mm 
 
 BV 4277 .L52 1872 
 
 Liddon, Henry Parry, 1829- 
 
 1890. 
 Some elements of religion 
 
 CO 
 
 py 
 
SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 
 
SOME ELEMENTS OF 
 RELIGION 
 
 1870 
 
 / ^'^ 
 
 H. P. LIDDON, D.D. 
 
 CANON OF ST. PAUL S 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 SCRIBNER, WELFORD, & ARMSTRONG 
 
 1872 
 
v^ 
 
 .A-t' 
 
 Perche, se tu alia virtu circonde 
 La tua misura, non alia parvenza 
 Delle sustanzie che t' appaion tonde, 
 Tu vederai mirabil convenenza, 
 Di maggio a piu, et di minore a meno, 
 In ciascun cielo, a sua intelligenza. 
 
 Par. xxviii. 73 — 78. 
 
TO 
 
 iojn TOillfam ©gU, ^sq„ iH,©. 
 
 OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 WHOSE WORK AND CHARACTER SUGGEST 
 
 MANY PRECIOUS LESSONS 
 
 WHICH HE NEVER THINKS OF 
 
 TEAC HING 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 These Lectures were delivered in St. James' 
 Churchy Piccadilly, during the Lent of 1870. 
 
 They were, at the time, through God's mercy, 
 of service at least to some minds, — anxious, if it 
 might be, to escape from perplexities which beset 
 an age of feverish scepticism. It was accordingly 
 difficult to resist the practical reasons which were 
 urged in favour of publishing the Lectures; but 
 the announcement of their intended publication 
 was, perhaps, made, before the drawbacks which 
 must necessarily accompany the rhetorical treat- 
 ment of such a subject as the present, in a perma- 
 nent form, had been sufficiently considered. More- 
 over, a fulness and method of discussion which 
 satisfies the purposes of a Lecture, and which in- 
 deed is all that an audience will bear, must fall 
 altogether below the standard which may be rea- 
 sonably looked for in a book, supposed to make 
 
viii Advertisement. 
 
 any pretension whatever to claim the character of 
 a formal treatise upon a wide and serious subject. 
 Of this, upon further reflection, the Avriter be- 
 came so strongly convinced as to have enter- 
 tained the design of expanding these fragments 
 into a larger work. But, apart from the pressure 
 of other duties, he could not but feel that such 
 an attempt would destroy, together Avith the 
 identity of the Lectures, any moral or spiritual 
 associations that might cling to them; and, in 
 working for the cause of Faith, as in other 
 matters, 
 
 " Un sou, quand il est assure, 
 Vaut mieiix, que cinq en esperance." 
 
 The Lectures are therefore published as they 
 stand. It will be borne in mind that they sug- 
 gest only a few thoughts on each of the points of 
 which they treat ; that they cannot but raise some 
 difficulties which they leave unanswered ; and, in 
 a word, that their limits are not in any sense de- 
 termined by those of the general subject, but only 
 by the number of Sundays in Lent. 
 
 Whitsuntide, 1872. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 iFirst ^untiag m ILent, 
 THE IDEA OF EELIGI0:N". 
 
 Ps. cxliii. 8. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Sheiv Thou me the ivay that I should loalh in, for I lift tq) my 
 
 soul unto Thee ...... 1 
 
 LECTUEE 11. 
 
 ^econti Siintiag in ILzxit 
 
 GOD, THE OBJECT OF EELIGION. 
 
 Ps. xlii. 2. 
 My soul is athirstfor God, yea even for the living God: when shall 
 
 I come to ai^ijear before the presence of God . . .39 
 
 LECTUEE III. 
 
 W^ixH .Sunbag in Emt. 
 
 THE SUBJECT OF EELIGIO^— THE SOUL. 
 
 Ps. viii. 4, 
 
 What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? . . .81 
 
X Contents. 
 
 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 iFourt]^ Sutttrag in 3Leixt. 
 
 THE OBSTACLE TO EELIOION— SIK 
 S. James i. 1 5. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 When desire hath conceived, it hringeth forth sin; and sin, when 
 
 it is finished, hringeth forth death . . . .128 
 
 LECTUEE V. 
 
 iJFfftJf ^utttiag in %mt 
 
 PEAYEE, THE CHAEACTEEISTIC ACTI0:N' OF 
 EELIGTOI^. 
 
 S. Matt. vii. 7. 
 
 Ask and it shall he given you . . . . .166 
 
 LECTUEE VL 
 
 Palm ^utttiag. 
 
 THE MEDIATOE, THE GUAEANTEE OF EELIGIOUS 
 
 LIFE. 
 
 S. Matt. 3HBiir-41. XK/V". ^-j- 
 Jesus ashed them, saying, What think ye of Christ ? . . 204 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 dFirst Suntiag in Ucnt 
 THE IDEA OF RELIGIOK 
 
 Ps. cxliii. 8. 
 Shew Thou me the ivay that I should walk in, for I lift iip my soul unto Thee. 
 
 
 
 UE age, it has been said, longs to be religious. If this 
 is too unguarded an assertion, it is at least true tliat 
 tlie instinct or sentiment of religion is treated among us 
 with more respect and sympathy than has been the case at 
 some past epochs of our national history. Amid the de- 
 baucheries of the Restoration, and the shallow habits of 
 thought on the gravest subjects which marked portions of 
 the last century. Religion, in the broad sense of the term, 
 was largely discredited, even when it was not openly 
 scouted as a weakness or a suj^erstition. Whereas in our 
 day religion is named, even by the irreligious, with the 
 forms if not with the sincerity of respect. And some men 
 interest themselves in religion as an abstract good, with 
 very great sincerity, who oppose by turns all that asserts 
 its power and presence in the world. Thus they declaim 
 
 B 
 
2 Religion, how far welcomed [Lect. 
 
 against cliurclies, while tliey explain that in doing this they 
 are befriending that true Eeligion which churches misre- 
 present. Or, they would do away with priesthoods; but 
 then they are only anxious, while rescuing the fair jewel of 
 religion from clerical keeping, to make its sway more 
 imperial, by making its mien and countenance more 
 human. Or they make w^ar upon theology — the theology 
 of Apostles, Fathers, Creeds; but theology, they declare, 
 again and again, is a pedantic product of the clerical un- 
 derstanding, and they for their part are passionately inter- 
 ested on behalf of the religion of the human heart. They 
 discredit " book revelations," and insist upon errors of fact 
 or errors of morals, which they hold to be discoverable 
 in the Bible; but they are all the more eager to profess 
 and feel a zeal for that unerring and sublime essence of 
 rehgion, which is not bound, as they phrase it, to the letter, 
 and which fires their enthusiasm in renouncing the letter. 
 And thus, however warmly the institutions, the ministers, 
 the beliefs, the sacred literature of religion, may be suc- 
 cessively assailed, religion itself, wx are assured, is respected ; 
 or rather it is respect for and loyalty to religion — to religion 
 divested of accretions wliich have gathered round it and ob- 
 scured its beauty during the lapse of time, — which is in fact 
 the animating motive of this most friendly and discrimina- 
 ting opposition. 
 
 That religion should be thus safeguarded as an idea, 
 when all that secures its practical power is by turns ob- 
 jected to; that the abstract, disembodied, intangible essence 
 
I.] hi the Modern World. 3 
 
 should be so sedulously honoured, while its concrete forms, 
 its living and working embodiments, are opposed and de- 
 nounced, is a fact which must engage attention. How are 
 we to account for it ? Is it that we live in a " period of 
 transition," when men have not yet faced the last conse- 
 quences of the principles which they are adopting, and hang 
 with a pardonable, although illogical tenderness between 
 premiss and conclusion ? Does the sacred name of religion 
 still command an awe which, while it is not strong enough 
 to protect many practical interests, can yet hedge around a 
 remote object with the forms of popular respect ? Is 
 it that, as of old, barbarian invaders, who will without 
 scruple devastate the precincts and sack the interior of 
 the temple, are pausing involuntarily, spell-bound, almost 
 terrified, upon the threshold of the sacred shrine ? Or 
 does the sesthetic feeling of our time, looking at human 
 life with the eye of an artist rather than with the 
 eye of a statesman or philanthropist, j)rompt this in- 
 terest on behalf of religion, as alone adequately repre- 
 senting and upholding the ideal side of human existence ? 
 Does it anticipate, not without reason, the dull, barren, 
 uninteresting, prosaic level of existence to which we 
 shoidd be reduced, if all that points upward in thought 
 and feeling could be utterly stripped from us, and 
 eliminated; if human life could be robbed of the 
 most refining and stimulating influences that can be 
 brought to bear on it ? Or is this reserve of interest on 
 behalf of religion at bottom a social, or political — if you 
 
4 Why religion is respected. [Lect. 
 
 like, a selfish — class instinct ? Is it order cowering before 
 approaching rev^olution, and endeavouring to sup^oort its 
 regiments and its policemen with forces summoned from 
 some higher world, whether of fact or fancy; with invisible 
 powers capable of making their way into the very heart of 
 the enemy's camp ? Is it that we of this generation, who have 
 read in the annals of a neighbouring country the stern lessons 
 taught by eighty years of active or suppressed anarchy, are 
 more keenly alive than were our ancestors to the tremen- 
 dous force of the volcanic passions latent in human nature ? 
 Ai'e we willing to grant that some religion at least is a 
 social necessity ; a necessity in the sense of Machiavelli, if 
 not in the sense of Jesus Christ ? Are we satisfied that the 
 brute within us, if he is to be chained and imprisoned at 
 all, can only be taken captive by a superhuman master, 
 and will never forfeit his destructive liberty, except at the 
 bidding of an unearthly creed ? 
 
 Undoubtedly, it may be admitted that religion owes some- 
 thing, on the score of respect yielded to her as an abstract 
 idea, to each of these causes. The awe which a reasoned 
 scepticism cannot always crush, the perception of what it is 
 that constitutes beauty in life, combine with the stern prac- 
 tical instincts of social safety, with the love of order, and the 
 anxiety to make property and life secure, to insist that man 
 must have sometliing in the way of a religion. Schemes of 
 independent morality, even if they were theoretically defen- 
 sible, are not equal to resisting the impetuosities of passion, 
 or the exorbitant demands of a low seK-interest. " Take my 
 
L] Inflttejice of the S2ibjective spii'it. 5 
 
 word for it," said a great statesman, " it is not prudent as 
 a rule to trust yourself to any man who tells you that he 
 does not believe in a God or in a future after death." ^ 
 
 But a deeper reason for the fact we are considering, is to 
 be found in the wider conviction that religion is, if I may 
 so express it, an indispensable part of man's moral and 
 mental outfit. Two causes have contributed to deepen this 
 conviction in modern times. 
 
 The first is the subjective spirit of the age, which 
 insists on looking^ at truth, not as it is in itseK, in its 
 utter independence of the mind of man, but as it pre- 
 sents itself to man's mind, or rather as man's mind in very 
 varying moods apprehends it. This spirit, while it has 
 weakened the public hold upon Creeds and Scriptures, has 
 directed attention, with an intensity unknown before our 
 day, to the needs of the human mind, and among them to 
 its supreme need of a religion. It has indeed exaggerated 
 this into maintainim:^, as with Feuerbach, that all existing^ 
 religions are but the creations of human thought, which, 
 while it is really doomed to an uninterrupted contact with the 
 world of sense, aspires to create, if it cannot discover, an ideal 
 world beyond; but this paradox only yields an additional 
 testimony to the need we have, as men, of some religion, 
 in order to do justice to our humanity. Religion, says a 
 modern English writer, who certainly will not be suspected 
 of any desire to exaggerate its influence, is that " which 
 gives to man, in the midst of the rest of creation, his special 
 
 ^ Sir liobeit Peel. 
 
6 I 7iflite7ice of historical sttidies. [Lect. 
 
 elevation and dignity." ^ And it was perhaps, npon tlie 
 whole, the most marked feature in the work of Schleier- 
 macher, that when groping his way back from the grim 
 intellectual desert into which many of his countrymen 
 had been led, under the guidance of the older Eation- 
 alism, he insisted with such emphasis and success upon the 
 necessity of religion in order to the completion of human 
 life. Beyond any of his contemporaries, he saw and 
 pointed out that by our capacity for religion; by our power 
 of looking beyond this deceptive and passing world of sense 
 to a higher world, invisible and eternal; by loyalty to 
 the obligations which that clearer sight imposes on iis, 
 we men are best distinguished from the brutes around us. 
 Language itself, the physical dress in which we clothe 
 our thought, is not more distinctly royal among our out- 
 ward human prerogatives, than that upturned countenance 
 which, as the heathen poet divined, is the symbol of our 
 intelligent capacity for a higher life. 
 
 The indispensableness of religion to human life has also 
 been forced on the mind of this generation by a deeper 
 study of history. The more we know of the annals of our 
 race, the more clearly is it seen how the greatest catastrophes, 
 and the most profound and far-reaching changes, have really 
 turned upon religious questions ; and that the stronger and 
 more definite has been the religion, the more fundamental 
 and striking have been these results. Thus, for instance, 
 the modern history of Europe has been little else than a 
 
 ^ l>oude : Hist. Engl. xii. 535. 
 
I.] A more peinnanent ccutse. 7 
 
 history of struggles fundamentally religious. A recent 
 historian of civilisation has indeed maintained that this is 
 true only of the past, ^ and that the present age has more and 
 more learned to restrict its enthusiasm to material objects. 
 But he forgets that religion does not cease to influence events 
 among those who reject its claims : it excites the strongest 
 human passions not merely in its defenders, but in its enemies. 
 The claim to hold communion with an unseen world irritates 
 when it does not win and satisfy. Atheism has again and 
 again been a fanaticism ; it has been a missionary and a per- 
 secutor by turns ; it is lashed into passion by the very pre- 
 sence of the sublime passion to which it is opposed. We of 
 to-day know full well that no political subjects are discussed 
 so warmly as those which bear even remotely upon religion. 
 " The deepest subject," says Goethe, " in the history of the 
 world and of mankind, and that to which all others are sub- 
 ordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief" - 
 
 While these causes make an interest in religion, of what- 
 ever kind, inevitable among thoughtful men in our day and 
 generation, they only reinforce, they do not obscure or 
 supersede, those permanent reasons for its influence, which 
 are part of our natural and human circumstances. Among 
 these it may suffice to mention one. It is a fact, certain to 
 each one of us, that we shall individually die. If science 
 could arrest the empire of death, as it has limited that of 
 disease ; if thouglit, in its onward march throughout the cen- 
 turies, could rob us utterly of the presentiment of an im- 
 
 1 Buckle : Hist. Civ. i. 241-325. ^ q^, ^y Lulhardt. 
 
8 What is religion ? [Lect. 
 
 mortality and of our aspirations towards a higher world, then 
 religion would retain, in the fixed circumstances of life, no 
 ally of anything like equal power. But there is the certainty, 
 present to each one of us in our thoughtful moments, never 
 entirely absent from the thought of those who seriously 
 think at all, that an hour will come when we shall face the 
 problem of problems for ourselves and alone; when we shall 
 know by experience what really is beyond the veil, and how 
 it is related to that which we see and are here ; and it is 
 impossible, with this prospect before us, to treat the voice 
 and claims of religion as wholly trivial or unimportant. ^ 
 
 But here the question arises as to what it is that man seeks 
 in seeking religion. Or rather, what is religion? We 
 know it wdien we meet it in life ; we know it by its bearing, 
 by its fruits, by the atmosphere with which it surrounds 
 itself. But what is it within the soul? what is its chief 
 element or substance ? What is this power which does not 
 meet the eye, but which w^e trace in its results ? what is the 
 true psychological account that must be given of it ? 
 
 I. 
 
 As we repeat the question, " Wliat is religion," we find 
 ourselves, it may be, in the position of standing face to face 
 
 ^ This is admitted, although, of course, in terms which the writer would 
 not adopt, by Mr. Buclde. Hist. Civ. i. 113. 
 
I.] Docs it consist in right feeling? 9 
 
 with a very old acquaintance, with whose countenance and 
 habits we have been familiar all our lives, but of whose 
 real self we cannot but feel we have a somewhat shadowy 
 perception. 
 
 1. Is religion, then, in the heart of man, to be looked 
 upon chiefly as the highest and purest form of feeling ? Is 
 feeling the essential thing in true religion ? So thought 
 no less a person than Schleiermacher. ^ He makes religion 
 to consist in feeling — notably in our feeling of dependence 
 on a Higher Power ; and his influence has won for this 
 representation a wide acceptance in modern Protestant 
 Germany. 2 Such in England is, or has been at times, the 
 practical instinct, if not the decision, of Wesleyanism and 
 kindred systems.^ Feeling, not knowledge; feeling, not 
 morality ; feeling, not even conscience, is the test of accep- 
 tance — that is to say, of satisfactory religion. Acceptance 
 is warranted by the sense of acceptance ; religious progress 
 is measured by the sense of enjoying more and more the 
 raptures of the religious life. 
 
 Nor, if we look either into the recesses of the human 
 heart, or into the historical expressions of religious earnest- 
 
 1 Schleiermacher, Chris tliche Glaube, i. pp. 6-14. He is expanding the 
 proposition that "Die Frommigkeit, welche die Basis aller kirchlichen 
 Gemeinschaften ausmacht, ist rein fiir sich betrachtet weder ein Wissen noch 
 ein Thun, sondern ein Bestimmtheit des Geflihls oder des unmittelbaren 
 Selbstbevvusstseins." Compare p. 16. Das gemeinsame aller derjenigen 
 Bestimmtheiten des Selbstbevvusstseins, welche liberwiegend ein Irgend- 
 wohergetrofTensein der Empfiinglichkeit aussagen, ist dass wir uns als 
 abhangig fiihlen. 
 
 2 As with Nitzsch, Twesten, and others. Cf. Grimm, Inst. Th. Dogm. 
 p. 19. 
 
 ^ Compare the remarks in Southey's " Life of Wesley," p. 207. 
 
I o ''Feeling " in the Psalter and S. Paul. [Lect. 
 
 uess, can tlie high place of feeling in the religious life be 
 rightly depreciated. Feeling is the play of our conscious- 
 ness coming into contact with its object : it varies in in- 
 tensity according to the interest we take in that object : it 
 is a totally difierent thing in the case of a casual acquaint- 
 ance and of a near relative. When, then, the soul is in 
 intimate contact with the Object of objects — with God, 
 — feeling, the purest and the most intense, is not merely 
 legitimate, but ordinarily inevitable. How much of the 
 Psalter is feeling — the tenderest, the strongest, the most 
 loyal, the most affectionate ! " Like as the hart desireth 
 the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, God. 
 My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God.: 
 when shall I come to appear before the presence of God ?" 
 "Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none 
 upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee!" "My 
 soul hangeth upon Thee : Thy right hand hath upholden 
 me." " Do not I hate them, Lord, that hate Thee, and am 
 not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee : yea, I hate 
 them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies !"^ 
 How profoundly is the religion of S. Paul, as we study it 
 in his Epistles, penetrated by feeling ! Always in felt 
 contact with an unseen Master ; he is tender, he is vehe- 
 ment, he burns, he is melted : his dispositions towards his 
 fellow-men are so various and keen, because in him feeling 
 has been educated in a hioher Presence. — "The love of 
 
 o 
 
 Christ constraineth us : " " To me to live is Christ : " " Who 
 
 ^ Pa. xlii. 1 ; Ixxiii. 2 J ; Ixiii. 8: cxxxix. 21-22. 
 
L] '^Feeling " imist have a true object. 1 1 
 
 shall separate us from the love of Christ ? " " I live ; yet not 
 I, but Christ liveth in me:" "It any man love not the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha." ^ 
 
 But the question is not whether feeling be an element of 
 sincere religion ; but whether it be the one most essential 
 element. And here two observations cannot fail to strike us. 
 
 In the long run, there can be, for well-ordered minds, no 
 strong play of feeling apart from a sense of the intellectual 
 truth of the object upon whicli feeling is bestowed. To 
 lavish, feeling, if it be possible to do so, upon a personage 
 who is even suspected of being mythical or half mythical, 
 is to prostitute feeling. Some idea, then, of the object of 
 feeling must precede the feeling, as well as a conviction 
 of the truth of the object so conceived of. We are told 
 that religious feeling is especially the sense of entire de- 
 pendence upon a Higher Power : man's inmost soul hangs 
 confidingly upon the Power in which we live and move and 
 have our being. But, then, what is this power ? That is a 
 question wdiicli must be answered before feeling can 
 determine its complexion. Is this power an impersonal 
 force ? is it a blind fate or destiny ? is it some vast 
 machine, having neither heart nor will, but moving on- 
 wards through endless cycles of destructions and recom- 
 binations, of life and death, unceasingly, resistlessly, 
 inexorably ? If so, feeling at least cannot take the form of 
 absolute dependence : there is no such thing as surrender- 
 ing yourself in trustful resignation to a piece of machinery, 
 
 1 2 Cor. V. 14; Phil. i. 21; Ttom. viii. 35; Gal. ii. 20; 1 Cor xvi. 22. 
 
12 ''Feeling " nntst lead to right practice. [Lect. 
 
 whicli may crush you to deatli at any moment in its 
 advance. Trustful dependence is only possible when that 
 on which we depend is seen to be a Person, and a moral 
 Person, that is to say, holy, truthful, compassionate, just. 
 But here we pass out of the region of feeling. It appears 
 that before feeling can trust itself, something is wanted 
 to guide and colour it. Knowledge is at least as essential 
 to religion as feeling ; and knowledge of the Object of 
 religion, expressed in clear and precise terms, is after all 
 only another name for dogma. 
 
 But, moreover, feeling, even if intelligent, must accom- 
 pany right moral effort, in order to be religious. Feeling, 
 even when directed to heavenly objects, may be, in its 
 substance, partly physical ; and there is no necessary con- 
 nection between feeling so originating and moral earnest- 
 ness, or even a right morality. Nay, it is very possible for 
 those who feel warmly to imagine, mistakenly enough, that 
 warm feeling is the same thing as, or an adequate substi- 
 tute for, acting rightly. He who said, " If ye love Me, keep 
 ]\iy commandments," ^ implied that there are forms of reli- 
 gious passion, distinct no doubt from the true Christian 
 grace of love, which may co-exist with disobedience, and 
 may even appear to compensate for it. The Galatians had 
 not been the less willing to " pluck out their own eyes," 
 out of devotion to S. Paul, at the time of their conversion, 
 because they afterwards looked on him as a personal enemy 
 for telling them the truth about the Judaisers.^ The 
 
 1 S. John xiv. 15. 2 (^al. iv. 15, 16. 
 
L] Is 7^cligion a kind of knoiv ledge f 1 3 
 
 Apostle was not insincere who protested, " Though I should 
 die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee;"^ albeit a 
 few hours later, at the crisis of danger, he could exclaim, 
 " I know not the Man." ^ Feeling is not necessarily moral 
 j^urpose ; and its possible deficiencies on tliis side, as well 
 as on the side of knowledire. shew that we cannot regard 
 it as alone forming the raw material of religious life. ^ 
 
 2. Is it then more nearly true to say that the one 
 essential thing in religion is knowledge — knowledge of 
 God and of the things of God ? Somewhat of this kind 
 was the opinion of the Gnostics of the second century. 
 They regarded the Christian doctrines as simply an addi- 
 tion to the existing stock of current human speculations, 
 and they ventilated what appear to us nothing less than 
 the wildest fancies under the protection of current Chris- 
 tian phrases, which served to decorate and recommend 
 speculations that often had nothing to do with Christianity. 
 They thought that the Apostles had been unintellectual 
 persons, upon whose well-meant efforts they had them- 
 selves improved.'^ Since faith has in it a large moral ele- 
 ment, their watchword was, not faith, but hioiuledge ; and, 
 
 1 S. Matt. xx\d. 35. "- S. Matt. xxvi. 72, 74. 
 
 2 Hegel, Werke, xvii. 295 (qu. Grimm). Giiindet sich die Religion im 
 Menschen nur auf ein Gefiihl, so hat solches richtig keine weitere Bestiin- 
 mung als das Gefiihl seiner Abhiingigkeit zu seyn, und so ware der Hund 
 der beste Christ, denn er tragt dieses am starksten in sich, und lebt vornehm- 
 lich in diesem Gefiihle, Auch erlosungsgefiihle hat der Hund, wenn 
 seinem Hunger durch einen Knochen Eefriedigung ^vird." This does 
 not exclude the truth that the affectionate loyalty of a dog for his master is 
 a reb\xke to the coldheartedness of Christians ; but it is rightly implied that 
 the religion of humanity must be based on something more than feeling, 
 
 •* S. Irenajus, Ha^r. III. 12, 12. 
 
14 '' Kiiozv ledge'' necessary to religion, [Lect. 
 
 in tlieir own phrase, tins knowledge was to be the salvation 
 of sonls. ^ 
 
 The history of the human mind repeats itself, and a 
 position which is at bottom akin to the foregoing, is 
 familiar to some of ns in the philosophies of Schelling and 
 Hegel. Here too faith is only the lower grade, the popular 
 form of the religious consciousness ; its most cherished 
 doctrines are only parables of the realities open to the eye 
 of science upon which the modern thinker may gaze. 
 His religion is thus mainly an effort of the intellect, which 
 is perpetually engaged in disentangling and distilling from 
 the rude forms of old-w^orld creeds those abstract scientific 
 conceptions which are better suited to the palate of modern 
 philosophy. 2 
 
 It has already been implied that knowledge — true know- 
 ledge of truth — is of vital importance to religion. ISTo one 
 would question this, except in the interests of a morbid 
 fanaticism. Eeligion is impossible without some know- 
 ledge of its object ; and our capacities for true religious 
 life must, to a certain extent, vary Avith our varying degrees 
 of religious knowledge.^ "This," says our Saviour, "is 
 
 ^ Compare the account which S. Irenaeus gives of the Yalentinians, 
 Haer. i. 6, 2. Their contemptuous estimate of Catholic Christians is ex- 
 pressed in the phrase " ol 81 epycjv Kai iriaTeus \pL\rjs jSejSaLOVfxeuoi Kal fxrj rriv 
 TeKeioLV yvCocnv ^xoi'Tes." 
 
 2 In the words of a more recent Hegehan writer, " Dass der Inhalt der 
 Eeliwion und Philosophic derselbe sey, indem den Vorstellungen des religiosen 
 Bewusstseyns ein ihner fern liegender Sinn untergelegt wird, den man 
 unverholen auszusprechen sich nicht getrauen darf. Daumcr, Andeutung 
 eines Syslemes speculativer PMlosophie, p. 45, qu. by Grimm. 
 
 8 Rom. X. 2; Eph. i. 17; iv. 13; Phil. i. 9; Col. i. 9, 10 ;U . 2; 1 
 Tim. ii. 4 ; 2 Tim. iii. 7 ; Heb. x. 26 ; 2 Pet. i. 2, 3, 8 ; ii. 20. 
 
L] but it must be accompanied by love. 1 5 
 
 life eternal ; that they may know Thee, the only true 
 God, and Jesus Christ, AYhom Thou hast sent." ^ The 
 knowledge spoken of here, and elsewhere in the Bible, is 
 indeed not merely intellectual : it is knowledge in act ; 
 it is the knowledge which is won by love and obedience, 
 as distinct from, although together with, intelligence. 
 ^N'evertheless, knowledge, in its ordinary sense of informa- 
 tion apprehended by the understanding, is indispensable 
 to religion. Sight is not the power of walking or working ; 
 but we cannot work or walk blindfolded without disaster. 
 
 Yet no mere action of the intelligence, however active, 
 upon the subject-matter of religion, is the true back-bone of 
 religion. Knowledge alone may only enhance responsibility. 
 If Christ had not come and spoken to the Jews, they had 
 not had sin : as it was, they had no cloke for their sin.^ 
 S. Paul contrasts a merely intelligent apprehension of reli- 
 gious subjects with love. " Knowledge," he says, " puffeth 
 up, but charity edifieth."^ The whole drift of S. 
 James' Epistle goes to shew the worthlessness, religiously 
 speaking, of unfruitful knowledge. The hearer of the 
 Word who is not a doer, is compared with the man who 
 continueth in the perfect law of liberty besides looking into 
 it. The first does but realize a fleeting and unproductive 
 impression ; the second has undergone a change of life. * 
 
 The most intellectual of the Greeks, whose thoughts about 
 God and the soul might at times almost seem to anticipate 
 
 1 S. John xvii. 3. « S. John xv. 22 ; ix. 41. 
 
 3 1 Cor. viii. 1. * S. James i. 22-24. 
 
1 6 Is religio7i anothe}^ name for morality f [Lect. 
 
 Christianity, as they have been welcomed with the respect 
 of many a generation of Christians, has unwittingly warned 
 us of the religious impotence of mere culture, by staining his 
 pages, not once or twice, but hal:)itually, with sympathetic re- 
 ferences to crimes, tolerable enough to the public sentiment of 
 Athens, but the very names of which are defiling to Chris- 
 tian lips. The most intellectual Gnostics were sensualists ; 
 sensualists upon a theory and with deliberation.^ And 
 modern history, if it were worth our while to consult it 
 here, yields many a warning that intellectual culture about 
 religious things is one thing, and genuine religion quite 
 another. Henry VIII., who had been destined for the 
 English Primacy, was among the best read theologians of 
 his day ; but whatever opinion may be entertained of his 
 place, as a far-sighted statesman, in English history, no 
 one would seriously speak of him as personally religious. 
 
 Intelligence indeed, however cultivated, is only a depart- 
 ment of human life. Man is something greater than a culti- 
 vated intellect ; even than an intellect cultivated by study 
 of the highest objects that can be presented to it, — by study 
 of the things of God. More than this is needed to con- 
 stitute religion ; which, if it be not merely a sentiment or 
 passion, so certainly it is more than an intellectual effort, 
 however serious be its purpose or sublime its goal. 
 
 3. Are we then to say, with a large section of the modern 
 world, that the essential thing in religion is morality ? This 
 
 ^ S. Irenoeus, Hser. i. 6, 3. 5t6 Stj /cat rd aireLpyixeva iravra dSews oi 
 TeKeioraTOL irpdrTovcnv ainCJv, irepl &v ai ypafpai dia^ejSaiovvTai, roi/s TroLOVvras 
 avTo. ^aa-CKeiav Qeov fir] KXrjpopofMrjcreLu. Cf. 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10. 
 
L] Morality essential to time religion, i 7 
 
 was the teaching of Immaiiuel Kant. Eeligion, as he phrases 
 it, is a practical recognition of the Divine origin of the 
 moral law.^ And it is a doctrine which constantly meets 
 us in the society and the general literature of our own 
 country at the present day. Its popularity is easy of 
 explanation in an age when belief in the Unseen has been 
 seriously weakened among those classes of the people to 
 which the political necessity of strengthening virtues which 
 purify life and uphold society is pre-eminently obvious. 
 
 And certainly we must admit that religion has no more 
 appropriate work than the regulation of human life in 
 accordance with moral truth: it is in this province 
 especially that we look for evidences of its reality and 
 its power. " By their fruits ye shall know them," ^ said 
 its one great Master, of certain religious aspirants. "Pure 
 religion," according to His Apostle, "and undefiled before 
 CTod and the Fatlier, is this, to visit the fatherless and widows 
 in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the 
 world." 3 In other words, it is active philanthropy and per- 
 sonal purity. The language used to describe it in the Bible, 
 implies that knowledge of religion and religious emotion are, 
 as we have seen, worse than incomplete, if they do not lead to 
 active goodness. ^ Wliat a man knows or feels is of little im- 
 port, until it is ascertained what he does, or rather what he is. ^ 
 
 But it by no means follows that morality can be truly 
 described as the essence of religion. It differs from religion 
 
 ^ Quot. in Luthardt : Apologetische Vortriige, 1. 6. "^ S. Matt. vii. 16. 
 3 S. James i. 27. * S. Matt. vii. 22, 23 ; 2 S. Pet. ii. 20, 21. 
 
 ^ Ps. XV. i. S2(2-; xxiv. 3, 5 ; Rom. viii. 13, 14. 
 
1 8 Morality, how related to religion. [Lect. 
 
 in this, that morality is conformity to a law of right, while 
 religion is essentially a relation towards a Person. A 
 perfect, absolute morality will cover the same practical 
 ground as true religion. But if men endeaA^our to treat 
 morality as the only essential element in religion, and 
 accordingly attempt to plant it on some independent basis, 
 physical or otherwise, of its own — two things will happen. 
 Such a morality will be much narrower than a religious 
 morality; it will, in the judgment of religious men, present 
 an incomplete view of the real cycle of duty ; notably, it 
 will fail to recognize that most important side of duty 
 which we owe exclusively to God. But, besides this, 
 morality, divorced from religion, will tend more and more, 
 from the nature of the case, to approximate to a depart- 
 ment of mere human law; to concern itself only Avith acts 
 and not with motiA^es ; to make the external product, and 
 not the internal gOA^erning principle, the supreme con- 
 sideration. Morality, severed from religious motive, is like 
 a branch cut off from a tree : it may, here and there, from 
 accidental causes, retain its greenness for a Avhile ; but its 
 chance of vigorous life is a A^ery slender one. ISTor is it 
 possible to popularize a real morality, a morality that shall 
 deal Avith motives as Avell as with acts, Avithout unveiling 
 to the eye of the soul something more personal than an 
 abstract laAV. It is when man has caught sight of the one 
 Perfect Being, and in the effort to escape from the weak- 
 ness and degradations of his own earthly life, " lifts up his 
 soul" to this unseen, all-poAverful, all-bountiful Friend, 
 
L] Religion a bond behueefi man and God. 19 
 
 that lie may hope to discover the true ideal of his life, and 
 to realize it. Eeligion is thus the constant spring and 
 best guarantee of morality; but morality is not the " essence 
 of religion." Eeligion consists fundamentally in the prac- 
 tical recognition of a constraining bond between the inward 
 life of man and an unseen Person. ^ 
 
 The ancients were fond of discussing the derivation of 
 the word religion ; and Cicero refers it to that anxious habit 
 of mind which cons over again and again all that bears on the 
 service of heaven. ^ Lactantius may be wrong in his etymo- 
 logy, but he has certainly seized the broad popular sense of 
 the word, when he connects it with the idea of an oblio'a- 
 tion by which man is bound to an invisible Lord.^ 
 
 With this the Biblical phraseology is in substantial har- 
 mony. The expressions which describe the religion of the 
 earliest Patriarchs are in point ; and, like much else in the 
 Pentateuch, they mould the later language of the Psalter. 
 Enoch and Noah are said to have "walked with God;" 
 Abraham was bidden " walk before the face of God, and be 
 perfect."^ Here God is represented as the bounden Com- 
 panion of a man's life, as well as his all-surveying Judge 
 and Master ; and this idea of religion as personal devoted- 
 ness to God underfies all the representations of Scripture 
 
 ^ Compare Eus. Prsep. Ev. 1, 2. y] irpos top eva /cat fxopov cos dXrjOQs 
 o/xoXoyov/nevov re Kal 'dvra Qebv dvavevais Kai i) Kara tovtov ^(jjrj. 
 
 2 Nat. Deor. ii. 28. Qui omnia quaa ad cultum deorum pertinerent, dili- 
 genter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, religiosi dicti sunt ex relegendo. 
 
 2 Inst. Div. iv. 28. Vinculo pietatis obstricti, Deo religati sumus, unde 
 ipsa religio nomen cepit. Compare the hostile phrase of TiUcretius, " religio- 
 num se nodis solvere." Cf. St. Aug. Retract. 1. 13 ; de ver^ relig. xli. 55. 
 
 * Gen. V. 24 ; vi. 9 ; xvii. 1. 
 
20 Religion a '' covenant and '' com7minionr [Lect. 
 
 on the subject. Eeligion in the understanding, is the 
 knowledue of God/ — of His will and commandments ; it is 
 the knowledge of His "mystery" or secret counsel revealed 
 in Christ. - AVhen the Jewish law had been given, religion 
 was practically a "walking in the law of the Lord ;"^ when 
 the Christian revelation has been made, it is an "acknowledg- 
 ment of the truth which is after godliness." * But in this 
 truth, in that law, it seeks a Person ; it is fundamentally 
 the maintenance of a real relation with the Personal God, 
 or with a Divine Person really incarnate in Jesus Christ. 
 Accordingly, religion, both Jewish and Christian, is de- 
 scribed as a covenant; it is a bond or understanding 
 between the nation or the soul and God ; or, still more, 
 from the point of view of a faith that worketh by love, it is 
 personal communion Avith God. "That which we have seen 
 and heard," says S. John, " declare we unto you, that ye 
 also may have communion with us, and truly our com- 
 munion is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." ^ 
 
 Thus religious life is more than feeling, since feeling may 
 be physical, misdirected, selfish. It is more than knowledge, 
 which, even if it be complete and accurate, may fail to 
 govern the moral nature. It is more than obedience to a 
 moral code, because such obedience, if sufficiently complete 
 to Ije religious, already implies relations to the Lawgiver. 
 And yet religion is feeling ; it is mental illumination ; it 
 is especially moral effort ; because it is that which implies, 
 and comprehends, and combines them all. It is the sacred 
 1 Hos. iv. 1. 2 Eph. i. 17. 
 
 =5 Ps. cxix. 1 ; Cf. S. Luke i. 6. * Tit. i. 1. '^ 1 S. John i. 3. 
 
L] C/iaracf eristics of a trite religion. 
 
 21 
 
 bond, 'freely accepted, generously, entliusiastically, persis- 
 tently welcomed, whereby the soul engages to make a con- 
 tinuous expenditure of its highest powers in attaching itself 
 to the Personal Source and Object of its being. It is tlie 
 tie by which the soul binds itself to God, its true friend. To 
 be thus bound to a person is to cherish strong, nay, 
 passionate feelings towards him ; it is to seek to know all 
 that can be known about his wishes and character, and to 
 register this knowledge in exact terms ; it is to obey 
 scrupulously all that is clearly ascertained to be his will. 
 " Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up 
 my soul unto Thee." This is the language of feeling, pure 
 and strong ; it is the language of intelligence, ever desir- 
 ing a higher knowledge of its Highest Object; it is the 
 language of obedience, the most absolute that man can 
 proffer. It is these, because it is the voice, the exceeding 
 great cry, of that unquenchable passion, of that irrepressible 
 aspiration, wdiereby the soul of man shews forth its truest 
 dignity and highest virtue in seeking the better to know 
 and love and serve its Highest and Invisible Object ; be- 
 cause, in a word, it is the language of religion. 
 
 XL 
 
 If the prayer of the human soul be granted, can we infer 
 from the needs of the suppliant any of the necessary 
 
2 2 I . Mysterioitsness of a trtte religiotcs creed, [Lect. 
 
 characteristics of the great gift which is to relieve them ? 
 To say that we can do so will not be " dictating terms to 
 God," because He is not more the author of a religious 
 Eevelation than of the moral and mental instincts which 
 demand it. To say that we can do so will not involve our 
 " paying court to the corrupt instincts of a fallen nature ; " 
 because it certainly is not these instincts which seek a 
 close apj)roach to a nearer vision of the Throne of Moral 
 Purity and Light. Nor will it compromise the True Faith 
 by drawing attention to some features which are, and must 
 be, more or less common to it with the false faiths whereby 
 man, again and again, during his long and weary history, 
 has sought to satisfy the noblest of his passions, even 
 when he has only lighted up the dark canopy of heaven 
 from fires kindled by himself on earth. For in order to 
 exist at all, false beliefs must embody some, even con- 
 siderable elements of truth; and conversely, the True 
 Faith, in order to be itself, must have something, both in 
 its form and in its substance, common to itself and to every 
 falsehood that opposes it. 
 
 1. First of all, then, an answer from God to the religious 
 needs of man will be, at least in some degree, a mysterious 
 answer : it will half unveil much which shades off into the 
 unknown and the incomprehensible. To profess to reveal 
 the Infinite, and yet to undertake to explain everything to 
 the perfect satisfaction of a finite understanding, is worse 
 than unreasonable. And a creed which should discover 
 nothing that lies beyond the province of our experience, can 
 
L] Why a true 7^eligion is rnysteiHoiis. 23 
 
 have no pretensions to be a religions creed at all. For 
 religion is not a relation to or commnnion with natnre, or 
 with any natural force or law ; it is communion with an 
 Invisible Person. Certainly, we hear men speak of a 
 religion of art, of a religion of work, of a religion of civil- 
 isation. Harmless metaphors these, if it be only meant 
 that all the occupations of life can and should be penetrated 
 and sanctified by the sense of God's Presence and Will ; 
 but mischievous and misleading to the last degree, if it be 
 suggested that either art, or work, or civilisation is in 
 itself an end worthy of the highest energies of the human 
 spirit. He only who made us for Himself — the Infinite 
 and Eternal God — can be the object of religion, and any 
 serious answer to the religious aspirations of humanity must 
 point to Him. " Our preachers," said a German writer, refer- 
 ring to his university some thirty years ago, " having got rid 
 of the Christian doctrines by means of the higher criticism, 
 are now insisting with much earnestness upon the importance 
 of taking regid.ar exercise." ^ Eegular exercise is no doubt 
 a matter of real importance in its way: but an advocacy of its 
 advantages, however impassioned, says nothing to that side 
 of our being which breathes tlie prayer, "Shew Thou me the 
 way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee." 
 That Christianity is mysterious, is no new objection against 
 it. Unquestionably it is mysterious. In the year 1702, 
 Toland undertook to prove that " Christianity is not mys- 
 terious:" but he only succeeded in leading a certain num- 
 
 ^ Dr. Tholuck to Dx\ Pusey. 
 
24 2. Dejiiiiteness of true religion. [Lect. 
 
 ber of minds to a belief that it is false. That " the Gospel 
 contains nothing contrary to reason " is the conviction of 
 every Christian, who knows that right reason and revela- 
 tion are alike gifts of God. That the Gospel "contains 
 nothing above reason/' is an assertion so paradoxical, as to 
 be undeserving of a reply from those who believe that the 
 historical and doctrinal statements of the ISTew Testament 
 are integral elements of the Gospel. Toland, indeed, could 
 only make any approach to demonstrating his thesis, by 
 tampering with the ordinary and world-wide sense of the 
 term " Mystery;" and since the days of Toland science her- 
 self has, by her discoveries, made men feel more keenly 
 than did our fathers the mysteriousness of I^ature, and 
 through Nature, of Nature's God. 
 
 2. Next, God's answer to man's prayer must, at least 
 within limits, be definite. An answer made up altogether of 
 vague hopes, aspirations, surmisings, guesses, probabilities, 
 whatever its other merits, will not meet the specific needs of 
 man. What does man seek in seeking a religious creed ? 
 He seeks intellectual satisfaction and moral support. His 
 intellect asks for reliable information upon certain subjects 
 of the most momentous importance. How does he come to 
 be here ? Whither is he going ? What is the purpose and drift 
 of the various forms of existence around him ? Above all, 
 what is the nature, what are the attributes and dispositions, 
 of that Being to Whom the highest yearnings of his inmost 
 self constantly point as the true object of his existence ? 
 In asking that the answers to these questions shall be 
 
I.] Moral and iiitellcctttal reasons for it. 25 
 
 definite, that what is certain shall be affirmed as certain, 
 what is doubtful as doubtful, what is false as false, he is 
 only asking that his religious information shall be pre- 
 sented in as clear and practical a shape as his information on 
 other subjects. In no department of human knowledge is 
 haziness deemed a merit: by nothing is an educated 
 mind more distinguished than by the resolute effort to 
 mark the exact frontiers of its knowledge and its ignorance ; 
 to hesitate only when hesitation is necessary ; to despair of 
 knowledge only when knowledge is ascertainably out of 
 reach. Surely on the highest and most momentous of all 
 subjects this same precision may be asked for with reve- 
 rence and in reason ; surely the human mind is not bound 
 to forget its noblest instincts wdien it approaches the 
 throne and presence of its Maker. 
 
 Yet more necessary are definite statements of truth and 
 duty to the moral side of human life. To obey at all, we 
 must know what are the true limits of obedience, and what 
 the nature and authority of the lawgiver. A soldier under 
 fire has two things to do : first to attend to the word of his 
 commanding officer, and then to strengthen his will by all 
 the considerations which may enable him to do his duty. 
 Man, as a moral being, is engaged in a perpetual campaign 
 against the invading forces of temptation which assail him 
 from without, and the insurrectionary outbreaks of lawless 
 passions from within. If he is to make a successful resis- 
 tance, he must be penetrated by a conviction that it is of 
 vital importance to resist to the last extremity. This 
 
26 Theology necessary to religion. [Lect. 
 
 conviction must itself be made iij) of and depend upon 
 other convictions, sucli as the sanctity of God, His power, 
 His omnipresence, the interest which He takes in our suc- 
 cess, the strength with which He supplies us, the certainty 
 that He will come to judge us. A faltering, hazy represen- 
 tation may feed an aimless sentimentalism ; it is useless for 
 the purposes of an earnest moral struggle. 
 
 An exact creed and code of conduct is therefore a need 
 of man's mental and moral nature, and all religious systems, 
 whatever their truth or falsehood, have attempted to satisfy it. 
 The answer to this need, with wdiich w^e are familiar, is that 
 contained in the Christian theology ; and we use that word 
 in its broad sense, as including the whole cycle of revealed 
 doctrine and morals. Theology, in its scientific exhibition, 
 results from the effort which the Christian mind makes 
 from age to age to reduce to a precise and working form 
 the dej^osit of truth committed at the first to the Chris- 
 tian Church. It is the elaborate inventory which century 
 after century the Church has been taking of the priceless 
 treasures which were committed to her keeping in the 
 age of the Apostles. What doctrines may and may not be 
 catalogued in that inventory without serious inaccuracy, is 
 a point upon wdiich, unhappily, there are wide divisions 
 in the Clnistian world; but in the fifty generations of 
 Christians from the first until the present age there has never 
 been any sort of question as to the duty of ascertaining, 
 as correctly as may be, what are the truths which Christ 
 and His Apostles have taught, what is the exact area and 
 
L] ^^sthetic objections to definitcncss, 27 
 
 import of tliese truths, what their moral and social signi- 
 ficance, what onr practical duties towards them. 
 
 Yes ; but it is said, has not this inveterate instinct of the 
 Christian mind been fatal to the beauty of religious truth ? 
 Is not religious truth better left in the vague, hazy distance 
 of -popular thought ? Is it not vulgarized by this nearer 
 probing, by this inquisitive anxiety to make out exactly 
 what it is ? Is not the New Testament vague and undecided, 
 and are we likely to improve upon it ? Are not the clergy, 
 too, under a temptation to confuse between their professional 
 instinct of making the most of their title-deeds, and the 
 real broad interests of Christendom ? Has not Christendom, 
 in fact, suffered by over-definitions, by false definitions ; 
 and this in former ages as certainly as in our own ? 
 
