this 
 
202 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 power absolutely where others possessed it 
 conditionally. He may have possessed it with- 
 out limit ; others within limits. If this were 
 so, these acts of healing would not be miracles 
 in the strictly scientific sense. They would 
 imply very great superiority in Him to other 
 men. But they would be in themselves under 
 the law of uniformity. Now it is clear that 
 if this should turn out to be so, though these 
 acts would not be miracles for the purposes 
 of Science, they would still be miracles for the 
 purposes of Hevelation. They would do their 
 work in arresting attention, and still more in 
 accrediting both the message and the Messenger. 
 They would separate Him from ordinary men. 
 They would prove Him to be possessed of cre- 
 dentials worth examining. To the beUever it 
 would make no difference whether Science called 
 them miracles or not. To him it would still 
 remain the fact that here was a Messensier whom 
 God had seen fit to endow with powers which 
 no other man ever possessed in such degree and 
 such completeness, though others may have 
 possessed some touch of them greater or less. 
 Further, it is necessary to repeat what was 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatu7'al Power. 203 
 
 briefly remarked in a previous Lecture, that the 
 position which miracles take as regards us who 
 read them many centuries after, and as regards 
 those who witnessed and recorded them at the 
 time, is quite different. To them the miracles 
 were the first and often the chief proof that the 
 man who wrought them had been sent by God, 
 and that His message was a revelation, not an 
 imj^osture ; to us they ai'e, if accepted at all, 
 accepted as a part of the revelation itself 
 There are no doubt a few minds that are con- 
 vinced by Paley's argument, and beginning with 
 accepting the miracles as proved by sufficient 
 external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion 
 that therefore the teaching that was thus accom- 
 panied must be divine. But most men are quite 
 unable to take to pieces in this way the records 
 in which Revelation is contained, and to go from 
 external evidence taken alone to the messeno-ers 
 who thus proved their mission, and thence to the 
 substance of the message which they taught. To 
 most of us, on the contrary, the Revelation is a 
 whole, capable of being looked at from many sides, 
 and found to be divine from whatever side it is 
 seen ; and one of its aspects is this supernatural 
 
204 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 character by which it appears to assert its identity 
 Avith tliat Moral Law which claims absolute supre- 
 macy over all the physical world. The main evi- 
 dence of the Eevelation to us consists in its 
 harmony with the voice of the spiritual faculty 
 within us; and the claim which it asserts to have 
 come through teachers endowed with supernatural 
 power is so far corroborative evidence as it falls in 
 with the essential character of the Moral Law. 
 That eternal law claims supremacy over the physi- 
 cal world and actually asserts it in the freedom of 
 the human will ; and a Kevelation which comes 
 from Him Who in His own essential Being is 
 that very law personified, might be expected to 
 exhibit the same claim in actual manifestation 
 in its approach to men. 
 
 Bearing these limitations and characteristics 
 of the miraculous element in the Bible in mind, 
 let us ask how that miraculous element is therein 
 presented. 
 
 First, in the account of the creation, it is 
 taught that the original existence of all matter 
 flows from a spiritual source. We do not define 
 God as the cause, meaning that that is His 
 essence, and that except as causing other things 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 205 
 
 to exist He does not exist Himself. But we 
 describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all 
 things exist by His Will, and that without His 
 Will nothing could ever have existed. And as 
 the Revelation tells us that He is the source 
 of all existence, the Creator of the substance of 
 things, so too does it assert tliat He gave all 
 things their special properties and the laws of 
 those properties, and that not only the original 
 creation, but all the subsequent history of all 
 things has been the outcome of His design, and 
 that He has thus prescribed the government of 
 the whole universe. And yet again the Revela- 
 tion from the beginning to the end maintains His 
 living Presence in and over all things that He 
 has thus formed, and denies that He has parted 
 with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh 
 acts of government, whenever and wherever He 
 sees fit. For He is necessarily free and cannot 
 be restrained by anything but His own holiness. 
 And unless He expressly revealed to us that 
 His own holiness prevented Him from inter- 
 fering with His own creation, we could not put 
 limits to what He could do. The Revelation that 
 He has given us says just the contrary, and 
 
2o6 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 from end to end implies that He is present in 
 the government of the creation which He has 
 made. 
 
 What evidence, then, is there in the world of 
 phenomena that He has ever thus interfered % 
 Putting aside as untenable all idea of a j^triori 
 impossibility, admitting that God can work a 
 miracle if He will, admitting that a miracle 
 avowedly worked in the interest of a divine 
 revelation stands on a totally different footing 
 from a miracle avowedly worked in any other 
 interest, putting the breach of the law of uni- 
 formity made by a miracle on the same footing 
 as the breach of the same law made by a human 
 will ; we have to ask what evidence can be given 
 that any such miracles as are recorded in the 
 Bible have ever been worked 1 
 
 It is plain at once that the answer must be 
 given by the New Testament. No such evidence 
 can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in 
 the Old Testament. The times are remote ; the 
 date and authorship of the Books not estab- 
 lished with certainty; the mixture of poetry 
 with history no longer capable of any sure 
 separation into its 2:)arts ; and, if the New Testa- 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 207 
 
 merit did not exist, it would be impossible to 
 show such a distinct preponderance of proba- 
 bility as would justify us in calling on any to 
 accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as 
 historically true. 
 