 Certainly there are arguments which may be urged 
 against definitions; and first of aU on icsthetic grounds. 
 A picture of Turner's is a more beautifid thing than a 
 working drawing; but if your object be to give the 
 measurements of a public edifice. Turner's picture would 
 not be the more useful guide of the two. It is easy 
 to advise a man to "study and admire the poetry of 
 Isaiah and S. John, without troubling himself with the 
 truth of their theological dogmas, or even of their 
 historical statements." isTo doubt the poetry of the Evan- 
 gelist and of the Prophet is of consummate beauty, but it 
 is not their poetry which has impressed them on the thought 
 and heart of the Christian world. The really important ques- 
 tion about both these writers is, what do they exactly teach 
 
28 Definiteness of the Neza Testament. [Lect. 
 
 upon the gravest subjects that can interest thoughtful men ? 
 And next, is their teaching true ? The answer to this, to be 
 worth having, must be a sharply defined answer ; and art, 
 if needs be, must make a sacrifice to the demands of truth. 
 That there have been unnecessary definitions, rash defini- 
 tions, false definitions in Christendom, must be frankly 
 granted ; that they are still possible cannot be denied, 
 in view of contemporary events; that they have injured 
 the cause of Christ cannot be doubted. But the ques- 
 tion is as to the principle of definiteness, not as to 
 its abuse : false definitions, like false miracles, imply the 
 true, of which they are a counterfeit and caricature. As 
 to the New Testament, those who speak of its teaching 
 as indefinite, appear to confuse between its substance 
 and its form. Made up as it is of four biographical 
 sketches, of one narrative of the lives and works of some 
 missionary teachers, of twenty-one letters, six of them 
 addressed to individuals, and of one descrijotion of a 
 heavenly vision, its form is, of necessity, unmethodical ; it is, 
 if you will, anti-scholastic. But its form is distinct from its 
 substance ; and from age to age the clear import of its sub- 
 stance is pressed upon the imagination and heart of the 
 w^orld by the matchless beauties of its form. The teaching 
 of the New Testament indefinite ! It is simple paradox. 
 AVhat can be more definite than the account of Christ's Birth, 
 of His Miracles, of His Eesurrection, of His Ascension 
 into heaven, in the first three Gospels ? Wliat more definite 
 than the awful representation of His Person in the fourth ? 
 
L] Dcjiniteiiess of the New Testament. 29 
 
 Is the account of j ustification in the Epistle to the Eomans 
 and the Galatians indefinite ? Or that of the Eucharist and 
 the supernatural gifts of the Spirit in the Eirst Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, or that of the incorporation of the Church 
 with the living and triumphant Christ in the letters to 
 the Colossians and Ephesians, or that of its organization 
 in the Pastoral Epistles ? Is it not rather true that the 
 New Testament is much too definite for modern unbelief, 
 and that the real crime of the Church is, not that she has 
 added the quality of definiteness to the writings of the 
 Apostles and the Evangelists, but that she has persistently 
 called attention to that quality which from the first, and 
 from the nature of the case, belonged to them ? 
 
 How, indeed, could it be otherwise ? How would 
 the cry of humanity for light and guidance have been 
 answered? how would it not rather have been mocked 
 and scorned, by a revelation of the indefinite; by a 
 revelation of mists whereof none could decide the fron- 
 tiers, or unfold the meaning, or insist upon the worth ? 
 Such a revelation would have in fact revealed nothing; 
 nothing that might not have been in some degree 
 surmised by reason ; nothing that could invigorate tlie 
 heart or control the will. And in Christianity God has not 
 disappointed us. He has not contrived to say much with- 
 out asserting anything. If our Heavenly Father has not 
 answered the petition of His children for the solid bread of 
 truth with a stone. He as certainly has not met it with a 
 transcendental vapour. 
 
30 3- Positive character of a trtie i^eligion. [Lect. 
 
 3. Thirdly, a real answer to the religious needs of man 
 must be positive. It must state what is truth, and not 
 merely what is not truth. The soul of man does not look 
 inward and upward only in the hope of detecting falsehoods: 
 its deepest desire is to know, not what is not, but what is. 
 Merely negative teachers are as the wind ; they destroy but 
 they cannot build ; at their best they do but sweep away the 
 unsubstantial fictions of human fancy or human fraud, but 
 they erect nothing solid in the place of the discarded fictions. 
 Positive truth alone can feed, sustain, invigorate the soul. It 
 is no support in the hour of despondency or in the hour of 
 temj)tation to reflect or to be told that such and such a 
 doctrine or system is false. Possibly enough it is false; but 
 what then ? Does a sense of its falsehood nerve the will to do 
 and the heart to sustain when action and endurance are hard ? 
 A sense of falsehood only supplies moral power so long and so 
 far as you are confronted with the falsehood. You hate the 
 lie, and your hatred imports force into your contradiction ; 
 you loathe the idol, and a righteous scorn nerves your arm to 
 shatter it. But when the idol has been pulverized and the 
 lie is exploded, your force is gone. Your force was purely 
 relative to the objects of its animosity, and it perished with 
 them. Nay, more ; even while they lasted, your force was 
 good for nothing beyond and beside the function of destroy- 
 ing them. Such force is like Jehu ; it is trenchant energy 
 so long as vengeance has to be wreaked upon the house of 
 Ahab; but it is abject impotence when the time comes for 
 settling the polity of Israel on a sure foundation, and of 
 
L] Unfrtcit fulness of I'eligioits negations. 
 
 storing up a legacy of strength and safety for the coming 
 times. Positive doctrine, on the other hand is, or ought to 
 be, moral power. The whisper in the heart of the moral 
 fool, " there is no God," can never add to his stock of moral 
 strength. The faith of the Psalmist, " the Lord liveth," is at 
 once followed by the exclamation, " and blessed be my 
 strong Helper, and praised be the God of my salvation." ^ 
 The soul caimot rest upon the void which is the result of 
 that vast negation : it can and does draAV comfort, strength, 
 support, determination, as it grasps and leans upon this 
 greatest of all assertions. 
 
 This is a point which requires insisting on, especially 
 in an age of criticism. Here and there criticism may 
 vindicate an affirmation ; its more ordinary occupation is 
 to destroy. It almost proceeds upon the assumption that 
 the soil of truth is encumbered on all sides with brushwood 
 and rubbish, and that it can scarcely do wrong in burning 
 and clearing away for ever. We may allow that there is 
 legitimate and useful Avork for it to do ; but it is not the less 
 true that the temper of mind which it creates is prone to 
 entertain a most serious misapprehension on religious 
 matters. It tends to beget the notion that religious truth 
 is simply negation — negation of false beliefs, negation of 
 superstitious practices, negation of the errors and mistakes 
 of other people ; but scarcely anything that is really posi- 
 tive, with a body and substance of its own. Very many 
 people in this country, especially among the educated 
 
 ^ Ps. xviii. 47. 
 
32 A trite religioii has negative aspects. [Lect. 
 
 classes, conceive of religion* in this way, and to their own 
 unspeakable loss. What God is not, what Christ is not, 
 what the atonement and work of Christ are not, what 
 prayer is not, what sacraments are not ; — these are the ques- 
 tions with which they concern themselves almost exclu- 
 sively. Yet the only question that is lastingly practical is 
 what God, Christ, the atonement, prayer, the sacraments 
 circ. The negative conclusion does nothing beyond remov- 
 ing one or more misconceptions, or being supposed to do 
 so ; or rather it does something which were better undone. 
 It satisfies the vague sense that religion is too important a 
 concern to be entirely passed by : it furnishes a form of 
 interest in religion, of strictly intellectual interest, that may 
 be warranted to entail no practical consequences. And thus 
 the half-awakened conscience is again lulled to sleep, by en- 
 countering a religious idea which only presents itself to be 
 discarded ; and the eyes of the spirit close, perhaps for ever. 
 Do I say that a true faith has no negative aspects ? 
 Certainly not. The Jewish faith was a negation of Poly- 
 theism : Christianity is a negation of Polytheism, and of 
 much besides. The most characteristic writings of the great 
 Apostle are protests against false ideas of the work of Christ : 
 the most elaborate of the Catholic creeds contains a 
 repudiation of errors which deny the trutli of the Divine 
 Nature, or the trutli of the Person of Jesus. But in these 
 cases the negation does not stand alone ; it is only the 
 inevitable corollary of a greater affirmation. Unlike the 
 dreary criticism which makes a solitude in the human 
 
I.] A^. Absohiteiiess of the trice religio7t. 33 
 
 spirit, and then sardonically calls it peace, the negations 
 of the Creed do but remove obstructions to its positive 
 statements: they clear a space in thought for laying the 
 foundations and raising the walls of a solid edifice, within 
 which the Divine Architect has provided for the most 
 urgent wants of man. 
 
 4. Yet again, if man's deepest needs are to be satisfied, 
 he must believe that his creed is absolutely, and not merely 
 relatively, true. Eelative truth — truth which is true only 
 to certain persons or under certain circumstances — ceases 
 to be truth when those persons and circumstances pass. It 
 is transient ; and to say that truth is transient, is to qualify 
 the idea of truth by an attribute which destroys it. Eela- 
 tive truth is not truth, in the plain sense of the term ; it is 
 only opinion ; it is opinion which in the event proves to be 
 unfounded. 
 
 We are often told that Christianity, like the other 
 positive religions of the world, is relatively true ; and 
 hard words are used of Christians, who say that its truth is 
 absolute if it be true at all. Yet how can a creed profess to be 
 relatively true without admitting itself to be really false ? 
 It was pardonable in Benhadad's Syrians to suggest that the 
 God of Israel was only a God of the hills ; but no believing 
 Israelite coidd have granted this without denying the first 
 article of his creed. And Philosophy has sometimes meant 
 to befriend Christianity, by asserting that it teaches a rela- 
 tive truth. She bids believers make the best of it, on the 
 ground that if not absolutely true, it is a 2:)hase of truth, 
 
 D 
 
34 Worth of '' relative'' triith in religion. [Lect. 
 
 true to tlie believer, true provisionally, although liable to be 
 superseded by a higher truth in days to come. But who 
 could make the most of a creed with such an estimate of its 
 worth as this ? Would any sensible man die for a " rela- 
 tively true " religion ? Could it teach him the duties of 
 prayer or self-sacrifice ? Would he live for it ? Would he be 
 even interested for long in a philosophy which he believed 
 to be only relatively true ? Wliile the Ptolemaic system 
 of the heavens lasted, it was supposed to be absolutely true : 
 Would the ancient world have listened quietly to the 
 Ptolemaic teachers had it suspected, however distantly, the 
 advent of a Copernicus ? The ceremonial element in the 
 Jewish dispensation, as S. Paul has taught us, was only of 
 relative authority. But it was believed by the Jews to be 
 absolute. To see in it "a figure of the time then pre- 
 sent," was already to have become a Christian, Any creed, 
 whether true or false, must claim to be absolute, or it 
 must make no claim at all, since upon faith in its absolute 
 truth depends the necessity and reasonableness of all the 
 acts, habits, efforts, sacrifices, which constitute its practical 
 side — all the ventures, in short, which men make on 
 account of it. 
 
 To say that Christianity is only relatively true ; that it 
 is but the prelude and introduction to some broader reli- 
 gion of humanity, which will in time supersede it, is, in fact, 
 to reject Christianity. Por from the first Christianity has 
 claimed to be the Universal Eeligion. It was destined from 
 the first to embrace the whole world ; it was to last through- 
 
I.] The tC7iiversal religion imcst be absohite. 35 
 
 out tlie ages. " Go ye/' said its Founder, " and make dis- 
 ciples of all nations, baptizing tlieni in the name of the 
 Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;" and, "lo, 
 I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." ^ 
 In this claim of universality, whether in time or range of 
 empire, there lay the implied and further claim to be the 
 Absolute Eeligion — the one final unveiling of the Universal 
 Father's mind before the eyes of His children.^ This con- 
 viction underlies S. Paul's earnest apostolate of the Gentiles 
 in the face of active Jewish prejudice. He "owed"^ the 
 absolute religion, as he could have owed no relative religion 
 whatever, to the Greeks and to the Barbarians alike, to the 
 philosophers and to the uneducated. To his eye all the 
 deepest divisions of country, race, and station vanished 
 entirely as men passed within the Church. " There is," he 
 exclaimed, "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor un- 
 circumcision. Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ 
 is all, and in all." ^ A religion conscious of being suitable 
 only to particulal? dates or localities could never have 
 originally aspired to bring within the range of its influence 
 all the varieties of race and thought that are found in the 
 human family. It would feel its unsuitableness to some 
 races, to some civilizations, to some historical periods, if not 
 to aU. " To make all men see what is the fellowshijo of the 
 mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been 
 
 1 S. Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. 
 
 - Baur: Vorlesungen iiber Neutestamentliche Theologie, p. 131. 
 
 ^ Rom. i. 14. 
 
 *Col. iii. 11; cf. Gal. iii. 28. 
 
36 5- Provision for the heart and zuill. [Lect. 
 
 hid in God," ^ was an ambition approj^riate " to the faith 
 once for all delivered to the Saints." ^ 
 
 5. Lastly, if man's religious wants are to he answered, his 
 creed must s^^eak, not merely to his inteUigence, hut to his 
 heart ^nd will. He cannot really rest upon the most unim- 
 peachable abstractions. He needs something warmer than the 
 truest philosophy. He yearns to come in contact with a heart ; 
 and no religion therefore can really satisfy him which does 
 not at least lead him to know and love a person. An unseen 
 Friend, who will purify, and teach, and check, and lead, and 
 sustain him : — that is his great necessity. And this want, 
 this last but deepest want of man's religious life, Christi- 
 anity has satisfied. As humanity, " sitting in darkness and 
 in the shadow of death," pleads with the Power Whom it 
 feels but cannot see — " Shew Thou me the way that I 
 should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee " — lo ! the 
 heavens drop down from above, and the skies pour forth 
 righteousness. And One fairer than the children of men 
 presents Himself to all the centuries and countries of the 
 world with the gracious bidding, " Come unto Me, all ye 
 that labour and are heavy laden, and I mil give you rest." ^ 
 
 In the Lectures which are to follow during the succeed- 
 ing Sundays of Lent, an attempt will be made to insist 
 upon some of the truths which are most fundamentally 
 related to the soul's religious life, as they come into contact 
 with some forms of modern thought. Of so vast a subject 
 a few fragments are all that, from the nature of the case, 
 
 i Eph. iii. 9. 2 S. Jude 3. » S. Matt. xi. 28. 
 
L] Anticipations and caittions. 37 
 
 can possibly be offered. If we couid say all that could be 
 said, such truths must still shade off into the unknown. 
 But we may at least endeavour to trace what w^e can see 
 of theu^ real outline, to quicken our sense of their positive 
 contents, to deepen our convictions of their absolute and 
 unchanging significance, to enhance the influence which they 
 already exert over our moral natures. It is not well that such 
 topics should be approached with no higher purpose than that 
 of an intellectual enterprise. If w^e do not mean the cry, 
 " Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift 
 up my soul unto Thee," it w^ere better not to enter on the 
 holy ground. Eeligion indeed must always command the 
 attention of practical men, because it is, at least, one of 
 the most powerful forces, because it shapes the strongest 
 passions, that can govern the conduct of large masses of 
 mankind. It also will ever be interesting to serious thinkers, 
 wdiether they accept its authority or not; for without 
 controversy it has a w^ord to say upon the highest objects 
 of human thought. But for those who look at it, not only 
 from without but from within, not as a toy of the intellect, 
 ]3ut as a necessity of the soul, it must be something more 
 than this. If there be any truth in its teachings at all, if its 
 aspirations be anything more than a waste of heart and effort, 
 lavished through centuries upon what are after all only 
 weird or graceful phantoms of the brain, then nothing that 
 can occupy our thoughts can really compare with it in point 
 of absorbing and momentous import. Beyond everything 
 else, it must have imperious claims upon the time and 
 
38 Anticipations and cautions. [Lect. I. 
 
 tlioiiglit and working power of every human being who has 
 ever felt, in any serions degree, the unspeakable solemnity 
 of life and death. May God endow us with a sense of this 
 interest in that which binds us to Himself, or may He 
 deepen it ; and then, in answer to the longings which in 
 every sincere soul it will assuredly foster, may He this Lent 
 be mercifid to us, each and all, and bless us, and shew us 
 the light of His countenance, and be merciful unto us ! ^ 
 
 1 Ps. Ixvii. 1. 
 
LECTURE 11. 
 
 Seconti Sutttiag in ilent, 
 
 GOD, THE OBJECT OF EELIGION. 
 
 Ps. xlii. 2. 
 
 My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God : when shall I come to 
 appear before the presence of God ? 
 
 rriHEEE is scarcely, even in the Psalter, a more touching 
 -*- psalm than this. The Psalmist is probably an exile 
 of the early Assyrian period. In the land of his captivity, 
 he is surrounded by all the institutions of an established 
 idolatry, and, as he sadly reflects, he is far removed from the 
 Holy Home of the race of Israel ; from the place which the 
 Lord had chosen to put His name there ; from the worship 
 and fellowship of the sacred commonwealth. His thought 
 spans the intervening desert, and he dweUs with a full and 
 aching heart on all that lies beyond it. He remembers 
 the festival services in Jerusalem in bygone years, wdien he 
 went with the "multitude keeping holyday," when he,too,had 
 his share in the " voice of joy and praise." As he calls up 
 in memory this cherished part, he pours out his soul in secret 
 grief ; and while the cruel heathen around taunt him with the 
 
40 The '' liviiig'' God. [Lect. 
 
 insulting question, Where is thy God ? he can only find 
 refuge in tears ; his tears, as he tells us, flow by day and 
 by night. Wlien will the long years of exile have an end ? 
 When will he come to " apj)ear before the presence of God" ? 
 He is like the thirsty stag, panting after the distant water- 
 brooks ; his inmost being is " athirst for God, yea even for 
 the living God." 
 
 " The living God ! " What a strange, yet what a preg- 
 nant phrase ! Surely, the Author of Life must live ; yet 
 here is an expression which hints at the idea of deities who 
 are not alive. It was thus that the Hebrews distinguished 
 the true God Who had revealed Himself to their ancestors 
 from the false gods of the nations around tliem. " As for 
 all the gods of the heathen, they are but idols; but it is the 
 Lord that made the heavens." ^ The heathen deities were so 
 much carving, sculpture, and colouring; or they were so 
 much human imagination or human speculation ; they had 
 no being independent of the toil, whether of the hands or of 
 the brains of men. They had no existence in themselves ; 
 they did not live, whether men thought about them or not : 
 as we should say, they had no objective existence. It was 
 true that evil spirits, by lurking beneath the idol forms, or 
 draping themselves in the debasing fancies of the heathen 
 world, might contrive to appropriate the homage which the 
 human heart in its darkness lavished uj)on its own crea- 
 tions ; and thus the Canaanites are said, in their cruel 
 Moloch-worship, to have sacrificed their sons and their 
 
 ^ Ps. xcvi, 5. 
 
II.] Elements of trtUh in heathenism. 41 
 
 daughters unto devils.^ But the broad contrast, latent in 
 the expression " the living God," is the contrast between 
 imagination and fact ; between an Existing Being and a 
 collection of fancy personages ; between a solemn truth 
 and a stupid and debasing unreality. 
 
 We are not here concerned to inquire what elements of 
 truth there may have been in the forms of heathen worship 
 with which the Jews came into contact. - Some truth there 
 certainly was in the most degraded of them ; since a religion 
 which is pure undiluted falsehood could not continue to 
 exist as a religion, and the false religions which do exist, 
 only exist by virtue of the elements of truth which in varying 
 proportions they severally contain. The lowest fetichism 
 witnesses to the great truth, that man must go out of himself 
 in order to seek for an adequate object of his heart-felt 
 devotion — of his highest enthusiasms. And no instructed 
 Christian would deny that certain forms of heathenism 
 embrace incidentally the recognition of considerable dis- 
 tricts of fundamental truth. If, indeed, as S. Paul says, 
 God teaches all men uj) to a certain point through nature 
 and conscience,^ it could not be otherwise; and this inter- 
 mixture of truth, which is thus latent in all heathenism, 
 
 1 Ps. cvi. 37. 
 
 2 On the "Dispensation of Paganism," see NewTiian's *'Arians of the 
 Fourth Century," pp. 87-91 ; and the quotation from S. Clem. Alex. Strom, 
 vii. 2. " He (the Word) it is who gives to the Greeks their philosophy. . . . 
 His revelations, both the former and the latter, are drawn forth from one 
 fount ; those who were before the Law, not suffered to be without Law ; 
 those who do not hear the JeAvish philosophy, not surrendered to an unl)ridled 
 course." 
 
 3 Eom. i. 19, 20. 
 
42 Heathe7iisrn Jiozu estimatedin Scrip ttti^e. [Lect. 
 
 yields the best starting-point for convincing heathens of the 
 errors which they admit, and of the truths which they deny 
 beyond. '^ In this sense, undoubtedly, the science, which has 
 been of late named Comparative Theology, may be made 
 really serviceable to the interests of Christian truth. It is 
 a widely different thing to start with an assumption that all 
 the positive religions in the world, the Jewish and Christian 
 revelations included, are alike conglomerate formations in 
 very varying degrees, partly true and partly false ; and that 
 the religion of the future — an etherealized abstraction, to 
 be distilled by science from all the creeds and worships of 
 mankind — will be something beyond, and distinct from all 
 of them. Certainly heathenism is not treated, either in the 
 Old Testament or in the New, with the tenderness which 
 would befit such an anticipation as this. Practically speak- 
 ing, and as contrasted with the revealed truth, whether 
 Jewish or Christian, heathenism is represented as a lie. To 
 live within its territorial range is to live in the kingdom 
 of darkness ; ^^ to practise its rites is to be an enemy to God 
 by wicked works ; ^ to go after false gods is to have the 
 earnest of great trouble,^ and to provoke the anger of the 
 real Lord of the Universe. The Assyrian idols did not raise 
 in the exile's mind any question as to the stray elements of 
 truth which might be u.nderlying so much tawdry and impure 
 error. " My soul," he cried, '' is athirst for God, yea even 
 
 ^ So S. Clem. Alex, speaks of Greek pliilosophy as viro^ddpav ovaav t^s 
 Kara Xpiarbv (pLXoao(pias^ — Strom, vi., qu. by Newman, ubi sup. 
 2 Is. Ix. 2 ; 1 Pet. ii. 9. s (3ol. i. 21. 
 
 * Ps. Ixxviii. 59, 60 ; cvi. 36-40. 
 
IL] God, the object of the SoiiVs thirst. 43 
 
 for the li\dng God : when shall I come to appear before the 
 presence of God ? " 
 
 The language of this exile is in truth the language of the 
 human heart, under the stress of the purest and deepest 
 desire that man can know. In this life man is an exile ; he 
 is parted from his true home and country ; he is the victim 
 of an unconquerable restlessness. This restlessness of the 
 mind — this "wasting fever of the heart" of man — this 
 unwillingness to be satisfied with any earthly good — 
 attracted the attention of ancient thinkers. But they did 
 not understand its secret. They would fain have accounted 
 for it by pointing to some fatal warp or flaw in human 
 nature; or they would have silenced it by the tentative 
 guesses of successive philosophies, moving in cycles which 
 ended in proclaiming that nothing beyond the province of 
 sense is trustworthy ; or they would have buried it beneath 
 the cares of business, or the cares of empire, or the grosser 
 attractions of sensual pleasure. But again and again the 
 human heart has protested against these endeavours to 
 crush the noblest of its aspirations ; and history again and 
 again has echoed with the cry, "My soul is athirst," 
 not for pleasures which may degrade, nor yet for philo- 
 sophies which may disappoint, but for the Pure, the 
 Absolute, the Everlasting Being. " My soul is athirst for 
 God : when shall I come to appear before the presence of 
 God?" 
 
 Was this cry ever heard more distinctly by those who 
 have ears to hear the voices of the spiritual world than in 
 
44 The thirst of the Soul, how [Lect. 
 
 our own generation ? The passion, or, as tlie Psalmist phrases 
 it, the thirst for God — the strong desire of the soul mounting 
 towards Him with all the agonized earnestness of a disap- 
 pointed and tortured sense — speaks, not merely or chiefly in 
 churches and pulpits, but in magazines, in newspapers, in 
 social gatherings, in political assemblies, with a fervour and 
 decision which would have startled the age of George III. 
 The pulse of this desire is felt outside the Christian camp ; 
 it quickens the very enthusiasms of error and paradox; often 
 enough, it mistakes friends for foes and foes for friends; but 
 it is generally sincere, vehement, intolerant of delay and 
 trifling. " ]\Iy soul is athirst for God, yea even for the 
 living God," is the desire of desires ; it really underlies and 
 explains all others that are not purely brutal in this Europe, 
 this England of the nineteenth century. Let us see how 
 it fares — this thirst for God — at the hands of some great 
 speculative systems which more particularly challenge 
 attention in the present day. 
 
 I. 
 
 High in the world of thought, if we determine its place 
 by the intellectual forces which it can at present muster, 
 while we refuse to adopt any truer and worthier rule of 
 measurement, lies the camp of the Materialists. Material- 
 ism is sometimes digested into a system ; sometimes it is 
 little more than an intellectual tendency. Occasionally it 
 
11. ] satisfied by Materialism. 45 
 
 displays the constructive entliusiasm together with the stiff, 
 and, perhaps, pedantic livery of Positivism: more frequently, 
 it is shy of committing itself to positive theories, while it is 
 consistently earnest in resenting all attempts to base know- 
 ledge upon anything besides the verdict of sense. It bids us 
 believe what we can see and smell, and taste and touch ; it 
 invites us to make such generalizations as we can out of the 
 repoi-t wdiich om- senses bring to us. Thus, it assures us, 
 will the mighty universe in which we live reveal itself to 
 us ; and we shall learn to perceive in it two, and only two, 
 elements in the last analysis, — a kingdom of matter, that 
 is apparently eternal, unceasingly, infinitely modified by 
 eternal force. How this force and that matter came to be, 
 it knows not : it affirms, as it denies nothing. A philosophy 
 that is positive does not concern itself with the origin 
 of the universe, " if it ever had one," or with what hap- 
 pens to living beings after their death. ^ Of this eternal 
 interfusion of force with matter, man himself is only a ripe 
 and very complex product. There is nothing in him for 
 which his chemistry cannot give an account : his intelli- 
 gence is exactly proportioned to the mass of his brain : his 
 thought is " but the expression of molecular changes in the 
 physical matter of his life:"^ his thought is impossible 
 without phosphorus ; his consciousness is only a property 
 of matter : ^ his virtue is the result of a current of electri- 
 
 * Paroles de Philosophie Positive, p. 31, qu. by Bp. Dupaiiloup. 
 2 Fortn, Rev., 1869. 
 
 2 Biichner, Kraft und Stoft, § 122. Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke, 
 . . . . auch das Bewusstsein ist iiichts als eine Eiseiischaft des StofFes. 
 
46 The thirst of the Soul, how [Lect. 
 
 city ; his virtue and his vice are strictly due to his natural 
 organization, they are " products in the same sense as are 
 sugar and vitriol." All that he can do, either with himself 
 or with the world around him, is to search out and to re- 
 gister the several qualities of matter, and to number and 
 measure the ever-shifting forms of the force which governs 
 it. There may be something beyond matter and force 
 — who knows ? But science, which deals only with posi- 
 tive realities, cannot concern herseK with, as she does not 
 need, " such an hypothesis " as God. Can God be verified 
 by the senses ? Is He not a phantom that belongs properly 
 to the childhood of humanity ? Is He not an anachronism 
 in a scientific age ?^ What is He, then, whom men com- 
 monly name God ? God, says Feuerbach, whose Panthe- 
 ism is really Materialism, is only " the nature of man 
 regarded as absolute truth ;" " that which is given to man's 
 God, is in truth given to man himself;" "what a man 
 declares concerning God, he in truth declares concerning 
 himself;" "the Divine activity is not distinct from the 
 human ;" " in God man has only his own activity as an 
 object ;" " the mystery of the inexhaustible fulness of the 
 Divine predicates is nothing else than the mystery of 
 human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely 
 modifiable, but consequently phenomenal being." ^ In 
 other words, God does not exist apart from the mind and 
 imagination of man ; He is only its creation, and has no 
 
 1 See Conservation, E^volution, Positivisme, p. 70, qu, by Dupanloup, 
 I'Ath^isme, p. 70. 
 
11. ] satisfied by Materialism. 47 
 
 rightful place in the region of serious and scientific 
 thought. 
 
 This is not, I trust, a misrepresentation of the language 
 of contemporary Materialism : and J^^hatever else may be 
 said of it, this at least is certain, that it does nothing 
 whatever towards satisfying that great desire or " thirst " 
 for communion with a Higher Being, of which, in his best 
 and highest moods, man is so profoundly conscious. It 
 denies, if not that any such being really exists, at least that 
 we can know Him to be really existing. They who have 
 no satisfaction to ofier to a need naturally condemn the 
 demand for one : they wdio have no answer to give, would 
 rather not be questioned. And yet the religious side of man's 
 nature is a fact of which a philosophy of experience should 
 surely take account. Upon what is man's religious instinct 
 to spend itself in the Materialistic universe ? Upon that 
 phantom-god who, as we are told, is only a pale reflection 
 of human vanity ? But the soul asks for reality, and can- 
 not occupy itself with a confessed shadow. Upon that 
 eternal flux of self-existent matter? upon that ceaseless 
 activity of self-existing force ? But is there anything in 
 mere force or matter, or in both combined, I will not say 
 to satisfy a passion which is purest and strongest in saintly 
 men, but even to have any contact with or relation towards 
 it whatever ? How can that which is purely physical touch 
 the sense which appreciates a moral world ? It is a merit 
 of Auguste Comte to have recognized the necessity of some 
 answer; and he tells us that it is our privilege and our 
 
48 The Positivist deity. [Lect. 
 
 business to love, reverence, and worship " a Being, immense 
 and eternal — Humanity."^ Not, mark you, a sinless and 
 Divine representative of tlie race, sucli as we Christians 
 adore in the Incarnate Jesus, seated as He is at the right 
 hand of the Father. Not even an idealized abstraction, 
 which, in the pure realms of thought, might conceivably be • 
 separated from the weaknesses and degTadations of the 
 sum-total of human flesh and blood. But this very collec- 
 tive human family itself, in all ages and of all conditions, 
 viewed as one organism ; this human family, not merely 
 illuminated by its struggles, its sufferings, its victories, but 
 also weighted with its crimes, its brutalities, its deep and 
 hideous degradations. It might be thought that " we men 
 know man too well to care to worship him." Yet, seriously, 
 this is the god who is to supersede the Most Holy Trinity, 
 when Positivism has won its way to empire in European 
 thought. Will he, think you, satisfy the mighty thirst of 
 the human soul ? What does this thirst mean but man's 
 endeavour to escape from himself, to rise to an ideal, or 
 rather to a reality above himself, to lose himself in a Being 
 who is greater, wiser, better than himself? Yet here he 
 is bidden, in the name, if without the sanction of the 
 most recent science, to seek the object of his trust and 
 worship within himself, since nothing higher than him- 
 self is really cognizable by his understanding. It is 
 clear that teachers who do not believe in a living 
 God must leave one side, and that the highest, of human 
 
 1 Cat. Pos. Int. 
 
IL] Revolt of the human mind against A theism. 49 
 
 nature altogether uncared for ; since in truth they have 
 nothing to say to it. And history does not smile upon 
 materialistic attempts to bribe the religious yearnings of 
 the soul of man. Atheism could indeed, on one fatal day, 
 throne naked vice as the goddess Eeason upon the high 
 altar of a Christian basilica, while an apostate archbishop 
 lent his presence to the hideous ceremony ; but it was one 
 thing to obey the interested or sentimental fanaticism of 
 the Jacobin Clubs, and quite another permanently to 
 control the heart and convictions even of the Voltairianized 
 multitudes of Paris. ^ The realities of religion might have 
 been hated ; but this godless parody of worship could only 
 provoke a languid contempt. 
 
 II. 
 
 Against Materialism, in all its forms, the common sense 
 of man, not to speak of his religious instinct, will ever 
 protest. The idea or presentiment of God, everywhere 
 rooted in the mind of man, is a fact sufficiently important 
 to be treated as something better than a superstition by 
 those who put forward any serious doctrine about human 
 
 ^ Pressens^, L'Eglise et la Revolution rran9aise, p. 280. *' II ne resta de 
 ce jour que le souvenir d'une stupide parodie qui vengeait k elle seule la 
 religion sainte que Ton avait voulu fouler aux pieds. C'est en vain que pour 
 ranimer la ferveur on rempla^a h, Paris et dans les ddpartements les actrices 
 par les jjrostitu^es. L' ennui et le ddgotit frappferent le nouveau culte d^s 
 ses debuts. 
 
 E 
 
50 The world-wide feeling after God. [Lect. 
 
 nature. A mental fact is as worthy of attention as any 
 fact which can be appraised in a chemical laboratory or on 
 the roof of an observatory. Cicero's statement ^ that there 
 is no nation so barbarous and wild as not to have believed 
 in some divinity, is still, notwithstanding certain apparent 
 exceptions, true. A nation of pure Atheists is yet to be 
 discovered. " Unworthy and degraded as are many of the 
 beliefs on the subject of a Higher Power that are to be 
 found in the heathen world, some groping after the Great 
 Unseen, some tentative intuition, some shadowy belief there 
 is to be found always and everywhere. Man thinks of a 
 Higher Power as naturally as he thinks of the world 
 
 ^ Cic. de Legibus, i. 8. Itaque ex tot generibus nullum est animal praeter 
 hominem quod habeat notitiam aliquam dei : ipsisque in hominibus nulla 
 gens est neque tam immansueta neque tam fera, quae non, etiam si ignorat 
 qualem habere deum deceat, tamen habendum sciat. Tuscul. Disput., i. 13. 
 Ut porro finnissunum hoc afFerri videtur, cur deos esse credamus, quod nulla 
 gens tam fera, nemo omnium tam sit immanis, cujus mentem non imbuerit 
 deorum opinio: — multi de diis prava sentiunt (id enim vitioso more effici 
 solet) ; omnes tamen esse vim et naturam divinam arbitrantur : nee vero id 
 collocutio hominum aut consensus effecit ; non institutis opinio est confirmata, 
 non legibus. Omni autem in re consentio omnium gentium lex naturae 
 putanda est. 
 
 ^ Cf. Diderot, Philosophie des Canadiens. CEuvres, I. p. 433. Max 
 Miiller, " Chips from a German Workshop." " There is perhaps no race of 
 men so low and degraded as the Papuas. It has frequently been asserted 
 that they have no religion at all, and yet these same Papuas, if they want 
 to know whether what they are going to undertake is right or wrong, squat 
 before their karwar, clasp the hands over the forehead, and bow repeatedly, 
 at the same time stating their intentions. If they are seized with any 
 nervous feeling during this time, it is considered as a bad sign, and the pro- 
 ject is abandoned for a time ; if otherwise, the idol is supposed to approve. 
 Here we have but to translate what they in their helpless language call 
 'nervous feeling' by our word 'conscience,' and we shall not only under- 
 stand what they really mean, but confess, perhaps, that it would be well for 
 us if, in our own hearts, the karwar occupied the same prominent i>lace 
 which it occupies in the cottage of every Papua.*' 
 
11. ] The thonght ofGodlateiit in the human mind. 5 1 
 
 around him, or of himself. Nay, he thinks of Truth ; 
 and truth is no mere abstraction ; it is a Eeal Beinsf ; 
 it is God. 1 He thinks of the Infinite, says Fenelon, as he 
 thinks of the circle, of tlie line, of the distinction between 
 whole and part,^ The spontaneous activity of his con- 
 sciousness brings with it, contains in itself, the thought of 
 One who is greater, if not also stronger, wiser, better than 
 all else ; and that man should thus think of Him, is of 
 itself a presumption that He really exists.^ This instinc- 
 tive perception and affirmation of God is indeed not merely 
 an act of the intellect ; it is also, as will be insisted on pre- 
 sently, perhaps it is chiefly, an act of the moral sense, an 
 act of the conscience. It is that upward attraction of the 
 
 ^ Plat. Repub. vii. 517. 
 
 ^ De Texistence de Dieu, 1®'® partie, p. 60. L'id^e de Tinfini est en moi 
 comma celle des nombres, des lignes, des cercles, d'un tout et d'une partie. 
 Changer nos id^es ce serait an^antir la raison meme. 
 
 ^ The ontological " argument *' for the existence of God is stated in vary- 
 ing degrees of completeness by S. Augustine, Boethius, S. Anselm, and 
 Descartes. To cite the two last, S. Ans. Proslog. 2, convincitur etiam 
 insipiens (Ps. xiv. 1) esse vel in intellectu aliquid quo nihil majus cogitari 
 potest. Et certfe id quo majus cogitari nequit non potest esse in intellectu 
 solo. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re quod 
 majus est Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non potest est in intellectu ; id 
 ipsum, quo majus cogitari non potest est quo majus cogitari potest : sed 
 certfe hoc esse non potest. Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo majus 
 cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re. Descartes observes (Medit. 
 de Prim. Philos. 3, 4, sub fin.) " notiones nostras esse aut adventitias, 
 aut factitias, aut innatas. Ideam de Deo non esse adventitiam, Deum 
 enim non experienti^ duce reperiri ; neque factitiam, nam non arbitrio 
 a nobis effictam esse; ergo esse innatam, sive a Deo ii)so nobis suppe- 
 ditatam." This is undoubtedly the weakest of the arguments for God's 
 existence ; but its real value should not be mistaken on account of the 
 facility with which it lends itself to the Hegelian doctrine that " God is 
 only God in so far as He has knowledge of Himself ; but His self-knowledge 
 is ' sein selbst bewusstseyn in Menschen und das Wis^'en des Menschen von 
 Gott' " (Encycl. p. 576, qu. by Grimm). 
 
5 2 Instinctive apprehension precedes proof. [Lect. 
 
 soul upon which Plato dilates ;i it is the universal hypo- 
 thesis which Aristotle registers ;2 it is the world-wide 
 prejudice of Epicurus ; it is the " anticipation " naturally 
 imbedded in the human mind, of Cicero. ^ It precedes de- 
 monstration ; it is out of the reach of criticism ; it resists 
 hostile argument. It is, speaking philosophically, a fact 
 in psychological science, and a fact so fruitful and stimu- 
 lating, that to it must be traced all in human life and 
 effoi-t that looks really upward, — man's love of truth, his 
 clinging to a coming life, his aspirations to rise above the 
 level of animal existence. It is, speaking religiously, in 
 its way, a revelation ; it is a revelation of God within, as S. 
 Paul says, answering to the revelation of God from without; 
 it sets man's thought in motion as he gazes upon the 
 natural world, and bids him not to rest until he has wrung 
 from it a disclosure of the highest truth which it has to 
 teach him. 
 
 And thus, with this preparatory idea or intuition of a 
 Divinity, the human mind approaches what are caUed the 
 
 1 Cf. the whole passage in Plato, de Legibus, ix. x. 899, c. d. e., qu. by 
 Staudenmaier, Dogm. II. 22. 
 
 2 Arist. de Coelo, 1-3. iravTe^ yap a.vBpwn-OL irepl OeQ^v 'ixovffiv vir6\r}\l^LV, 
 Kul iravres tov avwTaroi t($ deicp rdirov d7ro§t56acri. Referred to by Stauden- 
 maier, ubi. sup. 
 
 3 Cic. de Nat. Deorum, i. 16. Solus enim vidit [Epicurus] primum esse 
 deos, quod in omnium animis eorum notionem impressisset ipsa natura. 
 Quffi est enim gens, aut quod genus hominum, quod non habeat sine 
 doctrina anticipationem quandam decorum ? quam appellat wpdXv^iv Epi- 
 curus, id est anteceptam animo rei quandam informationem, sine qua nee 
 intelligi quidquam, nee quaeri, nee disputari potest. Cujus rationis vim 
 atque utiUtatem ex illo coelesti Epicmi de regula et judicio volumine acce- 
 pimus. 
 
11. ] The Cosmological Argument. 53 
 
 proofs of God's existence. Looking out upon the universe 
 around it, the mind seeks for its productive cause. ^ What- 
 ever efforts may have been made by recent writers to reduce 
 causation to mere antecedence, the law of causation is at 
 once a primary law of human thought and of the world 
 without us. ^ What cause, what force, preceded and brought 
 into existence this universe ? All the causes with which 
 we come in contact here, are, as we term them, second 
 causes ; but they point to a cause beyond themselves, to a 
 cause of causes, to a supreme all-producing Cause, Itself 
 uncaused, unoriginate. The heavenly bodies move on un- 
 ceasingly in their orbits, obedient to the laws of gravita- 
 tion, but no law of gravitation could have assigned them 
 their place in space. ^ The whole universe bids us look 
 beyond itself for the adequate explanation of its existence. 
 " So far is it from being true," says Lord Bacon, " that the 
 
 ^ The cosmoloffical proof of God's existence is Btated with great beauty 
 and variety of illustration by Fenelon, Traits de I'existence et des Attributs 
 de Dieu, e. 1, 2. To the original form of the argument which, looking upon 
 the world as an effect, seeks for its cause, Leibnitz adds a second, based 
 upon the contingent nature of the world and its several parts, which obliges 
 us to seek in the wpQTou kivovv, or First Cause, the Unchanging and intrin- 
 sically Necessary Being. This Necessary Being is not, as Strauss says, 
 the " ewiges Grundwesen der Welt," or the permanent material of the 
 universe, as distinct from its ever-changing forms ; because the necessity of 
 seeking a first cause obliges us to go beyond the universe, which, as a whole, 
 is an effect. On the other hand, the cosmological argument does not of 
 itself lead us to a moral God, such as would satisfy the instincts of piety — 
 the " thirst " of the soul. 
 
 '^ Cf. M'Ccjsh, " Method of the Divine Government," Appendices III. and 
 IV. 
 
 3 Newton, Philos. Nat. Princip. L. III. schol. gen. Perseverabunt quidem 
 in orbibus suis per leges gravitatis, sed regularem orbium situm primitua 
 acquirire per has leges minimi potuerunt. 
 
54 The first cause the Highest Intelligence. [Lect. 
 
 explanation of phenomena by natural causes leads us away 
 from God and His Providence, that those philosophers who 
 have passed their lives in discovering such causes can 
 find nothing that affords a final explanation without having 
 recourse to God and His Providence."^ The father of the 
 inductive philosophy does but speak the common sense of 
 religion ; but will it be maintained, except by writers who 
 are prepared to deny the existence of causation, that he 
 does not also utter the common sense of scientific thought ? 
 Does the universe tell us anything as to the nature of 
 its First Cause ? Surely we may at least presume that the 
 Author of the natural world must be higher and greater 
 than anything in the natural world. ^ Water will not rise 
 above its source ; and it is inconceivable that, if there be 
 an Author of nature at all, His Self-existent Life must not 
 be higher and nobler than any life which He has bestowed. 
 Who does not see the force of the Psalmist's argument, 
 " He that made the ear, shall He not hear ? and He that 
 gave the eye, shall He not see ?"^ Above the life of the 
 
 ^ De Augm. Scient., iii. 4. Adeo ut tan turn absit ut causae physicae 
 hominem \ Deo et Providently abducant, ut contra potitis philosoplii illi qui 
 in iisdem eruendis occupati fuerunt, nullum exitum rei reperiant, nisi pos- 
 tremb ad Deum et providentiam confugiant. 
 
 2 That the one true God may be kno-wTi from His works in Nature is 
 taught, as against Gentile idolatry, in Isaiah xliv. ; xlv. 18, sqq. ; Acts xiv. 
 15-17 ; xvii. 22, sqq^. ; Rom. i. 19-20. That the natural world witnesses to 
 the beauty of His Being and Attributes is implied in Psalms viii. 2-4 ; xix. 
 1, sqq. ; civ., passim, &c. Holy Scripture, of course, does not demonstrate 
 the existence of Him Whose true Nature it unveils ; but it points to the 
 natural world as involving for all reasoning beings the privilege and the 
 responsibility of some knowledge of its Author's existence, and of His 
 character. 
 
 2 Ps. xciv. 9. 
 
11. ] The Teleological Argument, 55 
 
 tree, there is. that of the animal ; above that of the animal, 
 there is the life of man. Man, with all his ingenuity and 
 will, cannot produce a leaf or a shell-fish : and is it to be 
 supposed that the author of man's life is less endowed with 
 thought and volition than man ? We may paraphrase the 
 Psalmist : He That made the human intellect, shall He not 
 think ? And how came it to exist, if He did not make it ? ^ 
 There are chasms in the natural world which no theories 
 substituting a fated self-development for the free action of 
 God will really bridge over. There is the chasm between 
 the inorganic and the organic; the chasm between the 
 lifeless and that which lives ; the chasm between animal 
 instinct and the reflective consciousness. At each of these 
 levels of creation we seem to feel more sensibly than else- 
 wliere the fresh intervention of a creating Intelligence ; 
 and our conviction of His activity is strengthened when 
 we observe the interdependence and harmony of the uni- 
 verse as a whole, in which each part is necessary, in 
 which nothing is really out of place, and between the 
 several elements of which new relations are continually 
 coming to light, as if to justify His foresight and to enhance 
 our estimate of His inexhaustible resources. ^ "Those 
 
 ^ Bossuet, CEuv. i. 79. Si nous etions tous seuls intelligents dans le monde, 
 nous seuls nous vaudrions niieux avec notre intelligence imparfaite, que toute 
 la reste, qui serait tout-a-fait brute et stupide, et on ne pourrait compre- 
 hendre d'ou viendrait dans ce tout qui n'entend pas cette partie qui enteud, 
 I'intelligence ne pouvant nfiitre d'une chose brute et insensee. 
 
 2 The teleolo'jical argument for the existence of God, which sees a purpose 
 in the forces and laws of the natural world, and in the events of human 
 history, has been chiefly discredited in modern times by the popular suppo- 
 sition that modern attacks upon the doctrine of tinal causes have been really 
 
56 God, how related to the Cosmos. [Lect. 
 
 persons," says Montesquieu, "who maintain that a blind 
 fate has produced all the effects we see in the world, main- 
 tain that which is a great absurdity ; for what absurdity 
 can 1)6 greater than a blind fate producing intelligent 
 beings ?"^ How do you know, a Bedouin was asked, that 
 there is a God ? " In the same way," he replied, " that I 
 know, on looking at the sand, when a man or a beast has 
 crossed the desert — by His footprints in the world around 
 me." 
 
 III. 
 
 Thus does the common sense or reason of man lead him 
 up to recognizing One Supreme Intelligence as at least the 
 original cause of all that he is and sees around him. But 
 then the question arises, what is the relation that actually 
 subsists between this Highest Intelligence and the uni- 
 verse ? To this question there are two leading answers. 
 
 successful. For a partial and popular consideration of some recent objec- 
 tions to Final Causes, urged by Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lewes, and others, 
 cf. M'Cosh, Christianity and Positivism, pp. 78-88. Even if a doctrine of 
 evolution should in time be accepted as scientifically, and so as theologically 
 certain, such a doctrine would not be inconsistent either with that belief in 
 the original act of creation which is essential to Theism, or Avith " the recog- 
 nition of plan and purpose in the number and variety of animated beings." 
 " Evolution," from a Theistic point of view, is merely our way of describing 
 what "we can observe of God's continuous action upon the physical world ; 
 and because the phrase seems tacitly or poetically to invest the universe 
 with a power of seK-unfolding, it does not follow that the question of an 
 Intelligent Creator and Kuler is thereby decided in the negative by those 
 who employ it. 
 
 ^ Esprit des Lois. Cf. Ps. xiv. 1. 
 
II.] God banished front the world by Deis^n. 57 
 
 The Deist so far agrees with the Christian, as to admit 
 that God is related to the world as its Creator ; and that He 
 must have made it out of nothing by the fiat of His Will. 
 But with this admission — momentous as it is — the old 
 Deism practically closes its account of God's free personal 
 action upon His work. Since the creation, God's action is 
 represented as being practically superseded by a system of 
 imchangeable routine ; and this routine is conceived to be 
 so strictly invariable, as to bind the liberty of the pre- 
 sumed Agent. The Deistic theory of the universe might 
 remind us of the relations which, at least until some 
 very recent events, were understood to exist between the 
 Government of Egypt and the Sublime Porte. There was 
 occasionally a formal recognition of the sovereign power 
 on the part of the nominal dependency, but Egypt was 
 governed by a practically independent Viceroy ; the Suze- 
 rain's name was mentioned rarely, or only in a formal 
 way; his active influence would have been at once 
 resented, the real power being lodged elsewhere. Ac- 
 cording to the old Deism, God created the world ; but He 
 cannot be supposed ever to interfere with the ordinary laws 
 of its government. He cannot work miracles ; 'He is, in no 
 tangible sense, a Providence. He is well out of the way 
 of active human interests : it is not to be supposed that He 
 can hear the prayer of a worm writhing on one of His 
 planets ; that the happiness or misfortunes of a larger sort 
 of animalculse can give Him any real concern. So He is 
 throned by the Deistic \\Titer in magnificent inactivity 
 
58 Deistic apotheosis of Nature. [Lect. 
 
 at a very remote corner of the universe, while a new 
 power ha's practically taken His place. 
 
 In the last century, at the first great outburst of Deistic 
 thought, Nature practically superseded God. Men talked and 
 wrote persistently about the laws of Nature, the moods of 
 Nature, the religion of Nature : Nature was so vividly and 
 constantly personified in conversation and in literature, 
 that the European world might be supposed to have lighted 
 upon a new goddess, charged, in a very special sense, with 
 the interests of humanity. "We live in a more positive 
 and realistic age ; and where our fathers talked of Nature, 
 modern Deism names " laws." What is lost in pictur- 
 esqueness is gained in truth. There is no such person as 
 Nature ; but there are observable modes of the Divine 
 activity, which may never vary within the experience of a 
 race. Order is, as Christians know, a characteristic of all 
 God's works ; but He, the Almighty, is so little enslaved 
 by the rules which He freely observes, that moment by 
 moment He wills the very order that seems to bind His 
 liberty. Deism, however, really means by " laws " — forces 
 which have become somehow independent of God; fatal 
 forces, which defy His power to innovate upon their resist- 
 less play. But what can this impotent Deistic God, from 
 whose control his universe has so escaped as to constitute 
 itself a self-governing machine, — say or do to meet the 
 aspirations, or relieve the despondencies of the human 
 soul ? If we cannot love and trust volcanic forces, or vital 
 forces, the laws of growth or the laws of decomposition; 
 
11. ] Deistic experiments of Robespierre. 59 
 
 can we love and trust a being who has left this universe to 
 itself; who surveys it, if he does survey it, in the cynicism 
 of an unbroken silence from a very distant throne ; to 
 whom its vast oceans of hope and fear, and struggle and 
 disappointment, and triumph and failure — all the mysteries 
 of its moral life, are of no more concern than they are to the 
 rocks and seas around us ? No, the god of Deism does not 
 quench the religious thirst of the soul. The soul of man 
 seeks the Living God, not a deity who is as remote from 
 human interests as was the Jupiter of expiring Paganism. 
 
 The French Eevolution was fertile in religious or irreli- 
 gious experiments ; and as it endeavoured to satisfy the 
 human soul with Atheism, so it made yet more strenuous 
 effort to satisfy it with Deism. ^ Eobespierre had publicly 
 
 ^ So Alison. Compare Pressensd, TEglise et la Eevolution, p. 294. La 
 f^te eut lieu le 20 prairial. Rien n'avait dtdepargn^ pour larendre grandiose 
 et Dependant elle n'evita pas les pudrilit^s ridicules. Eobespierre, president 
 de la Convention, en bel habit bleu, avec un bouquet de fruits et d'^pis dans les 
 mains, prit place avec tous ses coUfegues sur Fampliitlieatre dlevd au milieu 
 des Tuileries. Aprfes un pompeux discours, il en descendit pour incendier 
 la statue de I'Atheisme, promptement remplac^e par celle de la Sagesse qui 
 parut mallieureusement tres enf um^e. Des Tuileries la Convention se rendit 
 au Champ de Mars, entourde et comme enlacde d'un ruban tricolore, qi;e 
 portaient des enfants orn^s de violettes, des adolescents ceints de myrtes, 
 des hommes d'age mtir couronn^s de feuilles de cheues et des vieillards pares 
 de pampre et d'olivier. Un char bucolique charg^ d'instruraents aratoires 
 suivait la Convention, train^ par les inevitables boeufs k cornes dordes et 
 suivi par les non moins inevitables jeunes filles en blanc. Au Champ de 
 Mars la Convention se pla^a sur une montagne artificielle, monument flatteur 
 pour les deputes de la majorite. Le president perora, les jeunes filles chan- 
 tbrent, les vieillards donnferent leur benediction, les cnnons tonnferent et tout 
 se termina par le cri de vive la Repuhlique. Ces pompes d'opera comique, 
 ces symboles ridicules et ces rites glaces apprenaient k la France qu'il est 
 plus facile de decreter un changement de religion que de I'operer. Jamais 
 le deisme ne fondera un culte et tout ce qu'il essayera dans ce genre tombera 
 
6o The SouVs thirst unsatisfied by Deism. [Lect. 
 
 declared that Cliaumette deserved death for the abomina- 
 tions which accompanied the Feast of Eeason in Notre 
 Dame, on November 7, 1793 ; and he took a leading part 
 in the Feast of the Supreme Being, which was celebrated 
 in the gardens of the Tuileries and in the Champ de Mars, 
 on June 9, 1794. The Convention decreed that he should 
 discharge the duties of Supreme Pontiff on the occasion. 
 The Deism of Eobespierre was sufficiently vivid to admit 
 of his believing that God does rule the affairs of men ; 
 he maintained with particular earnestness that God hates 
 kings and priests. The undeniable eloquence of the presi- 
 dent of the Convention, the art and industry of the painter 
 David, the music, the costumes, the political enthusiasm at 
 fever height, did all that could be done for the success of 
 the festival. But you cannot lash a multitude into devo- 
 tion to a remote and hypothetical abstraction by any 
 elaborate display of ceremonial ; and the real deity of the 
 occasion w^as Eobespierre. As he marched along, over- 
 shadowed with his plumes, and adorned with his tricolor 
 scarf, while the air resounded with cries of " Vive Eobe- 
 spierre," his countenance, says the historian, was radiant 
 with joy. " See how they applaud him," said his colleagues. 
 " He would become a god : he is no longer the High Priest 
 of the Supreme Being." History does not ascribe to this 
 attempt any special efficacy in reviving among the French 
 
 sous la risee publique. La fete fut trouvee bien longne, surtout pour ceux 
 quirritait le role preponderant de Robespierre. On raconte qu'un repre- 
 Bentant moins patient que ses collegues lui dit en termes d'une trivialite 
 energique: " Tu commences k nous ennuyer avec ton Etre Supreme." 
 
11. ] God buried m the world by Pantheism. 6i 
 
 people a sense of tlieir duties towards their forgotten 
 Maker. The most tangible result of the day was the 
 decree proposed by Couthon, for increasing the powers of 
 the Eevolutionary Tribunal. 
 
 To the question, What is the relation between the 
 universe and the Supreme Intelligence ? another and a very 
 different answer has been given. If Deism practically 
 banishes God from the world, Pantheism, at least, sees 
 what it calls God everywhere, and in everything. ^ The 
 Pantheistic god is the common principle which not only is 
 held to constitute the unity of, but which is, the universe. 
 According to Benedict Spinoza,- God is the one eternal sub- 
 stance, wdiich makes its appearance in the twofold realm 
 of thought and of matter. Out of it all individual forms 
 of existence are constantly emerging, and like waves upon 
 the ocean, they are as constantly sinking back into, and 
 being absorbed by it, as the common stream of universal 
 life. God alone is, says Fichte, and apart from Him is 
 nothing,^ — a great truth in one sense, and a great falsehood 
 in another. Hegel teaches that the Absolute is the universal 
 reason ; which, after having buried and lost itself in 
 nature, recovers itself in man, in the shape of self-conscious 
 thought. Man's thought of God, therefore, is the true God, 
 the only existing God. God exists only in human thought ; 
 
 1 Wegscheitler, Inst. p. 240. Pantheismus — ea sententia qua natixram 
 divinam mundo supponant et Deum ac mundum unum idemque esse 
 fitatuunt. 
 
 2 Cf. Tractat. de Deo. c. 2. Suppl. ad. opp. Amst. 1SG2. For his Theory 
 of Substance, cf. Ethic, p. 1, Def. 5. 
 
 3 Fichte, Von Sel. Leben, § 143. 
 
62 Secret of the strength of Paiiiheism. [Lect. 
 
 human thought is the reason of nature arriving at self- 
 consciousness. Man thinks of God, and, in man's thinking, 
 God exists ; He has no independent or personal existence.^ 
 The great attraction and strength of Pantheism lies in 
 the satisfaction which it professes to offer to one very deep 
 and legitimate aspiration ; it endeavours to assure man of 
 his real union with the source of his own and of the 
 universal life. It is this profound idea, this most fascinat- 
 ing allurement, that can alone explain the empire, which, 
 in various ages and under various forms. Pantheism has 
 wielded in human history. It inspires Eleatic and Indian 
 philosophies; it is the animating principle of such w^or- 
 ship of the generative and life-sustaining powers in nature, 
 as was, for instance, that of the Phoenician Baalim. Since 
 Lessing, Spinoza has almost reigned in certain districts of 
 cultivated Europe, and Germany is by no means the only 
 liome of the thought of Schelling and of Hegel. In its 
 later forms Pantheism is, speaking historically, a reaction 
 from and a protest against the older Eationalistic Deism. 
 It often represents a noble plea that God shall not be 
 banished by modern thought from all real contact with 
 humanity : nay, it would fain essay to do in its way what 
 the Divine Incarnation has actually done ; it would make 
 men partakers of the Divine Nature. And this, its religious 
 aim, is beyond question a main secret of its power. 
 
 ^ Hegel's fundamental error consists in his identification of the "abstract 
 thought " of man with the " Absolute Thought." Fichte (Zeitschrift fur 
 Philosophic, Ed. 17, § 292) says that this is " nicht niir hochst willkurlich 
 und grundlos, sondern eine contradictio in adjecto." Qu. by Hettinger ; cf. 
 Hegel, Phil, der Eel. §§ 207, 261, 2G3 ; Encycl. § 56. 
 
11. ] Does it satisfy the thirst of the Sotilf 63 
 
 Yet does the Pantlieistic deity afford any real satisfac- 
 tion to the needs of the soul of man ? Can he be the object 
 of any serious religious effort whatever ? What is there in 
 him to which the life of religion can possibly attach itself ? 
 He is not a person : for Pantheism necessarily denies the 
 existence of personality. He is not a cause : for Pan- 
 theism cannot tolerate any doctrine of causation. He is 
 not even, as the Absolute Substance, in anywise distinct 
 from phenomena ; for, while it is loyal to its central position, 
 l^antheism cannot afford to admit the correctness of such 
 a distinction. What is he then ? He is only a fine name for 
 the universe. He has no existence apart from it : he is the 
 universal life, of which you and I are transient manifesta- 
 tions or forms. You may indeed encounter him draped 
 and veiled in a phraseology so reverent and tender, that it 
 might seem to have been borrowed from the inmost shrines 
 of Christian mysticism ; but wdien you force yourself to 
 look at the hard reality beneath, you find that it is practi- 
 cally identical with that presented Ijy Materialism. ^ If 
 God be in reality only the spirit or life of the universe, 
 how can He provoke the yearnings of the soul, or how 
 satisfy its aspirations ? How can He be the object, whether 
 of religious homage, or of religious trust ? How can we 
 A'ield love, obedience, worship to a mere torrent of existence 
 that flows onwards inexorably beneath our feet; we, the 
 ripples, who do but rise upon its surface to sink away 
 
 ^ Strauss, Gl. 1, § 517. Seine Existenz als wesen ist unser denken von 
 ihm ; aber seine reale Existenz ist die Natur, zu welcher das einzelne Denk- 
 ende als Moment uehort. 
 
64 ■ Pantheis77t^ the sanction of moj^al evil. [Lect. 
 
 after our little moment of undulation ? Or how can a 
 sensible and modest man love, trust, worsliij), his own self- 
 consciousness, under the idea that in each reflecting mind 
 God has become conscious of Himself ? Nay, if religion 
 has anything to do with reverence for goodness and with 
 abhorrence of moral evil, if it is not a sentiment that has 
 been rendered by modern speculation wholly independent 
 of moral truth, how can we worship either an inner self 
 into which, as we must each of us know, evil penetrates so 
 constantly and so pervadingly; or an universal life of 
 which in its highest, that is its human, manifestation, evil 
 is, as a matter of fact, more frequently an accomjjaniment 
 than good ? How, I say, can such an absolute principle be 
 the object of religion, if its activity be manifested not less 
 truly in murder and lust than in heroism and unselfish- 
 ness ; if the darkest forms of evil stand to it in a relation 
 just as necessary as do the highest forms of good ; if by 
 it, in a word, all moral distinctions whatever are really 
 annihilated ? 
 
 Between Pantheism and an earnest hatred of moral evil 
 there is accordingly a necessary opposition, and this reason 
 alone establishes a permanent divorce between it and any 
 true effort at communion with the All-Pure, such as all 
 that is best in us enjoins. But further, that which in a 
 Christian, as in any earnest Theist, makes Pantheism im- 
 possible, is the first article of his creed : " I believe in God 
 the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." As the 
 act of creation was not witnessed, so it cannot be demon- 
 
11. ] Relapse of Pantheism into Materialism. 65 
 
 strated. " By faith we understand that the worlds were made 
 by the word of God." ^ Creation interposes an immeasur- 
 able chasm between the Creator and the creature ; be- 
 tween that Pure and Awfid. Life Which is indebted to none 
 else either for existence or support, and this life of depend- 
 ence, weakness, corruption. And belief in creation is a 
 necessary outwork of any true theism whatever: deny 
 
 ''■ Heb. xi. 3. That God created the universe is the first truth which Scrip- 
 ture teaches us about Him, Gen. i. 1. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4-7 ; Ps. xxxiii. 6-9, 
 thus reveahng His majestic beauty; Ps, xix. 1-7 ; xcvii. 1-6 ; cxix. 64. The 
 Jews knew that this creation involved not merely the bringing order and 
 life, e^ aixopcpov vXrjs, Wisd. xi. 17, but also originally the calling this form- 
 less material itself into being, e^ ovk 6vt(jjv, 2 Mac. vii. 28. In the New 
 Testament, creation is generally referred to as furnishing arguments for 
 moral truths or duties ; as by our Lord, Matt. xix. 4-6, for its witness to the 
 indissolubility of the marriage tie ; and by S. Paul, as yielding proof of God's 
 real relation to the world. Acts xvii. 24 ; or of His interest in the whole 
 human family, and of our duty of seeking Him, ih. 26 ; for the 
 refutation of a false dualistic asceticism, 1 Tim. iv. 3 ; cf. Ej^h. iv. 6. 
 That He has created all things and for Himself is His title to praise and 
 adoration. Rev. iv. 11. Although the New Testament does not in express 
 terms speak of creation out of nothing, it implies this truth. S. Paul's 
 arguments in Acts xvii. 24, and 1 Tim. iv. 3, would lose their force, if it 
 were true that God was not the maker of matter as well as the artist who 
 gave it form, while the doxology of Rev. iv. 11 could not be truthfully 
 addi-essed to a Being who had not created matter, or who had formed any- 
 thing out of pre-existent material which he did not create. The d/xop4>os vXrj 
 of S. Justin Martyr (Apol. i. 10), and even the vXtj axpovos of Clement 
 (Phot. Bibl. cod. 1C9) is not necessarily eternal; the creation of matter out 
 of nothing, and of the world out of matter, were distinct events, separated 
 by intervals that distance all human thought. Tertullian pointed out that 
 Hei-mogenes, in teaching the eternity of matter, was really a Ditheist (Adv. 
 Herm. c. 4.) The general teaching of the ancient church is exj)ressed by 
 S. Augustine (De fid. et symb. c. 2) : Credimus omnia Deum fecisse de 
 nihilo, quia, etiamsi de aliqua materia factus est mundus, eadem ipsa materia 
 de nihilo facta est, ut ordinatissimo Dei munere primo capacitas formarum 
 fieret, ac deinde formarentur qutecunque formata sunt. Hoc autem diximus, 
 ne quis existimet contrarias sibi esse Scripturarum senteutias : quoniam et 
 omnia Deum fecisse de niliilo scriptum est, et mundum esse factum de in- 
 formi materia,. 
 
66 The Creator present in His Works. [Lect. 
 
 creation and you deny God. If God in His unfettered 
 freedom did not summon into existence all that is, if the 
 universe escaped from Him against His will, He is not 
 alone the Omnipotent : if anything that we term matter or 
 spirit has from the beginning co-existed side by side with 
 Him, He is not alone the Eternal. ^ The difficulty is not 
 met by phrases about the eternal Idea passing into reality ; 
 since it wiU be asked how such a passage could have been 
 effected, or rather, why it should have taken place at all ? 
 A creative Will having no limits to its power, is at least 
 intelligible, but the mind refuses to dwell seriously on such 
 a process as a transmutation of thought into matter. In 
 its attempt to explain itself. Pantheism practically sinks 
 back into Materialism ; it has no exj^edients equal to the 
 task of saving its god from burial beneath the materialistic 
 chaos of matter and force. 
 
 Will it be said that to believe in a Creator-God is to 
 close the eye to the presence of God in creation ? But 
 who that believes in the Omnipresent can limit His pre- 
 sence ? Is not the original act of creation a warrant for the 
 Creator's continued presence with and action upon His 
 work?- The Apostle who taught the Athenians that God 
 made the world and all things therein, taught them also, and 
 in the same great sermon, that " He is not far from every 
 
 ^ Cf. S. Aug. Conf. xii. 7. Fecisti ccelum et terrain iion de Te, nam 
 esset ffiqxiale Unigenito Tuo, et aliud prseter Te non erat, unde faceres, 
 ideo de niliilo fecisti coelum et terram. S. Iren. Haer. ii. 10, 4. Homines 
 quidem de niliilo non possunt aliquid facere, sed de materia, subjacenti: 
 Deus autem materiam fabricationis suae, cum ante non esset, ipse adinvenit. 
 
 2 S. John V. 17. 
 
II.] 6^. AtigiLstine on God and tJie Universe. 67 
 
 one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our 
 being." ^ To assert God's presence in His works is one thing ; 
 to identify Him with them is another. His omnipresence 
 is a necessary attribute of His Deity ; while if He could be 
 identified with nature He would cease to be. If the mystery 
 of life, which attests God's presence in the natural world, 
 was ever felt in all its awe and its beauty by any human 
 soul, it was felt by the great Augustine. Witness the often 
 quoted passage of the Confessions in which he tells us why 
 nature was in his eyes so beautiful, by telling us hoAV 
 nature had led him up to God. " I asked the etirth, and 
 it said : ' I am not He ;' and all that is upon it made the 
 same confession. I asked the sea and the depths, and 
 the creeping things that have life, and they answered : 
 ' AVe are not thy God ; look thou aboA^e us.' I asked the 
 breezes and the gales ; and the whole air, with its inhabi- 
 tants, said to me : ' Anaximenes is in error, I am not God.' 
 I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars : ' We too,' 
 said they, ' are not the God Whom thou seekest.' And I 
 said to all the creatures that surround the doors of my 
 fleshly senses, ' Ye have said to me of my God that ye 
 are not He ; tell me somewhat of Him.' And Avith a great 
 voice, they exclaimed ' He made us.' "=^ 
 
 1 Acts xvii. 27, 28. 
 
 2 S. Aug. Conf. X. 6. Interrogavi terram et dixit : non sum ; et quse- 
 cumque in eadem sunt idem confessa sunt. Interrogavi mare et abyssos et 
 reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt : Non sumus Deus tuus, quaere 
 super nos. Interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis 
 suis : Fallitur Anaximenes, non sum Deus. Interrogavi coelum, sol em, 
 lunam, Stellas : Neque nos sumus Deus quera quteris, inquiunt. Et dixi 
 
68 God more than the Highest Intelligence. [Lect. 
 
 IV. 
 
 So long as the human mind only conceives of God 
 as a Supreme Intelligence, it will oscillate hesitatingly 
 between these two errors ; between a sterile Deism wdiich 
 banishes God from the world, and a reactionary Pantheism 
 which buries Him in it. It is when w^e gain a height 
 beyond, and observe the third great form of argument wdth 
 wdiich man clothes and fortifies his presentiment of God, 
 that we are saved from this liability. Here a view of God's 
 Nature opens out u^^on us, which is at once conservative 
 of His moral Purity and distinctness from created life, and 
 which also does justice to the intimacy of His contact with 
 the world and with humanity. 
 
 The philosopher of Konigsberg, who in his Critique of 
 Pure Eeason has made the most of some wxll-known objec- 
 tions against those arguments for God's existence, which are 
 drawn from the existence and structure of the universe, ^ 
 insists with great force upon the strength of the inference 
 by which the human conscience ascends to the recognition 
 of God. If Kant is a sceptic in the domain of speculative 
 thought, his doubts vanish altogether wdien, entering that 
 of the practical reason, as he terms it, he listens to the 
 commands of moral truth. ^ This practical reason is whoUy 
 independent of any discovery or decision external to itself: 
 
 omnibus iis qiue circumstant fores carnis mese : Dixistis mihi de Deo meo 
 quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid. Et exclamaverunt voce 
 magna : Ipse fecit nos. 
 
 ^ Luthardt, Apologet. Vortr. L. iii. Scholten, Phil, in Eel., p. 100. 
 
 2 Ki-itik d. reineu Vernunft, Abt. ii. B. 2, kap. 3, §§ 4, 5, 6. 
 
II.] Inference of the practical reason. 69 
 
 it apprehends the good as such without waiting for the 
 judgment of experience. Its commands are issued without 
 limit or reserve; they have an objective certainty; they 
 " judge all things, while they themselves are judged of no 
 man." They lead us to recognize as necessary truths, first, 
 the freedom of man's will ; next, a future life ; thirdly, the 
 existence of God. The voice of the practical reason, " Thou 
 oughtest," implies "Thou canst"; the categorical impera- 
 tive is meaningless in the absence of moral freedom. Man 
 is free, and his conscience perpetually affirms that he must 
 do good at all costs, even although doing good should not 
 make him happy. It affirms no less clearly that if he 
 is really virtuous he should be happy. Yet, in the experience 
 of life, the good man who does good is often unhappy, 
 while vice is not unfrequently salaried and crowned with 
 rewards that are denied to virtue. The sight of this con- 
 tradiction forces the conscience to infer a life to come, and 
 a Moral Being Who, in His justice, will re-establish those 
 relations between happiness and virtue which it persistently 
 recognizes as necessary. Thus the practical reason reaches 
 God, not by a demonstration of His existence, but as a 
 postulate of its own activity. Speculation may mislead, 
 but duty is a certainty; and duty is no arbitrary creation 
 either of our reason, or of our self-interest; it is not an 
 abstraction which rests on nothing beyond itself ; it is out 
 of the reach of merely speculative criticism, yet it leads us 
 to the Master of the moral world. Those clear, precise, 
 categorical orders which are imposed in varying degrees 
 
"JO Conscience not a prodiLct of ediication. [Lect. 
 
 of urgency upon all human wills, point to a really living 
 Euler of men, in ^Miom man cannot disbelieve without doing- 
 violence to himself. Certainly Kant would have had little 
 patience with the theory that conscience itself is only a 
 collection of prejudices received from childhood, and incor- 
 porated with the moral life ; that it is simply the result of 
 early training, and has no real basis in the soul. For this 
 theory confuses the furniture of the conscience with the con- 
 science itself; the acquisitions of a faculty wdth its existence. 
 It might be contended with equal justice that the human 
 mind does not exist because it is developed by exercise, and 
 enlarged by information.^ Certainly conscience may be 
 enlightened or it may be misinformed by education. But the 
 original faculty which perceives the existence of some right 
 and of some ^^Tong, whatever may be apprehended as such, 
 and which refers actions to such rioht and A\Tonq-; the 
 faculty which imder all circumstances pronounces in favour 
 of truth, and justice, and self-sacrifice, and courage, and 
 purity, wherever these can be found, because it intuitively 
 perceives their necessary excellence ; — this faculty demands 
 God. Conscience is unsatisfied, according to Kant, unless 
 there exists some Being above the world. Who can here- 
 after reconcile the discrepancies which exist between virtue 
 and fortune in this present life, in His quality of an arbiter 
 of human conduct. Here Atheism, especially in its Pos- 
 itivist guise, pleads the disinterestedness of real virtue, 
 
 ^ Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, pp. 462-491, ed. Rosenkranz. Siimintt. 
 Werke, 2'^'" Theil. These criticisms are discussed by Kleutgen, Theologie 
 der Vorzeit. Bd. ii. p. 46, sjj- Philosophie der Vorzeit, ii. diss. 9, 1. 
 
11. ] God a postidate of the conscience. 71 
 
 which is good and does good for the sake of goodness, 
 seeking no reward, and daunted by no misfortune. ^ But 
 when Kant maintains that tliere must be a moral God, he 
 does this not in the interests of a mercenary virtue, but 
 in those of an absolute and consummate justice, which pro- 
 claims in every human conscience the necessity of establish- 
 ing an harmony or correspondence between the conditions 
 of human existence on the one hand, and man's demerits 
 or deserts on the other. 
 
 Thus it is that conscience demands God; and the atheistic 
 whisper in the fool's heart of which the Psalmist speaks, 
 belongs in truth to moral rather than to intellectual folly. 
 It is ultimately traceable to a failure to perceive and feel 
 the mighty and abiding contrast which exists between 
 moral good and moral evil, and the necessary bearing of 
 this contrast upon the ultimate destinies of the universe. 
 In a good man, belief in God results from belief in the 
 invincibility of good ; the intensity or feebleness of a man's 
 belief in God is a spiritual thermometer, whereby the tem- 
 perature of his moral being may be pretty accurately 
 measured. When the moral sensibilities are weakened or 
 blunted by culpable indulgence until known sin is tolerable 
 or even welcome, then the intellect is always open to 
 theories which represent good and evil as alike forms of the 
 Universal Life, or as equally fatal results of that " unrea- 
 soning and irresistible piece of machinery which we name 
 
 ^ Cf. too Strauss Glaubensl. 1, 393, qu, by Luthardt, Lcct, III., whom 
 I here follow. 
 
72 Conscience, Jiozv fai" affected by the Fall. [Lect. 
 
 the Universe." But although the human conscience is an 
 earnest theistic apologist in exact proportion to its vitality, 
 its affirmation of God should not be divorced from the in- 
 tellectual inferences which the universe suggests to us. 
 The evidential strength of Theism, like that of Christianity, 
 lies not in any single proof, but in the collective force of 
 the various evidences which are producible in its favour; and 
 of these, the cry of conscience, if the strongest practically, 
 is, after all, only one. ISTor does it follow that because con- 
 science is a true guide towards the throne of a Living and a 
 Moral God, it is therefore an infallible judge in reviewing 
 all that He may reveal to us about Himself or the laws of 
 His government. We may reasonably accept the witness 
 of the universal conscience of good men in favour of Theism, 
 without binding ourselves to accept all that has been 
 pleaded by individuals in the name of conscience against 
 portions of the Jewish history, for example, or the doctrine 
 of the Atonement. If it be urged from another side that 
 it is after all " the conscience of fallen man upon which 
 we rely for this great affirmation of God," the reply is, that 
 the Fall cannot have destroyed our j^owers of apprehending 
 truth, or it would have destroyed our responsibility, and 
 that it is not the weakness which the Fall has wrouoht in 
 human nature, but the strength which still survives it, 
 whereby man affirms the existence of a Moral God and 
 seeks Him. So far as man is a fallen being, no doubt, at the 
 approach of the Lord God, he " hides himself amid the trees 
 of the garden," to the end of time. But those truth-seeking 
 
IL] Feebleness of conscience luithoitt a Revelation. 73 
 
 elements of his spiritual nature which, as the Christian 
 creed teaches, were in Paradise invigorated by a robe of 
 supernatural grace, afterwards forfeited by the sin of our 
 first parents, are throughout heathendom still kindled into 
 activity by the prevenient grace of the Holy Spirit, breath- 
 ing as He wills across the deserts; and thus fallen man 
 seeks the Lord, if haply he might feel after Him and find 
 Him, though He be not far from every one of us, ^ instinc- 
 tively assured, as all good men must be, of His existence, 
 and hoping that He may be fully unveiled at last. 
 
 Yet the feebleness of conscience in fallen man is a fact 
 of sisrnificance. Althouo-h conscience seeks in God, not 
 merely, as does intellect, a solution of the problem of the 
 universe, but a Legislator Who has given and A^Hio will 
 enforce the law of right and wrong ^Titten in the human 
 heart, conscience is nevertheless in the mass of men, if 
 left to itself, too enfeebled to keep a Moral God clearly in 
 view, even when it has caught sight of Him. It requires 
 an aid external to itself, a token from its Object that it is 
 not mistaken about Him. It requires a revelation. With- 
 out a revelation, historical theism is either the fruitless 
 speculation of a few isolated thinkers, or the underlying 
 idea of a popular superstition which obscures and degrades 
 it. In a certain true sense it is itself a revelation; but its 
 utterances require a countersign in the world without, 
 which may make it certain that the inner legislator is also 
 the Elder of the L^niverse. Conscience itself, exactly in the 
 
 ^ Acts xvii. 27. 
 
74 Identity of the God of Conscience aiid the [Lect. 
 
 ratio of the clearness with which it discerns the moral na- 
 ture of God, discerns the implied necessity of a revelation. 
 It is sure that He Who is Himself just and merciful, cannot 
 leave men altogether to themselves: that the All-Good cannot 
 permanently disappoint the desires and powers which He 
 has Himself implanted. And thus the antecedent proba- 
 bility of a revelation is to a good man not less than over- 
 whelming; and Christianity assures us that his conviction 
 is warranted by the fact. 
 
 The substance of the Christian revelation of God con- 
 sists not merely in the teaching of Jesus Christ, together 
 with the old Hebrew literature on which He sets His seal, 
 and the apostolical doctrine which He warrants by anti- 
 cipation, but also in His life. His life was an unveiling 
 of God to the eye of man's sense, that the eye of man's 
 spirit might understand Him. Christ's life, not less than 
 His teaching, confirms the highest instincts of the human 
 conscience, and educates them up to a point which of 
 themselves they could never have reached. But how is 
 man enabled to identify the Author of this law within 
 him, perfectly reflected, as it is, in the Christ, with 
 the Author of the law of the universe without him ? 
 The answer is, by miracle. Miracle is an innovation upon 
 physical law, — or at least a suspension of some lower 
 physical law by the intervention of a higher one, — in the 
 interests of moral law. The historical fact that Jesus 
 Christ rose from the dead identifies the Lord of physical 
 life and death with the Legislator of the Sermon on the 
 
11. ] God of Naticre certificated by Miracle. 75 
 
 ]\Iouiit. Miracle is tlie certificate of identity between the 
 Lord of N"ature and the Lord of Conscience, — the proof 
 that He is really a Moral Being Who subordinates physical 
 to moral interests. Miracle is the meeting-point between 
 intellect and the moral sense, because it announces the 
 answer to the efforts and yearnings alike of the moral sense 
 and the intellect; because it announces revelation. It 
 may be asked whether miracle, in revealing God, is not 
 subversive of the idea of God, Whom it reveals. Does it 
 not postulate in Him two contradictory wills, the one 
 whereby He enacts a permanent law, the other whereby 
 He suspends it? And is not this irreconcileable with the 
 highest views of His nature, as the Immutable, Who is 
 what He is unchangeably, because what He is, is abso- 
 lutely the best? No. For this is to apply to the Divine 
 Mind a human standard of measm^ement. Succession is a 
 law of human thoughts; because the mind of man is finite. 
 If I resolve to spend each day for the next six months in a 
 given way, and then, three months hence, determine that I 
 will spend one particular day very differently, I am without 
 doubt guilty of traversing my original and general inten- 
 tion by a second and particular intention which contradicts 
 it. But with God, no such self-contradiction is possible ; 
 because in the Divine Mind there is no succession, whether 
 of ideas or resolves. The Eternal Being sees the end in 
 the beginning; He sees the exception together with the 
 rule so simultaneously, that it is untrue to say that He 
 anticipates it. It is a simple, indivisible act of will, where- 
 
76 Dignity of God not comp7'omised [Lect. 
 
 by He everlastingly wills the rule together with the excep- 
 tion — the exception with the rule. With Him is " no 
 variableness, neither shadow of turning." ^ The idea that 
 God, in w^orking a miracle, contradicts His own earlier 
 purpose in giving to the physical w^orld unchangeable laws, 
 not merely betrays a conception of law as something 
 independent of the free activity of God, but introduces into 
 our conception of the Divine Mind the finite and human 
 idea of succession in thought and will. Whereas, in truth. 
 He, the Infinite, embraces, by one single act, present, past, 
 and future, the general and the particular, the individual 
 and the universal; reaching, as the Wise Man says, "from 
 one end to another, mightily, and smoothly and sw^eetly 
 ordering all things." ^ 
 
 But does God compromise His dignity by working a 
 miracle, or by exerting a sjjecial Providence over His 
 works ? It is pleaded, indeed, that He must do so. It is 
 said to be inconceivable that the Maker and Monarch of 
 all these suns can interest Himself in the concerns of one 
 of the smallest of His planets; in a particular race of 
 creatures on its surface, in individual members of that 
 race, in you and me. To imagine this, we are told, is 
 only to indulge human self-love, which interprets all 
 things, even the Deity Himself, by the promptings of 
 its own boundless self-complacency. 
 
 And yet, wdiat kind of " dignity " is it which is thus 
 pleaded in order to depreciate the freedom, energy, and 
 
 1 S. James i. 17. 2 wisd. viii. 1. 
 
11. ] by mii^acles which attest His morality. 'jj 
 
 ubiquity of God's Providential Eule ? It is at best the 
 dignity of an oriental despot; lie is too engrossed in 
 tlie cares of personal government, or in tlie pursuits of 
 personal indulgence, to listen to the voices and to study 
 the wants of the poor, who struggle and suffer around 
 the walls of his seraglio. The notion that a really great 
 intelligence will concern itself only and exclusively with 
 broad principles and general interests, to the neglect of 
 particulars and details, is, even when we are speaking of 
 human minds, a mistaken notion. This vulgar contempt 
 for details belongs to the pretentious imitation rather than 
 to the reality of mental power. A really great intelligence 
 combines the observation and study of details with the firm 
 grasp of comprehensive principles ; and in this power of 
 combining things, which in lower minds are found apart, 
 lies the strength and secret of its greatness. Nor is this 
 less, rather it is much more the case, with the Eternal Mind. 
 God is not less Divine in literally numbering the sparrows 
 that fall to the ground, and the hairs of the human head, 
 than in formulating the highest laws which govern either 
 planetary systems or spiritual intelligences; while this 
 comprehensive and penetrating interest and action, spending 
 itself upon the wdiole outward and inward life of His 
 creatures, is the symptom and expression of the moral 
 interest which the reasonable creation commands in the 
 heart of the Creator. 
 
 No ; God's greatness is not enhanced by systems which 
 would banish Him from the world, or condemn Him to 
 
78 God revealed to the soul in Christ. [Lect. 
 
 impotence. The miracles of Christianity are so far from 
 compromising its Theism, that they illustrate and secure it. 
 The God of Christianity is no mere First Cause, or Supreme 
 Intelligence. He is a Moral God. If He is Power and 
 Wisdom, He is also Sanctity, Justice, Providence, Mercy, 
 Love. According to the Gospel, Love is His Essence; 
 and love is interest in, and self-sacrifice for that which is 
 its object. It is such a God as this alone Who can be 
 the adequate object of religion. 
 
 Traceable everywhere in human history, traceable 
 especially in the history of one separated and chosen 
 race, the interest of the Perfect Moral Being in the moral 
 and thinking creatures of His hand culminates at Beth- 
 lehem and on Calvary. The Incarnation of the Eternal 
 Son, the manifestation of the Divine life of Love, and 
 Justice, and Compassion, and Purity, flashing through a 
 veil of flesh, and leading up to a death of agony and shame, 
 wdiich alters the Avhole existing moral relation between 
 earth and heaven ; this is the glorious creed which rivets 
 a Christian's conviction of the moral intensity of the life of 
 God. " God so loved the world that He gave His only 
 begotten Son." What could He do more in order to con- 
 vince us that He is not merely a Force or an Intelligence, 
 but a Heart ? At the feet of Him who could say, " He 
 that hath seen ^le hath seen the Father," we understand, 
 and feed upon the certainty, that God is moral as well as 
 intellectual " light, and that in Him is no darkness at all." 
 A^^ien a man's hold upon this creed is gone, his thought 
 
11. ] Practical considerations. 79 
 
 falls back, at best, u^^on the more rudimentary and less 
 adequate ideas of the Godhead ; the darker mysteries of 
 the world's history present themselves with more painful 
 force ; and the mind tends inevitably, in the last resort, 
 either to Deism or to Pantheism ; to a Deism which just 
 permits God to create, and then dismisses Him from His 
 creation ; or to a Pantheism which identifies Him with all 
 the moral evil in the universe, and ends by j)ropagating 
 the worship of new Baals and Ashteroths. 
 
 A few words in conclusion. 
 
 God being really alive, His existence is a fact with which 
 no other fact that the human mind can come to recognize 
 will possibly compare. jSTothing among created things that 
 can engage and stimulate thought, nothing that can warm 
 and expand affection, nothing that can invigorate will and 
 purpose, ought, in the judgment of any thinking human 
 being, to compete with the Eternal God. Our reasonable 
 duty tow^ards God is " to believe in Him, to fear Him, and 
 to love Him, with all the heart, with all the mind, with all 
 the soul, and with all the strength." And yet that unbegun, 
 unending, self-existent Life; that boundless Intelligence 
 administering a boundless Power ; that long array of moral 
 Attributes which win our love while they must also move 
 our reverence and fear ; what is He, our God, to us ? Do we 
 thirst for God ? As the days, and months, and years pass, 
 do we ever look out of and beyond ourselves upon that vast 
 ocean of Uncreated Life Wliich encircles us. Which pene- 
 trates our inmost selves ? Do we ever think steadily, so as to 
 
8o Practical considerations. [Lect. II. 
 
 dwell with a real intellectual interest upon Him Who is the 
 first and highest of truths, to Whose free bounty we our- 
 selves owe the gift of existence, and to Whom we must 
 one day account for our use of it ? Do we ever sincerely 
 desire to love Him, and to live for Him ? Or are we con- 
 stantly hurrying along our solitary path from one vanish- 
 ing shape towards another, while we neglect the Alone 
 Unchangeable ? Be sure that, if we w^ill, in God revealed 
 in Christ, the soul may slake the thirst of the ages ; and 
 the dreariest, and darkest, and most restless existence may 
 find illumination and peace. " This God is our God for 
 ever and ever: He will be our guide unto death, and 
 beyond it." To each one of us, now. He is, if w^e will; if 
 we will, He will be, for ever, to each the Eternal Truth, 
 wherein thought can never find its limit; the Uncreated 
 Beauty, "most Ancient, yet always Fair," wdiereof affec- 
 tion can never tire; the Perfect Eule, existing eternally in 
 the Life of the Necessary Moral Being, w^hereunto each 
 created will may perpetually conform itself, yet never ex- 
 haust its task. Without this Awful and Blessed Being, 
 man has no adequate object, even during these days of his 
 brief earthly existence; his thought, his affection, his pur- 
 pose spring up and are exercised only that they may 
 presently waste and die. With God, the human soul not 
 merely interprets the secret of the universe; it compre- 
 hends, and is at peace with, itself. For God is the satis- 
 faction of its thirst; — He is the object of Eeligion. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 Cfjtrtr Suntrag in Hent 
 THE SUBJECT OF EELIGIOX— THE SOUL. 
 
 Ps. viii. 4. 
 WTiat is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? 
 
 ~Q ELIGION, we liave seen, is not a sentiment, or an idea, 
 -*-^ or even a code of moral practice. It involves the 
 establishment and maintenance of a real bond between God 
 on the one hand and man on the other. To the perfectness 
 of this bond, feelinj?, thought, and moral earnestness on the 
 part of man, contribute elements which are indispensable 
 to it; so that religion in itself, although beyond each of 
 them, is dependent upon all. Its object, as we have also 
 seen, is the Personal and Moral God. In a mere first cause, 
 in a mighty force, in an all-surveying intelligence, religion 
 finds nothing to which it can attach itself; and systems 
 which, like Pantheism, deny the personality of God, or, as 
 did the old Deism, remove Him from all interest in and 
 moral action upon the world, are thereby destructive of 
 religion. And we have so far anticipated the matter 
 
 G 
 
82 Vahie of the tnquijy, [Lect. 
 
 before us, as to observe that, whatever else may be said for 
 or against it, Christianity satisfies those conditions of a real 
 religion, in which these theories severally fail; and that 
 in Christendom, the purity and spirituality of a Personal 
 God on the one hand, and His ultimate contact with us 
 men on the other, by means of a Personal Incarnation, 
 are fully and equally recognized. But this brings us face 
 to face with a question of scarcely inferior importance, 
 at least from our human and practical point of view. 
 Eeligion being a real relation between man and God, it 
 is natural and inevitable to pass from considering one 
 of its terms to the consideration of the other. If God 
 be the object, what is the subject of religion? What is 
 this created being who can thus enter into relations with 
 the high majesty of heaven? or, as the Psalmist puts it 
 at once more reverently and more truthfully, " What is 
 man, that Thou art mindful of him?" What is it in man 
 which makes him capable of this exceptional relation to 
 God, as implied in his capacity for religion ? 
 
 It would be a mistake to treat this inquiry on which we 
 are embarking as so entirely speculative that it can secure 
 or fortify no practical results. It is easy, but unwise, in 
 days like ours to ignore the great questions which open be- 
 neath our feet as well as above our heads, under the joretence 
 of being practical men who have neither time nor inclination 
 for theory. No doubt, it is better to be a good man than 
 to be a good psychologist; but an accurate notion of the 
 real nature of the soul may contribute very materially in 
 
III.] Why is man capable of i^eligionf 83 
 
 an age like ours to personal enthusiasm for practical good- 
 ness. How are you to decide whether man is capable of 
 religion, or hoAV far his capacity extends, until you know 
 what, in his inmost, deepest being, man really is ? In other 
 words, this question of man's capacity for religion is sub- 
 stantially the question whether man be not merely a bodily 
 organism, but also and especially a spiritual personality. 
 
 Certainly Eevelation has familiarized Christians with the 
 angels, as supramundane beings, in a very high degree cap- 
 able of religion. But religion, as it comes before us on the 
 surface of this planet, is a monopoly of man. Among the 
 lower creatures we find nothing like it; we can discover no 
 place for it. Man is the highest being of which these 
 creatures have cognizance. Often, indeed, may we discover 
 in their attachment to ourselves, in their fidelity, in their 
 tenderness, in the true delicacy of the attention which 
 they shew us, much that rebukes us when we reflect on the 
 poor service that we ourselves pay to a Higher Master. 
 But having no unseen world open to them, and being, as 
 they are, incapable of any properly reflective thought, they 
 are also incapable of religion, of any consciously personal 
 relationship to the Source of all Life. But man can look 
 above and beyond this world of sense; he can enter into 
 real communion with the Monarch of both worlds; and the 
 secret of his doing this lies in that which, by virtue of God's 
 bountiful gift and appointment, he himself is as distinct 
 from the creatures around him. 
 
84 Extemial aspects of man. [Lect. 
 
 What is man ? Wliat, let us ask, is tliis or that given 
 man of our acquaintance, a near relation, one of ourselves ? 
 In the distance, or at first sight, a single human being is 
 what the world chiefly associates with him ; he is so much 
 property, so much professional skill, so much political 
 influence, so much social power, so much literary reputation, 
 so much practical capacity for public affairs. Upon these 
 things the public eye is wont to rest chiefly, if not exclu- 
 sively; these things are labelled with this or that great 
 name wdien it is repeated in conversation or in the news- 
 papers. But they are only the accidents of any human 
 life. They are external to it. They tell us nothing about 
 it, nothing at least that a true appreciation of human 
 greatness would most care to know. When do we see the 
 man himself ? We stand face to face with him ; we listen 
 to a voice ; we note the peculiarities of a manner ; we study 
 the ever- varying lines of a human countenance ; but we 
 are still outside the real man. His voice, his manner, his 
 expression, may tell us something about him ; it may be a 
 great deal ; but they are not himself. We get nearer his 
 real self, when we can observe and compare and take to 
 pieces what he says and does ; in his speech and his action, 
 he reveals at least some portion of his character. But that 
 which speaks and acts is beneath speech and action ; it is 
 always and necessarily invisible. The knife of no anato- 
 
III.] Mail himself a person. 85 
 
 mist, however delicately wielded, can detect it in the folds 
 of any human brain ; no psychologist can draw it out into 
 the light by an exhaustive analysis of any human thought. 
 Underlying all the outward decorations of man's life ; 
 underlying the human face, and form, and speech, and 
 action, although thrilling through them as if threatening 
 ever and anon to become visible ; underlying all that is 
 most private and subtle even in secret thought, is that 
 around which all else is gathered, and without which all 
 else would be stripped of its significance, without which it 
 would never have been or would cease to be. 
 