 But in the New Testament we stand on 
 different ground. And we have here first the 
 evidence which Paley has put together to show 
 that the early Christians spent their lives and 
 finally surrendered their lives as witnesses to a 
 Gospel which included miracles both among its 
 evidences and as part of its substance. It is not 
 possible to get rid of miracles nor the belief in 
 miracles from the history of the Apostles. They 
 testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual 
 fact, and make it the basis of all their preaching. 
 They testify to our Lord's miracles as part of the 
 character of His life. It is necessary to main- 
 tain that they w^ere mere fanatics with no claim 
 to respect but rather to the pity which we feel 
 for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold 
 that no miracle was ever wrought by our Lord. 
 It is difficult to maintain even their honesty 
 if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord 
 without any basis of fact to rest on. No man 
 
2o8 Appai''ent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 who is not determined to upliold an opinion at 
 all hazards can question that St. Paul and 
 St. Peter believed that our Lord rose from the 
 dead, and that they died for and in that belief 
 
 But, in the second place, behind the Apostles 
 stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be 
 said of the documents that compose the New 
 Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show 
 that our Lord was universally believed by His 
 disciples to have the power of working miracles 
 and to have often worked them. There is no 
 hesitation in regard to this ; no hint of any 
 doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any 
 disclaimer on His part. He must have known 
 whether He could work miracles or not. He 
 must have known that His disciples believed 
 Him to jDossess the power. There is not the 
 slightest trace of His ever having implied that 
 this was a misconception. He did sometimes 
 disclaim what was ascribed to Him, even when 
 what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but 
 was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of 
 what it implied. * Why callest thou Me good ? 
 There is none good but One, that is, God,' we do 
 find. But ' Why askest thou Me to do this % 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 209 
 
 There is none tliat can do this but One, that is 
 God/ we do not find. It is plain that He 
 accepted the behef that assigned Him powers 
 above those of other men — powers given Him 
 by His Father in heaven — and never discouraged 
 it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest 
 ground, and admit for argument's sake that the 
 New Testament contains a legendary element, 
 and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the 
 Gospels and Epistles without altering them 
 beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented 
 to us in the New Testament would become a 
 difierent person if the miracles were removed. 
 And if He claimed to possess and exercise this 
 power, the evidence becomes the evidence of 
 One Who must have known and Whom we 
 cannot disbelieve. 
 
 And this claim, which He has thus made, and 
 which was thus accepted by His disciples, is 
 corroborated by the power, different in form but 
 similar in kind, which He exerted then on the 
 men of His own day, and has ever since con- 
 tinued to exert on all succeeding generations. 
 The first disciples were under His absolute 
 dominion. They preached Christ and not them- 
 
 p 
 
2IO Apparent Collision of Science zvith [Lect. 
 
 selves. They referred everything to Him, and 
 professed to have no power but from Him. 
 St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous 
 power of influence, yet professes to be nothing 
 without Christ and to be everything in Christ. 
 Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but com- 
 mitted His Kevelation to His Apostles, and we 
 only know Him through them. But they are 
 not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher ; 
 philosophers succeeding a philosopher ; prophets 
 succeeding a prophet. To no one of them does 
 it occur for a moment to teach anything except 
 as from Him. St. Paul gives advice sometimes 
 which he does not profess to be giving by our 
 Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts 
 the mark of his own inferiority on what he says, 
 and claims for it no such authority as belongs to 
 a word from Christ. A word from Christ was 
 final on all subjects. 
 
 And this power over men has never weakened 
 from that day to tliis. There is no other power 
 like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the 
 majority of cases by trial of some theory as a 
 working hypothesis. Such too has been the pro- 
 cedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ ; stake 
 
Vir.] the Claim to SupcrnattLral Poiver. 2 1 1 
 
 your happiness on Him ; stake your hope of 
 satisfying all spiritual aspirations on Him ; stake 
 your power of winning the victory over tempta- 
 tion on Him — this is the exhortation of Apostle, 
 and martyr, and saint, and evangelist, and 
 pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus 
 tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis 
 have not failed. The Christian Church has 
 been stained with many a blot. HI deeds have 
 been wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws 
 have been passed. Strange superstitions have 
 prevailed. But no other body can show such 
 saints, no other body can produce so great a 
 cloud of witnesses. It is certain that the lives 
 and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of 
 those who have trusted their all to Christ have 
 made them what He bade them be, the salt of 
 the earth. And they testify with one voice 
 that they know no other power which has 
 upheld them but the power of Christ whom 
 they have taken for their Lord. Others have 
 sometimes been set up as in some sort rivals to 
 Him as teachers or as examples ; but here there 
 is no rival even pretended. In no other man 
 have men been called on to believe as a living 
 
 p 2 
 
2 1 2 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 present power, able to give strength and victory 
 in the conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, 
 has passed through times of spiritual depression, 
 we may almost say of degradation. And in 
 the worst of times within the Church there 
 bas always remained a wonderful recuperative 
 power, which bas shaken ofl" inconsistencies and 
 defects in the past, and will do so yet more 
 in the future. But tbis recuperative power 
 has always shown itself in one form, and in 
 one form only, namely, a return to Christ and 
 to trust in Him, a trust which has never been 
 falsified. 
 
 The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is 
 enough to prove that belief m His supernatural 
 powers and in His exercise of those powers was 
 no gradual growth of later times, but from the 
 very beginning rooted in the convictions of 
 those who must have known the truth. The 
 character of our Lord as revealed in the Gospels 
 makes it impossible to disbelieve His claims 
 whatever they may be. His power attested by 
 generations of believers ever since corroborates 
 those claims by the persistent evidence of 
 eighteen centuries. 
 
VIT,] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 213 
 
 Against this evidence what is to be said % 
 It is said that the evidence for the uniformity 
 of nature is so overwhehnino; that nothino: can 
 set it aside. And further it is said, that, even 
 if it be conceded that it might be set aside, 
 no evidence sufBcient for the purpose has yet 
 been produced. 
 