 What is man ? He is, in the root and seat of his being, 
 a person. He is that wdiich each of us means when 
 he says, " I." Let us turn to look at this question from 
 within, rather than from without; for after all, it is 
 within ourselves that we can, each for himself, only 
 and really grapple with it. What do we mean, each 
 of us, by " I." We mean, first of all, something distinct, 
 utterly, profoundly distinct, from all that is not "I"; some- 
 thing which is conscious, as nothing else is concious, of this 
 deep distinctness. I think, and I know that it is only I 
 w^ho think ; I think about myself, and I know that it is 
 myself only upon w^hich I only am thinking ; no other self 
 commingles with this consciousness, or I should not be 
 myself; I am thus conscious of my own identity, and of 
 my radical separateness from all besides. Nay, more, I 
 can trace and assert this identity of myself with myself, 
 this separateness of myself from all that is not myself, for 
 a long term of past years. When the outward cu-cum- 
 
86 The sense of personality. [Lect. 
 
 stances of my life were far otlier than they are now ; when 
 my bodily mien was so different that none could recognize 
 in it the myself of to-day ; when the inner companions of 
 my secret being were not as they have been since, so that 
 I had other thoughts, other feelings, other resolves than 
 now ; yet still underlying these differences there was, deep 
 down at bottom, the same self, thinking, feeling, resolving 
 then, even as it resolves, and feels, and thinks now. And of 
 no one fact am I more certain, or so certain, as of this ; — 
 that this self of the present is the self of thirty or forty 
 years ago ; that it was then as it is now, that it is now 
 as it was then, a thing distinct from all else in the 
 universe ; and a thing of which, among creatures, I alone 
 have actual cognizance. And as I am certain that it is 
 separate from all besides, and that, as long as my memory 
 will serve me, it has never been otherwise ; so I feel at this 
 moment, as I always have felt, that I possess it ; that its 
 thoughts are my thoughts ; that its will is my will ; that this 
 thought and will are not powers which come in upon me 
 like a flood and possess me, but that they are strictly forms 
 of my own activity. If I think, I choose to think ; if I will, 
 it is I, and no other being in the universe, who does will ; 
 my will is the exercise of a freedom, unshared by any 
 partner of my life ; and, if I choose, indestructible. ^ 
 
 ^ See Psychologie, by Ainedee Jacques, in the Manuel de Philosopliie, 
 Hachette, 1867. In Is. xxvi. 9, the Ego tj{< is clearly distinguished both 
 
 from the '•t'^ai and the Tl^"! ; in Prov. xxxiii. 15, and Eccles. vii. 25, it is 
 
 distinguished from the i^p of the Speaker. In Scripture vphawirov (2 Cor. 
 
 i. 11) refers to external manifestation of the person, and vTroaracns (Heb. i. 
 
III.] The lozuer animals do not possess it. ^j 
 
 Such, or, at least, something of this kind, is the sense of 
 personality as we, each one of us, experience it. As long 
 as Ave can remember, it has been at the bottom of all that 
 we have felt, thought, and done ; it has penetrated every 
 movement of our minds and hearts ; it has welded the 
 many elements of our lives, outward and inward, moral 
 and intellectual, spiritual and even bodily, into a con- 
 sistent whole. "When it is felt, our inmost being is felt ; 
 we can get no deeper than that reflective thought, than 
 that conscious will. Here we touch, so far as we can 
 touch, personal spirit ; and it is because man is a personal 
 spirit, or, as Scripture terms it, a being made in the image 
 of God, that he is master of the world around him. ^ The 
 mere animal is not thus conscious of, and capable of reflect- 
 ing, on his own existence. He lives and feels ; he carries 
 instinct forward, it may be, to the very confines of reason. 
 But he does not comprehend his life ; he does not reflect 
 that it is he who lives ; he is not conscious of remember- 
 ing a line of personal existence, unshared by any other 
 being, and threading a series of years and a long train of 
 divergent circumstances. He does not anticipate a future. 
 
 3, xi. 1) to the substance that underlies the appearance. There is no word 
 in Scripture to express "person" in the sense of a self-conscious, self deter- 
 mining being. Del. Bibl. Psychologic, vi. 1. Worter's art. Seele in Wetzer 
 and Wette ; Diet. Encycl. 
 
 ^ On the Likeness of God in man see Delitzsch, Biblische Psychologic, ii., 
 § 2. The Divine Image consists in man's self-consciousness and moral free- 
 dom, TO voepov /cat avre^ovcnop. Man's dominion over the earthly world is 
 *' an effluence of the Divine likeness, and not the Divine likeness itself." By 
 means of the Resurrection even man's body attains Tr]v eiKova tou eirovpaviov 
 (1 Cor. XV. 49), in that it is transfigured into the image of the God-man. 
 See the whole of thi.s interesting section. 
 
88 Personality not merged in species. [Lect. 
 
 Neither is lie free or deliberate in his exercise of will : his 
 will is only impulsive desire or passion, unregulated by 
 intelligence ; it is not his instrument ; it is his mas'ber. 
 Being thus the slave of nature around him and of his own 
 nature, of his own instincts, and of the force of circi;jn- 
 stance, he never can project himself beyond nature, and 
 so rise above it, and take the measure of it and of his own 
 relation towards it. He is thus passive when face to face 
 with his nature, he is thus entirely under its control, 
 because he altogether belongs to it ; because in him there is 
 nothing which comes from a higher world, and is inde- 
 pendent of the world of sense. ^ Accordingly the single 
 animal is only a specimen of his kind, the individual exists 
 only in the species : but man, besides belonging on his 
 animal side to an animal species, yet knows himself to be, 
 in his individual capacity, a solitary essence, personal and 
 indivisible. With man, the animal species, the lower 
 nature which he shares with his kind, is subordinate to the 
 individual, because in man that which constitutes the 
 individual, his inmost being, belongs to a separate and a 
 higher order of existence. ^ 
 
 ^ Wiirter, art. Seele, ubi. sup. 
 
 ^ It were to be wished, observes Delitzsch, that personality and individu- 
 ality were less frequently confused in common language than they are. 
 Personality is common to all men as such : by it men are raised above plants 
 and beasts. Between the " thought," feeling, instinct of the brute, and the 
 inner life of man, who is conscious of himself, and can in thought project 
 himself beyond himself, there is an impassable gulf. Individuality only 
 marks off the single specimen of the kind, whether it be man or beast ; it 
 implies nothing as to his subjective life. Although this obvious distinction 
 is not formally expressed in Scripture, it is observable that in the narrative 
 of the creation p^ is used only of plants and beasts, not of man ; as if 
 
III.] Doctrine of '' internal facts !^ 89 
 
 This consciousness of personal life is not to be referred 
 to anything in man's physical constitution. Thought 
 after all is not merely phosphorus ; and psychology is not 
 correctly described as a branch of physiology. The great 
 Scottish thinkers of half a century ago laid much stress 
 upon the doctrine of what they called " internal facts." 
 By an internal fact they did not mean a fact removed from 
 the cognizance of the five senses ; because there are many 
 purely physiological facts which might be defined in this 
 way, — as, for example, valvular action in the circulation of 
 the blood. They meant an act of which the personal 
 consciousness alone takes cognizance. If you lift a heavy 
 weight, so far as the visible muscular exertion of the arm 
 goes, that is an external fact; but the cause of this 
 external fact is an internal fact, a determination of your 
 will — that is, of yourself; and of this cause you alone are 
 conscious. How your will acts upon your muscles, you 
 cannot say ; but this at least you do know, that it is your 
 will which, by a voluntary self-determination, caused the 
 movement of the muscles of your arm : and this internal 
 fact is just as certain to you as the external one. Or 
 suppose that you feel annoyance at some action of a 
 neighbour, and reflect almost immediately that this feeling 
 is undeserved, and fall back upon this and that considera- 
 tion in order to set it aside, and succeed in doing so. 
 Here you have three distinct internal facts ; the original 
 
 to imply that man is more than an individual specimen of a kind, — that he 
 is a person. — Bibl. Psych, iv. 1. 
 
90 Spirihiality of the soul. [Lect. 
 
 feeling, the bringing reason to bear upon tliat feeling, and 
 the altered state of feeling which succeeds. All of these 
 are strictly internal, strictly peculiar to the consciousness ; 
 yet as appreciable by observation, and as immediately 
 appreciable, as any fact of physiology. There is no 
 necessity, exclaims the eminent thinker who suggests 
 this illustration, for losing ourselves " in metaphysical 
 hypotheses, in order to demonstrate the spirituality of 
 the soul, and Kant was right in throwing these old- 
 fashioned arguments to the winds. The spirituality of the 
 soul is a fact ; it is a positive fact ; it is a fact just as 
 notorious as the sunlight. Men are still inquiring, and 
 will probably inquire while time shall last, what matter is. 
 But we do practically know what spirit is, for we have 
 each one of us a sample of it in ourselves, that is to say, 
 in the thinking, feeling, determining subject which we 
 name ' self " ^ 
 
 It would be an impertinence to say that the spirituality 
 of the human soul " is taught in Scripture," because Holy 
 Scripture everywhere presupposes it, and is unintelligible 
 without it. But a question may be raised as to the form 
 in which it is taught there. Scripture sometimes appears 
 to exhibit human nature as composed of two elements, 
 sometimes as of three. Moses represents man as origina- 
 ting from " the combination of an immediate breathing of 
 God with an earthly body," - and Solomon distinguishes 
 
 1 Saisset, L'ame et la Vie, pp. 16, 17, 18, 22. 
 
 2 Gen. ii. 7 ; cf. Del. Bibl. Psych, ii. § 4. 
 
III.] Scriptural analysis of man s nature. 91 
 
 the dust wliicli at death must " return to the earth as it 
 was " from " the spirit " that " shall return unto God who 
 gave it."i After a like manner our Lord distinguishes 
 the true life or soul of man^ from his animal life, and 
 the " spirit," which in His disciples was " willing," from 
 the " flesh " that was weak \^ and in dying He resigns His 
 Human Soul to the Father, with the words, " Into Thy 
 hands I commend My Spirit." * In the same manner S. 
 Paul bids Christians glorify God both in their body and 
 in their spirits, since both body and spirit belong to 
 Him; ^ and S. James compares faith without w^orks to 
 that separation between the body and the spirit which 
 implies the death of the body.^ In these passages, man 
 is regarded as composed of a body and of a single super- 
 sensuous nature, which is sometimes called life or soul,'' 
 and sometimes spirit; but elsewhere, this immaterial nature 
 itself is subdivided into self-conscious, self-determining 
 spirit, and animal life-power or soul. Thus S. Paul prays 
 that the spirit, and soul, and body of the Thessalonian 
 Christians, each part subsisting in its perfect integrity, 
 may be preserved blameless until our Lord's second 
 
 ^ Eccles. xii. 7. " S. Matt. vi. 25, ouxt -17 ■^vx<] TrXeiov kari ttjs Tpo(prjS. 
 
 3 S. Matt. xxvi. 41. ^ S. Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 ^ 1 Cor. vi. 20, see text, ^ S. James ii. 26. 
 
 ^ " According to the usus loquencU of all the books of the Bible, {^>2J i^^XV^ 
 
 frequently denotes the entire inward nature of man." This is true even 
 of S. Paul. If xf/vxrj in his writings means nothing more than " vis qua 
 corpus viget et movetur," he is at issue with S. Luke, with the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, and with Eph. vi. 6, Col. iii. 23, Phil. i. 27 ; in all of which 
 passages the seat of moral resolve is placed in the ^f/vxv- Cf . Delitzsch, Bibl. 
 Psych, iii. § 9. 
 
92 Oneness of the vital principle iji maji. [Lect. 
 
 coming ;^ and the word of God is described in the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews as having, from its moral power, an analytical 
 efficacy which separates as clearly between the spiritual and 
 psychical elements of man's immaterial nature, as between 
 the life of sensation and the life of motion in his corporeal 
 nature." Still it cannot be concluded from these two pas- 
 sages that man consists of three essentially distinct elements. 
 If this language of S. Paul obliges us to see in soul and 
 spirit something more than two distinct relations of man's 
 inward nature, it does not imply more than two distinct 
 departments of that nature, the higher region of self-con- 
 scious spirit and self-determining will, which belongs to 
 man as man; and the lower region of appetite, perception, 
 imagination, memory, which in the main is common to 
 the undying soul of man and the perishable inmost being 
 of the brute. Man's soul is not a third nature, poised 
 between his spirit and his body ; nor yet is it a sublimate 
 of his bodily organization, any more than his body is a 
 precipitate of his soul. It is the outer clothing of the 
 spirit, one with it in essence, yet distinct in functions; 
 the centre of man's life, psychical and animal, is his 
 spirit. ^ 
 
 But whatever Holy Scripture may explicitly say about 
 
 ^ 1 Thess. V. 23, oKoKk-qpov vixQiv to irvevfia, /cat 17 ^vxv, xal to crui/xa. 
 
 - Heb. iv. 12, duKVov/Jievos ax/" /Ji.€pi(7/j.ov \pvxris re Kal irvevfiaTos, apfiQiv re 
 /cat jJLveKCiv. 
 
 ^ In our o-\\ai day Anton Giinther revived the psychological duahsm of 
 Occam, by making the distinction between the soul and sj^irit in man an 
 essential distinction ; in other words, by representing each man as possessed 
 of two souls, one the seat of reason, the other of sensation and gro^vth. 
 
III.] Oicr Lord's estimate of what man is. 93 
 
 the spiritual personality of man as a formal doctrine, it 
 implies much more by its constant appeal to man's 
 liiHier nature. From first to last it treats man as a beino- 
 who, altliough clothed in an animal form, is essentially and 
 in himself a spirit. It surrounds him with precepts which 
 a self-determining spirit only can obey ; with examples, of 
 which only a reflecting sj)irit can enter into the force and 
 drift ; with prayers, aspirations, modes of thought and feel- 
 ing, that have no meaning for a being who is not exj^eri- 
 mentally conscious of his spiritual subsistence. Especially 
 is this observable in those Divine pages which form the 
 inmost sanctuary of Holy Scripture ; in the Life and Words 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ. As human forms pass before 
 Him, in the Gospel, although He is constantly relieving 
 human want and pain, it is plain that the outward man 
 means for Him, relatively, almost nothing, and that His 
 eye rests persistently, exclusively, upon the man within. 
 As we accompany Him in that brief but exhaustive study 
 of humanity, we feel before the centurion or Pilate little or 
 nothing of the maj esty of the Eoman name. Although Christ 
 appeared when the Empire of the C?esars was in its splendour, 
 He speaks of the " kings of the Gentiles," in a phrase of 
 studied vagueness ; as if to suggest the utter insignificance 
 of the highest political interests which only touch man's 
 outward life, when they are contrasted with those higher in- 
 
 That this theory has no biblical warrant appears to have been satisfactorily 
 shewn by Delitzsch : its experimental difficulties are obvious. The E'jo 
 which thinks, reasons, wills, is, we all of us know, identical with the Ego 
 which experiences the sensations of sight, smell, hearing, touch. 
 
94 ^ personal spirit only capable of religion. [Lect. 
 
 terests of the human spirit which He had come to promote. 
 Even the greatness and authority of the successors of Aaron 
 disappears, or recedes into the background, in the atmo- 
 sphere of this exacting estimate, which knows no respect of 
 persons ; while on the other hand, at His bidding, a few 
 obscure and illiterate Galilean peasants become respectively 
 a S. Peter, a S. John, a S. Mary Magdalen — names which 
 of themselves recall neither political weight nor intellectual 
 prestige, but types of spiritual character, beautiful and 
 majestic, upon which already eighteen centuries of pro- 
 gressive civilization have been forward to lavish all but 
 the best of their reverence and their love. 
 
 It is indeed as personal spirits, tabernacling in bodily 
 forms, that we men are capable of religion. Eesolve man's 
 higher nature into physiological sensation with Materialism, 
 and religion becomes an absurdity. As spirits, we are 
 linked and bound to the Father of Spirits ; as spirits, we 
 believe, we hope, we love ; as spirits, we enter into the com- 
 plex mystery and activities of prayer ; as sj)irits, we take 
 in each other that deep and penetrating interest which 
 pierces beneath the outline of the human animal, and holds 
 true converse with the supersensuous being within. All 
 that weakens or lowers our consciousness of being spirits, 
 weakens in that proportion our capacity for religion : all 
 that enhances that consciousness, as surely enlarges it. 
 
III.] Theory of the sotiF s pre-existence. 95 
 
 II. 
 
 Man, then, if we track him to the centre of his being, 
 is a spirit, whatever be the dignity and organic indis- 
 pensableness of his outward form. Wliat do we know about 
 the origin of man's spirit, of his deepest self ? We know 
 when and under what conditions a human body comes 
 into existence. What do we know about the origin of a 
 human soul ? 
 
 If we take account of the ancient and of the Eastern 
 world, one of the most popular answers to this question 
 will be found in the theory that the soul exists before the 
 body. Sometimes this is stated without an attempt at closer 
 definition ; more frequeiitly it takes the form of a doctrine 
 of Metempsychosis. According to this doctrine the spiritual 
 part of each man's being is as a forced emigrant, who has 
 previously occupied other frames, and who may have others 
 to inhabit hereafter ; although man's inextinguishable hope 
 suggests that an escape from this fatal cycle may be achieved 
 by pre-eminent virtue, which will at length secure an in- 
 corporeal immortality for the weary wanderer. ^ 
 
 The Western and less systematized form of the doctrine 
 is due to Plato. Plato, who did so much in the way of 
 training the ancient world to realize the greatness and 
 uniqueness of the soul, accounted for the soul's present 
 
 ^ For a recent European theory of a curiously Gnostic complexion, see 
 " Le Lendemain de la Mort, ou la vie future selon la Science," par Louis 
 Figuier. Paris, 1871. 
 
g6 Platonic foi^m of the theory. [Lect. 
 
 and, as he deemed it, humiliating relation to the body, by 
 saying that the soul had existed previously in another 
 state of being, and was condemned to tenant a human 
 frame as a kind of punishment. Plato was probably less 
 anxious to give a complete account of the origin of the 
 soul, than to explain the source of certain ideas which he 
 encountered in the human mind. They occupied much 
 of his attention, and he desired to invest them with 
 an authority that might place them beyond the reach of 
 popular discussion. To Plato it seemed that these ideas 
 were relics of a higher knowledge enjoyed by the soul in 
 some earlier stage of its existence ; he could account for 
 them no otherwise, because they so transcended the poor 
 realities of man's present experience. Thoughts w^hicli 
 appeared to result from scientific speculation were in truth 
 only a form of memory — memory of some bygone existence, 
 passed in an ideal world from wliich the soul had fallen down 
 into the sphere of sense and under conditions of time. ^ 
 
 Plato's speculation about the soul w^as of deeper and 
 more permanent interest to humanity at large, than the 
 particular theory which led him to adopt it. It naturally 
 found its way, in company with his other guesses, to Alex- 
 andria. It w^as adopted by Neo-Platonist thinkers, and 
 even in the Jewish schools ; it was taught by Philo, as 
 well as by Plotinus ; it was filtered through Essenism into 
 the religious philosophy of the Talmud and the Cabbala ; ^ 
 
 ^ nf\\uv r\ fJidOrjcns ovk &\Xo tl ^ dvcifivrjcris Tvyxdvei odcra. Cf. Plat. Phaed., 
 
 E. 73-77, 246. 
 
 2 Delitzsch quotes Joel, Religions philosophie der Sohar, pp. 107-109. 
 
III.] Pre-existence of the sold not Scripticral. 97 
 
 it entered into more than one type of Gnosticism ; it appears 
 among the other eccentricities of the eccentric Origen; 
 it forms a link between the philosophical bishop 
 of Cp'ene, Synesius, and the outer world of Pagan 
 thought. But it was stoutly opposed by the immense 
 majority of Christian teachers/ and was finally condemned 
 by the collective Church, as an untenable error. ^ For it 
 never had any basis in Holy Scripture; not even in those 
 v/ritings which are historically connected with Alexandrian 
 thought, or which have been supposed, on strictly internal 
 grounds, to have an Alexandrian colouring.^ To suppose 
 that it underlies the doctrine of an original or birth-sin, as 
 taught in the New Testament, is to forget that the great 
 teacher of that doctrine expressly states that the conse- 
 quences of the first sin devolve upon those who have 
 not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression.* 
 
 1 Even by Clement of Alexandria, 6 Geos r;,uas eTvoiy\cjiv ov irpdovTas' ^XRV^ 
 yap /cat eldevai rifias oirov rjfJLev el irpo rji-iev. Qu. by Klee, Doginatik. p. 
 433, from Strom, viii. ; Mali, torn. vii. p. 88. S. Peter of Alexandria 
 characterises it as a shred of heathenism: to yap fidO-qfia tovto rrjS eWrjVLKr/'i 
 ian (piXocrocplas Kevrjs Kai dWorpia^ oCicttjs tCov ev 'KpLcrrip evaejSQs 6e\uvTwv 
 '^?}v. De Anim. frag., ih. 
 
 2 In the Second Council of Constantinople ; Hefele, Conciliengesch. ii. 772. 
 
 ^ E.g., not in Wisd. viii. 19, 20, which refers to an altogether excep- 
 tional attribute or Personality. The Cabbalist reference to Eccles. xii. 7, 
 and Origen's to Eom. ix. 11-13, Luke i. 47, Jerem. i. 5, are set aside on ex- 
 aoiiuing the passages. Nor are such arguments as Heb. vii. 9 to the point. 
 The pre-existence of our Lord's Divine Person, as taught in S. John and 
 S. Paul, would be relevant, if those Apostles had taught the pre-existence 
 of aijy one else, and if, in His case, this pre-existence did not clearly attach 
 to a representation of His Personal Dignity as su^jerhunian. His Humnn 
 Soul was, hke His Body, created in time, and then hypostatically united 
 to His J 're-existent Godhead. 
 
 * Pom. V. 14, CTTi Tous 1X1) afjiapTrjaavTa^ eirl roj o/wui-,'mr'. r-qs irapa^daeoss 
 A5d//,. 
 
 H 
 
98 A pre-existent soul destroys the idea o/^nan. [Lect. 
 
 The conception of a pre-existing soul is, moreover, broadly 
 at issue with the Scri]3tural account of man's creation. 
 Holy Scripture knows of no creation of souls prior to 
 the creation of bodies; the creation of the first man 
 comprises the simultaneous creation of his body and his 
 soul. Scripture carries us up to no moral act of any 
 soul livino- and workinsj before the creation of Adam's 
 body; it traces no moral circumstance of man's present 
 condition higher than to the sin of Adam in Paradise. 
 It represents marriage as honourable, and the offspring 
 of marriage as a blessing from the Lord; but these 
 representations would ill consist with the theory which 
 would treat the human body, the product of marriage, 
 as only a strange house of detention, wherein the un- 
 willing soul is bound during a lifetime, far from its true 
 end and home. In short, the theory of the soul's pre- 
 existence is broadly at issue with the biblical and Christian 
 doctrine of man, which makes man the synthesis of body 
 and spirit ; since, according to that theory, man existed in 
 his completeness, as spirit, before he was sent to inhabit a 
 human frame. And in this way such a theory cuts up by 
 the roots that profound argument for the future resurrec- 
 tion of the body, which is suggested by the fact that the 
 body is, under the terms of man's natural constitution, the 
 soul's one adequate organ and instrument ; it reduces the 
 body to the rank of a temporarily indwelt shell, which 
 might be escaped from with advantage. JSTor is the ver- 
 dict of our experience at issue with that of Christian 
 
III.] Theory of the souVs descent fro7it parents. 99 
 
 doctrine in this particular. If we have all of ns existed in 
 some previous state of being, how is it that no living 
 memory records any one distinct event in this presumed 
 phase of past existence ? If all traces of this supposed 
 pre-existent life should have been blotted out from one 
 memory, or from the majority of memories, how are we 
 to explain their entire disappearance from all ? Such 
 universal obKvion of a great past is in fact inexplicable, 
 except upon the extreme and violent hypothesis of a 
 miraculous annihilation of memory in all spirits that 
 have been heretofore united to human forms. The failure 
 of any one memory to recall the supposed life of human 
 souls in another sphere of being, is as unfavourable to the 
 supposition at the bar of reason, as its other demerits must 
 be held to be condemnatory of it in the judgment of faith. ^ 
 But if man's soul cannot be supposed to exist, as an 
 independent being, before the formation of his body, is 
 it a part, the highest part, of that transmitted inheritance 
 of life, which we receive, each one of us, from our earthly 
 parents ? Among the ancients this position was main- 
 tained most earnestly by TertuUian.^ He had already 
 broken aw^ay from the Church, and he wanted a strong 
 psychological tenet capable of bearing him weU out in the 
 
 ^ For some considerations to the contrary, see Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych, i. 
 1, who, however, insists that the theory in question has no Scriptural 
 foundation. 
 
 ^ Cf. Tertull. de Anima, c. 19. He speaks of the human soul " velut 
 sarculus quidam ex matrice Adam in propaginem deducta; " and argues that 
 in the process of natural conception, " cum omni sua paratura pullulabit, 
 tam intellectu quam sensu." Cf. passim, 19-21, 25-27, 37. 
 
I oo Materialist element in Tradiicianism. [Lect. 
 
 vigorous resistance wliicli, in his Montauist isolation, lie 
 offered to tlie Marcionite notion of a pre-existing soul. Of 
 course, if the soul was generated simultaneously with the 
 body, there was no room left for saying that it had ever 
 existed indej^endently ; and Tertullian accordingly pressed 
 the theory of Traducianism, as it is termed, with this object, 
 just as in a later age S. Augustine was attracted towards 
 it, for another reason equally independent of its intrinsic 
 merits. ^ If the soul was transmitted from sire to son, then 
 it was easy to answer the Pelagian question, how original 
 sin could be passed on together with it from Adam to his 
 descendants. But, notwithstanding this powerful motive 
 for accepting it, Augustine saw in the Traducianist doctrine 
 an element of Materialism.^ The ordinary comparison of 
 lighting one lamp from the flame of another, was too gross 
 an image accurately to adumbrate the act of giving being 
 to an immaterial consciousness. The idea of the soul 
 which Traducianism suggests, is really derived from animal 
 analogies, and is inapplicable to the conception of a purely 
 spiritual and indivisible essence. The difficulty was not 
 removed by saying that the body was not, as in the theory 
 
 ^ Beausobre (Hist. Crit. de Manichee, Amst., 1734) goes so far as to 
 attribute a strictly Traducianist doctrine respecting the origin of the soul 
 to S. Augustine. How keenly Augustine felt the dangers of Materialism 
 latent in this theory appears from such j^assages as De Gen. ad Litt. lib. x. 
 cap. i. 24-25. His general language is studiously undecided: cf. De Animii 
 et ejus orig. i. 2; iv. 2. De Lib. Arbitr. iii. c. 21, n. 59. His hesitation is 
 the more remarkable, as Pelagius made great use of Creatianism in opposing 
 the Catholic doctrine of original sin. See his Letter to S. Jerome ; Ep. 166, 
 c. 5, 9. 
 
 2 Ep. 190, ad Opt. c. iv. n. 13, 14, 15, cm. by Worter. 
 
III.] DifficiLliies of Traducianism. loi 
 
 of Tertiillian, the real generating agent, but only one inter- 
 mediate link in the process by which a sonl is engendered 
 by parent souls. AVhen Lactantius asked whether, on the 
 Traducianist h}^othesis, tlie soul of an infant was to be 
 supposed to be derived from the father, or from the mother, 
 or from both parents at once, he asked a question which 
 was, in fact, fatal to the theory.^ It was inconceivable 
 that a spirit, personal and indivisible, or that two spirits, 
 should engender another spirit; because to conceive this 
 was to attribute a purely animal process of propagation 
 to denizens of the supersensuous world." It has been 
 observed that children generally resemble their parents in 
 those qualities w^hich Ave describe collectively as tempera- 
 
 ^ De opificio Dei, c. 19. Illud quoque venire in quKstionem potest : 
 utrumne anima ex patre, an potius ex matre, an verb ex utroque generetur. 
 Sed ego id meo jure ab ancipiti vindico. Nihil enim ex his tribus verum 
 est, quia neque ex utroque neque ex alterutro seruntur animse corporibus. 
 Corpus enim ex corporibus nasci potest, qu -niam confertur aliquid ex 
 utroque ; de animis anima non potest, quia ex re tenui et incomprehensiUli 
 nihil jJOtest decederc. 
 
 - Delitzsch's attack upon the position that " the assumed ability of spirit 
 to propagate itself is contrary to the dualism of nature and spirit," does 
 not appear to be convincing. The Divine Nature being the Parent of 
 the material as well as of the Spiritual Universe, those Eternal Truths 
 internal to It, which are shadowed out by the Names of Father, and Son, 
 may well be the archetypes of material rather than of spiritual facts in the 
 universe. The Eternal Spirit Himself is "not begotten but proceeding." 
 The Tl^Pin of Prov. viii. 24, is to be referred to the Son, who is identical 
 with the Wisdom of the Proverbs. The application of the metaphor cf 
 generation and birth to God's natural (Job xxxviii. 28 ; Ps. xc. 2 ; Deut. 
 xxxii. 18) and supernatural (1 Pet. i. 3; James i. 18; 1 S. John iii. 9) 
 creations does not warrant any inference as to a possible parental relation- 
 ship between one created spirit and another. The angelic reference in Gen. 
 vi. 1-4 is, to say the least, far too doubtful to be made the basis of an argu- 
 ment. But cf . Bibl. Psych, ii. § 7, sub fin . 
 
I02 Theory of Creatianism. [Lect. 
 
 inent, as belonging to the region of animal life-power ; but 
 that no such resemblance can be calculated on, or, where 
 it does occur, regarded as other than purely accidental, in 
 respect of strictly personal qualities, such as genius, or 
 will. 1 Traducianism can undoubtedly point to great names 
 who favour it in ancient and modern times ; - and it rests 
 on too large an area of possibilities to be rejected with 
 anything like peremptoriness. But the general sense of 
 the Church is now, as it has been in past times, against 
 it ; it does not seem to harmonize, at least naturally and 
 easily, with the fixed outlines of a consistently spiritualist 
 philosophy, or, notwithstanding the easy explanation 
 which it affords of a doctrine of transmitted sin, to make 
 itself really at home with such an estimate of man's 
 spiritual nature as is implied by the great doctrines of 
 the Christian creed. 
 
 The other and more generally received doctrine, is known 
 as Creatianism. Each soul is an immediate work of the 
 Creator: He is perpetually creating souls out of nothing, 
 and infusing them into bodies.^ He creates each soul at 
 the moment when the body which is destined for it enters 
 
 ^ As by Wbrter, ubi supra. 
 
 2 S. Jerome, indeed, himself an earnest Creatianist, attributes Tradu- 
 cianism to the majority of Western teachers in his day : maxima pars occi- 
 dentalium, Ep. 78, ad Marcell ; but in antiquity Tertullian stands out almost 
 alone in his unfaltering decision. Augustine hesitates. Of moderja Traduci- 
 anists, Delitzsch among Lutheran, and Klee among Roman Catholic writers, 
 are perhaps the greatest. 
 
 ^ Quotidit; Deus operatur animas et in corpora mittit nascentivim. S. 
 Jerome; adv. Paif. Apol. xvi. 1, 3. Traducianism he thinks absurd: Satis 
 ridendi qui putant animas cum corporibus seri et non a Deo, sed a corporum 
 parentibus generari. Qu. by Klee, Dog-m. 
 
III.] On what gi^oimds it is excepted against. 103 
 
 really and j)roperly on its inheritance of life. ^ Creatianism 
 recognizes that sense of the immateriality of the human 
 spirit which expressed itself falsely in the doctrine of a 
 pre-existence, and which is so seriously compromised by 
 Traducianism. Personal spirit, it is asserted by the 
 Creatianist, cannot be transmitted from one created life to 
 another, like animal vitality. Yet Creatianism recognizes 
 the truth for which the Traducianists contended against 
 the advocates of the soul's pre-existence, when it maintains 
 that the soul and body are strictly contemporaneous in 
 their origin, and that they have profound and ineffaceable 
 relations to each other. 
 
 When it is pleaded against this theory of the origin of 
 the soul that it is at issue with the Scriptural representa- 
 tion of a Sabbath rest, which brought God's creative activity 
 to a close, ^ it is sufficient to reply that such an interpreta- 
 tion of the Mosaic narrative would oblige us to close our eyes 
 to the proved fact of a later origin of new species of animals, 
 besides being inconsistent with any adequate idea of God's 
 providential relation to the world. ^ When it is said that 
 Creatianism, if true, would enslave God, by bidding Him 
 give existence to an immortal spirit at the will of the 
 adulterer, and in defiance of His own law, this objection* 
 does indeed reveal the peculiar malignity of sins against 
 
 ^ This is apparently the drift of Peter Lombard's often-quoted maxim : 
 Creando infundit aiiimas Deus et infundendo creat. 
 
 - As by Klee, Dogmatik, p. 431. '"^ S. John v. 17. 
 
 * S. Augustine admits to S. Jerome that, before hearing his answer to 
 this difiHcu^ty, he had himself solved it by dwelhng on God's power and will 
 
1 04 C7^eatianis77i kozu tanght in H. Scripttwe. [Lect. 
 
 marriage; but it is merely an extreme illustration of the 
 general truth, that man can only sin with God's assistance ; 
 that all sin consists in the employment of God's bounty 
 against Himself. When, lastly, it is urged that the trans- 
 mission of original sin is on this hypothesis unintel- 
 ligible, it may be sufficient to say that original sin, being 
 rather of the nature of a defect than of a positive taint, 
 there is no difficulty in understanding how created souls 
 did not receive a gift which had been withdrawn from the 
 race to which at birth they became united. Upon the 
 whole, the Creatianist theory seems better to fall in with 
 the scattered hints and with the general language of 
 Scripture. It is apparently more in harmony with the 
 account of the creation of man, and with the general 
 representations of God's creative relationship to the spirit 
 of man, which we find in the Old Testament. ^ Especially 
 does it seem to be borne out by the distinction which is 
 drawn in the Epistle to the Hebrews between the " fathers 
 of our flesh " and the " Eather of spirits." ^ These expres- 
 sions discriminate with an accuracy from which there 
 would seem to be no escape between the contribution 
 made to the composite being of man by our heavenly 
 
 to draw gooJ out of evil in all His earthly providences. The giving being to 
 a soul, capable of knowing and loving its Creator, is of itseK a good, how- 
 ever it may be occasioned. Ep. ad Hieron. 166, c. 5. 
 
 1 Gen. ii. 7; Job xxxiii. 4; Ps. cxix. 73; Zech. xii. 1. 
 
 ^ Heb. xii. 9. The contrast, Delitzsch admits, between t'^j aapKos rj/xQu 
 irarepes, and the Divine irar-qp tGjv ■n-vevp.dTWv, is physical and not ethical. 
 " There can hardly," he remarks, " be a more classical proof -text for Crea- 
 tianism." The passages which imply the organic oneness and responsibility 
 of the race of Israel do not set this aside (vii. 5, 10.) Cf. Num. xvi. 22. 
 
III.] Bearing of these theories on Religion. 105 
 
 Parent immediately, and that which He bestows throiigli 
 created channels of the gift of life. ^ 
 
 This question of the soul's origin has carried us into a 
 region where we have at best to deal with high proba- 
 bilities ; where revelation has rather hinted at the truth 
 than unveiled it, and where reason certainly cannot pre- 
 tend to dogmatize. But it is not altogether unfruitful 
 to look at this side of our subject, even where certainty is 
 unattainable. To do so makes us all the more thankful for 
 certainty, when we know that it is within our reach. After 
 all, the difference between the Creatianists and Traduci- 
 anists does not raise the question whether the human soul 
 is made by God, but only the question whether it is 
 immediately created by Him. All that we are and have, 
 except the evil which we have wrought, and which clings 
 to us, comes from the One Source of Life ; but if religion 
 finds its strength in this general conviction, it is especially 
 stimulated by the belief that the soul is God's immediate 
 handiwork. The belief that the inmost being of each one 
 of us is created as immediately by God as was that of our 
 first parent Adam, brings each of us into a felt relationship 
 with God, and reminds us of our obligations towards Him, 
 more effectively than would be the case if we supposed 
 ourselves to receive spiritual as well as corporeal life 
 through a long series of ancestors. It is this persuasion 
 which underlies Bishop Andrewes' favourite ejaculatory 
 
 ^ Cf. Delitzsch's Discussion of Heb. xii. 9 against Elvard's theory that 
 cctp^ means here the natviral life in oi'position to the regenerate Ufe. 
 Ilebraerbr. in loc. 
 
T 06 Destiny of the soul. [Lect. 
 
 prayer from the Psalter, " Despise not Thou the work of 
 Thine own Hands," It is not in the anatomy and faculties 
 of the body, it is in the analysis and study of the soul, 
 that the greatness of human life is best realized, and our 
 indebtedness towards its Giver most deeply felt. This re- 
 flective reason ; this heart, capable of a boundless expan- 
 sion ; this will, which may be trained to a freedom and an 
 intensity of extraordinary power; — of what are these 
 faculties so suggestive as of the knowledge, love, and 
 service due to that Being of Beings Wlio is the End, as 
 He is the Author, of this centre of complex and self- 
 controlling life ? 
 
 III. 
 
 Man, then, is a sj^irit ; and, as it would seem, he is, as 
 such, immediately created by God. The gravest question 
 yet remains : Wliat is his destiny ? Whatever may be 
 said of the importance of questions bearing on the soul's 
 origin, no reflecting man will deny the interest of all that 
 bears upon its future. It is true that even this question 
 is ostentatiously set aside on the ground of its being un- 
 practical to discuss it. " The dead," it is argued, " do not 
 return to tell us their experience. What then can be 
 known certainly of that which befalls them ? We may 
 hope, or we may conjecture; we may desire, or despair; we 
 
III.] Inevitableness of death. 107 
 
 may dogmatize in the air, and make creeds of our aspira- 
 tions ; but wonld it not be better to confine ourselves to 
 subjects that are well witliin the range of our experience, 
 and where sure results are attainable, than to waste time 
 and sympathy upon that which belongs really and only to 
 the realm of fancy ?" 
 
 This way of treating the subject is possible and not un- 
 common among young men and women in good health, 
 who have never known a heartache ; and in the pages of 
 clever serials, where readers are carried forward almost 
 unresistingly, by clear type and well-turned sentences, over 
 the dreary wastes of sceptical thought. But the question of 
 the eternal future is too pressing to be thus left at a dis- 
 tance, permanently. If religion has many enemies in the 
 j)redominant tendencies of the modern world, she certainly 
 lias steady and inalienable allies in the permanent circum- 
 stances of human nature. . To the most refined and cultured 
 of ourselves, death is just as certain a contingency as it was 
 to our rudest forefathers, and its dread solemnities enter 
 just as penetratingly into the homes of rank and science, 
 as into the humblest cottages in the land. Sooner or later 
 it comes close to all of us, and the mists which hide its 
 stern realities from our eyes roll away, and leave us face 
 to face with them. 
 
 " They think that their houses shall continue for ever : 
 and that their dwelling-places shall endure from one 
 generation to another; and call the lands after their own 
 names. 
 
io8 Inevitableness of death. [Lect. 
 
 " Nevertheless man will not abide in honour : seeing 
 that he may be compared unto the beasts that perish ; this 
 is the way of them. 
 
 " They lie in the hell like sheep, death gnaweth upon 
 them, and the righteous shall have domination over them 
 in the morning : their beauty shall consume in the 
 sepulchre out of their dwelling. 
 
 " Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich : or if the 
 glory of his house be increased ; 
 
 " For he shall carry nothing away with him when he 
 dieth : neither shall his pomp follow him. 
 
 " For while he lived he counted himself an happy man : 
 and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak 
 good of thee. 
 
 " He shall follow the generation of liis fathers : and 
 shall never see light. 
 
 " Man being in honour hath no understanding : but is 
 compared unto the beasts that perish." ^ 
 
 This is the solemn irony of life, and from year to year 
 we find ourselves face to face with it. Death does not 
 move us much, when it visits those whom we do not 
 know, or whom we know only slightly ; when it only meets 
 us as it wends its way gloomily through the crowded 
 thoroughfare towards the distant cemetery, or as it catches 
 our eye in the supplement of our daily newspaper. It 
 
 1 Psalm xlix. 11, 12, M, 16-20. 
 
III.] Questions raised at the sight of death. 109 
 
 does not touch us as being wliat it is, so long as it only 
 produces social changes which excite our interest, while it 
 ]:eeps sufficiently at a distance not to wound our hearts. 
 We drape it in phrases which treat it as a solemn abstrac- 
 tion. No doubt it is solemn; but so is the war lately 
 raging in Paraguay, or a Eussian campaign in Central 
 Asia. We sliould speak very differently of a revolutionary 
 struggle in the streets of London, ujDon the issue of which 
 it was clearly understood that our own life and property 
 might immediately depend. But we find that at last death 
 comes home to us, even to us, in all the closeness of its 
 dreadful embrace. Not, it may be, this time to ourselves : 
 that were perhaps more bearable. The one human being 
 v/hom we have loved best on earth — the parent, the husband, 
 the wife, the child — lies before us. We see what is coming. 
 It is very gradual, perhaps, and there are many rallies in 
 which vital power struggles with disease, in which hope 
 flickers up in its contest with the presentiments of reason, 
 only to die back into a deeper despair. It is very gradual 
 — a slow processional movement to the grave : but the end 
 comes at last. At last a day comes to which the preceding 
 days are as if they had not been ; a day comes which lives 
 in memory. We can no longer reckon on hours ; we dare 
 not be away even for a few minutes, lest we should be too 
 late. A change has taken place, wliicli they know well 
 who are familiar with death, and of which none can mistake 
 the import. We feel, all feel, that the time is short, and 
 a few words are said into which is compressed a life — 
 
I lo Questions raised at the sight of death. [Lect. 
 
 its most sincere thoiigiit and love — a few assurances, 
 messages, entreaties ; no more is possible. Already, one by 
 one, the vital powers take their leave : first speech, then 
 movement, then hearing, then even eyesight. Still there 
 is breathing, now rapid and deep, now weaker and inter- 
 mittent ; and then there comes a last breath ; and we wait ; 
 and there is none after it. 
 
 It lies before ns, that loved form : only an hour ago it 
 spoke : we speak to it now, but in vain. We bend over 
 it in our agony, as if it was still what it had been ; but we 
 know — what would we not give to escape from our convic- 
 tion ? — that neither thought nor feeling tenants it now. 
 And the question must rise then, if it never rose before, with 
 an urgency proportioned to the grief which asks it ; — Is all 
 really over ? Has the real being, which one short hour ago 
 thought and felt so keenly, actually and for ever ceased 
 to be? 
 
 Do you say that in presence of that passionate agony 
 it is folly to ask for a decision which should only be 
 dictated by the coolest, the calmest, the most unimjDas- 
 sioned, the most disinterested science ? I answer that 
 that agony, if it be not itself an argument, is well fitted 
 to win a hearing for arguments to which, under ordinary 
 circumstances, our materialistic science is deaf. Such 
 a condition of feeling may be impatient on the one 
 hand of a physiology which seeks for the immaterial spirit 
 in the brain ; as it cannot, on the other, enter into a meta- 
 physical discussion of the alleged indestructibility of 
 
III.] ytLstice demands a f utter e state. 1 1 1 
 
 uncompoimded essences. But being itself pain, mental 
 pain, one of the great chastening, illnminating powers of the 
 moral world, it is at least in a mood to understand a moral 
 argument. And the moral argument for our immortality is, 
 after all, the strongest of those upon which reason can fall 
 back. It is no fancy which insists that Eternal Justice 
 cannot close His account with any human conscience at the 
 moment of death; that there must be an after- world in 
 which the too unequal balance of suffering and happiness, 
 of good and evil doing during life, will be surely rectified. 
 We must do stern violence to the best and deepest instincts 
 of our better nature before the voice of this argument can 
 be silenced. It is a moral conviction which protests against 
 the Materialistic theory that the soul is but an animated 
 vapour which becomes extinct with the life of the bodily 
 frame. It equally rejects the Pantheistic dream, that what 
 looks like a separate personality ceases when we cease to 
 breathe, while the soul sinks back into the vast under- 
 current of boundless life, which is the fabled vital force of 
 the Pantheistic universe. If morality has any serious basis 
 in the nature of things, if it be not a dream or a con- 
 ventionalism, there must be a future wherein each personal 
 spirit will subsist under conditions which will have direct 
 reference to its moral and spiritual attainments here. 
 
 For if one thing is evident to a man who takes notes of 
 what passes within him with the lapse of time, it is that 
 the inward being which he contemplates as " self," is con- 
 tinually developing. As the years pass, whether for good 
 
1 1 2 Immortality Jiow taught in H. Scripture. [Lect. 
 
 or evil, this immaterial, thinking, resolving being acquires 
 accumulating strength and intensity. Long after the 
 animal life of man has reached its highest point, and is 
 fairly on the decline, the spirit feels itself sensibly growing; 
 growing in the range of its intellectual grasp, growing in 
 its powder of will, growing in its sense of being a centre of 
 life, unlike any of the forms of animal or vegetable life 
 around it. Is it possible that death will abruptly put an 
 end to this hitherto uninterrupted development ? Is it 
 possible that we thus continuously expand in all that 
 constitutes our real human selves, only to find at the gate 
 of death that we were nothing but brutes after all, although 
 endovvxd with sensibilities and imaginations just keen 
 enough to make us the victims of an immense and ex- 
 ceptional delusion ? 
 
 It is often remarked that the Bible nowhere deals with 
 tlie natural immortality of the human soul as a thesis to 
 be proved. ^ As in the case of the soul's spirituality, the 
 Bible scarcely asserts, but it everywhere takes the truth 
 
 ^ It is not meant that the sonl of man is immortal through any internal 
 necessity, such as might he held to belong to an uncompounded essence. 
 In this sense God is 6 \x6vo% 'ix<^v dOavaaiap (1 Tim. vi. 1 6). In all creatures, 
 indestructibility is a gift. It is a gift to the spirit, as di-tinct from 
 the animal life-power of man. The ancients, Tatian and Justin Martyr, 
 who protested against the Greek idea of a necessary immortahty inherent 
 in the soul, did not deny the gift of immortality, which as a matter of 
 fact the Creator had bestowed. Just as man conceives of God, so he con- 
 ceives of eternity, and longs for it. His longing shows that he is 
 designed from eternity ; it is otherwise inexplicable. " God has placed 
 eternity, 0?)]) iii the heart of man" (Eccles. iii. 21). It is a matter of 
 
 experience ; and the argumentum ab appetitu aeternitatis to the reality of 
 an eternal future is an adaptation of the Cartesian inference from the idea 
 to the being of a Cod. Cf. Delitz^ch, Eibl. Psj-ch. vi. § 2. 
 
III.] The doctrijie of Scheol. 1 1 3 
 
 for granted. When patriarchs and kings are said in the 
 language of the Old Testament to be gathered to their 
 fathers, it is not merely meant that their bones were laid 
 in the common family resting-place. The natural scenery 
 of Palestine probably suggested the word which described 
 the revealed invisible home of the spirits of the dead. ^ It 
 was "a land of darkness, as darkness itself;"^ the common 
 receptacle of the " small and great," of the " servant and his 
 master," of kings and counsellors of the earth, of prisoners 
 and of oppressors.^ AU were gathered there, under new 
 conditions of life, incompatible with those earthly forms 
 of activity * which cease at death. Not that the dead 
 are passive or unconscious. Isaiah's description of the 
 movement of spirits in the unseen world at the descent 
 of the spirit of the King of Babylon can hardly be 
 resolved into poetical license ; and it is observable that 
 the heathen monarch is there together with the rulers 
 of Israel. ^ This doctrine of Scheol is perfectly consistent 
 with the general truth that at death the human spirit 
 returns to God,^ and that the souls of the righteous are in 
 " His hands," in the sense of being exempted from torment. "^ 
 IsTor is it in any way at issue with the doctrine of a bodily 
 resurrection, which, while its early and distinct appearance 
 in the Psalter^ is utterly inconsistent with the theory of 
 
 1 7"1SIV is properly what is sunk deep, bent in ; hence a ravine, abyss, 
 
 depth. Cf. Fuerst, Lex. in voc. 
 
 2 Job X. 21. 3 Job iii. 13-19. * Eccles. 9, 10. " Is. xiv. 9, sqq. 
 « Eccles. xii. 7. '' Wisd. iii. 1. 
 
 8 Ps. xvi. 10, 11 ; Acts ii. 25-31. Cf. also Ps. xlix. 16 ; Ixxiii. 23, sqq. 
 
 I 
 
114 Immortality in the New Testament. [Lect. 
 
 its being due to Eastern influences^ npon tlie Jewish 
 Eevelation at tlie period of tlie Captivity, does undoubtedly, 
 in tlie later books, come very prominently into view. Aj^art 
 from a popular belief in tliis doctrine, the imagery of Isaiah ^ 
 and EzekieP would have been unintelligible to their con- 
 temporaries ; and both in the dark days of the Captivity in 
 Babylon,* and in the later struggle of the Maccabees against 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, this faith in a Eesurrection sustained 
 the oppressed against the persecutors, even the martyi^s in 
 their agony. ^ So far as Alexandria influenced Judaism, 
 it discouraged faith in a corporeal Eesurrection. Philo, 
 like a genuine Platonist, sees in death the emancipation of 
 the soul from its bodily prison-house. But the ruling 
 religious minds in Palestine at the time of Christ's appear- 
 ance believed in the resurrection of our actual bodies.^ 
 Such a doctrine of course implies the immortality of the 
 soul ; but the only demonstration of the truth of the soul's 
 immortality is given in our Lord's reply to the Sadducees 
 on the subject of the Eesurrection. He argues from the 
 title, " the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God 
 of Jacob," which God w^as pleased to claim in centuries 
 long after the death of the patriarchs, that the patriarchs 
 must still be living, because God is the God, not of the 
 dead, but of the living.'' By this general statement our 
 
 ^ As suggested by Jul. Miiller, Studd. und Kritt, 1835. 
 2 Is. xxvi. 14-19. 3 Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14. Cf. Hos. vi. 2 ; xiii. 14. 
 * Dan. xii. 1-3, 13. ^ 2 Mace. vii. 9, 11, 14, 23 ; xii. 42-45 ; xiv. 16. 
 ^ S. Matt. xxii. 24, sgg. ; Acts xxiii. 8, xxiv. 15. Joseph. Ant. xviii. 1-3. 
 BeU, Jud. ii. 8-14. Qu. by Grimm. 
 
 '' S. Matt. xxii. 32 ; S. Mark xii. 27 ; S. Luke xx. 38. 
 
III.] Immoi^tality andottr Lord's Res7crrection. 1 1 5 
 
 Lord apparently implies that God does not create spiritual 
 beings only that they may sink back into nothing. The 
 distinctive teachino^ of the N"ew Testament abont the future 
 world everywhere presupposes the soul's immortality. If 
 death were annihilation for all of us, or for all but the just, 
 the descriptions of the end of the world, of the last judg- 
 ment,^ of the general resurrection,^ and of the future state, ^ 
 would have no interest for any but a minority of mankind. 
 It is the steady comdction that, in some way, we shall each 
 and all personally subsist after death, which secures to 
 these pages of our Bibles such universal interest. 
 
 This conviction of our immortality rests on what is for 
 Christians an unquestioned certainty. In Christian eyes, 
 the central fact of the world's annals is the Eesurrection of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. It occurred in the fidl 
 daylight of history : it was attested by hundreds of witnesses.* 
 We can only deny its truth upon a priori principles, which 
 are not merely destructive of serious belief that God is a 
 Moral and even a Living Being, but which are also fatal to 
 confidence in human history. The Eesurrection of Christ 
 is the guarantee of our own. The clouds which hung 
 around the gate of death in earlier ages have roUed away 
 
 1 S. Matt. XXV. 31-46 ; Acts xvii. 31 ; Eom. xiv. 10 ; 2 Cor. v. 10 ; 
 2 Tim. iv. 1 ; 1 S. Pet. iv. 5. 
 
 2 S. John V. 28, sqq.; Acts xxiv, 15. 
 
 3 Rom. ii. 10, viii. 18 ; 1 Cor. xiii. 12; IS. John iii. 2 ; Heb. x. 26, 27; 
 Rev. xiv. 13; S. Matt. viii. 12; S. Mark ix. 43, sqq.; S. John xii. 26, 
 xiv. 2, sqq. ; xvii. 24 ; Eev. xxi. 7, 8. 
 
 * 1 Cor. XV. 6, dScpdr} eirdvu) irevTaKocriois abekcpoh e^ctTra^, e^ Cov ol irXeiovi 
 fiivovcriv ews dpri, nues 5k /cat eKOifirjO-qcrav. 
 
1 1 6 Can the body be dispensed with for ever f [Lect. 
 
 since the day of our Saviour's triumph over death; the 
 presumptive speculations which were previously rife as to 
 the future state have been exchanged for strong certainties. 
 " Life and immortality have been brought to light by the 
 Gospel:" " God has begotten us again to a lively hope, by 
 the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead:" Christians 
 are " not to sorrow as those that have no hope :" Death 
 has lost its sting, and the grave its victory.^ 
 
 Here, too, let it be noted, that although the soul is the 
 seat of man's personal life, it is not, as has been already 
 hinted, man in his completeness. Man is a body as well 
 as a soul. Materialism itself has here done valuable service 
 in correcting the exaggerations of a one-sided spiritualism. 
 It is common, but erroneous, to speak of man's body as 
 being related to his spirit only as is the casket to the 
 jewel which it contains, or only as a prisoner to the walls 
 of his dungeon. 2 But as a matter of fact, the personal 
 spirit of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encom- 
 passing frame of sense, with which, from the first moment 
 of its existence, it has been so intimately associated: in a 
 thousand ways, and most powerfully, the body acts on the 
 soul, and the soul on the body. They are only parted at 
 
 1 2 Tim. i. 10; 1 S. Pet. i. 3; 1 Thess. iv. 13; 1 Cor. xv. ^o^. 
 
 ~ The false spiritualism which is implied in these metaphors is, in modern 
 times at least, chiefly due to the Cartesian philosophy. Descartes held that 
 the human soul was made only for the purposes of thought (Disc, sur la 
 Mdth. pt. 5.) ; the animal-life of man was, as a consequence, in his judgment, 
 merely that of an independent machine. Madame de Sevigne ralHes this 
 once popular theory " des machines qui aiment, des machines qui ont une 
 election pour quelqu'un, des machines qui sont jalouses, des machines qui 
 craignent." QEuvr. t. iii. lett. 170. 
 
III.] The body essential to man s fiill identity. 1 1 7 
 
 death by a violent A^Tencli. The spirit can indeed exist 
 independently of the body, but this independent existence 
 is not its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and 
 sense; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce from the 
 companion whose presence is needed to complete its life. 
 Would the soul, permanently severed from^ the body, still 
 be, properly speaking, man ? Would it not really be some 
 other being? Our inmost consciousness here echoes the 
 answer of science. The body which has been so long the 
 associate and partner of the soul's life, the instrument of 
 its will, the minister of its passions, mingling lower physical 
 sensations with that higher life of thought and feeling which 
 belongs to it, could not be altogether cast away without 
 impairing the completeness of our being, without imperilling 
 the continuous identity of our changeful existence. 
 
 This, then, is the true ground of the general resurrection, 
 which is no eccentric or gratuitous miracle, but the restora- 
 tion to man of that completeness of identity which is im- 
 paired by death. If the body did not rise, man would, by 
 dying, not simply enter upon a new stage of being; he 
 would exist as a different order or species of creature. His 
 moral history would have changed its conditions and 
 character. The disembodied spirit might repudiate the 
 weaknesses or excesses of the companion with which it 
 had finally parted company. As a matter of fact, aU men 
 are to rise again with their bodies, and to give account of 
 their own works: the complex being which acted here, is to 
 be judged hereafter. 
 
1 1 8 Bearing of religion on oittward things. [Lect. 
 
 The body and soul together share here in one composite 
 existence; each acts upon the other as well as with it. 
 The corruptible body presseth down the soul. The passions 
 which have their seat in the soul depict themselves upon 
 the surface of the body. On the one hand, an Apostle 
 reminds us that fleshly lusts war not merely against the 
 bodily health, but against the soul. ^ On the other hand, 
 a beautiful soul illuminates the face of a S. Stephen 
 with angelic light ; ^ and hereafter the bodies of the 
 blessed wiU be " glorious," that is to say, translucent 
 with the splendours of the glorified spirit.^ 
 
 IV. 
 
 Eeligion, in order to meet the wants of human nature, 
 will take account of man's composite being : she will have 
 lower relations to the bodies as well as higher relations to 
 the souls of men. As man has, besides his unseen person, 
 an outward and visible shape, so will religion herself pro- 
 vide sensible forms as well as supersensuous realities. 
 She will exact outward as well as inward reverence, because 
 in a composite being like man, the one is really the con- 
 dition of the other. There are bodily postures which 
 absolutely forbid heavenly exercises to the soul : to lounge 
 in an arm-chair is inconsistent with the tension of thought 
 
 1 1 S. Pet. ii. 11. 2 ^cts vi. 15. - 1 Cor. xv. 43. 
 
III.] Religion based on sense of immortality. 119 
 
 and will which belongs to adoration of the Most Holy. 
 Eeligiou, like man himself, is a beautiful spirit tabernacling 
 in a body of sense ; her divine and immutable truths are 
 shrouded beneath the unrivalled poetry of Bible language ; 
 her treasiu^es of gTace beneath the outward and visible 
 signs which meet us in sacraments. She proclaims the 
 invisible by that which meets the eye ; she heralds the 
 eternal harmonies by a music that falls upon the ear. She 
 certainly is not all form, for man is not a brute ; but also 
 she is not all spirit, for man is not an angel. She deals 
 with man as being precisely what he is, and she enlists 
 the lower faculties of his being in aid of the higher. Yet 
 if she is true to man and to herself, she never allows hmi 
 to forget the unseen in the seen, the inward in the outward, 
 the soul in the body. For religious purposes, the soul 
 must always be incomparably of the highest importance, 
 as being the very man himself, the man in the secret 
 recesses of his being, the man at the imperishable centre 
 of his life, the man as he lives beneath the Eye, and enters 
 into relations with the Heart of his infinite Creator. 
 
 Certainly if belief in our being personal spirits is essential 
 to relioion, and belief in the immediate creation of the soul 
 by God is stimulating to it, belief in the soul's immortality 
 is of yet higher religious importance. The relation between 
 God and the soul, in which religion consists, would be little 
 more to us than a sentiment or a literary taste, if we were 
 persuaded that we should have taken leave of it, as we 
 shaU have taken leave of our clothes and of our books. 
 
1 20 Religion impossible^ if all ends at death. [Lect. 
 
 when we are laid in our coffins. Would religion be worth 
 our attention as serious men, would it be anything more 
 than a plaything, if all really ended at death ? That the 
 soul is immortal, standing in its immortality, for weal or 
 woe, face to face with the Everlasting God ; — this truth, 
 dimly grasped by natural religion, has been wrought into 
 the very heart and fibre of Christendom. It is taken for 
 granted by Christian faith just as naturally as is the fact 
 of life itself. It underlies that sense of an eternal life which 
 good men already enjoy here, and which implies not simply 
 a consciousness that admits of no idea of succession or 
 time, but an immortal soul in fixed communion with an 
 Eternal Object. It teaches man to look upon all the acts 
 and habits which really feed and strengthen religion as a 
 part of his ^preparation and outfit for eternity, to be in some 
 sense carried with him as he crosses the heights which form 
 his present horizon, and which shut out from his view 
 the eternal world. And thus it has elevated and enriched 
 human nature in a thousand ways, which we only do not 
 sufficiently appreciate because we are so entirely accustomed 
 to them. 
 
 Let me illustrate this by an example. Putting reHgion 
 for the moment out of the question altogether, there is no 
 doubt as to the view which a ^philanthropist must take of 
 suicide, suj)posing it to become general, and regarding it in 
 its influence upon society. When a popular Cyi^enaic 
 teacher, Hegesias, advocated suicide, at Alexandria, as 
 being the course upon which a really wise man would 
 
III.] Christian estimate of sicicide. 121 
 
 resolve after comparing the sum of tlie pleasures of life 
 ^yitll tlie sum of its misfortunes, Ptolemy felt it necessary, 
 in the interests of good government and of society, to 
 oblige him to close his lecture-room. But the sentiment 
 with which suicide is practically regarded among us is not 
 based on any mere estimate of its social bearings, still less 
 is it looked upon only as a mode of passing out of life. 
 The announcement that this or that well-known man had 
 destroyed himself would create in any modern society a 
 sensation distinct in kind from that which Avould be caused 
 by the simple announcement of his death. ^ "Why is this ? 
 It is because Christianity, revealing to man as a certainty 
 the fact of his immortality, has given a new meaning, value, 
 solemnity to life. To live is to be on our trial, with a 
 tremendous future immediately before us ; and to shorten 
 this trial by a voluntary act, is, apart from other and even 
 graver aspects of such an act, felt to be altogether irrecon- 
 cileable with this, the Christian estimate of life.^ 
 
 Considering the strength of the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion which is naturally implanted in us, suicide shocks us 
 as beino- a violent contradiction of that instinct. Yet 
 
 o 
 
 while cases of suicide are to be found here and there, in 
 all times and districts of history, there have been periods 
 and places when suicide has been nothing less than a passion 
 
 ^ Since this observation was made, it has been painfully ihustrated in the 
 case of the lamented M. Prevost-Paradol. 
 
 2 Lecky, " History of European Morals," ii. 52. " Direct and deliberate 
 suicide, which occupies so prominent a place in the moral history of antiquity, 
 almost absolutely disappeared within the Church." Cf. pp. 40-63 of this 
 interesting chapter. 
 
122 Pagan theories of suicide. [Lect. 
 
 — a moral epidemic swaying the imaginations and wills of 
 wdiole classes even of educated men. In India suicide has 
 been for at least two thousand years the result of energetic 
 conviction ; it is stiU what it was at the date of Alexander's 
 conquest. It is at this day the effort by which the indivi- 
 dual would plunge into the infinite, in which it is his pre- 
 sumed happiness to forfeit his individuality ; whether that 
 infinite be the supreme soul of the Brahmins, or the 
 Mrvana of the Buddhists. In Greece and Kome, suicide 
 was a precept not of religion but of philosophy. It was 
 recommended by philosophies the most opposed to each 
 other. In Greece the great representatives of the Cynic 
 school, Zeno, Diogenes, and in Christian times, Peregrinus, 
 died by their own hands. The Cyrenaics formulated the 
 doctrine of suicide, as an escape from the preponderating 
 miseries of life. At Eome, Lucretius, the Epicurean 
 poet, as well as Cato and Brutus, under Stoic influences, 
 destroyed themselves. The Epicurean feeling, that when 
 life had been made the most of for the purposes of 
 enjoyment it was time to end it, coincided as to its 
 practical result with the Stoic doctrine that the stern 
 effort by which man could in extremity make good his self- 
 mastery is a voluntary death. Of this doctrine Seneca is 
 the gTeat master. Suicide is, he contends, the act by whicli 
 man asserts Iris rights over himself, when face to face with 
 the menaces and oppressions of tyranny : suicide is the door 
 though which liberty may retire from a world of slaves. 
 This doctrine especially it was which dictated suicide 
 
III.] Suicide imder the Reiiaissance. 123 
 
 on a considerable scale in the first of tlie three j)eriods 
 when like a moral plague it has darkened the life of 
 Europe. During the later days of the Eoman Eepublic, 
 and under the stern Csesarism of the Empire, suicide was 
 recommended and practised as an escape from the political 
 and social evils of the time. The spirit of suicide only 
 fell back before the advance of the Church; and more 
 than three centuries after Seneca, we find S. Augustine 
 combating his arguments one by one in the closing books 
 of the treatise on the City of God. The second period 
 was that of the Eenaissance in the sixteenth century. 
 Suicide had nearly disappeared during the Middle Ages ; 
 but when educated Italy, with Leo X. at its head, had 
 saturated itself afresh with Paganism, it was natural that 
 some of the moral ideas of antiquity should reappear in 
 the train of so engrossing a study of its mind and style. 
 Philippo Strozzi, the prisoner of the Grand Duke Cosmo I., 
 destroys himself, praying God — it is an odd mixture of 
 Christian and Pagan creeds — that his soul may be placed 
 along with the soul of Cato of Utica, and of others who 
 have died after the same fashion. Montaigne in his essays 
 defends suicide elaborately; and in time it had its de- 
 votees in England, no less than in France and Italy. The 
 more positive and earnest Clmstianity of the seventeenth 
 century brought with it a more worthy appreciation of 
 the real seriousness of life : but in the succeeding age the 
 taste for suicide was renewed, not as a part of the com- 
 plete Pagan ideal of conduct, but as the fruit of a melan- 
 
1 24 Suicide at the end of the last centicry. [IjECT. 
 
 clioly estimate of our condition in tliis world, joined to 
 impaired or decomposing religious convictions. The felt 
 disappointments of life as a whole, the absence of fixed 
 aims, the culture of imagination and passion without any 
 regulating faith, the feverish indecision, the languid yet 
 ever - growing self-idolatry, the moral atmosphere of 
 impatience, irritation, curiosity, the mingled rapture and ' 
 pain of vagrant imagination, the utter caprice and prostra- 
 tion of will, — these w^ere the characteristics of a period 
 wdiich was impersonated by, and which recognized itself 
 at length in Goethe. In the earnestness as well as in the 
 levity of an irreligious age, the ordinary motives to self- 
 destruction acquired a new and fatal force ; and the grow- 
 ing evil was only checked by the Christian reaction which 
 followed on the French Eevolution throughout Europe; 
 and which again restored belief in the solemnity of life by 
 forcing men to look steadily at the eternity which succeeds 
 it. Certainly, we have only to refer to yesterday's paper ^ 
 to read the account of a suicide from London Bridge. 
 Domestic misfortunes, temporary derangement, moral 
 despair, still count their too immerous tale of victims. 
 But it is a simple matter of fact that belief in a future 
 state, as taught by Christ and His Apostles, is the one 
 adequate antidote to this weird contempt for the gift of 
 existence — a contempt which cannot really extinguish the 
 gift which it yet can so irretrievably curse. ^ 
 
 1 Standard, March 19, 1870. 
 
 - On this subject the opening Essay in M. Caro's Nouvelles Etudes Morales 
 is full of interest ; and I am indebted to it in the foregoing paragraphs. 
 
III.] Christianity and the value of the sotd. 125 
 
 It would be easy to sliew in like manner Iioav — sometimes 
 directly, sometimes indirectly — Christianity lias bettered the 
 condition of the masses of mankind by making Christians 
 feel the value of each separate life. Our Lord has done this, 
 as no other has done it: nowhere is human life thought so 
 highly of as where the Christian creed is sincerely believed 
 to be absolute truth. The history of infanticide is one 
 among other illustrations of this result of a hearty belief in 
 immortality. The great Christian doctrines centre in, they 
 are unintelligible apart from, faith in the value of the indi- 
 vidual soul. The soul's value is measured in a Christian's 
 judgment by the stupendous truth of the Incarnation and 
 Death of the Everlasting Son; by the gift and energies of 
 the Divine Spirit; by the perpetual intercession of Christ 
 in heaven; by the grace and power of the Sacraments; by 
 the prospects which open to faith's eye beyond the grave — 
 upwards into an illimitable heai^en, downwards into a 
 fathomless hell. Confronted with each of these truths, the 
 soul confidently, yet tremblingly, feels its dignity — its price- 
 less dignity — in the eye of its Maker. The soul feels as if, 
 #hen it turns awdiile from the daily round of duty to gather 
 itself up into itself, to sink a shaft into the depths of its 
 consciousness, there w^ere two, and only two, beings ia ex- 
 istence — itself and its God. To know more of Him, to love 
 Him more, to serve Him better — this is its constant effort ; 
 and its hope and prayer is to receive day by day, in larger 
 measures, more abundant communications of His mind and 
 of His life, In a word, when dwelling on the soul's nature 
 
126 Oitr business is to save 02cr sotds. [Lect. 
 
 and destiny, man understands that religion is his highest 
 and most reasonable field of thought and work. 
 
 It has indeed been said that the old phrase of " saving 
 one's soul " has ceased to have much meaning for the religion 
 of educated people in the present day. If this be indeed 
 true, we can only rejoin, in all truth and sorrow, " so much 
 the worse for the educated people." Wliatever be a man's 
 place in society or in letters, whatever his circumstances in 
 this earthly scene, it remains true that, to close with the 
 offers which Christ makes to sinners, to " work out his salva- 
 tion with fear and trembling," is his one most important 
 business here. The eternal realities do not change with 
 our intellectual fashions ; and like the laws which govern 
 our physical frames, the spiritual rules under which men 
 live or die are the same for all of us. The day will come 
 when the God-fearing peasants of Devonshire or of York- 
 shire will rise in judgment against the cultured irreligion 
 of the centres of our modern civilisation: not because it is 
 cultured, but because it is irreligion; because in the glare 
 of its enthusiasms for the additions which it has made to 
 the knowledge of our material home and structure, it has 
 forgotten almost or altogether the Eternal Home beyond. 
 
 The salvation of the soul can only be treated as an old- 
 world anachronism, when it is clear either that man has no 
 real soul, or that it does not survive death, or that if it does 
 survive, its condition hereafter has no reference whatever 
 to its state and actions here. If this be really meant, it is 
 better to say so; only, in that case, it is difficult to see what 
 
III.] Awfulness and blessedness of life. 127 
 
 sphere is left for religion at all. If it be not meant, tlien, 
 undoubtedly, a variety of the gravest questions at once 
 open before us, both as to what we have to be saved from, 
 and as to the means and conditions of our salvation. Upon 
 the first of these questions, we shall encounter in the next 
 lecture some of the more serious differences which divide 
 the modern world: to-day it must suffice to have insisted 
 upon the mingled blessedness and awfulness of life. "V\^iat 
 it is to live here at all as a human being ; what it is to 
 possess or ratlier to be a centre of self-reflecting thought, 
 of self- determining will, a centre of life which under some 
 conditions will be perpetuated indefinitely; — this, when we 
 think of it steadily and in good earnest, is, next to the 
 spiritual sight of God Himself, the most solemn, the most 
 chastening, the most stimulating consideration that can 
 open upon us. Let us make much of it, in the interests 
 both of the present and of the future, for the sake of God 
 and truth, as well as of our OAvn lasting happiness. Let us 
 determine to ask ourselves again and again during the 
 coming week, what in our inmost selves we really are, and, 
 next, whither we are going. Let us listen to a voice which 
 will at times find some echo in every conscience, and which 
 bids us, in God's name, reflect that " the things which are 
 seen are temporal, while the things which are not seen 
 are eternal." 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 dFourtfj Suntrag in iient* 
 
 THE OBSTACLE TO EELIGION-SIK 
 
 S. James i. 15. 
 
 TMien desire hath conceived, it hrinjeth forth sin; and sin, when it is 
 finished, hringeth forth death. 
 
 rpHE ground wliicli we have hitherto traversed is, in the 
 -■- main, common ground to those who accept the idea 
 of religion in any serious sense at all. Eeligion is im- 
 possible, except as a bond between a real, that is to say, a 
 moral and governing God, and a real, that is to say, a 
 conscious, self- determining, immortal soul. Deny either 
 term of the statement, and religion dissolves into an 
 unpractical sentiment, which either has no adequate object, 
 or else no adequate subject and field for its existence. 
 Hitherto, therefore, at least generally, we have occupied 
 positions which may be taken up even by theories which 
 are very earnestly opposed to some of the most distinctive 
 features of the Christian creed. But to-day we advance a 
 step further; and this advance, it is well to say at the 
 outset, must forfeit the sympatliy of many who have thus 
 
Lect. IY.] Siji, not an invention of Christianity. 129 
 
 far been able to accompany us. We have readied a point 
 at which we encounter a fact of such widespread and 
 deep significance, that it must perforce colour and impress 
 any real religion, from first to last; so that its pressure 
 and importance are felt both in the drift and substance of 
 religious belief, and in the characteristic temper and dis- 
 positions of a religious mind. The fact in question is 
 moral evil. Moral evil, or sin, is the disturbing and dis- 
 organizing force which breaks up the original relationship 
 of love and confidence between God and man. In view of 
 moral evil, revelation must be not merely illuminative, but 
 remedial ; and religion, in order to be true to the facts of 
 human nature, must consist predominantly of penitence 
 and contrition. And Christianity is broadly at issue with 
 not a few of the religious proposals which aspire to take 
 its place in the present day on this very ground. It does, 
 and they do not, practically recognize this universal and 
 fundamental fact : they do, and it will not, consent to gloss 
 it over, or to explain it away, or to assume that man's 
 religious wants can be really satisfied without looking it 
 boldly in the face, and providing against it a cure and an 
 antidote. 
 
 It would be a very great error to suppose that Christi- 
 anity has invented the idea of sin only for the purpose 
 of remedying it. If sin were not a fact independent of 
 Christianity ; if it were not an integral feature of human 
 life, Christianity would long ago have perished. In the 
 spiritual world, too, there is such a thing as supply and 
 
 K 
 
1 30 Sin7^ecognizedi7ij2idaism & Heathendom. [Lect. 
 
 demand; and if a religion pre-supposes wants wliicli do 
 not exist, and brings remedies for diseases of wliicli nobody 
 is conscious, it has already signed its deatli-warrant. It is 
 true that Christianity, as a revelation of the highest moral 
 truth, has, beyond any other religion, educated man's sense 
 of sin; but this sense of sin was not itself a result of 
 Christianity. Long before Christ came, the moral sin and 
 sickness of the world was felt, rather than explicitly 
 recognized. It was of course recognized by the educated 
 conscience of Israel, with its moral law, creating a know- 
 ledge of sin, and its sacrificial system, deepening the sense 
 of the guilt of sin, and its prophetic ministry, bringing 
 these general truths home with an unflinching courage and 
 precision to the sinful kings and populations of the later 
 centuries of its history. But this heart-sickness of the 
 world was also a fact very vividly present to the com- 
 paratively uneducated conscience of Greece. What makes 
 a great heathen say that even if death does involve endless 
 unconsciousness, it ought, nevertheless, to be looked upon 
 as substantial gain ; a deep sleep throughout a lifetime, a 
 sleep unbroken by dreams, being, in his opinion, preferable 
 to the active life of the most fortunate of mankind ? 
 Probably he could not have told us the real reason ; this 
 was an instinct of his rather than a reasoned judgment. 
 He instinctively perceived that in human life, as he saw it, 
 even under its brightest aspects, there was on the whole 
 more evil than good. More evil than good, — but not 
 merely or chiefly more physical evil. The natural courage 
 
IV.] The sense of si7i in Heathendom. 131 
 
 of a gTeat soul would never have regarded a preponderance 
 of misfortune or of pain in a human life as a reason for 
 wishing to be practically non-existent. The evil which 
 decided the balance of judgment against the expediency of 
 life, was more penetrating, more oppressive, more fatal to 
 the sense of having a right to live than any pain of body, 
 or loss of friends or of goods could possibly be. It was, in 
 a word, moral evil. The heathen knew of the existence of 
 moral evil, but they had very imperfect ideas of its extent 
 and nature. They knew that there was a right and a 
 wrong, to which man is bound to conform himself; but 
 what is right and what is wrong, and why right is right, 
 and wrong is wrong, these were subjects upon which their 
 knowledge was exceeding imperfect. But the general fact 
 of man's disloyalty to such moral truth, as he knew, is 
 often admitted by the leading minds of antiquity. They 
 acknowledge man's secret misery ; his proneness to yield to 
 temptations which his conscience condemns ; his forfeiture 
 of the light which he actually enjoys by disobedience to 
 its requirements. " I see and approve of the better 
 course," says Horace, " I follow the worse." " Nature has 
 given us small sparks of knowledge," says Cicero, " we 
 corrupt and extinguish them by our immoralities." " AVe 
 are all wicked," says Seneca, " what one of us blames in 
 another, each will find in his own bosom." ^ 
 
 The Epistle to the Eomans itself, which sets out by 
 shewing that both the Jewish and Gentile worlds, by 
 
 ^ Quoted by Luthardt. 
 
1 3 2 The melancholy of Werther. [Lect. 
 
 reason of the sin wliicli had overmastered tliem, stood in 
 need of the justifying righteousness of Christ, is scarcely 
 more explicit in its assertions than are these great heathen. 
 For to o1)serve human life- at all, and to reflect on the 
 observation, is to be conscious of its moral anomalies. 
 This consciousness often takes the disguised form of a 
 bitter complaint against the external conditions, nay, the 
 very fact of life itself. So it was at the end of the last 
 century. Werther translated Hamlet into the language 
 of modern life, and Goethe made Werther European. 
 Werther embodied the philosophy of melancholy; of dis- 
 satisfaction with life, grounded on a sense of hopeless 
 irretrievable failure. In days nearer to our own, this 
 Pessimism has found a prophet in Schopenhauer, the 
 philosopher of Frankfort. " The history of every life," he 
 says, " is but a history of suffering ; the course of life is 
 generally but a series of greater or of less misfortunes. 
 The true sense of the monologue in Hamlet may be thus 
 summed up. Our condition is so wretched that utter 
 annihilation would be decidedly preferable." ..." The 
 oft-lamented shortness of life may perhaps be its best 
 attribute." ..." Life," he pursues, " may be re- 
 presented as a constant deceiver in things both great and 
 small. If it makes promises, it never keeps them, except 
 to shew how undesirable is that which was desired. First 
 the hope, then the thing hoped for, disappoints us. Life 
 gives only to take away. The charm of distance shews us a 
 paradise, which vanishes like an optical delusion, if we 
 
IV.] The Pessimism of Schopeiihaiier. 133 
 
 allow ourselves to approach it. Hence our happiness ever 
 lies in the future or in the past ; the present may be com- 
 pared to a dark cloud which the wind drives before it over 
 the sunny plain ; behind it there is the sunshine, beneath 
 it a constant shadow. Life is consequently ever unsatisfy- 
 ing; the future being uncertain, the past irrecoverable. 
 Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly, little, great, 
 and greater discomforts ; with its disappointments, its 
 misfortunes, baffling all calculation ; bears so plainly the 
 impress of something which is to be spoilt to us, that it is 
 difficult to imagine how this could ever have been mistaken, 
 and how any one could have conceived that life was given 
 to be thankfully enjoyed, or man made to be happy. The 
 general structure of life would rather produce the convic- 
 tion that nothing is worth our efforts, our energies, -and 
 our struggles; that all possessions are vanity^ the world 
 a bankrupt in all quarters, and life a business which does 
 not pay its expenses. Satisfaction and prosperity are 
 merely negative — merely the absence of suffering; only 
 sorrow and want can be positively felt." . . . "We 
 do not perceive that certain days of our lives have been 
 happy till they have given place to unhappy ones. If, then, 
 there were a hundred times less sorrow in the world than 
 there is, its mere existence would be enough to confirm a 
 truth expressed in various ways, though always with some 
 indirectness — namely, that the existence of the world is a 
 matter not of rejoicing but of grief ; that its annihilation 
 would be preferaljle to its existence ; tliat it is fundamen- 
 
134 S. Paid on tJie groans of creation. [Lect. 
 
 tally something wliicli ought not to exist. Human life, 
 far from wearing the aspect of a gift, has every appearance 
 of an incurred debt, the payment of which is exacted in 
 the form of the urgent necessities, the tormenting desires, 
 the unceasing want which life involves. The whole period 
 of life is generally consumed in the liquidation of this debt, 
 and yet it is only the interest which can be thus paid off. 
 The payment of the capital is effected by death." ^ 
 
 Such is Schopenhauer's reply to the sunny Optimism 
 of Leibnitz, who deems this " the best of possible worlds" ; 
 and in this philosophy of despair we listen to the same 
 chord as that abeady struck by the Platonic Socrates, only 
 the despair is deej)er and sadder than was possible for a 
 heathen, who had never heard of a Christian's hope. For 
 Schopenhauer might also seem at times to be expanding 
 and paraphrasing S. Paul's picture of the whole creation 
 groaning and travaiHng in pain together until now ; only 
 S. Paid saw light upon the distant horizon, and he knew 
 the secret of the present distress. It was moral evil wliich 
 had introduced this unrest and disorder, or which, if it had 
 not introduced all physical suffering into the universe, at 
 least had made it so intolerable. The aggravated, un- 
 appeasable restlessness which results from a conscious 
 forfeiture of the harmony of our being with the moral law 
 of the universe; — this it is wliicli quickens the agony of 
 that j)iteous wail to which we have just been listening : 
 
 ^ Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstelluiig, § 67, 59, ii. 46, 
 qu. by Luthardt, Apolog, Vortr. Vorles, 2, Notes. 
 
lY.l Oi'igin of moral evil. 135 
 
 this it is which lights up in the human consciousness the 
 sense of an ahnost infinite capacity for pain. 
 
 The presence and power of moral evil in the world has 
 ever afforded matter for the persevering, anxious, weary 
 exercise of human thought. The difiiculties of the problem 
 have not silenced inquiry ; the failure of one generation of 
 thinkers has not discouraged another. Like the movements 
 of the heavenly bodies, or the laws of health, the existence 
 of moral evil is too patent, too importunate a subject, to be 
 permanently set aside by human beings : it exerts over all 
 who seriously consider the meaning and facts of life too 
 irresistible a fascination not to demand from each generation 
 some attempt at accounting for it, however others may 
 have failed to do so. And in dealing with this problem 
 let us observe that there are two fatal tendencies, which 
 beset, on this side and on that, the necessary path of 
 inquiry with the importunity of a resistless fascination. 
 Like Scylla and Charybdis, they divide between them the 
 great majority of those who would attempt a passage ; to 
 escape from the one is generally to fall a victim to the 
 attractions or violence of the other. Our path then lies 
 between the temptation to extenuate the idea of evil, and 
 the temptation to tamper with the idea of God. 
 
136 Spinoza s theory of moral evil. [Lect. 
 
 1. Of these, the more welcome to the spirit of our time 
 is the former. It is impossible to deny that moral evil 
 exists ; but is it impossible to soften that stern idea of evil 
 which haunts the human conscience, and which is sanctioned 
 by Eevelation ? May not moral evil be represented as a 
 necessary product of man's nature and constitution, as the 
 mere expression and symptom of his place among created 
 beings, nay, even as an indispensable condition of his 
 turning his opportunities to the best account and of 
 fulfilling his destiny ? Yes, it has been said, sin in man 
 is only the measure of his failure to achieve ideal or 
 metaphysical perfection. Man is confessedly a finite 
 being ; and the evil which clings to him, or which he does, 
 is but an appropriate feature of his original circumstances. 
 " The good is that which is, or the real : evil begins with 
 that which is not, or with the unreal." Therefore the 
 Unbounded, All-powerful Being is alone the good, be- 
 cause of His Infinity and Almightiness. Creatures are 
 partly good and partly evil ; they are good so far as they 
 exist ; their evil begins with their finitude ; it begins at 
 the point where their little life shades oft through weak- 
 ness into non-existence. In this sense too, " whatever is, 
 is right :" whatever tries to be, and cannot be, is wrong. 
 Sin and weakness, strength and virtue, are interchangeable 
 terms. Man as a moral agent suffers in two ways for this 
 metaphysical imperfection of his life. His knowledge of 
 duty is very limited, so that, while he really aims at what 
 is good he constantly does something less than good, only 
 
IV.] Sin not d?ie to otcr limited knowledge. 
 
 from want of that enlarged information which is denied 
 him by the limited conditions of his being. And he is 
 also tied down to a gross material body, filled with sensual 
 impulses and instincts, which control and overmaster his 
 loftier aspirations. His sensuous nature necessarily and 
 perpetually depresses the level of his thought and action ; 
 and in this depression, thus physically necessitated, from 
 the line of his ideal attainments to that of his actual 
 attainments, consists his sin. 
 
 Now, so far is sin from being the product of im- 
 perfect knowledge, that the imperfection of man's know- 
 ledge is the measure of his innocence. Knowledge is 
 essential to responsibility; the latter can only exist in 
 the ratio of the former. The lower creatures cannot 
 sin against the knowledge which we have, but which 
 they do not possess : we cannot sin against a higher 
 knowledge than that which has been vouchsafed to us. 
 But we know enough to have enormous opportunities for 
 sin open to us ; and when we do sin, our consciences do 
 not whisper that had we known more we might have been 
 .. nocent still. Omniscience is not a condition of virtue; 
 philosophers are not always saints, nor little children 
 always criminals. Nor is sin accurately attributed to the 
 necessary action of our sensuous nature. It is not, by any 
 means, universally or even generally the product of in- 
 surgent senses. Euinous as are the sins for which per- 
 verted sensual instincts furnish the material, there are 
 many sins of the darkest type which have nothing to do 
 
138 Oiu^ sensiioiLs natttre 7iot the so2Lrce of sin. [Lect. 
 
 witli sense. "We should be just as capable of envy and 
 hatred, of ambition and pride, of untruthfulness, or the 
 desire to destroy a fellow-creature, if we had no bodies 
 at all. Sin then, as such, is not the irrepressible product 
 of a sensuous body ; nor is it the imperfection of moral or 
 spiritual effort which alliance to such a body is thought 
 of necessity to imply. In order to practise virtue, it is 
 indeed often necessary, with the Apostle, to keep under 
 our body and bring it into subjection ; ^ but the body does 
 not exert any irresistible power of depression over the 
 higher instincts of the soul, or it would be useless to 
 struggle against it. The seat of sin is in the will, whether 
 sin be chieily spiritual or sensual; the body merely 
 furnishes one of the spheres wherein temptation may be 
 found and sin is possible ; and sin is a much graver thing 
 than any failure to attain ideal goodness wdiich arises from 
 our being weighted with a body of sense. If sin were only 
 inevitable weakness ; if it were nothing more serious than 
 a lowly condition in the scale of being resulting from 
 man's physical circumstances ; the conscience of man would 
 no more torture him on account of it than the conscience 
 of the cripple or the blind accuses him of his misfortune. 
 Sin differs from virtue not as a flower which has been 
 frostbitten differs from a flower which has escaped the 
 frost, but as a self-made devil differs from an angel ; and 
 the body can no more fetter the will of the saint than the 
 triumph of its rebellious senses can be held to measure or 
 diminish the responsibility of the sinner. 
 1 1 Cor. ix. 27. 
 
IV.] Sin not simply a failu7'e to be good, 139 
 
 So faint an estimate of evil may help ns to create a 
 morality that shall accommodate itself to human life as it 
 actually is. It will not furnish us for long with a standard 
 of moral truth which will remind us of what our life actually 
 is not. It may recommend itself at once, and very per- 
 suasively, to our self-love. It were pleasant to think, if 
 we could think, that we have never been in the terrible 
 predicament of opposing and refusing a known standard 
 of goodness; that, at the worst, we* are only pardonable 
 and even interesting instances of failure to be all that we 
 conceivably might have been. To see in evil nothing 
 beyond the result of man's finite nature; to see in it a 
 privation only and not a contradiction of good, is undoubt- 
 edly calculated to put us all on very good terms with our- 
 selves. But is any theory of the kind consistent with the 
 most rudimentary idea of evil ? Surely our consciences 
 teU us that evil is a great deal more than a maimed effort 
 at goodness, more than a privation of goodness which 
 might be but is not. Evil and good are not, so to put it, 
 upon the same line of advance, with only this difference, 
 that while goodness is success, evil is failure. If, for 
 instance, I tell a very deliberate lie, with a view to getting 
 possession of a sum of money by doing so, I surely do 
 something more than fail to reach an ideal of perfect 
 trutlifulness. I move very deliberately in an opposite 
 direction to that of truth ; I do not come short of it ; I 
 contradict and trample it under foot. If nobody ever told 
 a lie without wishing to tell the truth, while yet he failed. 
 
140 The idea of sin in Holy Scriptu7^e. [Lect. 
 
 from defective knowledge, to do so perfectly, this theory 
 of evil as the symptom of man's finite nature might at least 
 claim a hearing. As it is, the real facts of every human 
 conscience are against it. 
 
 And accordingly Holy Scripture speaks of sin in terms 
 which are utterly at variance with any such estimate of 
 moral evil as this. It speaks of " sin having dominion over- 
 us/'^ and of the justified being " dead unto sin;"- but we 
 are not ruled by imperfect forms of goodness, nor do we 
 " die " to moral efforts which were only less successful than 
 our present ones. It speaks of sin as a service, the wages 
 of which is death ;^ as a defilement from which w^e must be 
 cleansed and washed;* as a bondage from which Christ 
 makes us free.^ There is, it appears, a law of sin in our 
 members, to which we maybe brought into captivity;^ and 
 sin it is which constitutes the sting of death, '^ and which 
 in its deliberate and emphatic form is the death of the soul.^ 
 How is all this language, which presupposes an energetic 
 contradiction to exist between sin and holiness, to be 
 reconciled with any representation of sin as being merely 
 imperfection, whether of knowledge or of moral force ? As 
 if there w^ere no sins except those of negligence and omis- 
 sion, no sins of set purpose to do evil; as if there were no 
 such thing as knowing evil to be evil, and dehberately 
 embracing it!^ 
 
 1 Rom. vi. 14. 2 jjom ^j 2. » p^^j^. vi. 23 ; cf. 1 S. John iii. 8. 
 
 * Ps. li. 2-7 ; Isa. i. 16 ; Jerem. iv. 14 ; Acts xxii. 16 ; 1 Cor. vi. 11 ; Rev. 
 i. 5 ; Rev. vii. 14. 
 
 " Rom. vi. 16-22. ^ poj^. vii. 23. ^ 1 Cor. xv. 56. 
 
 « 1 S. John V. 16. » Rom. i. 32. 
 
lY.] Is sin a nee essaiy foil to virticef 141 
 
 Indeed, to represent sin as something due to tlie original 
 imperfection of human nature is to contradict the sanctity 
 and justice of God. God is the Maker of His creatures ; 
 and if creatures are imperfect, as compared with the Creator, 
 it is from the necessity of the case, because the creature is 
 not the Creator. But this inherent or metaphysical imper- 
 fection does not necessarily imply moral imperfection : had 
 it been so, God coidd not have created at all without 
 violating His own attributes. And certainly, if man only 
 sins because his views of absolute good are limited, and his 
 higher aspirations weighed down by the body of sense 
 which encompasses him, the author of that intellectual 
 finiteness and of that sensual frame is the author of man's 
 sin; and God, in creating, forfeits His sanctity, and in for- 
 feiting His sanctity ceases to be the object of religion. 
 
 This conclusion, indeed, is not declined by the Pantheistic 
 philosophy, and by that large body of thought in our day, 
 which is profoundly, because for the most part unconsciously, 
 moulded by it. Sin, we are told, like everything else, is 
 really due to the Divine activity; but, then, sin is not with- 
 out its uses — I had almost said, its merits. It is, forsooth, 
 the stimulant and condition of goodness. As in the world 
 of Heo-elian thou^^ht, truth, we are told, is not to be looked 
 for in any single and direct affirmations, but only as the 
 term of a series of contradictions, which not only may be 
 true together, but are together necessary to express the full 
 truth; so it has been asserted, that in the moral sphere there 
 is a somewhat similar law of contradictories; that it is as 
 
142 Evil not thei^efore good^becaitse overruled. [Lect. 
 
 unphilosopliical to find fault with what is vulgarly described 
 as sin, as it is to keep no terms with what is coarsely described 
 as falsehood. Sin is the necessary foil to goodness: without 
 sin goodness would never be roused into active life. Con- 
 tradiction is a condition of moral life: goodness is not 
 tranquil conformity to law, but energetic struggle against 
 that which contradicts it, and which by contradicting it 
 makes it what it is. " Just as nature is made up of con- 
 trasts, and in it we see light opposed to darkness, and heat 
 to cold, and expansion to concentration, and pleasure to 
 pain, and health to sickness, — even so does the true life of 
 the human soul emerge from deep contrasts ; it is only 
 developed by the encounter between truth and falsehood, 
 between good and evil." ..." Evil is thus a condition, 
 almost an ingredient of good. Goodness would slumber in 
 itself, it would be without the necessary impulse to exertion, 
 unless it were constantly kept on the alert by the antago- 
 nistic energies and excesses of evil." ^ 
 
 This singular travestie of the account which the revela- 
 tion has given of the permission of moral evil in the world, 
 involves a fallacy of confusion. It confounds the good 
 ends which evil, against its nature, may subserve in the 
 purposes of an overruling Providence, with the inherent 
 qualities of evil itself. Certainly it is better for the 
 health of the body that latent disease should shew itself 
 in pronounced illness; and when such illness is over, 
 a patient may be all the stronger and better for having 
 
 ^ Cf. quot. by Klotz, in his art. Slinde. 
 
lY.] Goodness independent of evil. 143 
 
 been ill. But for all that, disease is disease, and not a 
 variegated form of health; and a man in wliom disease 
 had never been latent, and whose constitution had been 
 even monotonously free from its assaults, will be, at least, 
 as well as another who may have happily survived a scarlet 
 fever. What God in His loving Omnipotence may make 
 evil do in spite of its nature is one thing; what it is in itself 
 is another. Yice is not a necessary aliment, it is not even 
 a necessary foil to virtue. The devil is not necessary to 
 the existence of God ; and goodness does not depend either 
 for its beauty or its strength upon the antagonistic efforts 
 of sin. If it were so, we should at once reach the practical 
 conclusion of the Materialistic philosophy, which denies the 
 existence of any free will in man whatever, and sees in all 
 moral actions, whatever their colouring, the inevitable 
 result of antecedents which create them, by as necessary a 
 law as any which rules the world of matter. Upon Mate- 
 rialistic principles, the murderer Traupmann ouglit never 
 to have been executed: he was no more responsible for his 
 atrocities than a flash of lightning or a wave would be for 
 the destruction of a human life. But upon the principles 
 of the aesthetic Pantheism, it might even have been ques- 
 tioned whether French society did not on the whole gain 
 by his horrible activity: and whether one who had done 
 so much to exhibit the virtue of respect for human life in 
 high rslief, by so emphatically contradicting it, was not, in 
 consideration of his services, entitled to receive some higher 
 and more substantial reward than a reprieve of the penalty 
 which he actually suffered. 
 