 Now to deal with this second assertion first, 
 we must ask what is the nature of the evidence 
 that would be deemed sufficient ? If the in- 
 quirer does not believe that God created and 
 still governs the world, assuredly no evidence 
 wiU ever be sufficient to convince him that God 
 has worked a miracle. The existence of God is 
 certainly not to be proved by His interference 
 with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself 
 to us primarily in that way, He would have 
 wrought many more miracles than we now 
 know of, and would have kept our faith alive 
 by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations 
 of His presence and power. But He has not 
 so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest 
 mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order 
 that we might walk by faith and not by sight. 
 It will be a hopeless task to convince men that 
 
214 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 there is a God by pointing, not to His creation 
 but to His interference with creation. But if 
 a man do believe there is a God, what knid of 
 evidence ought he to expect to show him that 
 God has interfered in the course of the creation \ 
 In the first phice, he must not expect that 
 the physical evidence, that is the miraculous 
 evidence, for Eevelation should Idc of such a 
 character as to stand above the spiritual evi- 
 dence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the 
 existence of a God is to be found in the voice 
 of conscience, and the arguments from design 
 and from the order and beauty and visible pur- 
 pose of the creation are secondary — corrobora- 
 tive not demonstrative — so too the primary 
 evidence of a Kevelation from God must be 
 found in the harmony of that Kevelation with 
 the voice of conscience, and only the secondary 
 and corroborative evidence is to be looked for 
 in miracles. And in both cases the reason is 
 the same. For it is not God's purpose to win 
 the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, 
 the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the 
 humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are 
 discontented with tlieir own sl)ortcomino-s, the 
 
yil] the Claim to Siipcrnahiral Power. 215 
 
 souls tliat have a capacity for finding liappiness 
 in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose 
 of the Revelation made to us if the hard-headed 
 should have an advantage in accepting it over 
 the humble-minded. The evidence must he 
 such that spiritual character shall be an clement 
 in the acceptance of it. There would be a con- 
 tradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly 
 recognised God were the spiritual faculty, and 
 the faculty wdiereby we mainly recognised His 
 Eevelation were the scientific faculty. 
 
 And, in the second place, we have no right 
 to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought 
 in one age should be such evidence as properly 
 belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged 
 tliat the evidence suj)plied by the testimony of 
 the early Christians is of little value because 
 it was never cross-examined. No such precau- 
 tions surrounded the evidence as would now- be 
 required to give any value to evidence of similar 
 events. The witnesses gave up their lives to 
 attest what they taught ; but there was no one 
 to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's 
 evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now 
 be put to the test of searching questions. But 
 
2 1 6 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 to make such objections as these is to make 
 what is on the face of it an absurd demand. 
 It is to ask that the scientific processes of the 
 nineteenth century should have been anticipated 
 in the first, that men should be miraculously 
 guided to supply a kind of evidence which 
 would be utterly superfluous at the time in 
 order to be convincing eighteen hundred years 
 afterwards. This would indeed have put the 
 miraculous incidents in the New Testament 
 narrative altogether out of place, and made 
 the miracles more important than the Revela- 
 tion which they were worked to introduce. 
 
 Now, if these two conditions are borne in 
 mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence 
 could be obtained of a miraculous life than we 
 possess concerning the life of our Lord. 
 
 The moral and spiritual evidence is His own 
 character which intentionally overshadows all 
 the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should 
 have made a false claim. And the material 
 evidence is the testimony of men who freely 
 gave their lives in proof of what they said. 
 Nor has anything yet been said or written to 
 shake Paley'.s argument on this [to int. 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 2 1 7 
 
 But, if we pass on to the other objection, that 
 no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a 
 miracle because the evidence for the uniformity 
 of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see 
 in such an assertion an instance of that inability 
 to get out of an accustomed groove against 
 which Science has perpetually to guard. In 
 Science the uniformity of nature is so indis- 
 pensable a postulate, that without it we cannot 
 stir a step. And if the student of Science is to 
 admit a breach, it can only be by stepping out- 
 side of his science for the time and conceiving 
 the possibility that there is some other truth 
 beside scientific truth, and some other kind of 
 evidence beside scientific evidence. We have 
 all heard of the need of guarding against the 
 bondage in which custom binds the mind. We 
 have heard of the student who when first he 
 saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the 
 horses that impelled it, because he had never 
 known, and consequently could not imagine any 
 other mode of producing such motion. But 
 this danger attends not only the separate in- 
 vestigations which Science makes into pheno- 
 mena ; it attends Science as a whole. And it 
 
2 1 8 Apparent Collision of Science wilh [L?ct. 
 
 is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that 
 Science has not proved and cannot prove that 
 the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature 
 itself. 
 
 The evidence for the luiiformity of nature 
 consists in the fxct that from the beginning of 
 Science the known reign of pliysical law has 
 been steadily extending without a check ; that 
 instance after instance of apparent exception 
 has been brought by further examination within 
 its province ; that the hypothesis of uniformity 
 has now been long on trial and has never yet 
 been found to fail ; that no one who has so tried 
 it has the sligflitest hesitation in trustino- it for 
 the future, as he has proved it in the past. 
 But clearly as this evidence proves a general, 
 it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It 
 has not succeeded in showing that the human 
 will comes under the same rule. It has not 
 succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which 
 claims superiority for the moral over the 
 i^hysical. And when the utmost extent of 
 human knowledge is compared with the vast- 
 ness of nature, the claim to extend the induc- 
 tion from generality to universality is seen to 
 
YIl] the Claim to Supernatural Power. 219 
 
 be utterly untenable. So much as tins, indeed, 
 Science lias rendered bigbly probable, that the 
 uniformity of nature is never broken except 
 for a moral purpose. It is only for such a 
 purpose that the will is ever free. It is only 
 for such a purpose that Pvevelation has ever 
 claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond 
 this Science cannot go. Let it be granted tliat 
 the claim for freedom of the will has been often 
 unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let 
 it be granted that religions professing to be 
 revelations have included records of miracles 
 which had no moral purpose. This does not 
 affect the general conclusion that the evidence 
 for uniform it V has never succeeded, and can 
 never succeed in showing, that the God who 
 made and rules the universe never sets aside 
 a physical law for a moral purpose, either by 
 working through the human will or by direct 
 action on external nature. 
 