144 Evil, if necessary, must be condo7ied, [Lect. 
 
 Indeed, it is here that we see how irreconcileable any such 
 theory is with the plainest instincts of a healthy conscience. 
 If evil is necessary to the existence of good, why should 
 conscience condemn evil? How can conscience condemn 
 that which is necessary to the good which it approves? 
 How, if we are to pursue this line of thought, can we ulti- 
 mately avoid acquiescing in a theory which, denying all 
 distinctions of right and wrong as of the nature of baseless 
 prejudice, sees in evil, as in good, only an energetic mani- 
 festation of life apart from any moral colouring whatever? 
 A last protest may indeed be made to the effect that man's 
 business is to contradict the metaphysical necessity for evil 
 by the moral demand that it should be resisted. But this 
 very demand, if it is to be enforced, must proceed upon the 
 serious conviction that moral evil is evil; that it is a some- 
 thing which need not be; and that if we will, we are indi- 
 vidually and perfectly free to accept or to reject it. 
 
 Theories such as these are in truth expedients for repre- 
 senting sin as being less serious than it is; for softening 
 the repulsive contrasts which it presents to holiness; for 
 securing to it a right to feel at home in human conduct 
 and in the human soul. Every such theory attempts to 
 put forth a more or less disguised justification and apology 
 on behalf of sin, at the bar of intellect, that sin may, if 
 possible, be received without dishonour, if it be not wel- 
 comed at the court of conscience. But conscience, when she 
 is not benumbed or asleep, must protest implacably against 
 these attempts to make sin respectable. She can see in 
 
IV.] Doctrine of Tzuo Pj^inciples, 145 
 
 tliem only so many invitations addressed to the single sonl, 
 bidding it look tolerantly or fondly on the snre instrnment 
 of its degradation and rnin; so many invitations addressed 
 to human society, bidding it recognize or welcome the foe 
 who is sworn to impede and to destroy the indispensable 
 conditions of its coherence and progress. 
 
 2. It has indeed been the dread of softening down the 
 idea of evil which has led the human conscience in very 
 early ages to tamper with the idea of God. The instinctive 
 recoil from the one error has plunged it into the other. 
 The physical evil of " pain, of disease, of death, inflicts 
 itself upon the senses; and conscience accounts for physical 
 evil by tracing it to moral evil. Conscience cannot deny 
 the malignity of moral evil without dethroning herself. 
 But why should moral evil exist ? The All-Holy could not 
 have created it: to have done so would have been to cease 
 to be Himself. But why did He permit it ? And who gave 
 it being, that He should permit it? 
 
 In ages and civilizations when the idea of God was im- 
 perfect or impoverished, men accounted for the existence 
 of evil by ascribing it to a being or principle, coeval with 
 God, independent of Him, and of course opposed to Him. 
 Whether this evil was supposed to be matter out of which 
 the Good God had fashioned the world, or whether it was 
 conceived of as something more sjpiritual, the object and 
 origin of the system was identical. It was an effort to 
 account for the great perplexing mystery — the existence 
 of evil. It is impossible, argued these ancient thinkers, 
 
 L 
 
146 Ormuzd a7id Ahrimaii. [Lect. 
 
 that moral life and death, that good and evil, can flow from 
 
 a single sonrce. It is impossible that a Holy God can have 
 
 been the author of evil. Evil, then, must be referred to 
 
 some other origin: it must have had an author of its own. 
 
 So far we cannot but follow; but then the argument appeals, 
 
 in order to sustain its own false inference, to the gigantic 
 
 proportions which evil has actually assumed. Considering 
 
 how world-wide and imperial is the sway of evil, must not 
 
 evil, it asks, be referred to some person, principle, force, or 
 
 tendency, higher and older than created things; to some 
 
 almighty source, existing side by side with the Author and 
 
 Source of goodness, in eternal contradiction to His mind 
 
 and work? 
 
 If we take the ancient Parsee doctrine as a sample, we 
 
 find, in the lines of the Bundehesch, the good and evil 
 
 principles — Ormuzd and Ahriman — contrasted as follows: — 
 
 " Ormuzd is the hght; 
 This Hght is without beginning; 
 Ormuzd is on high, 
 Ormuzd is Holy, 
 Ormuzd hath all knowledge." 
 
 On the other hand — 
 
 "Ahriman is in darkness; 
 This darkness is without beginning; 
 Ahriman is in the depths; 
 Ahriman delightetli in strife; 
 Ahriman hath only a derived knowledge."^ 
 
 Here, while Ahriman is in respect of knowledge the 
 inferior of Ormuzd, they are represented as coeval; al- 
 
 ^ Ahardanesch, qu. by Hanneberg from Jos. Miiller, art. Parsismus. 
 
IV.] Anti-dualism of Isaiah. 147 
 
 tliougli the modern Parsees, especially when in conflict 
 with Christianity, have tended, by exalting Ornmzd alone, 
 to approach more and more closely to a practical Monothe- 
 ism.^ But there is no real question as to the practical 
 Dualism of the earlier doctrine, which prevailed in Persia 
 at least from the date of Darius Hystaspes to that of 
 Alexander the Great, and again after the fall of the 
 Parthian dynasty, — the doctrine which is confronted in the 
 pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Isaiah, the God of 
 Israel proclaims — 
 
 " I am the Lord, 
 And there is none else : 
 
 There is no God beside Me 
 
 I form the hght and create darkness; 
 I make peace and create evil; 
 I the Lord do all these things."^ 
 
 Here we have a revelation probably designed to protect 
 
 the faith of Israel ac^ainst the Dualistic influences to which 
 
 it would be exposed during the later period of the Captivity. 
 
 The Eternal Lord of Heaven was much more ancient than 
 
 this antagonism of good and evil which meets men's eyes 
 
 in the world, and which suggested the faith from which 
 
 was evolved the Zendavesta. The evil x^rinciple itself 
 
 was in this sense only created by Him, that He had formed 
 
 the wills which, in their perverted freedom, gave it birth. 
 
 " I am the Lord, and there is none else." 
 
 1 Cf. Hanneberg, who quotes Wilson, " The Parsee Keligion," Bombay, 
 1843, p. 107. It would seem that the superiority of Ormuzd was never 
 supposed to imply his power of preventing the birth of Ahriman or of 
 annihilating him. 
 
 2 Isa. xlv. 5, 6, 7. 
 
148 Dicalism is, in fact, Atheism. [Lect. 
 
 In Cliristiau times we find S. Paul insisting upon the 
 truism, as it appears to us, tliat " every creature of God is 
 good, and nothing to be despised," ^ as a reason for reject- 
 ing certain distinctions of food whicli were insisted on by 
 some ancient ascetics at Ephesus. But here he is really 
 combating another form of the doctrine of Two Principles ; 
 which held matter to be the seat and source of evil, and 
 certain kinds of food to be peculiarly representative of the 
 grossness of matter. Wlien Augustine, in a later age, as a 
 still unconverted young man, giving the freest license both 
 to sensual passions and to intellectual enterprise, was 
 casting about for a theory which would at once countenance 
 his excesses, and furnish him with a working philosophical 
 explanation of the universe, he found it in Manicheeism. 
 Manicheeism was the Dualism which had acquired a 
 Christian flavour by coming into contact with Christianity ; 
 and we may form some idea of the strength and fascina- 
 tion of the theory, by observing how tenacious was its hold 
 upon the strong and beautiful mind of the greatest of the 
 Fathers, even when the full light of Catholic truth was 
 already breaking upon him. 
 
 Isaiah's words wHl have already suggested that seriously 
 to believe in two eternal principles is fatal to serious belief 
 in the existence of God. God is the one Self-existent 
 Being ; the Maker of all things, visible and invisible. To 
 assert that another — whether essence, person, or even 
 matter — existed eternally side by side with God, is to deny 
 
 1 1 Tim. iv. 4. 
 
IV.] The idea of evil impaired by Dualism. 149 
 
 God's first and necessary prerogatwe, as the Alone Eternal, 
 and Self-existent. If God is to be screened in human 
 thought from the blasphemy which would credit Him 
 with the origination of evil, it must be by some doctrine 
 which, unlike Dualism, does not virtually annihilate Him 
 in order to do so. 
 
 But the doctrine of Two Principles does not succeed even 
 in its main object, namely, the protection and affirmation 
 of the unimpaired idea of evil itself. Evil is, in its quaintly 
 perverted estimate, rather a gTowth of nature than the free 
 product of a created will : evil has a positive substance of 
 its own. Evil must therefore be conquered by a physical 
 rather than a spiritual or moral treatment. This would 
 seem to have been the idea of these mistaken ascetics 
 at Colossae, ^ whom S. Paul observed and reproved. And the 
 error leads to consequences beyond itself. If evil is 
 physical, there is no more reason for distress at a habit 
 of lying, than at tuberculation of the lungs. If sin is 
 physical, remedies may or may not succeed ; and a moral 
 struggle is on the whole less reasonable than a torpid 
 resignation. 
 
 At any rate, it may be said, we of this generation are 
 not Dualists : and what good is to be done by disinterring 
 and gibbeting the corpses of ancient errors ? But let us 
 recollect that when error is buried as a formal theory, it 
 often leaves behind it a miasma which infects the world 
 of thought for many a succeeding generation. A¥e practi- 
 1 Col. ii. 22, 20. 
 
150 Dicalisin in eveiyday life. [Lect. 
 
 cally affirm a second evil principle in the universe when 
 we acquiesce in the notion that evil in ourselves or in 
 others, in individuals or in societies, is invincible. We do 
 not tallv of a second principle ; we assume one. We 
 assume not merely a powerful but an unconquerable devil, 
 when we despair of expelling, by God's grace, that which 
 is evil in ourselves or in others. We bow, as we say, to 
 the inevitable ; we recognize such and such tendencies of 
 the times. They are perhaps at issue with what we know 
 to be right. But there they are ; the current flows all one 
 way and with increasing strength, and we say that it is 
 useless to attempt to make head against it. Instead of over- 
 coming evil with good, like the Apostle, we philosophically 
 resign ourselves to being overcome with evil. But our 
 notion of the invincibility of sin and error is at issue with 
 our still professed faith in the one All-Powerful and Holy 
 God. Our faint-heartedness, our despair, our abject fatalism 
 in presence of evil, within and around us, is properly a 
 relic of the old Dualistic leaven, which sees in evil the 
 resistless play, the unconquerable energy of an eternal 
 principle ; which refers it to a power that, could it have 
 existed, would have made God impossible. 
 
 No. There must be no tampering with the idea and 
 character of God ; with His Unity, with His Omnipotence, 
 with His Sanctity. To deny these is to destroy, in human 
 thought, the ascertained object of religion. If there is one 
 God, All-powerful and moral, and if moral evil is a fact in 
 the universe, the existence and nature of moral evil must 
 
lY.] Desire the i^aw matej^ial of sin. 151 
 
 be in some way accounted for by serious Theists, if it can 
 be accounted for at all, without impugning tlie morality 
 and tlie Omnipotence of God. 
 
 11. 
 
 Wliat, then, is sin in itself? What representation of 
 it will neither obliterate the lines of moral truth, nor do 
 injustice to the Sanctity or the Omnipotence of God ? 
 
 S. James, in the passage which is before us, furnishes 
 us with materials for answering this question. He says 
 that desire when it hath conceived brinsjeth forth sin. He 
 thus places the origin of moral evil in the created will, of 
 which desire is the moral ingredient. Desire is, indeed, 
 the raw material of moral life. It is the plastic force 
 which may become, under different circumstances, either 
 sanctity or sin : and thus S. Augustine has defined 
 virtue as " love or desire ruled by true order." Desire is 
 part of the original outfit of every human being; a 
 sympathetic force by which the various instincts and 
 faculties of our nature are drawn towards a something 
 external to itself What is that something? In man's 
 unfallen state of old, and in his state of perfectly restored 
 sanctity hereafter, God is the true object of all human 
 desires : man desires God for His own sake, and all created 
 objects only for the sake of God. In the original design 
 
152 SclfisJmess at the root of sin. [Lect. 
 
 of God, desire in the moral world corresponds to the law of 
 attraction in the physical ; and the perfected saint, in all 
 the activity of his moral and intellectual life, moves 
 around the great Centre of his adoration with an undeviat- 
 ing regularity, such as is that of the planet circling in 
 its orbit around its parent sun. But the planet cannot 
 modify or weaken the attraction which governs it. It 
 cannot plunge anarchically through space, seeking a place 
 in some other system where it may move around some 
 other sun, or itself become the centre of other satellites ; 
 whereas desire, being moral, does not bind free agents to 
 loyal revolutions around their true Centre by any such 
 necessity. Man may at his option cease to desire God : he 
 may, in the stead of God, desire one of God's creatures for 
 its own sake, and with the A^ehemence of an absorbing 
 passion. 1 And since no other creature can really take 
 God's place, man thus comes to make himself his own 
 centre ; to view all persons and events relatively to him- 
 self ; to think of God, if at all, as only one of the points 
 on the circumference of his own petty and fictitious 
 universe. Wlien desire is thus perverted, by being wedded 
 to the things of time and sense, as if they could really 
 satisfy the yearnings of the soul, it " bringeth forth sin." 
 Like an atmosphere charged with infection, desire spent 
 upon created things is pregnant with sin: it implies 
 that idolatrous surrender of self to creatures, that passionate 
 claim upon creatures on behalf of self, which in the end 
 
 1 S. John ii. 17, e-KiBvyla tov Kdafxov. Tit. ii. 12; Rom. vii. 7, 8. 
 
lY.] Other aspects of an act of sin, 153 
 
 breaks tlie bond between God and the soul.^ And lience 
 an act, or series of acts, whether of thought, or w^ord, or 
 deed, to which in its freedom the will consents, and which 
 contradict the moral order of the universe. 
 
 And this is sin. Sin, to be complete, need not become 
 speech or action : a formed desire, deliberately assented to 
 by the will, constitutes sin. " He that looketh on a 
 woman," says om^ Lord, " to desire her, hath committed 
 adultery with her already in his heart." ^ Indeed, it is 
 the internal act, and not the material product of the act, 
 which is chiefly of moral importance. Wliat is the precise 
 form or turn of the inward act ? Here the beautiful and 
 suggestive words, which are used to express the idea 
 of sin in the sacred language, but Avhich are untranslate- 
 able into our clumsier Western tongue, will help us. In 
 the fifty-first Psalm, for instance, besides the generic 
 expression for evil,^ there are three words which describe 
 different aspects of the idea of sin. Of these, one implies 
 that God's will being the aim which man rightly pursues, 
 sin is a missing his true goal in life.* A second regards 
 
 ^ This aspect of sin has been well re -stated in Jul. Miiller's Lehr. v. d. 
 Sunde, i. i. c. 3. 
 - S. Matt. V. 28. 
 ^ y"l, V. 6, broadly opposed to ^^[^ — Gen, xxiv. 50; Levit. xxvii. 10. In 
 
 a more emphatic moral sense, Prov. viii. 13; Ps. vii. 10. j;j^"i means 
 
 originally to be noisy, tempestuous; the transition to the idea of moral 
 disorder appears in yy-i, which is primarily used of breaking in pieces with 
 
 a crash, Job xxxiv. 24, Ps. ii. 9 ; then of evil generally, and finally, in the 
 Hiphil especially, of evil action. — J, Mtiller, Lehr. v. d. Siinde, i. i. c. 2. 
 
 * i<tDn? V, 5. The primary idea seems to be that of stumbling on the way 
 to a goal — Prov. xix. 2 ; in which is implied the missing of the object of 
 
154 Sin contradicts Eternal Law, [Lect. 
 
 sin as a twisting or perversion of tlie will from tlie right 
 way.^ A third brands it as rebellious transgression of 
 Divine law," of a covenant with God, of the law w^hich 
 man is bound to obey. The New Testament ex]Dressions 
 substantially correspond ; and they have tliis in common. 
 Sin is an offence against moral truth ; known, and contra- 
 dicted although known. " Sin," says S. Augustine, " is 
 something said or done or desired in contradiction to the 
 Eternal Law." 
 
 Why the " Eternal " Law ? This question can only be 
 answered when we reflect on the nature of moral truth. 
 Moral truth is not like the laws and facts of the physical 
 world ; it is not something which might have been other- 
 wise than as it is, had God so willed. God was under no 
 necessity to make either one or a million suns or planets, 
 or to furnish them with a particular temperature and 
 particular inhabitants. Why not ? Because there was 
 nothing in His necessary nature which constrained Him to 
 do so. He created in His freedom: He created as He 
 created in His freedom : He mi^ht have created otherwise : 
 He was free not to have created at all. But could God 
 ever have sanctioned you or me in saying that that which 
 
 search — Pro v. viii. 36. Not that '^\^T\ is used only or chiefly of sins of 
 infirmity, whether of thought or will : it is often applied to the gravest sins, 
 and implies that which is characteristic of all sin, namely, that sin is a moral 
 action, in which man misses the aim for which he was created by God. 
 ^ 1*"!^' ^- ^' fj^o^ riiyj to be bent or distorted, implies evil considered as 
 
 ' T T r 
 
 departure from man's appointed path. — Job. xiii. 26 ; Gen. iv. 13. 
 
 " yK^S. V. 5. y^S primarily implies faithless rebellion against a covenant, 
 
 as in Isa. i. 2, xliii. 27 ; Jerem. iii. 13; Amos iv. 4; 1 Kings xii. 19, &c. 
 
I Y.] and therefo^^e the self-existent natnre of God. 1 5 5 
 
 we know to be false is true ? Why not ? Because, in 
 sanctioning us, God would be contradicting, not a law 
 which He might have made other than as He has made it, 
 but a necessary truth of His own eternal nature. A moral 
 truth is like a mathematical axiom ; we see it intuitively, 
 and we do this because it is necessarily true, and as being 
 necessarily true, is also a truth of God's eternal, nature. 
 Can any reasonable man, for instance, without destroying 
 and uprooting the very constitution of the mind which 
 God has^ given him, conceive that under any j^ossible 
 circumstances it could ever have been true that things which 
 are equal to the same are not equal to one another ? If 
 not ; then, here we have an Eternal Truth. And if this 
 be an Eternal Truth, it is, as such, a real part of God's 
 Eternal Nature ; since if this be denied, we must admit that 
 there are eternal truths independent of God, and existing 
 eternally apart from Him. Would not this in effect be a 
 denial of His solitary self-existence ? Either God does not 
 exist, or all that is eternal is God. But if pure mathe- 
 matical truth, as being eternally true, be thus Divine, moral 
 truth is not less so. If we cannot believe that a lie was 
 ever right, this is because veracity is an eternal law of 
 the Divine nature ; and this applies to the whole moral 
 law, which is, in reality, the Divine nature formulated 
 into rules which suit the conditions of creaturely existence. 
 Thus, given the parental relationship, it never could have 
 been right to dishonour a fatlier or a mother : given human 
 life, murder could never have been other than criminal: 
 
156 Permission of evil by God. [Lect. 
 
 given tlie responsibility of transmitting the gift of life, and 
 adnltery, which trifles with that responsibility, could never 
 have been condoned : given the idea of personal rights, of 
 property, and stealing is necessarily condemned. And 
 thus it is that sin does not contradict a rule which God 
 has made of one kind, but which He might have made of 
 another; it contradicts a rule which, in its principle, is 
 necessary and eternal ; a rule which does not depend even 
 upon the will of God Himself, since it embodies and 
 expresses His Divine and unchanging Nature ; a rule which 
 accordingly it is impossible to contradict, without running 
 counter to, and, so far as we can, setting at naught and 
 destroying the very being and nature of God Himself. 
 " Against Thee only have I sinned," is the voice of the 
 sinner's deepest knowledge of himself. And it was this 
 which led ancient divines to say, that if, im" imijossibile, 
 moral evil could be pushed to a point of sufficient exaggera- 
 tion, it would annihilate God. By this saying, they ex- 
 pressed the vital and fundamental antagonism which 
 exists between sin and the Divine natiu-e. 
 
 N'ow, such an account of moral evil cannot be said to 
 attenuate its malignity; but is it equally carefid of the 
 character of God ? If evil be thus antagonistic to God, 
 how can God, at once Almighty and All-holy, have allowed 
 it to exist ? As All-holy, He must abhor it ; as Almighty, 
 He surely might have proscribed what He abhors ? 
 
 The answer is, that, notwithstanding the inherent quality 
 of evil, the possibility of its existence is, so far as we can 
 
lY.] Sin an abuse of God's genei^osity. 157 
 
 see, a needful condition of true moral freedom. God miglit 
 have created a universe ruled from first to last by physical 
 la^Y, and so incapable of deviation from tlie true rule of its 
 action. In such an universe, moral evil would have found 
 no place, only because there would have been no creatures 
 properly capable of moral good. Our experience tells us 
 that God has not chosen to stint down His creative activity 
 to these proportions : that we are free agents, is not more 
 a matter of faith, than of experience. We know that God has 
 created beings whose higli privilege it is to be able freely 
 to choose Him as then king, as the accepted Master of their 
 whole inward life ; but if this privilege is to be real, it also 
 carries with it the implied power of rejecting Him. The 
 alternative risk is the inevitable condition of the consum- 
 mate honour: it is actually a substantial part of the 
 honour. A moral being must at least have a capacity for 
 disobedience if he is to be able freely to obey. 
 
 If, then, God has permitted evil, it is not because He has 
 ceased to be Himself, but because His generosity has been 
 abused. The source and root of moral evil is to be found, 
 not in the Good God, but in the abused freedom of the 
 creature, whether it be man or angel. It were hard indeed 
 to blaspheme God for His generosity ; to complain that He 
 has made us men and not brutes or stones, because, for- 
 sooth, as a race, as well as in our individual lives, we have 
 turned His bounty against Himself, and made the great- 
 ness of His gift the measure of our degradation. 
 
 It will be urfred that God must have "foreseen" the 
 
1 58 6". P aid and S.AtLgzistine on permitted sin. [Lect. 
 
 abuse that would follow upon His gift of freedom. Cer- 
 tainly. But those who believe in His wisdom and His 
 love at all, must surely believe that He foresaw much else. 
 They will believe with S. Paul that if, in the event, sin 
 has abounded, grace has much more abounded.^ They 
 will believe with S. Auo-ustine that " God knew it to be 
 more agreeable to His almighty goodness even to bring 
 good out of evil, than not to permit evil to exist." ^ He 
 might be trusted to strike the balance of advantages between 
 a universe ruled only by physical law and a universe so 
 oj)en to the possible invasion of evil as to be darkened 
 by its actual presence and apparent victory, but withal 
 illuminated by the remedy, which, in the long run, was 
 to be much more than equal to grappling with the disease. 
 Sin might be tolerated, if the Eternal Son was to'redeem 
 the world. We know at any rate how the world's Euler 
 has decided, and it is scarcely reasonable to complain that 
 He has not admitted us to share all the reasons which 
 governed His decision. 
 
 III. 
 
 Here, then, I repeat the statement with which I began, 
 that if a religion is to be real life-controlling power, it 
 
 ^ Rom. V. 18, 19, 20, ov Be iTrXeovaaep rj ajxaprla, virepeirepi(Xcrev(Tev r] xctpis. 
 
 2 De Cor. et Gr. c. 10. Qui creavit omnia bona valde et mala ex bonis 
 exoritura esse prasscivit ; scivit magis ad omnipotentissimam suam bonitatem 
 pertinere etiam de malis benefacere quam mala esse non sinere. 
 
lY.] Religion must grapple zuitk sin. 159 
 
 must practically recognize the fact of sin. For, since sin 
 provokes God's necessary displeasure on the one hand, and 
 destroys man's power and even his wish to seek God on 
 the other, its direct effect is to break up that bond between 
 God and man in which religion essentially consists. Eeli- 
 gion, therefore, must deal with sin, not as if it were making a 
 supererogatory exertion, but as a condition of its ow^n exist- 
 ence. It must remove this fatal obstacle to its proper activity, 
 if it is to exist at all. Not less necessary is this practical 
 recognition of sin by religion, if religion is to be of any 
 real benefit to society. Go out into the streets of this 
 great capital, or read the daily journals which register the 
 thought and incidents of our national life, and what are 
 the two spectres which meet you most constantly ? Are 
 they not suffering and crime ? And what is suffering, at 
 least in the main, but the effect and shadow of sin ; if not 
 of the sufferer's own sin, yet at least of some physical or 
 social legacy from a parent's error ? What is crime in its 
 most venial form, but sin, prompted by suffering and 
 organized and solidified, until in its brutal exuberance it 
 threatens even the existence of society? Has religion 
 nothing to say to the moral mischief which is the parent 
 of these dark phantoms ? Is she dreaming ? Is she power- 
 less ? Is she abandoning her high hope and mission of 
 saving humanity from its worst enemies ? 
 
 It is here tliat true religion parts company altogether 
 with certain phases of so-termed religious thought, which 
 are not without an ambition to be considered at least the 
 
1 60 '' Religions'' philosophies zukick ig?iore sin. [Lect. 
 
 rudiments of some future religion of civilization. Doubt- 
 less they embody mucli which recommends them, at any 
 rate, to the interest of educated people. They are philo- 
 sophical; they are enterprising; they are in good taste ; they 
 occupy a large amount of attention in our journals and 
 periodicals. Nor are they insensible to the evil of crime, 
 considered as a cause of social disturbance and danger. 
 They would sometimes deal more hardly with it than 
 would be morally possible for men who had a deeper insight 
 into the relative responsibility of criminals. But ignoring the 
 awful yet blessed doctrines of Eedemption and Grace, they 
 have no remedy for sin ; no remedy, that is, of any practical 
 value ; and after all, sin is the great fact with which they 
 ought to deal. Animated speculation on religious topics, 
 careful reproduction of the external drapery of scenes in 
 early sacred history, quick capacity for analyzing and deline- 
 ating sentiment, is very welcome in its place. It has indis- 
 putably a literary value ; but it does not help us to confront 
 the stern realities of this human world. The religion which 
 has no fixed doctrines, or scarcely any ; no code of absolute 
 truth, to be taught and suffered for at all costs ; no word of 
 heart-searching warning, and yet of tenderest consolation 
 for sinners, — is not really a religion at all. It is at best 
 a very one-sided philosophy. Its endeavours to deal Avith 
 the great heart-sores of humanity remind us of some great 
 physician who, at the bedside of a patient, writhing in pro- 
 tracted agony, should airily discuss his own last excursion 
 in the Alps, or the last debate in Parliament, or at best the 
 
I^-] yestis teaches the nature of sin. i6i 
 
 most recent resolution arrived at by the IM^etropolitan Board 
 of Health. 
 
 The religion of Jesus Christ, as taught by His Apostles, 
 does not thus trifle with the seriousness of sin. It begins by 
 deepening the sense of sin, the perception of its real area 
 and power in human life. It adds poignancy to the feeling of 
 shame and guilt which follows upon deliberate sinful action 
 in a healthy conscience. By the Mosaic laAV there w^as a 
 knowledge of sin. ^ By the teaching and example of Jesus 
 Christ there is a much truer and deeper knowledge of it.^ 
 That faultless and unapproached Life which we study in the 
 pages of the Gospels, brought home to the heart as w^ell as 
 to the understanding by the secret teaching of the Eternal 
 Spirit, endows the Christian with an ideal of sanctity alto- 
 gether his own.^ Around the Sermon on the Mount, or the 
 last discourse in the supper-room, tliere is an unearthly 
 atmosphere of purity and holiness, which lights up in the 
 soul, with microscopic distinctness, the consciousness of 
 secret evil, more perfectly than could any code of precepts. 
 One only appearing among us in human form has been 
 able to ask the tremendous question, " Which of you con- 
 vinceth Me of sin ?"'^ And as we gaze on Him, holy, 
 harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, in His purity, 
 His courage. His humility, His tenderness, His majestic 
 moral strength. His fearless loyalty to truth, His vast 
 charity, we see that wdiicli reveals us to ourselves. At the 
 feet of the Lamb without blemish and immaculate, we feel, 
 
 1 Rom. iii. 20. 2 S. Matt. v. 21-48. » S. John viii. 12. * S. Joliuviii. 46. 
 
 M 
 
1 62 ycsKs teaches the consequences of sin. [Lect. 
 
 with Job, that the report of God's sanctity has been at 
 length exchanged for sight ;^ we exclaim with the Apostle, 
 " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." ^ 
 
 Nor does Jesus Christ stop here. He reveals, as does no 
 other, not merely the fact and malignity of sin, but its 
 consequences. The sternest things that have ever been 
 said, as regards sin's prospects in another world, first 
 passed the tenderest lips that ever proclaimed God's love to 
 man.^ Our Lord would not leave the revelation of the 
 penal future to His Apostles: He took the unpopularity of 
 making such a revelation upon Himself. No unbelieving 
 criticism can really touch the plain meaning of the tremen- 
 dous words in which the All- Merciful One has depicted 
 the case of a moral being, stiffened by final impenitence 
 into a j)ermanent self-torturing rebellion against Eternal 
 Justice and Eternal Love. But for that awful measure of 
 sin, the saying concerning Judas had been a paradox ; " It 
 were good for that man if he had never been born." '^ 
 
 Yet if Jesus Christ had only taught us the penalties of 
 sin. He would but have enhanced the terrors of the ancient 
 law. Whereas, in reality, He has made it possible for us 
 to look at moral evil as it is. We Christians can dare to 
 face it, for He has brought us both a pardon and an antidote. 
 His cross and passion are a revelation as well as a cure. 
 A\^ien dying, He shews us Avhat sin is. At least to those 
 who take Him at His word, and see in Him One Higher 
 
 1 Job xlii. 5. 2 s. Luke V. 8. 
 
 3 S. Mark ix. 43-48 ; S. Matt. xxv. 46 ; S. John v. 29. 
 
 * S. Matt. xxvi. 24; S. Mark xiv. 21. 
 
I^-] yesiis is the Atoiiemeiit for sin. 163 
 
 than the sons of men, the Cross will surely have this mean- 
 ing. Why could not the Holy One, manifested to His 
 reasonable creatures in a form of sense, have ended a life of 
 beneficence and glory by such a visible ascent to heaven as 
 was that of the Tishbite ? Why those years of privation 
 and sorrow, those sufferings and insults, that shame and 
 scorn ? Why the prostration in the garden, and the Wounds 
 and the Blood, and the agony lengthened out by ingenious 
 cruelty, and the ostentatious exultation and triumph of the 
 hosts of evil, and the darkness and gloom of the closing 
 scene ? Woidd not this mean failure, if it had not been 
 proved by the event to mean a victory, wherein the Divine 
 Sufferer Avas triumphing, as His Apostle notes, over the 
 associated powers of darkness ? ^ That unfathomed pain is 
 the true measure of sin for Christians. In that keen sensi- 
 tiveness, in that strength of a self-sacrificing Will, in that 
 exhaustive anticipation of and intellectual familiarity aa ith 
 the coming Agony, followed by so entire an acceptance of 
 it, we Christians discern the real character of the adversary 
 which the Perfect Moral Being conquered by His voluntary 
 death. From that fountain of pardon and strength which 
 He opened upon Calvary, all" the resources which His 
 Church can wield in her struggle with His great enemy, 
 and in her continuation of His work of reconciliation and 
 peace, are consistently derived. ISTo virtue exists in the world 
 which is not His; no cleansing which His Blood has not 
 made good. Standing beneath the Cross, we can never 
 
 1 Col. ii. 15. 2 Acts iv. 12. 
 
1 64 The sense of sin in a faithful Christian. [Lect. 
 
 deem moral evil less or other than the greatest, if it be not 
 rather the only evil. Kneeling before the Crucified, be our 
 sense of guilt what it may, we can never despair; since 
 the comj)lete revelation of the malignity of sin is also 
 and simultaneously a revelation of the Love that knows 
 no bounds. ^ 
 
 It is these concrete truths, and no abstract considera- 
 tions, which really keep alive in the Christian heart an 
 abhorrence and dread of moral evil. With that evil, even 
 when all has been pardoned, every Christian life is, from 
 first to last, in varying degrees, a struggle. There are great 
 conflicts, and there are periods of comparative repose; 
 there are days of failure as well as days of victory ; there 
 are quickenings of buoyant thanldul hope, and there are 
 hours of a discouragement which is only not despair. But 
 two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes 
 light of any known sin,^ and he ncA^er admits it to be 
 invincible.^ While he constantly endeavours, by the 
 sanctification of his desires, by entwining his affections more 
 and more around the Source of goodness, to destroy sin in 
 the bud, or rather in its root and principle, he is never off 
 his guard; never surprised at new proofs of his natural 
 weakness; never disposed to underrate either his dangers 
 or his strength. He knows that now, as eighteen centuries 
 ago, he wrestles not against flesh and blood,* but against 
 principalities and powers that bear him no good will: he 
 
 1 2 Cor. V. 14 ; Eoiu. v. 15. MS. John iii. 9 ; v. 18. 
 
 »1 Cor. X. 12. *Eph. vi. 12. 
 
IV.] The victory over sill. 165 
 
 knows, that as at the first so now, " if any man sin, we have 
 an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, 
 and He is the propitiation for our sins." ^ And thus, in his 
 inmost life, he is at once anxious and hopeful; confident 
 yet without presumption ; alive to all tliat is at stake day 
 by day, hoiK by hour ; yet stayed upon the thought, nay, 
 upon the felt presence of a Love Which has not really left 
 him to himself. And at last, when it seems best to that 
 Eternal Love, the day of struggle draws to its close, ^ and 
 the towers of the Everlasting City come into view; the city 
 within wdiose precincts intellectual error cannot penetrate, 
 and moral failure is unknown. " Thanks be to God Wlio 
 giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." ^ 
 
 Your alms are asked to-day on behalf of the additional 
 clergy needed by this great parish with its twenty thousand 
 poor.* You will feel that this is an opportunity of testing 
 the earnestness of your desire to struggle against our com- 
 mon enemy, whether in the world or in your own hearts, 
 by freely placing your means at His disposal, Who is its 
 only real Conqueror. 
 
 1 1 S. John ii. 1. 22 Tim. iv. 6. ^ i Coj., xv. 57. 
 
 * St. James's, Piccadilly, Additional Curates' Fund. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 jpiitf) Suntiag in Uent. 
 
 PEAYEE, THE CHAEACTEEISTIC ACTION OE 
 EELIGION". 
 
 S. Matt. vii. 7. 
 Ash and it shall be given you. 
 
 T) ELIGION is the bond between the soul and God, which 
 ■^^ sin, by virtue of its very nature, breaks up and 
 destroys. It is of importance to inquire whether man can 
 strengthen and intensify that which he can, it seems, so 
 easily ruin if he will. Does his power lie only in the 
 direction of destruction ? Has he no means of invigorating 
 and repairing a tie, in itself so precious, yet in some 
 respects so frail ? The answer lies in our Lord's promise. 
 Prayer is the act by which man, conscious at once of his 
 weakness and of his immortality, puts himself into real 
 and effective communication with the Almighty, the Eternal, 
 the Self-Existent God. I say, effective communication. 
 Eor prayer, as our Lord teaches in the text and elsewhere, 
 is not without results. God answers prayer in many ways. 
 His answers to the soul's petition for health and strength 
 
Lect. Y.] Prayer the language of all religions. 1 6 7 
 
 are collectively described as grace ; grace being the invisible 
 influence whereby He on His part strengthens and quickens 
 the tie which binds the petitioner to Himself. " Ask and it 
 shall be gii^en you." Prayer then braces the bond of religion 
 from the side of man ; and grace, God's highest answer to 
 prayer, braces it in a different and far more powerful 
 sense on the part of God. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the practice of prayer is 
 CO- extensive with the idea of religion. Wherever man has 
 believed a higher power to exist, he has not merely dis- 
 cussed the possibility of entering into converse with such 
 a power ; he has assumed, as a matter of course, that he can 
 do so. Upon desert plains and wild promontories, not less 
 than in crowded thoroughfares and gorgeous temples, priest- 
 hoods, and kings, and multitudes have taken prayer for 
 granted, as being the most practical as Avell as the most 
 interesting and solemn concern of life. The surface of the 
 earth, of parts of our own island, is still covered with the 
 relics of some among these ancient worships. And if the 
 implied conceptions of deity were degraded, and the rites 
 cruel, or inhuman, or impure, and the minds of the 
 worshippers not seldom imbruted by the very acts which 
 should have raised them heavenward; still the idea of 
 worship as the natural correlative of belief in the super- 
 human was always there. To know that a higher Being 
 existed, and interested Himself, in whatever way, in the 
 destinies of man, was to feel that it was at once a right 
 and a duty to approach Him. 
 
1 68 Prayer in Holy Scripture. [Lect. 
 
 And as we pass the historical lines within which, as 
 Christians believe, mankind has enjoyed a knowledge of 
 God's successive revelations of His true self and His true 
 will, ^^e find that prayer is the prominent feature, the 
 characteristic exercise of man's highest life. Sacrifice 
 begins at the very gates of Eden.^ The life of early 
 Patriarchs is described as a " walking with God," a con- 
 tinuous reference of thought and aspiration to the Father 
 above. Who yet was so near them.^ And after the Mosaic 
 LaAV was given, when the idea and range of sin had been 
 deepened and extended in the mind of Israel, we find 
 prayer organized in a system of sacrifices, suited to various 
 wants and moods of the human soul, consciously dealing 
 with its God as the King, both of the sacred nation and of 
 the individual conscience. Penitence, thanksgiving, inter- 
 cession, adoration, each found an appropriate expression.^ 
 Later still, in the Psalter, prayer — the purest, the loftiest, 
 the most passionate — took shape in imperishable forms. 
 And when at length a new revelation was made in Jesus 
 Christ, there was little to add to what was already believed 
 as to the power and obligation of prayer, beyond revealing 
 the secret of its acceptance. Our Lord's precepts* and 
 example^ are sufficiently em]3hatic ; and His Apostles 
 appear to represent prayer not so much as a practice of 
 
 ^ Gen. iv. 4. ^ Qg^. v. 21 ; vi. 9. 3 i^gvit. i.-vii. 
 
 * S. Matt. vi. 9 ; S. Luke xi. 2 ; S. Matt. xxvi. 41 ; S. Mark xi. 24 ; 
 S. Luke xviii. ] , &c. • 
 
 5 S. Matt. xiv. 23 ; S. Mark vi. 46 ; S. Luke vi. 12, ix. 28 ; S. John 
 xvii. 1. 
 
v.] Religio7i as such has its specific work. 1 69 
 
 tlie Christian life, as its very breath and instinctive move- 
 ment. The Christian must be "continuing instant in 
 prayer ;" he must " pray without ceasing." ^ 
 
 Each faculty, or endowment, or form of activity that 
 belongs to man has, over and above a number of more 
 indirect effects, its appropriate and characteristic action, in 
 which its whole strength is embarked, and in which it has, 
 so to speak, its full play. To this law religion is no excep- 
 tion. While its influence upon human life is strong and 
 various in proportion to its high aim and object ; while it 
 is felt, wdien it wields real empire, in every department of 
 human activity and interest, as an invigorating, purifying, 
 chastening, restraining, guiding influence, it too has a work 
 peculiarly its own. In this work it is wont, if we may 
 so speak, to embark its collective forces, and to become 
 peculiarly conscious of its direction and intensity. This 
 work is prayer. Prayer is emphatically religion in action. 
 It is the soul of man engaging in that particular form of 
 activity which presupposes the existence of a great bond 
 between itself and God. Prayer is, therefore, nothing else 
 or less than the noblest kind of human exertion. It 
 
 ^ Rom. xii. 12 ; 1 Tliess. v. 17. 
 
1 70 Objectiofi to prayer as merely ' 'sentimental. ' ' [Lect. 
 
 is tlie one department of action in which man realizes the 
 highest privilege and capacity of his being. And, in doing 
 this, he is himself enriched and ennobled almost indefi- 
 nitely: now, as of old, when he comes down from the 
 mountain, his face bears tokens of an irradiation which is 
 not of this world. 
 
 That this estimate of the value of prayer is not universal 
 among educated people in our day, is only too notorious. 
 If many a man were to put into words with perfect honesty 
 and explicitness what he thinks, he would say that prayer 
 is an excellent thing for a clergyman, or for a recluse, or 
 for a sentimentalist, or for women and children generally ; 
 that it has its uses as a form of desultory occupation, an 
 outlet for feeling, a means of discipline. For himself, he 
 cannot really think that much prayer would help him much. 
 It implies a life of feeling — perhaps, he would say, of morbid 
 feeling ; and he prides himself upon being guided only 
 by reflection. It is sustained, he thinks, by imagination, 
 rather than by reason ; and he deems imagination puerile 
 and feminine. His religion, whatever it is, has nothing to 
 do with imagination, and is hard reason from first to last; 
 and accordingly prayer seems to him to be altogether less 
 worthy of the energies of a thinking man than hard work, 
 whether it be work of the hands or of the brains, whether 
 it be study or business. The dignity of real labour is pro- 
 verbial, but where, he asks, is the dignity of so sentimental 
 an occupation as prayer? "For his own part, he thinks," 
 (I am quoting words wliich have actually been used) " that 
 
v.] Serious prayer is a form of hard work. 171 
 
 religion is not worship, but only another name for doing 
 good to our fellow-creatures." 
 
 ]N"ow, without saying one word to disparage the intimate 
 connection between religion and philanthropy, let us ex- 
 amine the idea of prayer, which is taken for granted in such 
 language as the foregoing. Is it true that prayer is, as is 
 assumed, little else than the half passive play of sentiment 
 which flows languidly on through the minutes or hours of 
 easy reverie? Let those who have really prayed give the 
 answer. They sometimes describe prayer with the patriarch 
 Jacob as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power, which 
 may last, not unfrequently in an earnest life, late into the 
 night hours, or even to the break of day. ^ Sometimes they 
 refer to common intercession with S. Paul as a concerted 
 struggle. 2 They have, when praying, their eyes fixed upon 
 the Great Intercessor in Gethsemane, upon the drops of 
 blood which fall to the ground in that Agony of Eesignation 
 and Sacrifice.^ Importunity is of the essence of successful 
 prayer. Our Lord's references to the subject especially 
 imply this. The Friend who is at rest with his family, 
 will rise at last to give a loaf to the hungry applicant.-^ 
 The Unjust Judge yields in the end to the resistless eager- 
 ness of the widow's cry. ^ Our Lord's blessing on the Syro- 
 Phoenician woman is the consecration of importunity with 
 God.« And importunity means, not dreaminess, but sus- 
 tained work. It is through prayer especially that •' the 
 
 1 Gen. xxxii. 24. 2 p^Q^ xv. 30. » S. Luke xxii. 44. * S. Luke xi. 8. 
 ^ S. Luke xviii. 5. « S. Matt. xv. 27-28 ; S. Mark vii. 28-29. 
 
172 Prayer exercises the 7mders landing, [Lect. 
 
 kingdom of lieaven sufferetli violence, and the violent take 
 it by force." ^ It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton 
 of Salisbury, that " no man was likely to do much good in 
 prayer who did not begin by looking upon it in the light 
 of a work, to be prepared for and persevered in with all 
 the earnestness which we bring to bear upon subjects which 
 are, in our opinion, at once most interesting and most 
 necessary." 
 
 This indeed will appear, if, looking to an act of real 
 prayer, we take it to pieces. Of what does it consist ? It 
 consists always of three separate forms of activity which, 
 in the case of different persons, co-exist in very varying 
 degrees of intensity, but which are found, in some degree, 
 in all who pray, whenever they pray. 
 
 To pray, is first of all to put the understanding in motion, 
 and to direct it upon the Highest Object to "Wliich it can 
 possibly address itself, the Infinite God. In our private 
 prayers, as in our public liturgies, we generally preface the 
 petition itself by naming one or more of His attributes. 
 Almighty and Everlasting God ! If the understanding is 
 really at work at all, how overwhelming are the ideas, the 
 truths, which pass thus before it; a boundless Power, an 
 Existence which knows neither beginning nor end. Then 
 the substance of the petition, the motives which are alleged 
 for urging it, the issues which depend upon its being granted 
 or being refused, present themselves to the eye of the 
 understanding. And if our Lord Jesus Christ is not Him- 
 1 S. Matt. xi. 12. 
 
y.] the affections, and the will, 173 
 
 self, as being both God and Man, the object of prayer, 
 yet His perpetual and prevailing intercession opens upon 
 Christian thought the inmost mysteries before the Eternal 
 Throne. And thus any common act of real prayer keeps, 
 not the imagination, but the understanding, occupied 
 earnestly, absorbingly, under the guidance of faith, from 
 first to last.^ 
 
 Next, to pray is to put the affections in motion: it is to 
 open the heart. The object of prayer is the Uncreated Love, 
 the Eternal Beauty; He of Wliose beauty all that moves love 
 and admiration here is at best a pale reflection. To be in 
 His presence in prayer, is to be conscious of an expansion 
 of the heart, and of the pleasure which accompanies it, 
 which we feel, in another sense, when speaking with an 
 intimate and loved friend or relative. And this movement 
 of the affections is sustained throughout the act of prayer. 
 It is invigorated by the spiritual sight of God, but it is also 
 the original impulse which leads us to draw near to Him.^ 
 In true prayer as in teaching, "out of the abundance of the 
 heart the mouth speaketh."^ 
 
 Once more, to pray, is to put the will in motion, just 
 as decidedly as we do when we sit down to read hard, 
 or to walk up a steep hill against time.* That sove- 
 reign power in the soul, which we name the will, does not 
 
 1 Eph. vi. 18; S. John iv. 22-29; Rom. x. 14; Heb. xi. 6. 
 
 2 S. Matt. XV. 8 ; 1 S. John iii. 21-22. 
 
 3 S. Matt. xii. 34 ; S. Lnke vi. 45. 
 
 ^ S. John ix. 31 ; S. Matt. vii. 21 ; S. James iv. 7-8. These passages all 
 imply that prayer in which the will is not engaged is worthless. 
 
1 74 Prayer more exacting than other work. [Lect. 
 
 merely, iu prayer, impel us to make the first necessary 
 mental effort, but enters most penetratingly and vitally 
 into the very action of the prayer itself. It is the will 
 Avhich presses the petition ; it is the will which struggles 
 with the reluctance of sloth or with the oppositions of 
 passion; it is the wdll which perseveres; it is the will 
 which exclaims, " I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless 
 me." ^ The amount of will w^hich we severally carry into 
 the act of prayer is the ratio of its sincerity ; and where 
 prayer is at once real and prolonged, the demands which 
 it makes upon our power of concentrating determination 
 into a specific and continuous act are very considerable 
 indeed. 
 
 ^ow, these three ingredients of prayer are also ingre- 
 dients in all real w^ork, whether of the brains or of the hands. 
 The sustained effort of the intelligence and of the will must 
 be seconded in work no less than in prayer by a movement 
 of the affections, if work is to be really successful. A man 
 must love his work to do it well. The difference between 
 prayer and ordinary work is that in j)i'£^yer the three 
 ingredients are more equally balanced. Study may in time 
 become intellectual habit, which scarcely demands any 
 effort of will : handiwork may in time become so mechani- 
 cal as to require little or no guidance from thought : each 
 may exist in a considerable, although not in the highest 
 degree of excellence, without any co-operation of the affec- 
 tions. Not so prayer. It is always the joint act of the will 
 
 ^ Gen. xxxii, 26. 
 
Y. ] Prayer deepens thesefise of apersonal existence. 1 7 5 
 
 and the understanding, impelled by tlie affections \ and wlien 
 either will or intelligence is wanting, prayer at once ceases 
 to be itself, by degenerating into a barren intellectual exer- 
 cise, or into a mechanical and unspiritual routine. 
 
 The dignity of prayer as being real work becomes clear 
 to us if we consider the faculties which it employs. This 
 will be made clearer still if we consider the effect of all 
 sincere prayer upon the habitual atmosphere of the soul. 
 Prayer places the soul face to face with facts of the first 
 order of solemnity and importance ; with its real self, and 
 with its God. And just as art, or study, or labour in any 
 department is elevating, when it takes us out of and beyond 
 the petty range of daily and perhaps material interests, 
 while yet it quickens interest in them by kindling higher 
 enthusiasms into life; so in a peculiar and transcendent 
 sense it is with prayer. Prayer is man's inmost movement 
 towards a Higher Power ; but what is the intellectual view 
 or apprehension of himself that originally impels him to 
 move ? Under wdiat aspect does man appear to himself in 
 2)rayer ? In a former lecture we have encountered the 
 mystery which lies enclosed within each one of us, — the 
 mystery which is yet a fact, — of an undying personality. 
 It is that which each human speaker describes as " I." It 
 is that of which each of us is conscious as no one else can 
 be conscious. Its existence is not proved to us by a 
 demonstration, since we apprehend it as immediately 
 obvious. Its certainty can be shaken by no sojohistical or 
 destructive argument, since our conviction of its reality is 
 
176 Prayer an escape from self to God. [Lect. 
 
 based upon a continuous act of primary perception. No 
 sooner do we withdraw ourselves from the im^^ortunities of 
 sense, from the wanderings of imagination, from the mis- 
 leading phrases which confuse the mental sight, than we 
 find ourselves face to face with this fact, represented by " I." 
 For it is neither the body which the real self may ignore, nor 
 a passionate impulse which the real self may conquer, nor 
 even that understanding which, close as it is to the real self, 
 is yet distinct from it. The body may be in its decrepitude ; 
 the flames of passion may have died away ; the understand- 
 ing may be almost in its dotage ; yet the inward, self-j^os- 
 sessed, self-governing being may remain untouched, realizing 
 itself in struggling against the instincts of bodily weakness, 
 and in crushing out the embers which survive the fires of 
 extinct passions. Now it is this self, conscious of its great- 
 ness, conscious of its weakness, which is the real agent in 
 prayer. In its oppressive sense of solitude, even in the 
 midst of multitudes, this self longs to go forth, and to com- 
 mune with the Father of spirits Who gave it life. This 
 real self it is wdiich apprehends God with the understand- 
 ing, which embraces Him with the affections, which re- 
 solves through the will to obey Him ; and thus does it 
 underlie and unite the complex elements of prayer, so that 
 in true heartfelt prayer we become so conscious of its 
 vitality and power. It is in prayer especially that w^e cease 
 to live, as it w^ere, in a single faculty, or on the surface of 
 our being : it is in prayer that we cease to regard ourselves 
 as animal forms, or as social powers, or as family characters 
 
v.] Greatness of communion with God. 177 
 
 and look hard, for the time being, at ourselves, as being 
 what we really are; that is to say, as immortal spirits, 
 outwardly draped in social forms and proprieties, and linked 
 to a body of flesh and blood, but in our felt spiritual soli- 
 tude looking steadily upwards at the face of God, and 
 straining our eyes onwards towards the great eternity which 
 lies before us.^ 
 
 Prayer is then so noble, because it is the work of man 
 as man; of man realizing his being and destiny with a 
 vividness which is necessary to him in no other occupation. 
 But what shall we say of it, when we reflect further that 
 in prayer man holds converse with God : that the Being of 
 Beings, with all His majestic attributes, filling and tran- 
 scending the created imiverse, traversing human history, 
 traversing each man's own individual history, is before 
 him : that although man is dust and ashes, he is, by prayer, 
 already welcomed in the very courts of heaven ? It is not 
 necessary to dwell on this topic. Wliatever be the daily 
 occupations of any in this Church, be he a worker with the 
 hands or a worker with the brain, be he gentle or simple, 
 be he unlettered or educated, be he high in the state or 
 amonci' the millions at its base, is ^ it not certain that the 
 nobleness of his highest forms of labour must fall infinitely 
 below that of any single human spirit entering consciously 
 into converse with the Infinite and Eternal God? 
 
 1 S. Luke xviii. 13, 14. 
 
1 78 Nahiral effects of prayej^ [Lect. 
 
 II. 
 
 But granted, men say, the dignity of prayer — granted 
 even its dignity as labour: wliat if this labour be mis- 
 applied? There are many functions in many states, 
 very dignified and not a little onerous, yet in a social and 
 human sense not very productive. Is prayer, in its sphere, 
 of this description ? Has it no tangible results ? Does it 
 end with itself ? Can the labourer in this field point to 
 anything definite that is achieved by his exertions ? 
 
 The question is sufficiently serious at all times, but 
 especially in our own positive and practical day. And 
 it is necessary to make two observations, that we may see 
 more clearly what issue is precisely before us. 
 
 In the first place, there is here no question as to the 
 subjective effect of prayer ; the effect which it confessedly 
 has upon the mind and character of the person who prays. 
 Such effects have been admitted on the part of those who 
 unhappily do not pray themselves ; just as the Jews, at the 
 time of the Betrayal, were so alive to tokens in the disciples 
 of companionship with Jesus. That aU the effects of 
 Christian prayer upon the soul, or most of them, are 
 natural, a Christian cannot admit : he believes them to be 
 chiefly due to the transforming power of the grace of God, 
 given, as at other times, so especially in answer to prayer. 
 But that some, effects of prayer upon the soul are natural 
 consequences of directing the mind and the affections 
 
v.] Intellectual, moral, social effects, i 79 
 
 towards a suj)erliiiman object, whether real or ideal, may 
 be fully granted. Tims it lias been observed that per- 
 sons without natural ability have, through the earnest- 
 ness of their devotional habits, acquired in time powers of 
 sustained thought, and an accuracy and delicacy of intel- 
 lectual touch, which would not else have belonged to 
 them. The intellect being the instrument by which the 
 soul handles religious truth, a real interest in religious 
 truth will of itself often furnish an educational discipline ; 
 it alone educates an intellect which would otherwise be 
 uneducated. ^ The moral effects of devotion are naturally 
 more striking and abundant. Habitual prayer constantly 
 confers decision on the wavering, and energy on the 
 listless, and calmness on the excitable, and disinterested- 
 ness on the selfish. It braces the moral nature by 
 transporting it into a clear, invigorating unearthly 
 atmosphere: it builds up the moral life, insensibly but 
 surely remedying its deficiencies, and strengthening its 
 weak points, till there emerges a comparatively symmetrical 
 and consistent whole, the excellence of which all must 
 admit, though its secret is known only to those who know 
 it by experience. 2 Akin to the moral are the social effects 
 of prayer. Prayer makes men as members of society 
 different in their whole bearing from those who do not 
 pray. It gilds social intercourse and conduct with a 
 tenderness, an unobtrusiveness, a sincerity, a frankness, an 
 evenness of temper, a cheerfulness, a coUectedness, a con- 
 
 1 Ps. cxix. 100. 2 pg xxvii. 4, 5, 6. 
 
i8o Prayer,asnicaninocoinm2tnionzvith God. [Lect. 
 
 stant consideration for others, united to a simple loyalty 
 to truth and duty, which leavens and strengthens society. 
 Nay, it is not too much to say that prayer has even physical 
 results. The countenance of a Fra Angelico reflects his 
 spirit no less than does his art : the bright eye, the pure 
 elevated expression, speak for themselves. It was said 
 of one who has died within the present generation, ^ that 
 in his later years his face was like that of an illuminated 
 clock ; the colour and gilding had long faded away from 
 the hands and figures, but the ravages of time were more 
 than compensated for by the light which shone from 
 within. This was what might have been expected in an 
 aged man of great piety ; to have lived in spirit on Mount 
 Tabor during the years of a long life is to have caught 
 in its closing hours some rays of the glory of the 
 Transfiguration. 
 
 Secondly, prayer is not only — perhaps in some of the 
 holiest souls it is not even chiefly — a petition for some- 
 thing that we want and do not possess. In the larger 
 sense of the word, as the spiritual language of the soul, 
 prayer is intercourse with God, often seeking no end 
 beyond the pleasure of such intercourse. It is praise ; it 
 is congratulation ; it is adoration of the Infinite Majesty ; 
 it is a colloquy in which the soul engages with the All- 
 wise and the All-holy; it is a basking in the sunshine, 
 varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun of 
 Eighteousness for His light and His warmth. In this 
 
 1 Eev. J. Keble. 
 
v.] Prayer not ahuays intended to get somethiug, \ 8 1 
 
 larger sense, the earlier part of the Te Deiim is prayer as 
 much as the latter part ; the earliest and latest clauses of 
 the Gloria in Excelsis as truly as the central ones; the 
 Sanctns or the Jubilate no less than the Litany; the 
 Magnificat as certainly as the fifty-first Psalm. When we 
 seek the company of our friends, we do not seek it simply 
 with the view of getting something from them: it is a 
 pleasure to be with them, to be talking to them at all, 
 or about anything ; to be in possession of their sympathies 
 and to be shewing our delight at it; to be assuring 
 them of their place in our hearts and thoughts. So it is 
 with the soul, when dealing with the Friend of friends — 
 with God. Prayer is not, as it has been scornfully 
 described, " only a machine warranted by theologians to 
 make God do what His clients want : " it is a great deal 
 more than petition, which is only one department of it : 
 it is nothing less than the wdiole spiritual action of the 
 soul turned towards God as its true and adequate object. 
 And if used in this comprehensive sense, it is clear that, 
 as to much prayer, in the sense of spiritual intercourse 
 with God, the question whether it is answered can never 
 arise, for the simple reason that no answer is asked for. 
 
 But whether prayer means only, as in popular language 
 it does generally mean, petition for a specific object, or 
 the whole cycle of possible communion between the soul 
 and God, the question whether it is heard is a very 
 practical one. We do not address inanimate objects, 
 however })eautiful they may be, except in the way of 
 
1 82 Prayer involves waste of time, [Lect. 
 
 poetical apostrophe. We do not enter into spiritual 
 colloquy with tlie mountains, or the rivers, or the skies, 
 with a view to discharging a duty to them, or really 
 improving ourselves.^ If there is really no being above 
 who does hear us, what can be the use of continuing a 
 practice that is based upon an altogether false presump- 
 tion ? The subjective benefits of prayer depend upon our 
 belief in its real power. But even if they did not, who would 
 go through a confessedly fictitious exercise at regular inter- 
 vals with a view to securincj them ? "VVlio would continue 
 to pray regularly, if he were once well persuaded that the 
 effect of prayer is after all only like the effect of the higher 
 philosophy or poetry ; an education and a stimulus to the 
 soul of man, but not an influence that can really touch the 
 mind or will of that Being to Whom it is addressed ? 
 Nobody denies the moral and mental stimulus which is to 
 be gained from the study of the great poets. But do we 
 read Homer, or Shakespeare, or Goethe each morning and 
 evening, and perhaps at the middle of the day ? Or if 
 such were the practice of any of us, should we have any 
 approach to a feeling of being guilty of a criminal 
 omission, if now and then we omitted to read them ? No : 
 if prayer is to be persevered in, it must be on the strength 
 of a conviction that it is actually heard by a Living 
 Person. We cannot practise any intricate trickery upon 
 ourselves with a view to our moral edification. We cannot 
 
 ^ The apostrophes of the Psalms and the Benedicite ai-e really acts of 
 praise to God, of which His creatures furnish the occasion. 
 
v.] tcnless God is really alive. 183 
 
 pray, if we believe in our hearts that in prayer we are only 
 holding communion with an ideal world of our own 
 creation; that we are like children, with overheated 
 imaginations, vainly endeavouring to pass the barriers 
 which really confine us to our dark earthly prison-house ; 
 while, in our failure, we half consciously, half uncon- 
 sciously, cheat ourselves with the consolation of talking 
 to shapes of power or benevolence traced by our fathers 
 or by ourselves upon its inexorable walls. We cannot fall 
 into the ranks of the Christian Church, lifting up the holy 
 hands of sacrifice and intercession on all the mountains of 
 the world, if in our hearts we see in her only a new 
 company of Baal-worshippers gathering upon the slopes of 
 some modern Carmel, and vainly endeavouring to rouse 
 her idol into an impossible animation ; while the Elijahs 
 of materialistic science stand by to mock her fruitless 
 efforts with the playful scorn of that tranquil irony to 
 which their higher knowledge presumably entitles them. 
 
 The question whether God hears prayer, is at bottom .^y 
 the question whether He is really alive ; whether in any 
 true sense of the term He exists at all. No word is used 
 more equivocally than the word " God " in the present day. v' 
 If by " God " we mean only a product of the thought or 
 consciousness of man, to which it cannot be certainly pre- 
 sumed that any being actually corresponds; the highest 
 thought of man — yet only man's highest thought; then there 
 is of course no one who can hear us. It has been said tliat 
 if a man talks out loud to himself, apostrophizing what are in 
 
184 If God is really alive, [Lect. 
 
 truth only his own conceptions, it is difficult not to credit 
 him with a certain tinge of madness; and it would be just 
 as practical to address our prayer to the carved and gilded 
 idols of Babylon, whose manufacture roused the sternest 
 satire of the Evangelical Prophet, as to the unreal abstrac- 
 tions, which, labelled with the Most Holy Name, are sent 
 us from the intellectual workshops, ancient and modern, of 
 Alexandria or of Berlin. And if by " God " is meant only 
 the unseen force of the universe, or its collective forces ; if 
 He is the principle of growth in the plant, the life-principle 
 in the animal or in man; we need not read Spinoza in order 
 to convince ourselves of the fruitlessness of prayer. A 
 self-existing force or cause, if such can be conceived, with- 
 out intelligence, without personality, of course without any 
 moral attributes, may be a thing to w^onder at, but it cer- 
 tainly is not a being to speak to. We may of course 
 ejaculate to such a thing if we like; but we might just as 
 well say litanies to the winds or to the ocean. The ques- 
 tion may be safely left to our utilitarian instincts. Time 
 and strength, after all, are limited, and we shall not in the 
 long run spend " our money," at least in this direction, " for 
 that which is not bread, or our lal30ur for that which 
 satisfieth not."^ 
 
 If, on the other hand, God exists, whether we think about 
 Him or not ; if He be not merely the mightiest force, the 
 first of causes, but something more; if He be a personal 
 Being, thinking with no limits to His thought, and willing 
 
 ^ Isaiah Iv. 2. 
 
v.] He must hear p7^aye7\ 185 
 
 with no fetters around His liberty; then surely we may 
 reach Him, if we will. "Wliat is to prevent it ? Cannot we 
 men, at our pleasure, embody our thought, our feeling, our 
 desires, or purposes in language, and so make them pass 
 into and be apprehended by the created finite personalities 
 around us ? Wliere is the barrier that shall arrest thought, 
 longings, desires, entreaties, not as yet clothed (why need 
 they be clothed ?) in speech, as they mount up from the 
 soul towards the all-embracing Intelligence of God ? And 
 if God be not merely an infinite Intelligence, but a moral 
 Being, a mighty Heart, so that justice, and mercy, and 
 tenderness are attributes of His character, then to appeal 
 to Him in virtue of these attributes is assuredly to appeal 
 to Him to some purpose. If an Omnipresent Intelligence 
 is a sufiicient guarantee of His being able to hear us ; an 
 interest such as Justice and Mercy imply on His part 
 towards creatures who depend upon Him for the original 
 gift, and for the continued maintenance of life, is a 
 guarantee of His willingness to do so. 
 
 It is on this ground that God is said to hear prayer in 
 Holy Scripture. That He shoidd do so foUows from the 
 reality of His nature as God. Elijah's irony implies that 
 He is imlike the Phoenician Baal in being really alive. ^ 
 A later Psalmist contrasts Him in like manner witli the 
 Assyrian idols, in that " they have eyes but see not, they 
 have ears but hear not." ^ They do but fiU their temples 
 with gorgeous impotence. But Israel's God is the author 
 
 ^ 1 Kings xviii. 27. " Ps. cxv. 5. 
 
1 86 Scriptural inferences from the life of God. [Lect. 
 
 of tlie very senses whereby we are conscious of each 
 other's presence and wishes, and can enter into a com- 
 panionship of thought and purpose. Is He debarred from 
 the use of the gifts which He Himself bestows with so 
 bountiful a hand ? " He that planted the ear shall He not 
 hear, or He that formed the eye shall He not see ? " ^ Is 
 it not, on the contrary, reasonable to believe that these 
 powers must exist in a much higher and more perfect form 
 in the one Being who gives them than in the myriads 
 upon whom they are bestowed, and by whom they are only 
 held in trust? And if it is improbable that, amid the 
 innumerable beings who are alive to the sights and 
 sounds of His creation, the Creator alone should be blind 
 and deaf; is it more probable that He who has implanted 
 in our breasts feelings of interest and pity for one another 
 should be Himself insensible to our pain and need ? Our 
 hearts must anticipate and echo the statement of the 
 Psalmist, that God does hear the desire of the poor ; that 
 the innocent, the oppressed, the suffering, have especial 
 claims upon Him. And, to omit other illustrations, our 
 Lord reveals Him as a Father, the common parent of men, 
 of whose boundless love all earthly fatherhood is a shadow 
 and a delegation. If the earthly parent, being evil, does 
 not yet give a stone when his child cries for bread ; the 
 heavenly Father will not fall short of the teachings of an 
 instinct which He has Himself implanted, by failing to 
 give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.^ 
 
 1 Ps. xciv. 9. 2 s_ Luke xi. 11-13. 
 
v.] Barriers supposed to arrest pj^ayer. 187 
 
 III. 
 
 If a man is a good Tlieist — we need not say, a good 
 Christian — lie must believe that the Father of Spirits is 
 not deaf to the voice of the human soul; that the thanks- 
 giving and praise, the intercessions and supplications, the 
 j)enitence and the self-surrender of beings to whom He has 
 given moral and intellectual life, is not utterly lost upon the 
 Giver. But will He indeed answer prayer, when prayer takes 
 the form of a petition for some specific blessing which must 
 be either granted or refused ? There is no doubt as to the 
 reply which the Bible and the Church have given to this 
 question. But what do some modern thinkers say about 
 it? Do they not deny the power of prayer, by surrounding 
 the Throne of God with barriers, which, as they would 
 have it, oblige Him, while " the sorrowful sighings of the 
 prisoners" of this vale of tears incessantly "come before 
 Him," to make as though He heard not, and to shorten 
 His hand as if it could not save V 
 
 The first presumed barrier against the efficacy of prayer 
 to which men point is the scientific idea of law, reigning 
 throughout the spiritual as well as the material universe. 
 This idea, as we are constantly reminded, is one of the most 
 remarkable conquests of modern thought; and no man, so 
 it is said, can enter into it with an intelligent sympathy 
 without abandoning the fond conceit that God will grant 
 a particular favour to one of His creatures upon being asked 
 
1 88 I. The ba^naei^ of law. [Lect. 
 
 to do so. It may have been pardonable to pray for rain, 
 for health, for freedom from pestilence and famine, when 
 these things were supposed to depend upon the caprice of 
 an omnipotent will. But the scientific idea of law renders 
 these prayers absurd. We know that a shower is the pro- 
 duct of atmospheric laws, which make a shower, under 
 certain circumstances, inevitable; that the death of an 
 individual is the result of physiological laws which abso- 
 lutely determine it. The idea that a shower or the death 
 of a man are contingent upon the good pleasure of a 
 Being Who can avert or precipitate them at pleasure is 
 unscientific ; it belongs to days when the idea of law had 
 not yet dawned upon the intellect of civilization, or when, 
 at any rate, large margins of the physical world, and the 
 whole of the spiritual world, were supposed to be beyond 
 its frontiers, as being abandoned to the government of a 
 capricious omnipotence. Surely, it is added, we have really 
 attained to a nobler idea of the universe, than was this old 
 theological conception of the Bible and the Church: the 
 superiority is to be measured by those fundamental instincts 
 of fitness within us, which assign to law and order a higher 
 place in our minds than can belong to a personal will. 
 
 Does not the very word law, by reason of its majestic 
 and imposing associations, here involve us in some indis- 
 tinctness of thought ? What do we mean by law ? When 
 we speak of a law of nature are we thinking of some self- 
 sustained invisible force, of which we can give no account 
 except that here it is, a matter of experience ? Or do we 
 
v.] What is meant by law? 189 
 
 mean by a law of nature only a principle wliicli, as our 
 observation shews us, appears to govern particular actions 
 of the Almiglity Agent Who made and Who upholds the 
 universe? If the former, let us frankly admit that we 
 have not merely fettered God's freedom; we have, alas! 
 ceased to believe in Him. For such self-sustained force is 
 either self-originating, in which case there is no Being in 
 existence who has made all that constitutes tliis universe. 
 Or otherwise, having derived its first impact from the 
 creative Will of God, this force has subsequently escaped 
 altogether from His control, so that it now fetters His 
 liberty; and, in this case, there is no Being in existence 
 who is Almighty, in the sense of being really Master of 
 this universe. If, however, we mean by law the observed 
 regularity with which God works in nature as in grace; 
 then, in our contact with law, we are dealing, not with 
 a brutal, unintelligent, unconquerable force, but with 
 the free will of an intelligent and moral Artist, "Wlio 
 works, in His perfect freedom, with sustained and beauti- 
 ful symmetry, ^Vliere is the absurdity of asking Him 
 to hold His hand, or to hasten His work? He to Whom 
 we pray may be trusted to grant or to refuse a prayer, 
 as may seem best to the highest wisdom and the truest 
 love. And if He grant it. He is not without resources ; 
 even although we should have asked Him to suspend 
 what we call a natural law. Can He not then pro- 
 vide for the freedom of His action without violating its 
 order? Can He not supersede a lower rule of working 
 
I go 2. The barrier of a Divine p7^edestinatio7i. [Lect. 
 
 by the intervention of a higher ? If He really works at 
 all ; if something that is neither moral nor intelligent has 
 not nsurped His throne, — it is certain that " the thing that 
 is done upon earth He doeth it Himself;" and that it is 
 therefore as consistent with reason as with reverence to 
 treat Him as being a free Agent, Who is not really tied 
 and bound by the intellectual abstractions with which finite 
 intellects would fain annihilate the freedom of His action. 
 
 No ; to pray for rain or sunshine, for health or food, is 
 just as reasonable as to pray for gifts which the soul only 
 can receive — increased love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
 gentleness, goodness, faith. All such prayers presupj)Ose 
 the truth that God is not the slave of His own rules of 
 action; that He can innovate upon His work without 
 forfeiting His perfection; that law is only our w^ay of 
 conceiving of His regularized working, and not an external 
 force which governs and moulds what we recognize as His 
 work. It dissolves into thin air, as we look hard at it, 
 this fancied barrier of inexorable law; and as the mist 
 clears off, beyond there is the throne of the Moral King 
 of the universe, in Whose eyes material symmetry is as 
 nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of 
 His moral creatures. 
 
 A second barrier to the efficacy of prayer is sometimes 
 discovered in the truth that all which comes to pass is fore- 
 determined in the predestination of God. How is the effi- 
 cacy of prayer to be reconciled, asks the fatalistic predesti- 
 narian, with the boundless power and knowledge of God ? 
 
v.] Prayer a depaiHment of human freedom. 1 9 1 
 
 Is not everything that happens to us the decision of an 
 Almighty, Wise, Beneficent Will ; a Will which, in human 
 phrase, has ordained it from all eternity ? Could this Will 
 have been, could It be, other than It is ? Has time any 
 meaning for It ? Is It not in Its Omniscience and Omnipo- 
 tence eternally what It is ? Where, then, is there any room 
 for the effect of prayer? Can it be conceived that the 
 erring understanding and finite will of the creature will be 
 allowed to impose its decisions on the infallible Mind and 
 resistless determinations of God ? Surely if we are to go 
 on praying, after recognizing the Sovereignty of God, we 
 must give up the notion of exerting a real influence upon 
 the Divine Will : we must content ourselves with resigna- 
 tion, with bringing our minds into conformity with that 
 which, as a matter of fact, is quite beyond the range of our 
 influence. 
 
 This language does but carry us into one department of 
 the old controversy between the defenders of the sovereignty 
 of God on the one side, and the advocates of the free will 
 of man on the other. The very idea of God, as it occurs to 
 the human mind, and the distinct statements of revelation, 
 alike represent the Divine Will as exerting sovereign and 
 resistless sway. If it were otherwise, God would not be 
 Almighty, that is. He would not be God. On the other 
 hand, our daily experience and the language of Scripture 
 both assure us that man is literally a free agent : his freedom 
 is the very ground of his moral and religious responsibility. 
 Are these two truths hopelessly incompatible with each 
 
192 Prayer is itself pi^ede.stined, yet free. [Lect. 
 
 other ? So it may seem at first sight ; and if we escape 
 the clanger of denying the one in the supposed interests of 
 the other, if we shrink from sacrificing God's sovereignty 
 to man's free will with Arminius, and from sacrificing man's 
 freedom to God's sovereignty with Calvin, we can only 
 express a wise ignorance by saying, that to us they seem 
 like parallel lines which must meet at a point in eternity, 
 far beyond our present range of view. "We do know, 
 however, that being both true, they cannot really contradict 
 each other; and that in some manner, which we cannot 
 formulate, the Divine Sovereignty must not merely be com- 
 patible with, but must even imply the perfect freedom of 
 created wills. So it is with prayer and the Divine pre- 
 destination. God orders all that happen to us, and, in virtue 
 of His infinite knowledge, by eternal decrees. But He also 
 says to us, in the plainest language, that He does answer 
 prayer, and that practically His dealings with us are 
 governed in matters of the greatest importance as well- as 
 of the least by the petitions which we address to Him. 
 Wliat if prayers and actions, to us at the moment perfectly 
 spontaneous, are eternally foreseen and included within the 
 all-embracing Predestination of God, as factors and causes, 
 working out that final result which, beyond all dispute, is 
 the product of His good pleasure ? Whether I open my 
 mouth or lift my hand, is, before my doing it, strictly 
 within the jurisdiction and power of my personal will ; but 
 however I may decide, my decision, so absolutely free to 
 me, will have been already incorporated by the All-seeing, 
 
\ ^'^^. A nthi^opoiJW7^phic conception ofGod's dignity. 193 
 
 All-controlling Being as an integral part, however insignifi- 
 cant, of His one all- embracing purpose, leading on to effects 
 and causes beyond itself. Prayer too is only a foreseen 
 action of man wliicli, together with its results, is embraced 
 in the eternal predestination of God. To us this or that 
 blessing may be strictly contingent on our praying for it ; 
 but our prayer is nevertheless so far from necessarily 
 introducing change into the purpose of the Unchangeable, 
 that it has been all along taken, so to speak, into account by 
 Him. If then, with " the Father of Lights " there is in this 
 sense " no variableness, neither shadow of turning," it is not 
 therefore irrational to pray for specific blessings, as we do 
 in the Litany, because God works out His plans not merely 
 in us but by us ; and we may dare to say that that which 
 is to us a free self-determination, may be not other than a 
 foreseen element of His work. 
 
 A third barrier supposed to interfere with the efficacy of 
 prayer is the false idea of the Divine dignity which is 
 borrowed from our notions of human royalties. It is assumed 
 that a supreme governor cannot be expected to take account 
 of trifling circumstances, or to decide between petty and con- 
 flicting claims. He legislates for the universe ; but it is not 
 to be supposed that He w^ill also discharge all the minute and 
 harassing duties of a local executive. The power of prayer 
 implies a special providence, and a special providence, we 
 are told, is beneath the dignity of God. "We have already 
 encountered this line of thought, not in its practical bear- 
 ings upon prayer, but as it affects our belief as to the Divine 
 
 
 
1 94 Material btdk not the test of greatness. [Lect. 
 
 Xature. " Do you imagine, men ask, when you reflect upon 
 the vast universe in which we live — upon that immeasur- 
 able space — upon those innumerable worlds — upon those 
 systems beyond systems of suns which are discovering 
 themselves slowly but surely to our telescopes — that He 
 who made this mighty whole has nothing to do but to listen 
 to the little story of your wants and hopes and fears ? He 
 has instituted some good and universal rules of govern- 
 ment under which you live : if they sometimes bear hardly 
 upon you, your case is only that of others, and you 
 must take your chance. To expect Him to suspend or to 
 revoke His legislation on your particular account, is to 
 sacrifice common sense to outrageous egotism ; the egotism 
 which can suppose that a petty individual life, a worm 
 crawling on the surface of one of His smallest planets, can 
 be an object of this particular consideration and interest to 
 the Almighty Creator." 
 
 Even at the risk of representing human egotism, it must 
 be here and again asserted that man's place in the creation 
 is not determined by the considerations which this objection 
 supposes. In the eyes of an intellectual and spiritual 
 being, material bulk is not the only or the highest test of 
 greatness. If God is not to be supposed to be mainly 
 interested in vast accumulations of senseless matter; if 
 there be in the estimate of a ]\Ioral Being other and 
 worthier measures of greatness ; if the organic be higher 
 than the inorganic ; and that which feels than that which 
 has no feeling; if that which thinks be higher than that 
 
v.] ^. The barrier of opposing hinnan interests. 195 • 
 
 wliicli ouly feels ; and that which freely conforms to moral 
 will higher than that which only thinks ; if a fly be really 
 a nobler thing than a granite mountain, and a little child 
 than a rhinoceros or a mammoth, — then we need not acquiesce 
 in this depreciatory estimate of man's place in creation, 
 or of his claims upon the ear of God. On his bodily side 
 man is insignificant enough. As a spirit conscious of his 
 own existence, and determining his action in the freedom 
 of his will, he does not deceive himself in believing that 
 God has crowned him with an especial glory and honour j 
 among the visible creatures.^ But even if man were not 
 thus honoured, it is, as we have seen, no part of the Divine 
 dignity to be inattentive even to the lowest creatures of His 
 hand. The Throne of heaven is not modelled upon the 
 type of an Oriental despotism, and God's Greatness is not 
 compromised by the duties of administration any more 
 than it is heightened by the enactment of law. The Infinite 
 ]\Iind is not less capable of formulating the most universal 
 principles because He enters with perfect sympathy and 
 intelligence into each of our separate wants and efforts, the 
 wants and efforts of creatures who are really greater, because 
 infinitely more like their Creator, than are the largest stars 
 and suns. 
 
 A fourth barrier to the eflicacy of prayer is supposed to 
 be discoverable in an inadequate conception of the interests 
 of human beings as a whole. To suppose that God can 
 answer individual prayers for specific blessings is incon- 
 
 1 Ps. viii. 5. 
 
196 A^o vmn inJ2ircd by another s real good, [Lect. 
 
 sistent, Ave are told, witli any serious a^^preciation of liumaii 
 interests. One man or nation asks for that wliicli may be 
 an injury to another. The Spaniards prayed for the success 
 of their Armada: the English prayed against it. Both could 
 not be listened to. The weather cannot consult the con- 
 venience of everybody at once : and therefore the specific 
 prayers of well-meaning villagers, if they could be attended 
 to, could only be attended to by a God who, instead of being 
 the Father of all His creatures, reserved special indulgences 
 for His favourites. 
 
 Here it is natural to remark that if God should think 
 fit to grant a large proportion of the particular requests 
 which would be found among the daily prayers of an 
 earnest Christian, He would not, to say the least, tliereby 
 do any injury to others, whether they were Christians or 
 not. Prayer for the highest well-being of any human 
 being may be granted without damaging other human 
 beings. If God should condescend in answer to prayer to 
 teach one of His servants more humility, purity, or love, 
 this would not oblige Him to withdraw spiritual graces 
 from any others in order to do it. Nor are other persons 
 the worse for coming into contact with one whom God 
 has made loving, or pure, or humble, in answer to prayer. 
 Is it not nearer the truth to say that they are likely to be 
 much better, and therefore that a large number of answers 
 to prayer for personal blessings necessarily extend in their 
 effects beyond those who are immediately blessed ? 
 
 But observe further that every prayer for specific bless- 
 
v.] All prayer tacitly conditioned. 197 
 
 ings in a Christian soul is tacitly, if not expressly, con- 
 ditioned. The three conditions which are always under- 
 stood are given at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer — 
 " Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be 
 done." In effect these three conditions are only one. If 
 a change of weather, or a restoration to health or any 
 blessing be prayed for, a Christian petitioner deliberately 
 wills that his prayer should be refused, supposing that to 
 grant it should in any way obscure God's glory in other 
 minds, or hinder the advance of His kingdom, and so con- 
 travene what must be His will. Every Christian tacitly 
 adds to every prayer, " Nevertheless not my will but 
 Thine be done." All Christian prayer takes it for granted, 
 first, that the material world exists for tlie sake of, and is 
 entirely subordinate to, the interests of the moral ; and, 
 secondly, that God is the best judge of what the true 
 interests of the moral world really are. Therefore, if his 
 specific petition is not granted, a Christian will not con- 
 clude tliat his real prayer is unanswered. His real prayer 
 was from the first that God's Name might be hallowed 
 among men by the advance of His kingdom and the doing 
 of His Will, through God's granting a particular request 
 which he urges. He knows that his own highest object may 
 be best secured by the refusal of the very blessing for 
 which he pleads ; and he puts his finite knowledge and 
 his narrow sympathies into the hands of Infinite Wisdom 
 and Infinite Love, with perfect confidence that the final 
 decision will be the best answer to liis real and deepest 
 
198 5- The barrier^ of hiLinan self-7'eliance. [Lect. 
 
 prayer. It is thus that he realizes the promise, "Every one 
 that asketh receiveth." He too receives that which he really 
 wants, though his specific petition should he refused. 
 
 A last barrier to faith in the efficacy of prayer is really 
 to be discovered in man's idea of his own self-sufficiency. 
 It can scarcely be doubted that one of the excellences of 
 our character as a nation is constantly a source of clanger 
 to our faith in the power of prayer. Pelagius was him- 
 self a native of Britain ; and the old heresy of substituting 
 human self-sufficiency for dependence on the grace and 
 help of God is A^ery congenial to the temper which we 
 English cultivate, with such success, in individual action 
 and in political life. After all, we say, do we not depend 
 on our own efforts for being what we are, and for doing 
 what we do ? Wliatever God may see fit to do for us, 
 our best form of prayer is work ; it is the determination 
 to secure what we want by personal efforts to get it. 
 The indolent or the imaginative may be left to lengthen 
 out their litanies ; but practical men will fall back upon 
 the wise proverb, that " God helps those who help them- 
 selves." 
 
 Here, however, it must be insisted on by the one side, 
 and admitted on the other, that many objects of prayer are 
 altogether out of the reach of human effort, and that if they 
 are to be secured at all, they must be given freely by God. 
 But the fact of our moral freedom, as felt in the capacity 
 for work, to which Pelagianism ajDpeals, is not more clear 
 than the fact of our dependence. Do what we will, we 
 
v.] Work and prayer, hoiu related. 199 
 
 depend on others. We are linked to tliem "by a thousand 
 ties ; we are, all of us, acted upon most powerfully by the 
 circumstances which surround us ; the governing moods of 
 thought and feeling within ourselves are often determined 
 by these circumstances. This is true of " self-made men," 
 as we call them, not less than of others. How much did 
 not Faraday owe to Sir Humphrey Davy ! And this 
 dependence upon circumstances is in fact dependence upon 
 things which God controls. Facts are not less facts be- 
 cause they seem to be incompatible ; because the effort 
 to reconcile them teaches our reason that its limits are 
 narrower than we wich. It is easier to say that man is 
 entirely free, that he depends on nothing ; or to say that 
 man is simply the creature of circumstances, that he is 
 never really free ; than to say, what is the real truth, that 
 man is, in his entire freedom, absolutely dependent, that 
 he is, in his entire dependence, absolutely free. Yet this 
 apparent paradox is the literal truth, which refuses to 
 ignore facts in order to make the task of reason easier, 
 and to enable it the better to round off its trenchant Init 
 inconclusive theories about human action. And because 
 life is so subtle an intermixture of dependence and action, 
 prayer is the most practical of all forms of work ; it is at 
 once the activity of man's freedom, and the expression 
 of his dependence ; and tlie answer which it wins is not 
 less, in one sense, the result of human effort, than in 
 another it is the work of God. 
 
 And thus it is in and 1)y prayer that the two governing 
 
200 SpeciUation and action meet in prayers [Lect. 
 
 elements of religious life, thought and work, alike find their 
 strongest impulse and their point of unity. Such is our 
 weakness, that we constantly tend to a one-sided use of 
 God's gifts. We are either absorbingly speculative and con- 
 templative on the one hand, or we are absorbingly practical 
 and men of action on the other. Either exaggeration is 
 fatal to the true life of religion, which binds the soul 
 to God by faith as well as by love ; by love not less than 
 by faith ; by a life of energetic service not less truly than 
 by a life of communion with light and truth. It is in 
 23rayer that each element is at once quickened in itself, 
 and balanced by the presence of the other. The great 
 masters and teachers of Christian doctrine have always 
 found in prayer their highest source of illumination, ^ot 
 to go beyond the limits of the English. Church, it is 
 recorded of Bishop Andrewes that he spent five hours daily 
 on his knees. The greatest practical resolves that have 
 enriched and beautified human life in Christian times 
 have been arrived at in prayer ; ever since the day when, 
 at the most solemn service of the Apostolical Church, the 
 Holy Ghost said, " Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for 
 the work whereunto I have called them."^ It is prayer 
 which prevents religion from degenerating into mere 
 religious thought on the one side, or into mere philanthropy 
 on the other. In prayer the man of action will never 
 become so absorbed in his work as to be indifferent to the 
 truth, which is its original motive. In j)rayer the man of 
 
 ^ Acts xiii. 2. 
 
y.] Anszuers to prayer a matter of expeinence. 201 
 
 study and contemplation ^yill never forget that truth is 
 given, not so much that it may interest and stimulate our 
 understandings, as that it may govern and regenerate oin^ life. 
 And thus it is that prayer is of such vital importance to 
 the well-being of the soul. Study may be dispensed with 
 by those who work with their hands for God : handiwork 
 may be dispensed with by those who seek Him in books 
 and in thought. But prayer is indispensable; alilve for 
 workers and students, alike for scholar and peasant, alike 
 for the educated and the unlettered. For we all have to 
 seek God's Face above ; we all have souls to be sanctified 
 and saved ; we all have sins and passions to beat back and 
 to conquer. And these things are achieved pre-eminently 
 by prayer, which is properly and representatively the 
 action of religion. It is the action whereby we men, in all 
 our frailty and defilement, associate ourselves with our 
 Divine Advocate on high, and realize the sublime bond 
 which in Him, the One Mediator between God and man, 
 unites us in our utter unworthiness to the Strong and 
 All-holy God. 
 
 That prayer, sooner or later, is answered, to all who have 
 prayed earnestly and constantly, is, in different degTces, 
 a matter of personal experience. David, Elijah, Hezekiah, 
 Daniel, the Apostles of Christ, were not the victims of an 
 illusion, in virtue of which they connected particular events 
 which would have happened in any case with prayers that 
 preceded it. They who never pray, or who never pray with 
 the humility, confidence, and importunity that wins its way 
 
202 The claims of p7^ayer tcpoit our time. [Lect. 
 
 to the Heart of God, cannot speak from experience as to 
 the effects of prayer; nor are they in a position to give 
 credit, with generous simplicity, to those who can. But, 
 at least, on such a subject as this, the voice of the whole 
 company of God's servants may be held to counterbalance 
 a few a iwiori surmises or doctrines; and it is the very 
 heart of humanity itself wdiich from age to age mounts 
 up with the Psalmist to the Eternal Throne — " Thou 
 That liearest prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come." ^ And 
 Christians can penetrate within the veil. They know that 
 there is a majestic pleading, which for eighteen centuries 
 has never ceased, and which is itself omnipotent — the 
 pleading of One who makes their cause His own: they 
 rest upon the Divine words, " Whatsoever ye shall ask the 
 Father in My Name, He will give it you."" 
 . / A time will probably come to most of us, if it has not 
 come to some already, when we shall wish that the hours 
 at our command, during the short day of life, had not been 
 disposed of as they have. After all, this world is a poor 
 thing to live for, when the next is in view. Whatever be 
 their claims, created beings have no business to be sitting 
 on that highest throne within the soul that belongs to the 
 Creator. Yet, for all that, too often they do sit there. 
 And time is passing. Of that priceless gift of time, how 
 much will one day be seen to have been lost; how ruinous 
 shall we deem our investment of this our most precious 
 stock ! How many interests, occupations, engagements, 
 
 1 Ps. Ixv. 2. 2 s, joiin xvi. 23. 
 
Y.] The view of time from the Eternal World. 203 
 
 friendships — I sx3eak not of the avowed ways of " killing 
 time/' as it is termed with piteous accuracy — will be then 
 regarded only as so many precautions for building our 
 house upon the sand: as only so many expedients for 
 assuring our failure to compass the true end of our exis- 
 tence ! It may not now seem possible that we should ever 
 think thus. Life is like the summer's day; and in the first 
 fresh morning we do not realize the noon-day heat, and at 
 noon we do not think of the shadows lengthening across 
 the plain, and of the setting sun, and of the advancing 
 night. Yet, to each and all, the sunset comes at last; and 
 those who have made most of the day are not unlikely 
 to reflect most bitterly how little they have made of it. 
 Yliatever else they may look back upon with thankful- 
 ness or with sorrow, it is certain that they will regret no 
 omissions of duty more keenly than neglect of prayer ; that 
 they will prize no hours more than those which have 
 been passed, whether in private or in public, before that 
 Throne of Justice and of Grace upon which they hope to 
 gaze throughout eternity. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 . ^alm Siintiag. 
 
 THE MEDIATOE, THE GUAEANTEE OF 
 EELIGIOUS LIFE. 
 
 S. Matt, xxiii. 41. 
 Jesus aslecl them saying, What thinJc ye of Christ ? 
 
 A T lengtli, Ave reach the limits which the season assigns 
 -^ to our scanty treatment of a snbject that is in itself 
 inexhaustible. The relationship or bond between God and 
 the soul of man, which we term religion, is obscured and 
 interrupted on man's side by sin ; it is reasserted and 
 strengthened by prayer. But no human efforts can of them- 
 selves avail to establish or to restore it. If God answers 
 the prayers of individuals, has He answered the prayer of 
 prayers ; the great prayer of humanity in all the ages ? 
 Has He deigned to grant the prayer that He, too, would 
 on His side give some sign or pledge of real communion 
 with us ; that He would not leave us to ourselves, walking 
 after our own ways, feeling after Him if haply we might 
 find Him, but only feeling on, century after century, in the 
 twilight of reason ; that He would, in prophetic language, 
 
Lect. YL] Moral probability of a revelation. 205 
 
 rend the heavens and come down, and Lid the skies 
 pour down righteousness ? Is religion only a human in- 
 stinct or effort upon which no encouragement, no sanction, 
 no corresponding and invigorating acknowledgment has been 
 bestowed from on high ? Or has God spoken ? Has He 
 unveiled Himself? Have the clouds and darkness that 
 are round about Him rolled away, so that the righteousness 
 and judgment which are the habitation of His seat might 
 become clearly manifest to us ? 
 
 If we really believe God to be a floral Being, we shall be 
 prepared to find that He has spoken to us. The strength of 
 the confidence with which we anticipate a revelation will 
 vary exactly with our faith in the morality of God. If He 
 were only an intelligence, or a force, there would be no 
 reason or apology for listening to hear whether any voice 
 breaks the silence of the spheres. But if He has, or rather 
 is, a Heart ; if the moral qualities which are discoverable 
 in ourselves have any transcendent and majestic counter- 
 part in Him ; then, supposing the question whether He has 
 given a revelation to be for us still unanswered, or even 
 unexamined, we do well to traverse all the corridors of 
 history, to take counsel with the current wisdom and ex- 
 perience of the living, and to cross-question the recorded 
 convictions of the dead, until we see reason to hope that a 
 solution is at least at hand ; until " the day da^^'n and the 
 day-star arise in our hearts." 
 
 Already, indeed, and almost at each stage of our progress, 
 we have ever and anon halted our steps, and hushed other 
 
2o6 Jesus Christ as Teacher of religion. [Lect. 
 
 disputants around us, that we might listen to One Wliose 
 place among men, at least as a Master and Teacher of 
 religion, does not really enter into controversy. It is He 
 Who has set forth in its fulness the parental character of 
 God. It is He Avho has fully unveiled to the eye of the 
 human soul the secret of its boundless capacities, and of its 
 disheartening impotence. It is He Who by His life of 
 unassailable purity, and by His death of voluntary sacrifice, 
 has lighted up the dark realities of moral evil. It is His 
 example. His precepts, it is widespread faith in His assist- 
 ance and intercession, which have popularized prayer, with- 
 out degrading its idea. It is through Him that prayer has 
 come to be the most serious and welcome occupation of the 
 noblest and purest in the human family ; the continuous 
 expression of a desire to assert and strengthen the link 
 wdiich binds man to the Source and End of his existence. 
 And thus, besides placing before us the idea of religion, He 
 has, as no other, taught us to know Him between Whom 
 and ourselves religion is a bond; and what it is, call w^e it 
 disease or antagonist, that breaks religion up; and what the 
 spiritual action in wdiich it is especially embodied and re- 
 asserted. Has He done more for religion than this ? Is 
 His relation towards it only an external one, such as was 
 that of a Eaphael or a Michael Angelo towards their 
 majestic creations, such as was that of a ISTew^ton or a Cuvier 
 towards the great subjects of their lifelong study ? Or is 
 He, besides being a Master and Teacher of religion, some- 
 thing: more, and altooether distinct from this ? Is He the 
 
VI. ] Is Jestis Himself the object of religion ? 207 
 
 masterpiece of His own art ? Is He tlie subject of His 
 own teaching ? Does He enter into the object-matter of 
 religion as an integral part of it ? Is He not merely the 
 greatest of religious teachers, but also the first and greatest 
 of religious lessons which God has given to man ? Is He, 
 in short, God's answer in history to man's constant aspira- 
 tion heavenward ; the impersonated bond between God and 
 man ; a " Mediator," as Scripture terms it, "Who bridges 
 over the chasm which sin had opened between earth and 
 heaven ? 
 