 Science will .continue its progress, and as the 
 thoughts of men become clearer it will be per- 
 petually more plainly seen that no tiling in 
 Revelation really interferes with that progress. 
 It will Ije seen that devout believers can observe, 
 
2 20 Apparent Collision of Science with [Lect. 
 
 can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity 
 and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active 
 an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as 
 those who deny entirely all possibility of 
 miracles and reject all Revelation on that ac- 
 count. The belief that God can work miracles 
 and has worked them, has never yet obstructed 
 the path of a single student of Science ; nor 
 has any student who repudiated that belief 
 found any aid in his study from that repudiation. 
 The rush of Science of late years has for the time 
 made many men fancy that Science is every- 
 thing; and believers in Revelation have helped 
 this fancy by insisting on their part that Revela- 
 tion is everything ; but such waves of opinion, 
 resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, 
 and scientific men will learn that there are 
 other kinds of knowledge besides scientific 
 knowledge, as believers are already learning 
 that God teaches us by other methods besides 
 the method of Revelation. The students of the 
 Bible will certainly learn that Revelation need 
 not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such 
 doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students 
 of nature will certainly learn that Science has 
 
VII.] the Claim to Supernatural Power. ii\ 
 
 nothing to fear from the teaching of Eevelation, 
 not even from the claim to miraculous power. 
 For most certainly both Science and Revelation 
 come from one and the same God; 'the heavens 
 declare His glory, and the firmament showeth 
 His handywork ; His law is perfect, converting 
 the soul ; His testimony is sure, making wise the 
 simple.' 
 
LECTURE VIIT. 
 
 THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 
 
 Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, 
 except in two ca^es ; the interference of human will and 
 of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of 
 Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but 
 in the pliy&ical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests 
 on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and 
 choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical 
 world : and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the 
 effects produced by Revelation. Nevertheless a demand for 
 more physical evidence ; but the physical cannot be allowed 
 to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from 
 leaning this way : superstition ; blindness ; stagnation. The 
 guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness : to take Jesus as the 
 Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will. 
 
LECTURE VIIL 
 
 THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT. 
 
 ' No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the 
 Holy Ghost.' I Cot. xii. 3. 
 
 TT is now the proper time to review the argu- 
 ment of these Lectures, and to endeavour 
 to trace, if possible, the source of the estrange- 
 ment which just at present separates Religion 
 and Science. 
 
 The postulate of Science is admitted on all 
 hands to be the imiformity of nature, and the 
 proof of this postulate has been found to consist 
 in an induction from the facts which nature 
 presents and our senses observe. Uniformity is 
 quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed 
 for some time it is instinctively used as a work- 
 ing hypothesis. So used it accumulates per- 
 petually increasing evidence of its truth, and if 
 we except two great classes of facts, we never 
 
 Q 
 
2 26 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 find any instance of its failure. The two classes 
 of facts which are thus excepted are the acts of 
 the human will and the miraculous element in 
 Eevelation, both of them instances of one thing, 
 namely, the interference of the moral with the 
 physical. To complete the induction and to 
 deprive the denial of universal uniformity of 
 all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary is 
 to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science 
 could get rid of these exceptions, though it 
 could not be said that the fundamental postu- 
 late was demonstrated, it could be said that all 
 the evidence was in its favour and absolutely 
 no evidence against it. And although scientific 
 belief would then still rank below mathematical 
 behef, it would nevertheless have a cogency 
 quite irresistible. Science would not thereby 
 gain in power of progress, in practical accept- 
 ance, or in utility to man. But men are so 
 constituted that completeness gives a special 
 kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other 
 way. If Science could but be complete it would 
 seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in nothing 
 else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion 
 for this completeness until every attempt to 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 227 
 
 question it is resented. I have seen a boy first 
 learning mechanics show a dislike to consider 
 the effect of friction as marring the symmetry 
 and beauty of mechanical problems ; too vague, 
 too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any 
 entrance into a system which is so rounded and 
 so precise without it. And something of the 
 same temper can sometimes be seen in students 
 of Science at the very thought of there being 
 anything in the world not under the dominion 
 of the great scientific postulate. The world 
 which thus contains something which Science 
 cannot deal with is pronounced forthwith to be 
 not the world that we know, not the world with 
 which we are concerned ; a conceivable world 
 if we choose to indulge our imagination in such 
 dreams, but not a real world either now or at 
 any time before or after. And yet the freedom 
 of the human will and the sense which cannot 
 be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to 
 all human conduct, perpetually retorts that this 
 world in which we live contains an element 
 which cannot be subdued to obedience to the 
 scientific law, but will have a course of its own. 
 The sense of responsibility is a rock which no 
 
 Q 2 
 
2 28 The Conclusion of the Argumeiit. [Lect. 
 
 demand for completeness in Science can crush. 
 All attempts at reconciling the mechanical 
 firmness of an unbroken law of uniformity 
 with the voice within that cannot be silenced 
 tellinir us that we must answer for our action, 
 have failed, and we know that they will for 
 ever fail. 
 
 If indeed it could be said that the progress 
 of Science was really barred by this inability 
 to make the induction complete, and to assert 
 the unbroken uniformity of all nature ; if it 
 could be said that any uncertainty was thus 
 cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or 
 misleading lights thus held up to draw in- 
 quirers from the true path, it would undoubtedly 
 become a duty to examine, and to examine 
 anxiously, whether indeed it could be true that 
 our faculties were thus hopelessly at variance 
 with each other, the scientific faculty imposing 
 on us one belief, and the spiritual faculty an- 
 other, and the two practically irreconcil cable. 
 But there is no reason whatever for thinking 
 this. Newton's investigations were unquestion- 
 ably pursued, as all true scientific investigations 
 must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth 
 
YIll.] The Co7tcLusion of the Argument. 229 
 
 of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never 
 felt it the slightest hindrance to his progress 
 that he always tacitly and often expressly 
 acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself 
 the power of setting this uniformity aside, and 
 indeed believed that He had used this power. 
 The believer who asserts the universality of a 
 law except when God works a miracle to set 
 it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in 
 comparison with an unbeliever who makes the 
 same assertion with no qualification at all. It 
 is granted on all hands that miracles are, and 
 ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that 
 reason need not be taken into account in the 
 investigation of nature. It is granted that the 
 freedom of the human will works within narrow 
 limits, and very slowly and slightly affects the 
 great mass of human conduct and what depends 
 on human conduct. And Science has often to 
 deal with approximations when nothing but 
 approximations can be obtained. We perpetually 
 meet in nature with quantities and relations 
 that cannot be accurately expressed nor accurately 
 ascertained, and we have to be content with 
 approximations, and we know how to use them 
 
2 ^o The Conclusion of the A rgument. [Lect. 
 
 in Science. Many chemical properties can only 
 be so expressed ; many primary facts, such as 
 the distances, the volumes, the weights of hea- 
 venly bodies ; and yet the approximations serve 
 our purpose. And so too, if there be a reserve 
 still uncovered by the scientific postulate, that 
 will not in any degree affect our investigation 
 of what is so covered. 
 
 In short, the unity of all things which Science 
 is for ever seeking will be found not in the 
 physical world alone, but in the physical and 
 spiritual united. That unity embraces both. 
 And the uniformity which is the expression of 
 that unity is not a uniformity complete in na- 
 ture, taken by itself, but complete when the 
 two worlds are taken together. And this Science 
 ought to recognise. 
 
 Let us turn from the physical to the spi- 
 ritual. 
 
 The voice within us which demands our ac- 
 ceptance of religion makes no direct appeal to 
 the evidence supplied by the senses. We are 
 called on to believe in a supreme law of duty 
 on pain of being lowered before our own con- 
 sciences. And this law of dut}^ goes on to 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 231 
 
 assert its own supremacy over all tilings that 
 exist, and that not as an accidental fact, but 
 as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy 
 cannot be other than an accidental fact unless it 
 be not only actual but intended. And intention 
 implies personality; and the law thus shows 
 itself to be a Supreme Being, claiming our 
 reverence, and asserting Himself to be the 
 Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things 
 that are. And this same voice within us asserts 
 that we are responsible to Him for all our 
 conduct, and are capable of that responsibility 
 because free to choose what that conduct shall 
 be. We are to believe not because the truth of 
 this voice is proved independently of itself, but 
 simply because we are commanded. Corrobora- 
 tive evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but 
 the main, the primary evidence is within the 
 soul. 
 
 Hence the strength of this belief depends on 
 ourselves and on our own character. To every 
 man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt 
 in proportion to the spirituality of each who 
 hears. Its acceptance is bound up in some way 
 with our own wills. How far it is a matter of 
 
2^2 
 
 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 choice to believe or to disbelieve it is not pos- 
 sible to define. The will lies hidden as it were 
 behind the emotions, the afiections, the nobler 
 impulses. The conscience shades off into the 
 other faculties, and we cannot always isolate it 
 from the rest. But though it be impossible to 
 say precisely how the will is concerned in the 
 spiritual belief, there can be no doubt that it 
 always takes its part in such belief. It is the 
 keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved 
 to its depths by the conscience, that grasp most 
 strongly the certainty of the law of duty. It is 
 the man with the strongest and noblest aspira- 
 tions, the man who sees the beauty of humility, 
 the man who feels most strongly the deep peace 
 of self-sacrifice, tlicd is the man who finds the 
 voice within most irresistible. It is not by any 
 means always the man who lives the most cor- 
 rect life ; correctness of life may be due to 
 natural and not to spiritual causes. And the 
 man whom we should find faultless in point of 
 morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, 
 and not have as yet, and perhaps may not have 
 to the last, the spiritual faculty strong within 
 him. But the man, even if he have many and 
 
VIIT.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 233 
 
 grievous faults, who nevertheless is keenly sus- 
 ceptible of higher things, is the one to whom 
 the voice within speaks with authority not to 
 be gainsaid, and to him that voice is final. 
 
 It is this fact that the perception of things 
 spiritual varies from man to man, and depends 
 on character, and involves action of the will, 
 that makes it always possible to represent our 
 knowledge of the law of duty as in itself 
 standing on a less sure foundation than our 
 knowledge of scientific truth. Whether a man 
 has or has not the necessary power of mind to 
 comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with 
 comparative ease. And if he have that power, 
 the reasoning is certain in course of time to be 
 understood, and when it is understood it com- 
 pels assent so long as it keeps within its own 
 proper domain. But the perception of spiritual 
 truth depends on a faculty whose power or 
 weakness it is far more difficult to test ; and it 
 involves the will which may be exerted on either 
 side. And for this reason men sometimes dis- 
 miss this truth as being no more than an 
 imagination, needed by some men to satisfy an 
 emotional nature, but having no substance that 
 
234 The Conclusion of the Argttment. [Lect. 
 
 can be brought to an external test. The be- 
 liever in God knows that the truth which he 
 holds is as certain as the axioms of mathe- 
 matics ; but he cannot make others know this 
 whose spiritual faculty is not awake ; and he is 
 liable to be asked for proof not of the spiritual 
 but of the physical kind. 
 
 Now this much must be acknowledged, that 
 we cannot but expect the claim to supremacy 
 over all things to show itself in some way in 
 the creation which has come from Him who 
 makes that claim. It would, no doubt, be a 
 serious difficulty if things physical and things 
 spiritual were cut off from one another by an 
 absolute gulf; if we were required to believe 
 that God had created and now ruled everything, 
 and yet we could trace not the slightest evi- 
 dence of His hand either in the creation or in 
 the history of the world. 
 
 There are then two ways in which we are 
 able to recognise Him even in this world of phe- 
 nomena. For in the first place, the creation 
 in its order and its beauty and its marvellous 
 adaptation of means to ends, confirms the as- 
 sertion of tlie spiritual faculty that it owes its 
 
VIII.] TJie Conchision of the Argument. 235 
 
 origin to an intelligent and benevolent purpose, 
 exhibited in the form in which purpose is always 
 exhibited. It works towards ends w^hich we 
 should expect a holy and benevolent Creator to 
 have in view, and it accomplishes those ends 
 in so large a proportion that, making allowance 
 for the limited range of our knowledge, the 
 general aim of the whole is seen with sufficient 
 clearness. The argument is not strong enough 
 to compel assent from those who have no ears 
 for the inward spiritual voice, but it is abund- 
 antly sufficient to answer those who argue that 
 there cannot be a Creator because they cannot 
 trace His action. And the scientific doctrine of 
 Evolution, which at first seemed to take away 
 the force of this argument, is found on ex- 
 amination to confirm it and expand it. The 
 doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever 
 design the world was formed, that design was 
 entertained at the very beginning and impressed 
 on every particle of created matter, and that 
 the appearances of failure are not only to be ac- 
 counted for by the limitation of our knowledge, 
 but also by the fact that we are contemplating 
 the work before it has been completed. 
 
236 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 And in the second place, while the creation, 
 the more closely it is examined the more dis- 
 tinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and 
 goodness of the Creator, so the history of the 
 world exhibits in the Eevelation made to man 
 clear proofs of that heavenly love which cor- 
 responds to the character of Him who has put 
 love at the head of all the requirements of His 
 law. The Eevelation given to us has undeni- 
 ably made a real mark on the world. It has 
 upheld millions of men in a holiness of life 
 corresponding in a very real degree to the 
 holiness required by the law of duty. It has 
 perpetually more and more cleared up the true 
 teaching of that law. It is still continuing the 
 same process, and generation after generation 
 is better able to understand that teaching. Its 
 fruits have been a harvest of saints and martyrs, 
 some known and reverenced, some quite un- 
 noticed. It has leavened all literature and all 
 legislation. It has changed the customs of 
 mankind and is still changing them. And if it 
 be replied that all this is nothing but one form 
 of the development of humanity and shows no 
 proof of a Divine Ruler, we have a right to ask 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of tlie Argument. 237 
 
 what then could be the source of such a de- 
 velopment, and how is it that so great a power 
 should always have worked in the name of God 
 and should have always referred everything to 
 His command? That fanaticism should plead 
 God's authority without any right to do so is 
 intelligible. But is it intelHgible that all this 
 truth and justice and purity and self-sacrificing 
 love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law, 
 should be the fruit of believing a lie % If there 
 be a God, it is to be expected that He would 
 communicate with His creatures if those crea- 
 tures were capable of receiving the communi- 
 cation ; and if He did communicate with His 
 creatures it is to be expected that His communi- 
 cation would be such as we find in the Bible. 
 The purpose of the Bible, the form of it, the 
 gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing 
 Kevelation contained in it, these harmonise with 
 the moral law revealed originally in the con- 
 science. And the effect which the Revelation 
 has produced on human history is real and 
 great. The power which God's Kevelation has 
 exerted on the world is an undeniable fjict 
 among phenomena. H is not a demonstration 
 
238 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 of His existence ; but it is a full answer to 
 those who say, * If God made and rules the 
 world why do we find no signs of His hand in 
 its course % ' 
 
 And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely 
 taken the form of a message or a series of 
 messages, but has culminated in the appearance 
 of a person who has always satisfied and still 
 satisfies the conception formed by our spiritual 
 faculty of a human representation of the divine 
 law. Our Lord's life is that law translated 
 into human action, and all the more because 
 human faculties had not first framed the con- 
 ception which He then came to fulfil, but He 
 exhibited the ideal, and our conception rose as 
 it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes 
 in Himself all the teaching, so does He give 
 from Himself all the power of the Eevelation 
 w^hich He came to crown. And every true 
 disciple of Christ can bear witness to the reality 
 of that power in sustaining the soul. 
 
 Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty 
 commands us to worship and to reverence, 
 shown Himself in the world of phenomena. 
 And He has given proofs of His existence and 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argumetit. 239 
 
 His character precisely corresponding to the 
 conception which He has enabled, and indeed 
 commanded, us to form of Him. And it is 
 because the proofs that He has given are of 
 this nature that we are tempted to ask for more 
 proofs of a different kind. 
 
 For it is undeniable that believers and un- 
 believers alike are perpetually asking for proofs 
 that shall have more of the scientific and less 
 of the religious character, proofs that shall more 
 distinctly appeal to the senses. Believers in all 
 ages have longed for external support to their 
 faith ; unbelievers have refused to believe un- 
 less supplied with more physical evidence. Be- 
 lievers shrink from being thrown inwards on 
 themselves ; they fear the wavering of their 
 own faith ; they are alarmed at the prospect of 
 the buttresses of their belief being taken from 
 them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual 
 evidence, if they can first find much physical 
 evidence. They wish (to use the Apostle's 
 words) to walk by sight and not by faith. 
 And unbelievers want a tangible proof that 
 shall compel their understanding before it awakes 
 their conscience. Thev demand a Revelation, 
 
240 The Conclusion of the ArgiLment. [Lect. 
 
 not only confirmed by miracles at the time, but 
 confirmed again and again by repeated miracles 
 to every succeeding generation. They want 
 miracles in every age adapted to the science of 
 the age, miracles which no hardness of heart 
 would be able to deny, which would convince 
 the scientific man through his Science inde- 
 pendently of his having any will to make holi- 
 ness his aim when he had been convinced. 
 This kind of evidence it has not pleased God 
 to give. It is not the scientific man that God 
 seeks as such, any more than it is the ignorant 
 man that He seeks as such. And the proofs 
 that He gives are plainly in all cases conditioned 
 by the rule that the spiritually minded shall 
 most easily and most keenly perceive their force. 
 And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do 
 not see that more need be said except to tell 
 them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is 
 by another way that they must look to find 
 God, and not by the wa}^ that they insist on 
 choosing. But believers who are in the same 
 case need to be warned of some very real 
 dangers that always attend a faith which makes 
 too much of tilings not spiritual. 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 241 
 
 For, first, there is a real and great danger that 
 the spiritual may be altogether obscured by 
 the literal and the physical. We look back 
 with astonishment on the Kabbinical interpre- 
 tations of the Old Testament, and all the more 
 because of the really great and true thoughts 
 that are sometimes to be found in the midst of 
 their fanciful conceits. We can trace the mis- 
 chief they did to true Religion by the perverted 
 reverence with which they regarded the words 
 and even the letters, and the very shapes 
 of the letters, in which their sacred books were 
 written. Their perversions of the law of God, 
 their subtle refinements of interpretation, their 
 trivial conceits, their false and misleading com- 
 ments and inferences, all certainly tended to en- 
 courage the hypocrisy which our Lord rebuked, 
 and against which St. Paul contended. But we 
 still see something of the same spirit in the 
 attempt to maintain a verbal and even literal 
 inspiration of the whole Bible, filHng it not 
 with the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with 
 minute details of doctrine and precept often 
 questionable, and, whenever separated from the 
 principles of the eternal law, valueless or even 
 
 R 
 
242 The Conclusion of the A rgtiment. [Lect. 
 
 mischievous. God's Word, instead of leading 
 us to Him, is made to stand between and hide 
 His face. 
 
 But, secondly, there is a serious risk that if 
 the mind be fastened on things external in 
 some way connected witli, but yet distinct from 
 the substance of Revelation, it may turn out 
 that these external things caimot hold the 
 ground on which they have been placed. They 
 have to be given up by force at last, when they 
 ought to have been given up long before. And 
 when given up they too often tear away with 
 them part of the strength of that faith of which 
 they had previously been not only the buttress 
 outside but a part of the living framework. It 
 is distinctly the fault of religious, not of scientific 
 men, that there was once a great contest be- 
 tween the Bible and Astronomy, that there has 
 since been a great contest between the Bible 
 and Geology, that there is still a great contest 
 between the Bible and Evolution. In no one 
 of these cases was the Revelation contained in 
 the Bible in danger, but only the interpretation 
 commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long- 
 afterwards to condemn the opponents of Galileo 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argitment. 243 
 
 and speak of their treatment of him and his 
 teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such 
 condemnation has not unfrequently been heard 
 from the very lips that nevertheless denounced 
 the teaching of the geologists. But in all these 
 cases the principle has been the same, and 
 believers have insisted that the Bible itself was 
 gone unless their interpretation of it was up- 
 held. And the mischief is double. For many 
 believers, and more especially unlearned be- 
 lievers, instead of gently helping one another 
 to form the necessary modification of their view 
 of the Bible teaching, instead of endeavouring 
 to find the way out of the perplexity and to 
 disentangle the true spiritual lesson from the 
 accessories which are no part of itself, insisted 
 that it must be all or nothing, and prepared 
 for themselves a very severe trial. There was 
 no doctrine involved whatever; there was no- 
 thing at stake on which the spiritual life de- 
 pended. The duty to be patient, to enquire 
 carefully, to study the other side, to wait for 
 light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all 
 this was forgotten in a somewhat unreasoning 
 impulse to resist an assault on the faith. And 
 
 i{ 2 
 
244 The Conclusion of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 there cannot be a doubt that on all these 
 occasions many believers have been seriously 
 shaken by slowly finding out that the position 
 they have taken is untenable. When men have 
 to give up in such circumstances they generally 
 give up far more than they need, and in some 
 cases an unreasonable resistance has been fol- 
 lowed by an equally unreasonable surrender. 
 And while believers have thus prepared a 
 stumblingblock for themselves they have put 
 quite as great a stumblingblock before others. 
 For students of Science, informed by instant 
 voices all around that they must choose between 
 their Science and the Bible, knowing as they 
 did that their Science was true, and supposing 
 that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best 
 knew what its teaching was, had no choice as 
 honest men but to hold the truth as far as 
 they possessed it and to give up the Bible 
 in order to maintain their Science. It w^as a 
 grievous injury inflicted on them ; and though 
 some among them might deserve no sympathy, 
 there were some whom it w^as a great loss to 
 lose. 
 
 But in the third place, the result of this 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argununt. 245 
 
 clinging to externals is to shut out Science and 
 all its correlative branches of knowledge from 
 their 2:)roper office of making perpetually clearer 
 the true and full meaning of the Revelation 
 itself. It is intended that E/cligion should use 
 the aid of Science in clearing her own con- 
 ceptions. It is intended that as men advance 
 in knowledge of God's works and in power 
 of handling that knowledge, tliey should find 
 themselves better able to interpret the message 
 which they have received from their Father in 
 Heaven. Our knowledge of the true meaning of 
 the Bible has gained, and it was intended that 
 it should gain, by the increase of other know- 
 ledge. Science makes clearer than anything 
 else could have made it the higher level on 
 which the Bible puts what is spiritual over 
 what is material. I do not hesitate to ascribe 
 to Science a clearer knowledge of the true in- 
 terpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and 
 to scientific history a truer knowledge of the 
 great historical prophets. The advance of se- 
 cular studies, as they are called, clears up much 
 in the Psalms, and much in the other poetical 
 Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt that this 
 
246 The Conclusion of the Argument, [Lect. 
 
 was intended from the beginning, and tliat as 
 Science has already done genuine service to 
 Eeligion in this way, so will it do still better 
 service with process of time. 
 
 On this side also, as on the scientific side, the 
 teaching of the spiritual faculty and the teaching 
 of Eevelation indicate that the physical and the 
 spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither 
 is complete without the other. Science enters 
 into Eeligion, and is its counterpart, and has its 
 share to take in the conduct of life and in the 
 formation of opinion. And the believer is bound 
 to recognise its value and make use of its 
 services. 
 
 In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism 
 between Science and Eeligion arises much more 
 from a difference of spirit and temper in the 
 students of each than from any inherent op- 
 position between the two. The man of Science 
 is inclined to shut out from consideration a 
 whole body of evidence, the moral and spiritual ; 
 the believer is inclined to shut out the physical. 
 And each, from long looking at that evi- 
 dence alone which properly belongs to his own 
 subject, is inclined to hold the other cheap, 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 247 
 
 and to charge on those who adduce it either 
 blindness of understanding or wilful refusal to 
 accept the truth. And when such a conflict 
 arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is 
 Faith and not Science that is likely to suffer. 
 For the physical evidence is tangible, and the 
 perception of it not much aflected by the cha- 
 racter of the man who studies it ; the spiritual 
 evidence stands unshaken in itself, but it is hid 
 from eyes that have no spiritual perception, 
 and that perception necessarily varies with the 
 man. 
 
 By what means then can a man keep his 
 spiritual perception in full activity % And is 
 there any test by which a man may know 
 whether his spiritual faculty is in contact with 
 the source of all spiritual life and is deriving 
 from that source the full flow of spiritual 
 power \ Revelation, if it tells us anything, 
 ought to tell us this. And the answer which 
 Revelation makes is expressed in the words of 
 St. Paul, ' No man can say that Jesus is the 
 Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' This doctrine 
 runs through the New Testament, and it im- 
 plies that one main purpose of our Lord's ap- 
 
248 TJie Conclusion of tJie Argument. [Lect. 
 
 pearance among men was to give them in His 
 life, His character, His example, His teaching, 
 at once a touchstone by which they could al- 
 ways try their own spirits, and judge of the real 
 condition of their own spiritual faculty, and 
 also a vivid presentation of the supreme spiritual 
 law by which they could for ever more and 
 more elevate and purify and strengthen their 
 own spiritual power and knowledge. 
 
 Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. 
 Let him put before his conscience the teaching 
 that Jesus gives ; the picture drawn of our 
 Father in Heaven whose holiness cannot allow 
 a stain upon a single soul, and whose tender- 
 ness cannot endure that a single soul should 
 perish ; Who ruleth all the universe, and yet 
 without whom not a sparrow falleth to the 
 ground ; the picture drawn of the ideal human 
 life, the humility, the hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, the purity ; 
 the picture drawn of human need, the helj)- 
 lessness, the hopelessness of man without God. 
 Let him ponder on all this and on the many 
 touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the 
 force, the superhuman sweetness and gentleness 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 249 
 
 with wliicli all is presented. And if his con- 
 science bows before it, and can say without 
 reserve and in unalloyed sincerity, ' This is my 
 Lord ; He shall be my teacher ; here I recognise 
 the fulness of the eternal law ; at His feet will 
 I henceforth sit and learn ; through Him will 
 I drink of the well-springs of eternal truth ; 
 His voice will I trust to the very utmost ;' 
 then may that man be sure that his conscience 
 is in contact with the Father of spirits, and that 
 his study will guide him into fuller and clearer 
 knowledge, and more certain conviction that he 
 is grasping the truth of God. 
 
 Let a man put before his heart our Lord's 
 own character. Let him think of the life 
 of privation without complaint, of service 
 to His kind without a thought of self; of 
 His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy, of 
 His tenderness to the penitent ; of His royal 
 simplicity and humility ; of His unwearied per- 
 severance in the face of angry opposition ; of 
 His deep affection for the friends of His choice 
 even when they deserted Him in His hour of 
 darkness ; of His death on the Cross and the 
 unearthly love that breathed in every word He 
 
250 The Conchision of the Argument. [Lect. 
 
 uttered and everything He did. Let him read 
 all this many times ; and if his heart goes out 
 to the Man whom he is thus beholding, if he 
 can say with all his soul, This is my Lord ; here 
 is the supreme object of my affection ; Him will 
 I love with all my strength ; from Him I will 
 never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve ; no 
 other do I know more worthy to be loved ; no 
 other will I keep more steadily before my eyes ; 
 no other will I more earnestly desire to imitate ; 
 no other shall be my example, my trust, my 
 strength, my Saviour ; if a man can say this, it 
 is certain that his heart is touched by God, and 
 the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul. 
 
 Let a man put before his loill the Lord's 
 commands ; the aims, the self-restraints, the 
 aspirations that the Lord required in His dis- 
 ciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly 
 courage in spite of all that earth can inflict 
 or can take away; the call to take up the 
 Cross and follow Him that was crucified ; the 
 warnings and the promises, the precepts and 
 the prohibitions ; let him think of the Leader 
 who never flinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid 
 His own law; let him think on the nobleness 
 
VIII.] The Conclusion of the Argument. 251 
 
 of the aims to which He pointed ; of the pro- 
 mise of inward peace made to those who 
 sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord and 
 re-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual 
 being; let him think of the sure help promised in 
 return for absolute trust, tried by millions of 
 saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man 
 put this before his will, and if he can say with 
 all his soul, This is my Lord ; here I recognise 
 Him who has a right to my absolute obedience ; 
 here is the Master that I mean to serve and 
 follow ; and in spite of my own weakness and 
 blindness, in spite of my sins, in spite of 
 stumbling and weariness of resolution, in spite 
 of temptations and in spite of falls, I will not 
 let my eyes swerve, nor my purpose quit my 
 will ; through death itself I will obey my Lord 
 and trust to Him to carry me through whatever 
 comes ; that man most certainly is moving in 
 tlie strength of God, and the power of the 
 Eternal Spirit lives within him. 
 
 Our Lord is the crown, nay, the very sub- 
 stance of all Revelation. K He cannot convince 
 the soul, no other can. The believer stakes all 
 faith on His truth ; all hope on His power. If 
 
252 The Conclusion of the Argument. 
 
 the man of Science would learn what it is that 
 makes believers so sure of what they hold, he 
 must study with an open heart the Jesus of the 
 Gospels ; if the believer seeks to keep his faith 
 steady in the presence of so many and some- 
 times so violent storms of disputation, he will 
 read of, ponder on, pray to, the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
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