 In pausing to consider this question, it is natural to every 
 Christian heart to express the joy of finding ourselves at 
 His blessed feet. Whose name is above every Name that is 
 pronounced, whether in His temples or elsewhere. On the 
 last five Sundays in which you have accompanied me with 
 your generous sympathy, it has often happened to us to 
 stray for a while into schools of thought, where He, our 
 Lord, is eithej unknown, or denied His due. We have 
 occasionally been listening to teachers and glancing at 
 systems which profess, in whatever sense, to be able to dis- 
 pense with Him. No men love home as do tliose whose 
 duty has for awhile obliged them to reside abroad ; and the 
 atmosphere of the New Testament and of the Church is not 
 the less welcome, because it is a change from that of human 
 literatures and of earthly philosophies. To-day we cease, 
 at least in the main, to measure the forms and density of 
 the clouds which veil the face of heaven from sad but 
 ea^^er multitudes. We pass into the light and warmth 
 
2o8 Historicaliinportance of the Life [Lect. 
 
 of the Sun of Eigliteousness, to occupy ourselves from 
 first to last with His glory and His beauty ; we advance 
 to recognize, as I trust, in Him the living bond of unity 
 between the great empire of souls on the one hand, and the 
 King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible on the other. 
 
 Jesus Christ is a Name around which a vast accumula- 
 tion of histories, ideas, beliefs, have gathered. Christianity 
 has many aspects; literary, philosophical, moral, historical, 
 political, theological, spiritual, practical What is the reli- 
 gious aspect of Christianity and of Christ? What is the 
 aspect which exhibits our Lord's relation to religion, consi- 
 dered as the bond between God and the human soul? 
 
 " Wliat think ye of Christ?" Is He a subject of the 
 highest historical interest ? No educated man, at least, 
 whatever be his faith or his life, can deny the reality or the 
 greatness of Christ's place in human history. Nothing is 
 more certain in the annals of mankind than this, that Jesus 
 Christ lived in Palestine, and was put to death eighteen 
 centuries and a half ago. This fact belongs to general 
 human knowledge, just as much as does the life of Julius 
 Cnesar, or of Alexander the Great, or of Socrates, or of 
 ]\Iahomet. Nobody, indeed, does deny the general fact. 
 
VI.] of Jcsits Christ, nndejtiable. 209 
 
 Strauss, for instance, tliongli he endeavours to distinguish 
 between the residuary historical element in the Gospels, 
 and the incrustation of legend, which, in his opinion, has 
 somehow become associated with it, yet fully admits that 
 there is history in the Gospels ; he admits that Jesus Christ 
 lived and died in the age of Tiberius. And if even this be 
 admitted, the life and death of Jesus Christ must possess 
 for any intelligent man the highest possible degree of 
 interest. He must feel that, in point of social and historical 
 importance, it stands alone. No doubt, at the time, the 
 Csesar Tiberius was everywhere on the lips and in the 
 minds of men; while the retired religious Teacher, as He 
 seemed to be, in Palestine, was by His teaching. His acts, 
 and the opposition which they aroused, only furnishing a 
 little conversation and excitement to the peasantry and to 
 the officials of a remote province. But if the importance 
 of a life is to be measured by its results in history and to 
 civilization, even although we should put all religious and 
 even moral considerations aside, who would think most of 
 the Emperor? What is the lasting and living influence 
 which Tiberius now exerts upon the world, except it be to 
 furnish a thesis now and then to clever essay writers, who 
 wish indirectly to attack or to defend modern imperialism? 
 But who can deny that at this moment, explain it how we 
 will, Jesus Christ, His life, His work. His Person, lives in 
 the hearts of multitudes as the object of most cherished and 
 devoted homage ; that He governs the ideas, the aspirations, 
 the social and political action of millions of mankind; that 
 
 P 
 
2IO Distinction between an intellectiLal [Lect. 
 
 the most active and enterprising section of the hnman 
 family, still, in various senses, places itself under the shadow 
 of His N'ame and patronage; and that if He has many 
 opponents, there is no serious probability of His being 
 spiritually or intellectually dethroned ? All this is a matter 
 of simple observation. The truth of it is most obvious to 
 those who know most about human affairs and human his- 
 tory. And it at once invests the earthly Life of Christ, and 
 all that illustrates and belongs to it, with the highest 
 practical and speculative interest ; with the interest which 
 belongs to the great problems of past history, and with the 
 interest which belongs to those great living forces that 
 make themselves felt day by day around us, and contribute 
 powerfully towards determining the current of events. 
 
 JSTot to be interested in the life of Jesus Christ, then, is 
 to be, I do not say irreligious, but unintelligent. It is to 
 be insensible to the nature and claims of the most powerful 
 force that has ever moulded the thought and swayed the 
 destinies of civilized man. But to feel this interest, it is 
 almost unnecessary to add, a man need not even profess to 
 be a Christian. He may indeed be earnestly opposed to 
 Christianity: and his opposition can scarcely in any case 
 be formidable, unless he has given his mind to the careful 
 study of that which he opposes. To such men as Celsus, 
 or Lucian, or Porphyry, or the apostate Emperor Julian, 
 or the philosopher of Ferney, Christianity was a matter 
 of the deepest intellectual interest. Men do not write 
 like Celsus, or act like Julian, or epigrammatize with the 
 
VI.] and a religioics intei^est in ^esns. 2 1 1 
 
 bitterness of Voltaire, about a doctrine in which they feel 
 little concerned. ISTay, in order to have such an interest, a 
 man need not be an active opponent of Christianity. Looking 
 upon it with the eye, and only with the eye, of a philoso- 
 pher ; jealously excluding from his estimate every trace of 
 passion, whether it be the passion of hatred or the passion 
 of affection; he may yet understand that it is too great, 
 too powerful, in a word, too original a phenomenon, to be 
 ignored, or rather not to be investigated with patient per- 
 severance. Such might seem to have been the case with 
 that most accomplished of modern critics, the late M. Saint- 
 Beuve. His History of Port-Eoyal betrays an intimate 
 acquaintance with the most delicate and beautiful forms of 
 Christian faith and Christian love. N"one knew better than 
 he the claims of Jesus Christ — of His life in itself, and of 
 His place in history — ujDon the attention of all earnest 
 students of nature and of man. N'o pages are more marked 
 than his by a sustained and rigid justice which is incapable 
 of condescending to a phrase that is dictated by any but 
 that which the writer intends and believes to be a severely 
 critical judgment. This lofty impartiality could not but 
 make him write at times like a devoted Christian in 
 virtue of his moral and literary sympathies; and many men 
 have read him without suspecting his real place in the 
 world of thought. Yet, at his last hours, we are told, he 
 purposely declined the ordinary consolations of a Christian 
 deathbed: his interest in Christianity did not imply a bond 
 to any living person with Whom, in the most solemn and 
 
2 1 2 Impression made byoitrL ord's ' 'character. ' ' [Lect. 
 
 critical moments of existence, there are histories to be 
 reviewed, and accounts to be settled. 
 
 That a literary and historical interest in Christianity 
 and Christ has its value, who would deny ? It may, in 
 union witJi faith and love, achieve services of no common 
 order for the kingdom of the truth. It may, under any 
 circumstances, enable Christians to realize the historical 
 settings of their faith, more truly and vividly than would 
 otherwise be j)Ossible. Thus, in a very creditable sense, it 
 may hew wood and draw water for the sacred camp, and 
 we must thank it with all our hearts for its services. But 
 it is not of itself a religious interest. It is only an 
 intellectual and scholarly taste dealing with a religious 
 subject-matter. It is one thing to cleanse the glasses 
 of a powerful telescope ; it is another to use them as 
 they should be used by an observer and student of the 
 heavens. 
 
 II. 
 
 But the question must occur. What was it in Jesus 
 Christ which gave Him, in sj)ite of social and political 
 insignificance, so commanding, so unrivalled a position in 
 history ? The least answer that can be given — I am far 
 from implying that it is an adequate answer — is, that His 
 character made a profound, an ineffaceable impression upon 
 
VL] Ckai^acter appreciated by the moral sense. 2 1 3 
 
 His contemporaries ; an impression so deep and abiding, 
 that it moved tliem, peasants and paupers as tliey were, to 
 acliieve the moral revohition of the civilized world. And 
 we are told that admiration for Christ's human character 
 is still the sustaining element in Christianity; that it 
 explains its per^Dctuation as it explains its original victories ; 
 that it furnishes, in fact, the true answer to the question, 
 " What think ye of Christ ? " Undoubtedly the appreciation 
 of moral character is a higher and more religious thing 
 than the appreciation of any external historical fact, how- 
 ever imposing. In order to enter into the political con- 
 sequences of a decisive campaign, a man requires only a 
 well-stored and cultivated intellect ; in order to do justice 
 to a saintly character the observer must have that which 
 is infinitely higher in itself, though of less account among 
 men — a sensitive moral instinct, a tender and penetrating 
 heart. And yet, happily, tlie higher gift is the more 
 common. The questions which may be raised about our 
 Lord's genealogies in the first and third Evangelists can 
 only be answered by a few well-trained scholars. But 
 every child can feel the pathos of the relief suddenly 
 given to the hungry multitudes; of the visit to the 
 house of mourning at Bethany; of the successive in- 
 cidents of the stern conflict with the Jews of Jerusalem ; 
 of the Last Supper; of the Agony; of the Betrayal; 
 of the Cross. A great character, even more than a great 
 picture, or a great poem, or a magnificent mountain, speaks 
 for itself. It commends itself to average men, even though 
 
2 14 Oitr Lord' s ''character'' not the product [Lect. 
 
 they cannot take tlieir sympathies to pieces, and say pre- 
 cisely what is the feature in it that fascinates them. 
 There is that in their humanity which responds, however 
 imperfectly, to the form of moral beauty before them, and 
 they surrender themselves to an instinct which they do 
 not explain, but which they can implicitly trust. 
 
 Thus it is that our Lord's simplicity. His self-sacrifice, 
 His love of the humble and of the poor, joined to His 
 resistless moral ascendancy. His fearless courage. His 
 strength which is so entirely compatible with the utmost 
 tenderness, touches us all. Nothing perhaps shews Jesus 
 Christ more clearly to us than the circumstances under 
 which He delivered the Sermon on the Mount. For here 
 we are convinced that His character was so far from being 
 a product whether of His nation or of His age, as to be 
 in marked opposition to some of their ruling tendencies. In 
 the Jew of the age of Tiberius, the national feeling, in- 
 tensified by the Eoman conquest, had almost killed out 
 the human. The children of the men who under David 
 and Solomon had ruled Western Asia, beheld on every 
 side the symbols of their political slavery. The Eoman 
 legionaries were keeping guard near the temple; the Eoman 
 tax-gatherer was making his presence felt in every home. 
 And so the Jew wrapped himself more and more closely 
 and sullenly in devotion to the ideas and institutions of 
 his ancestors, and looked forward to a time when the 
 prophecies would be fulfilled in the rigid political sense 
 in which he read them ; when the Eoman invader would 
 
VL] of His age and ciracmstances. 2 1 5 
 
 be driven by an indignant people, headed by tlieir King- 
 Messiah, from the sacred soil. There were adventurers in 
 that age who really endeavoured to meet this predomina- 
 ting national temper, and the effort led to some well- 
 known catastrophes. And doubtless it was such a political 
 expectation as this which was kindled in the breast of 
 multitudes by the announcement throughout Galilee that 
 the Kingdom of Heaven w^as at hand. The phrase fired 
 their imaginations. They followed the Teacher Who uttered 
 it out of their towns and villages to a distant hill-side, that 
 they might listen, as they trusted, to His plan for an 
 approaching insurrection or for a decisive campaign. And 
 what was His manifesto ? He uttered the Beatitudes ; 
 He compared the Pharisaic with the true morality; He 
 proclaimed the law and unfolded the prospects of a spiritual 
 empire, of the kingdom of the truth. 
 
 It is not in the unrivalled exhibition of any one form of 
 human excellence, whether purity or humility, or charity, 
 or courage, or veracity, or self-denial, or justice, or con- 
 sideration for others, that we best appreciate the signifi- 
 cance of our Lord's human character. It is in the equal 
 balance of all excellence, in the absence of any warping, 
 disturbing, exaggerating influence, that modern writers 
 have been forward to recognize a moral sublimity, which 
 they can discover nowhere else in history. The subject 
 has been handled by a distinguished living layman, who 
 certainly cannot be supposed to have approached it with 
 any strong ecclesiastical bias. He observes that " there 
 
2 1 6 Oitr Lord's ''character^' most vivid, yet [Lect. 
 
 are many peculiarities arising out of personal and historical 
 circumstances, wliicli are incident to tlie best human 
 characters, and which would prevent any one of them from 
 being universal or final as a type. But the t}^e set up 
 in the Gospels as the Christian type seems to have escaped 
 all these peculiarities, and to stand out in unapproached 
 purity, as well as in unapproached perfection of moral 
 excellence." ^ Accordingly he argues that it can be said 
 to belong exclusively to neither of the " two hemispheres 
 in the actual world of moral excellence — the noble and 
 the amiable, or, in the language of moral taste, the grand 
 and the beautiful." It belongs to both of them, " perfectly 
 and undistinguishably, the fusion of the two classes of 
 qualities being complete, so that the mental eye, though it 
 be strained to aching, cannot discern whether that on which 
 it gazes be more the object of reverence or of love." ^ This 
 type is equally free from sexual peculiarities ; it combines 
 the strength of manhood with feminine tenderness so com- 
 pletely as to leave no room for a supplementary female 
 type that should complete the ideal of Christian humanity. ^ 
 It sets before us an image of pure beneficence, disengaged 
 from all peculiar social circumstances which would dis- 
 qualify a character from being universal and the ideal, yet 
 adapted to all. * If that t}^3e of character was constructed 
 by human intellect, we must at least bear in mind that 
 " it was constructed at the confluence of three races, the 
 
 1 On some supposed Consequences of the Doctrine of Historical Progress: 
 A Lecture. By Goldwin Smith, M.A. 1861.— P. 15. 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 16. 3 /5,v^. p. 17. 4 Hid. 
 
VL] without any nari^owing peculiarities, 2 1 7 
 
 Jewish, the Greek, and the Eoman, each of which had 
 strong national peculiarities of its own. A single touch, a 
 single taint of any one of those peculiarities, and the char- 
 acter would have been national, not universal ; transient, 
 not eternal. It might have been the highest character in 
 history, but it would have been disqualified for being the 
 ideal." Supposing it to have been " human, whether it 
 were the effort of a real man to attain moral excellence, or 
 a moral imagination of the wTiters of the Gospels, the 
 chances, surely," he urges, " were infinite against its 
 escaping any tincture of the fanaticism, formalism, and 
 exclusiveness of the Jew — of the political pride of the 
 Roman — of the intellectual pride of the Greek. Yet it 
 escaped them all." ^ 
 
 In like manner, the character before us in the Gospels 
 cannot possibly be regarded as a reaction from something 
 else : it is not an antinominian protest against Pharisaism ; 
 it is not a fanatical patriotism protesting against servility 
 to the Roman rule ; it is not an exaggerated cosmopolitan- 
 ism in revolt against the narrow patriotism of the Jew : it 
 is the hi<^hest self-denial, without havinf? the character of 
 a formalized asceticism; it is, in short, " the essence of 
 man's moral nature, clothed with a personality so vivid and 
 intense as to excite, through all ages, the most intense 
 affection ; yet divested of all those peculiar characteristics, 
 the accidents of place and time, by which human personali- 
 ties are marked." "What other notion than this," asks 
 1 1 hid. p. 18. 
 
2i8 Astonishing self -proclamation of J esiis. [Lect. 
 
 the writer, " can pliilosoj^liy form of Divinity manifest on 
 earth ?"i 
 
 These eloquent and sincere words of Professor Goldwin 
 Smith will need no recommendation or comment. And 
 yet they suggest a question, which is in the path of our 
 subject, and wdiich, under any circumstances, cannot be 
 overlooked. This ideal Character of the Gospels is, on one 
 side, at issue with w^hat we should abstractedly conceive to 
 be a perfect human ideal. For He who presents it to us 
 proclaims Himself, in terms and to an extent wdiich are alto- 
 gether inconsistent with any true ideal of a purely creaturely 
 perfection. In the words of another writer of our day, 
 " The unbounded personal pretensions which Christ 
 advances, remain throughout a subject of ever-recurring 
 astonishment. It is common, in human history, to meet 
 with those w^ho claim some superiority over their fellows. 
 Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or 
 fellow-countrymen, and become rulers of those who were 
 at first their equals; but they dream of nothing greater 
 than of some partial control over the actions of others for 
 the short space of a lifetime. Few, indeed, are there to 
 whom it is given to influence future ages. Yet some men 
 have appeared who have been as levers to uj)lift the earth 
 and roU it in another course. Homer, by creating litera- 
 ture; Socrates, by creating science; Csesar, by carrying 
 civilization inward from the shores of the Mediterranean ; 
 Newton, by starting science upon a career of steady j)ro- 
 gress, — may be said to have attained this eminence. But 
 1 Ibid. p. 22. 
 
VI.] '' Christ's discovery is Himself!' 219 
 
 these men gave a single impact, like that which is con- 
 ceived to have first set the planets in motion: Christ 
 claims to be a perpetual attractive power, like the sun, 
 which determines their orbit. They contributed to men 
 some discovery, and passed away: Christ's discovery is 
 Himself. To humanity, struggling with its passions and 
 its destiny, He says — ' Cling to Me : cling ever closer to 
 ]\ie.' . . . He represented himself as the Light of the 
 world, as the Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to 
 immortality, as the Vine or Life-Tree of humanity. . . . 
 He commanded men to leave everything and attach them- 
 seh^es to Him ; . . . He declared Himself King, 
 Master, and Judge of men; . . . He promised to 
 give rest to all the weary and heavy-laden ; . . . He 
 instructed His followers to hope for life from feeding on 
 His body and His blood." ^ 
 
 If this statement only suggests the complete truth, it is 
 true as far as it goes. It might be sustained by a hundred 
 texts. That which is so striking, so overpowering in the 
 Gospels, is perhaps less the precise language which our 
 Lord uses about Himself, than the consistent bearing which 
 He assumes towards His discij^les and mankind. His 
 attitude is that of One Wlio takes His claims for granted ; 
 Who has no errors to confess, no demands to explain, or 
 to apologize for; no restraining instinct of self-distrust 
 to keep Him in the background; no shrinking from high 
 command, based upon a sense of the possible superiority 
 
 1 "Ecce Homo," pp. 176-177. 
 
2 20 Language of Jeszis Christ [Lect. 
 
 of those around Him. It is the bearing of One Who claims 
 to be the First of all, the Centre of all, with entire simpli- 
 city indeed, but also with unhesitating decision. 
 
 Let us dwell more in detail upon some of the language 
 which Jesus Christ really uses about Himself. He is 
 greater than the most venerable names in Jewish antiquity; 
 greater than the men whose greatness had been felt most 
 widely and deeply beyond the boundaries of Israel. He 
 is greater than Jonah, whose preaching brouglit Nineveh 
 to penitence ;^ greater than Solomon, in whom not 
 Israel only, but the whole East, recognized the wisest 
 of men.- Not merely is He David's descendant; He 
 is David's Lord.^ When Abraham was yet unborn. He 
 was already in existence.'^ Thus He could refer to 
 " the glory which He had with the Father before the 
 world was," ^ and to the fall of the rebel-spirit, which he 
 had witnessed.^ God is, in an entirely unique sense. His 
 Father ; '^ the Jews feel that He uses the word in a manner 
 which implies a tremendous claim. ^ For, indeed. He 
 is conscious of being " from above," ^ of having " come 
 down from heaven," ^^ of having come forth from being 
 
 1 S. Matt. xii. 41. 2 s_ Matt. xii. 42. 
 
 3 S. Matt. xxii. 41-46 ; Ps. ex. 1. 
 
 * S. John viii. 56, 57, 58 ; cf. i. 15, 27, 30. 
 
 ^ S. John xvii. 5 ; cf. verse 24. ^ S. Luke x. 18. 
 
 ^ S. Matt. X. 32 ; XV. 13 ; xvi. 17 ; x^^ii. 19 ; xxvi. 39, 42 ; S. Luke 
 xxiii. 46 ; xxiv. 49 ; S. John v. 30 ; x. 29 ; xiv. 2, 6. 
 
 ^ S. Jolm V. 17-18, irarepa lSiov ^Xeye rbv Qebv, ccrop eavTov ttolQiv ry Geo?. 
 
 ® S. John viii. 23, eyCo ck tQu &vu) el/xi. 
 
 ^^ Ibid. vi. 38, Kara^e^rjKa e/c rod ovpavov ; v. 51. 6 e/c rov ovpavoO 
 KaraBas. 
 
VI.] about Himself and His claims. 221 
 
 with the Father, ^ of having come forth out of God. - He 
 knows, not merely that He lives; but that He has in Him- 
 self, that He is, the Life; Life in the deepest sense of the 
 term, — perfect, blessed, absolute existence ; eternally re- 
 ceived from the Father, yet shared with Him thus from 
 everlasting to everlasting.^ Although, then. He is visibly 
 upon the earth. He is still really in Heaven.* He is 
 united to the Father not merely by a moral, but by a 
 natural union, ^ and so intimately, that "to have seen 
 Him is to have seen the Father,^ to have known Him 
 is to have known the Father."'' He is in the Father, and 
 the Father is in Him, by a perfect reciprocity.^ Of the 
 Father He only has adequate knowledge: He Himself is 
 known only by the Father. ^ As a consequence. He has 
 all thinc^s in common with the Father. ^ ^ Men, whom He 
 wills to redeem, are already His own. ^ ^ The Kingdom of 
 God is His Kingdom. ^ ^ The Angels are His Angels. ^ ^ The 
 " Church of the Living God" ^^ is His Church. ' ^ Power is 
 
 ^ Ihid. xvi. 28, i^i]\6ov irapa rod irarpos, Kai iXrjXvda els top koctixov. 
 
 "^ Ibid. viii. 42, e/c toO Qeod e^rfkdov Kal t/icw. Cf. S. John xvii. 8; xvi. 
 30 ; Ps. ii. 7 ; Micah v. 2. 
 
 3 S. John V. 26 ; xi. 25 ; xiv. 6 ; cf. S. John i. 4 ; 1 S. John i. 1, 2 ; v. 20. 
 
 ■* S. John iii. 13, 6 vibs toO avOpdo-Kov 6 &v ev np ovpav(^, 
 
 ^ S. John X. 28-30, iyib Kal 6 Trarrjp ev ecrfxev. 
 
 « Ibid. xiv. 9. ^ Ibid. viii. 19. 
 
 8 S. John xiv. 10 ; xvii. 21, 22. 
 
 » S. Matt. xi. 27. Cf. S. John vi. 46, 6 cbv irapa tov Qeov, ovtos e^hpaKe 
 Tov Trarepa. Ibid. x. 14, 15. 
 
 10 S. John xvi. 15 ; xvii. 10 ; cf. S. Matt. xi. 27 ; Heb. i. 3 ; S. Matt, xxi, 
 38 ; Acts X. 36. ; S. John i. 11. 
 
 11 S. John X. 14, 15, 27, 28 ; xvii. 10-12. 
 
 12 S. Matt. xiii. 41 ; S. John xviii. 36. Cf. S. Luke i. 33 ; "Rev. xi. 15. 
 
 13 S. Matt. xiii. 41 ; xvi. 27 ; xxiv. 31. i* 1 Tim. iii. 15. 
 16 S. Matt. xvi. 18 ; cf. Eom. xvi. 16. 
 
222 Wotdd oitr Lord's language abottt [Lect. 
 
 given Him not merely over the human race/ but also with- 
 out any assigned limits in heaven and in earth; ^ and the 
 glory with which He will appear at the last day is not 
 other than His Father's. ^ His working in the sphere of 
 sense and time corresponds to the ceaseless activity of 
 the Father.* He too quickens and will raise the dead.^ 
 He too forgives sins, as to the Paralytic;^ He too will 
 save the world ; '' He will seek and save the lost ; ^ He 
 will give eternal life. ^ To Him all judgment is committed, 
 and all nations shall one day be gathered before His 
 Throne. ^ ° Even now all men are to honour Him, even as 
 they honour the Father. ^ ^ 
 
 His words are familiar to our ears; but do we dwell 
 upon their real and awful meaning ? What should we 
 think of a religious teacher now who could permit him- 
 self to say that Eternal Life consisted in the knowledge 
 of himself as well as in knowledge of the Father ;i2 that 
 dislike of himself implied dislike of the Father ;^2 that 
 belief in himself secured eternal life;^* that disbelief in 
 himself involved present condemnation?^^ What, if he 
 should teU us that without him we could do nothing ;^^ 
 that united with him, we should bring forth much fruit ;^'' 
 
 1 S. John xvii. 2. 2 §_ Matt, xxviii, 18. ^ g ^^tt. xvi. 27. 
 
 * S. John V. 17, 19, 20. ^ lUd. verses 21, 28, 29; xi. 25, 40. 
 
 6 S. Matt. ix. 2-7 ; S. Luke vii. 36-50. '" S. John iii. 17. 
 
 s S. Luke xix. 10 ; ix. 56. . » S. John xvii. 2. 
 
 log, John V. 22, 27 ; S. Matt. xxv. 31-39. Cf. Is. xi. 3. 
 11 S. John V. 20-23. ^^ g j^^j^^ ^vii. 3 ; xii. 44. 
 
 1 3 S. John XV. 23 ; S. Luke x. 16. ^ * S. John iii. 16 ; v. 40 ; vi. 47. 
 
 1 5 S. John iii. 18 ; viii. 24. ^ ° S. John xv. 5 ; xiv. 6. 
 
 1 7 S. John XV. 4. 
 
VL] Himself be tolerable in any other? 223 
 
 that, altliouoh leavino- this world before us, he was fjoiiifj 
 to prepare places for us in the Eternal Home;^ that his 
 name would have resistless power with the Father 5^ that 
 in his name his pupils would cast out devils f that he would 
 send the Divine Spirit from the Father * AYlio, when He 
 came, would glorify the sender ? ^ What should we say of 
 the promise of a perpetual presence,^ of the pretension to 
 found an imperishable society/ of the delegation of power 
 to forgive sins,^ of the claim to be so faultless that in him 
 the Prince of evil had no part whatever ? ^ 
 
 Much else to the same purpose might be quoted from 
 the three earlier Gospels, as well as from the last; and 
 the question arises, how we are to account for this earnest 
 self-assertion on the part of Jesus Christ, to explain such 
 language ? How are we to adjust it, on the one hand, with 
 the sobriety and truthfulness of a perfect human character ; 
 on the other, with a due recognition of the rights of God ? 
 
 There are men who decline to entertain this inquiry. 
 They are not by any means forgetful of God. He weighs 
 upon their conscience, upon their imagination, upon their 
 life of daily thought and action, as the greatest and most 
 solemn of all facts. They are not insensible to the moral 
 beauties of the earthly life of Jesus Christ; on the con- 
 trary, they profess to be so enamoured of these beauties, or of 
 
 1 S. John xiv. 2, 3. - Hid. xvi. 23 ; xiv. 13, 14. 
 
 3 S. Mark xvi. 17, 18 ; cf. 20. '' S. John xvi. 7. 
 
 "> S. John xvi. 14. *' S. Matt, xxviii. 20. ^ S. Matt. xvi. 18. 
 
 8 S. John XX. 21-23 ; S. Matt. xvi. 19 ; xviii. 18. 
 
 » S. John xiv. 30. 
 
2 24 Our LorcTs self-proclamatioit [Lect. 
 
 some of them, as to be impatient of all other aspects of our 
 Lord's Work and Teaching, But they do not allow them- 
 selves to reflect steadily upon the question whether their 
 loyalty to the supreme rights of God, and their love for 
 Jesus Christ, do not alike oblige them to " consider the re- 
 lation which exists between Christ and God." Christian 
 theology appears to them in the light of a wanton importa- 
 tion of worthless metaphysics into the heart of a moral 
 history of simple and faultless beauty; but they do not 
 reflect that their moral ideal itself must fall to pieces, unless 
 they are prepared in some way to attempt the chief problem 
 with which Christian theology deals. 
 
 Is our Lord's language imposture ? The suggestion can 
 only be mentioned to be condemned by the entire drift and 
 atmosphere of His Life. Is it the hallucination of an en- 
 thusiast, so entranced in his idea as to be insensible to the 
 world of facts around him ? But even Channing has pointed 
 out that the enthusiasm takes a turn which would be incon- 
 ceivable, for a deranged enthusiasm, under the circum- 
 stances of Jesus Christ : " I can conceive," he says, " of His 
 seating Himself, infancy, on the throne of David, and secretly 
 pondering the means of His appointed triumphs; but that 
 a Jew should fancy himself the Messiah, and at the same 
 time should strip that character of all the attributes that 
 fired his youthful imagination and heart ; that he should 
 start aside from all the feelings and hopes of His age, and 
 should acquire a consciousness of being destined to a 
 wholly new career, and one as unbounded as it was new — 
 
VI.] unlike miy thing in the Hebrczv Prophets. 225 
 
 this is exceedingly improbable." ^ Was it, then, only the 
 natural manner of an oriental mind ; the habit of seizin^r 
 truth intuitively and enunciating it authoritatively, in 
 contrast with our vvestern methods of demonstration 
 and argument ? But this explanation, even if on other 
 accounts it could be admitted, does not cover the ground 
 required. It does not justify the actual substance and 
 contents of our Lord's language about Himself It does 
 not explain the fact that His language about Himself is 
 unlike anything which we find in the Hebrew prophets. 
 The prophets, if you will, announce truth in the intuitive 
 manner ; but they do not make themselves the subjects and 
 centres of the truth which they announce. They draw the 
 deepest distinctions between themselves and their Master : 
 they are sinners, and He is the All-holy; they are foolish 
 and incapable. He is All-powerful and All- wise. The rela- 
 tion in which Christ claims to stand, both towards the 
 Father and towards mankind, is utterly unanticipated by 
 anything that can be traced in the prophetic literature of 
 Israel; it reveals a Personality distinct in kind from any 
 that had previously appeared in Hebrew history. 
 
 And at this point we cannot but observe that our Lord's 
 language about Himself is entirely in harmony with the 
 character of certain of the miracles ascribed to Him in the 
 Gospels. The miraculous element cannot be weeded out 
 of the Gospel narratives, without altogether impugning tlie 
 historical value of those documents ; and to do this mainly 
 
 ^ Clianning : Works, ii. 56, 
 
 Q 
 
2 26 Our L ord^s m trades illustrate His words. [Lect. 
 
 because one department or one age of human experience 
 does not positively correspond with what we know as yet 
 about another, is not reasonable. Now, the Gospel miracles 
 fall, speaking roughly, into two classes; they are acts of 
 mercy, or acts of power. In one sense, they are all acts of 
 power; but the motive of compassion towards human suffer- 
 ing apparently predominates in the one class ; while, in the 
 other, the reason for working them must be chiefly looked 
 for in the need of demonstrating the personal power of the 
 Agent. Thus, among the miracles of mercy, there are seven- 
 teen cases on record of His healing bodily disease; there are 
 six cases of the cure of demoniacal possession, each of which 
 is described in detail; there are three cases of restoration to 
 life. On the other hand, the miracles at Cana in Galilee, 
 and of feeding the four and the five thousand, suggest, first 
 of all, the creative power of the Worker, although it was 
 wielded with a philanthropic object. The element of power 
 is more distinctly and exclusively apparent in His stilling 
 the tempest, and walking on the sea ; in His rendering Him- 
 seK invisible to a hostile multitude; in His awing by a 
 glance the traders in the temple, and the multitude that 
 came to take Him; in His cursing the barren fig-tree. Some 
 of this class of miracles are, in fact, objected to by a recent 
 writer, 1 on the specific ground that they only befit a 
 superhuman personality. We therefore do not strain the 
 import of such miracles in saying that they are, at least, in 
 harmony with Christ's language about His claims and His 
 superhuman Person. 
 
 ^ Schenkel : Charactertild Jesu. Absch. iv., Kap. 11, p. 123. 
 
VL] Significance of His sinlessness. 227 
 
 But our Lord's references to Himself are also iu keeping 
 with another phenomenon. He was sinless. Upon the 
 positive side of Christ's character we have already dwelt ; 
 upon the balanced perfection, the ideal universality of the 
 type. It was a life such as Paganism had not conceived ; 
 it was higher than, and distinct from, the unimpeachable 
 justice, the calm superiority to misfortune, the proud self- 
 respect, which constituted, in various proportions, the 
 Pagan ideal. It was a life of love and humility, of the 
 highest forms of holiness, expressed by example as well as 
 recommended by precept. But the most startling moral 
 feature in this life is that we can trace nowhere in it 
 any — the faintest — consciousness of guilt. The best men 
 ordinarily feel the taint of moral evil most constantly and 
 acutely : their language about their sins and shortcomings 
 seems even exaggerated to those who live at a greater 
 distance from the Source of sanctity than they themselves. 
 But Jesus challenges His enemies to convince Him of sin, 
 if they can. He never hints that He has done or said 
 any one thing which needs forgiveness. He teaches His 
 disciples to pray, " Forgive us our trespasses :" He never 
 prays for pardon Himself. Sorrow makes aU of us think 
 of that in our past lives, which, as conscience whispers, 
 has but too well deserved it : Jesus, in His sorrow, thinks 
 only of the sins of others. Certainly He is tempted ; but 
 there is nothing within Him that can respond to the 
 temptation : He is " holy, harmless, undefiled, separate 
 from sinners." And no attempts to fasten sin upon Him 
 
2 28 Christ only sinless, if He [Lect. 
 
 have had a trace of success, except so far as they have 
 gone hand in hand with a denial of His personal claims. 
 Strauss, for example, thinks it not merely fanaticism, but 
 " unjustifiable self-exaltation, for a man to imagine himself 
 so separated from other men, as to set himself before them 
 as their future judge." ^ Strauss, we must admit, is per- 
 fectly right, if the claim of Christ to judge the world is 
 not strictly based upon fact. It is strictly impossible to 
 maintain our faith in the faultlessness of His character 
 if we deny that a fundamental necessity of His Being 
 forced Him to draw attention so persistently, so imperiously, 
 to Himself. But, on the other hand, if His words about 
 Himself are sober truth, they only afford another illustra- 
 tion of His compassionate love for those whom He came 
 to enlighten and to save. 
 
 Doubtless it has been a favourite object with a modern 
 school, as men have said, " to bring down Jesus from 
 the clouds, and to restore Him, by criticism, to the domain 
 of history." This enterprise assumes that " the theological 
 and metaphysical Christ of the creeds," is a very different 
 person from " the living Christ of the Gospels." But when 
 such criticism enters upon its task, what happens ? If, in- 
 stead of declaiming vaguely against dogma, men really 
 wish to get to the bottom of this problem, they will find 
 that, of two things, one becomes absolutely necessary. Either 
 they must consent to forfeit the moral ideal which they 
 admire in the Gospels, and which, to do them justice, they 
 
 ^ Leben Jesu fiir das Deutsche Volk, p. 242. 
 
VI.] is hi deed Divine. 229 
 
 are sincerely anxious to preserve ; or they must fall back 
 upon those very statements of the creeds which, by affirm- 
 ing Christ's personal Divinity, really and only justify His 
 constant references to Himself, and His unbounded claims 
 upon mankind. His precepts about humility are contradicted 
 by His example, unless His statements about Himself are 
 dictated by that true humility which would rather incur 
 the suspicion of pride than conceal the simple fact. His 
 enforcement of sincerity ceases to awe us, if, in His language 
 about Himself, He was indeed guilty of consistent and 
 almost boundless exaggeration. His very charity loses its 
 lustre, and becomes suspected, if we are forced to feel that 
 He is ever capable of putting Himself unduly forward ; its 
 highest forms cease to represent in our eyes the Universal 
 Love ; they remind us rather of the efforts of this or that 
 tribune of the people, who clothes a personal ambition 
 beneath the activities of an ostentatious disinterestedness, 
 and w^hose efforts are at last crowned by a catastrophe 
 which they have really deserved. 
 
 H, on the other hand, we bow before the general impression 
 produced by Christ's character, and He be taken at His 
 word. He must be believed to be, in the absolute sense, 
 Divine. There is no room for an intermediate being, such 
 as Arianism imagined, who is neither God nor an angel, in 
 a serious theistic creed. And our Lord's words are strictly 
 inconsistent with what would be sober and true in any 
 creature, however exalted. They are not surpassed ; they 
 are only unfolded by the later teaching of apostles and of 
 
230 Harmony of revealed truth. [Lect. 
 
 creeds. The Christ of S. Paul's Epistles is really the 
 Christ of the earliest Evangelist ; the Christ of S. John 
 is the Christ of S. Paul ; the Christ of the Creeds 
 and the great Councils is the Christ of S. John. He 
 Who alone knows the Eather, and Whom none but the 
 Father knoAvs/ is the Image of tlie Father, ^ is in the Form 
 of God,^ is the Effulgence of God's glory and the exact 
 Impress of His Being/ is over all God blessed for ever. ^ He, 
 the only Begotten Son, or God, Which is in the bosom of the 
 Father, 6 isof one substance with the Father,'^ as being "God 
 of the substance of the Father, bes^otten before all worlds."^ 
 The later statements may be more elaborate; but they are 
 implied, in all their completeness, by the earlier. Just as 
 an anatomist, from his knowledge of the animal frame, can 
 pronounce upon the age and size of a skeleton of which he 
 only possesses the fragment of a single bone; so with our 
 eye upon S. John, and the Nicene confession, we can see 
 statements in S. Mark which can only be maintained when 
 men acknowledge the consubstantiality of the Son with the 
 Father. There are deep harmonies in truth which, from 
 first to last, bind it in its integrity rigidly together. 
 They cannot be set aside or trifled with; for truths which 
 we in our narrowness deem obscure or unimportant, are 
 often vitally necessary to the maintenance of others 
 which we are batter capable of appreciating. Our 
 Blessed Lord's Divinity, instead of obscuring His true 
 
 1 S. Matt. xi. 29. 2 Col. i. 15. ^ p^ii. ii. 6. * Heb. i. 3. 
 
 ^ Rom. ix. 5. 6 g_ joi^n i. IS. ^ Nic. Creed. ^Athan. Creed. 
 
VL] What is " the religion of Christ?'' 231 
 
 Manhood, is the safeguard and justification of its moral 
 perfectness : and we do the most beautiful of moral histories 
 a fatal injustice, if we forget that, in the words of the 
 Creed, its subject " is perfect God and perfect Man, of a 
 reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting ; equal to the 
 Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father 
 as touching His manhood ; Who, although He be God and 
 Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ."^ 
 
 This is the full and solemn truth ; that Jesus Christ 
 is not merely the Teacher but the substance of Christianity ; 
 not merely the author of the faith which Christians 
 profess, but its central object. For Christians the popular 
 phrase, " the religion of Christ," does not mean, as 
 Lessing suggested, only or chiefly the piety which in 
 the days of His flesh He exhibited towards the Father. 
 It means the piety, the submission of thought and heart, 
 the sense of obligation, the voluntary enthusiastic service, 
 of which He, together and equally with the Father, is 
 the rightful and everlasting Object ; which, when He was 
 on earth. He claimed as His due ; and which has been 
 rendered to Him now for more than eighteen hundred 
 years by the best and noblest of the human race. 
 
 ^ Athanasian Creed. 
 
232 Jesus the liviiig bond [Lect. 
 
 III. 
 
 In Jesus Christ, then, we have the guarantee or bond of 
 religion ; He is the means of an actual communication 
 between the soul of man and the Eternal God. '' There is 
 one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ 
 Jesus." ^ He is the Mediation in virtue of the very terms 
 of His Being : His office of Mediation is based upon the 
 two Natures which are united in His Single Person. On 
 the one hand, as the Eternal Son, He is One with the 
 All-Holy and Infinite God ; on the other, as the child of 
 Mary, He shares all the finiteness and weakness of our 
 manhood; He shares everything with it except its sin. 
 Thus He impersonates and maintains, by the very fact 
 of being what He is, a true vital bond between earth and 
 heaven. To us men, He is the last and most complete 
 unveiling of the interest which God takes in the well- 
 being of His moral and reasonable creatures ; the Highest 
 Organ of the Divine Mind and Will ; the only and certain 
 channel of those " unsearchable riches " ^ which flow down 
 from the Fountain of all goodness upon the beings whom 
 He has made. Before the Majesty of God He is the 
 unique and ideal Eepresentative of our race : He represents 
 us, not as being what we are, but as being what we were 
 meant to be by the Great Author of our existence. And 
 yet, although we are only weak and sinful, we may unite 
 ourselves to Him by faith, and love, and contrition for the 
 1 1 Tim. ii. 5. 2 j^pi, iii, 8. 
 
VL] between God and the Soul. 233 
 
 past, and be *' accepted in the Beloved." ^ His obedience 
 as Man, reaching its climax in the self-sacrifice of the 
 Cross, becomes ours through His free grace and mercy. 
 His inviqoratinfT life, which restores our race to its 
 original strength and beauty, is still communicated to us 
 by His Spirit and His Sacraments ; so that all who will, 
 may " put off the old man, wdiich is corrupt according to 
 the deceitful lusts ; and be renewed in the spirit of their 
 minds; and put on the new man, which after God is 
 created in righteousness and true holiness." - This cannot 
 be done by fallen man for himself, and out of the resources 
 of his warped and im^^overished nature. But " what the 
 law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, 
 God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, 
 and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ; that the righteous- 
 ness of the law mi^ht be fulfilled in us, who walk not after 
 the flesh, but after the Spirit." ^ Being as He is. Divine 
 as well as Human, Jesus is " made unto us Wisdom, and 
 Eighteousness, and Sanctification, and Eedemption."'^ Thus 
 in union with Him, those religious aspirations, which 
 are part of our natural outfit, find their true exercise, their 
 full satisfaction. As the Light of the world, He is the 
 satisfaction of the intellect. As " Fairer than the children 
 of men," He is the delight of the heart. As " Holy, harm- 
 less, undefiled, separate from sinners/' He challenges the 
 submission of the will. Intellect, feeling, moral effort, 
 each have their part in Him. He recognizes. He con- 
 
 1 Eph. i. tj. '-^ Eph. iv. 22 21. 3 Rom. viii. 3, 4. M Cor. i. 30. 
 
234 Dijficulties of revelation [Lect. 
 
 secrates them. He leads them upwards, in and through 
 His own Holy Humanity to the All-wise and All-beautiful. 
 The soul finds that in Him " is the well of Life, and that 
 in His Light it will see light." 
 
 Does it seem inconceivable that the Eternal Son of God 
 should have, indeed, thus come among us men, to teach 
 and to save us ; to make reconciliation between us and the 
 Almighty Father ; to bestow on us the priceless gift of a 
 new Nature ; and to lead us back, first one and then another, 
 to our true home and peace ? Certainly, it may w^ell move 
 our wonder to think of such grace and mercy. The Chris- 
 tian creed, when once it becomes precious to us, takes us 
 altogether out of the daily range of earthly thoughts and 
 interests, lifting us into a better, and brighter, but not 
 more mysterious, or less real, w^orld than this. The Incar- 
 nation and Death of the Everlasting Son seem impossible, 
 only because we do not steadily reflect upon the simple 
 but momentous truths which lie at the root of all reliG^ion, 
 and which all wlio are not Materialists or Pantheists 
 generally admit. Is the Incarnation so improbable, think 
 you, if God is indeed a moral Being, if man has an immortal 
 soul, if moral evil is inherently deadly in itself and in its 
 effects ? Do we not name " God," " immortality," '' sin," 
 without thinking what we mean ; as if these tremendous 
 words w^ere the symbols of trivial commonplaces, wdiich 
 implied nothing beyond themselves ? And is not this 
 careless treatment of these solemn truths which we profess 
 to own, the reason why many of us do not understand the 
 
YL] not gj^eater than those of 7iaticr at religion. 235 
 
 truths beyond them ? If the awfuhiess and magnificence of 
 God, the reality of eternity, the power and sting of moral evil, 
 were more often subjects of our thought, would our imagina- 
 tions be so startled, as they often are, by those doctrines of 
 grace which adjust and harmonize what else is so full of 
 perplexity ; by the Incarnation of the Blessed Son of God ; 
 by His plenary Atonement on the Cross for the sins of 
 men; by His unceasing Intercession for us before the 
 Father ; by the sanctifying energy of His Holy Spirit ; by 
 the power of His Sacraments, to renew and sustain our 
 life ? Surely the earlier truths are just as full of difficul- 
 ties for the imagination and the reason as the latter. We 
 put them out of sight as being less importunate ; but there 
 they are. That the All-foreseeing and Holy God should 
 have created us at all, is at least as startling as that, hav- 
 ing created, He should have redeemed us. Or rather, 
 when we reflect upon His morality, upon His justice, upon 
 His love, we must think that His Eedemption of the fallen 
 is really less wonderful than His Creation of a race 
 capable of such signal failure ; and we must find in our 
 daily experience of life, of the crimes and sufferings, which 
 so largely compose it, more embarrassment and distress for 
 reverent reason than can be furnished by critical specula- 
 tions upon the explanatory and consoling truth, tliat " God 
 so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, 
 that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but 
 have everlasting life."^ 
 
 ^ S. John iii. 16. 
 
236 Why the evidences of Christianity [Lect. 
 
 " Whosoever believeth in Him." It is not then, you say, 
 a matter of strict mathematical demonstration. No ; it is 
 not a matter of strict mathematical demonstration. If it 
 were, there would be no more room for faith than there is 
 in the process of learning a proposition of Euclid. Not to 
 acquiesce in the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid, is 
 to he intellectually deficient ; but to refuse assent to the 
 Christian creed does not necessarily imply intellectual 
 deficiency. Why not ? Because for such assent moral 
 dispositions are necessary as well as intellectual capa- 
 city. The evidence for Christianity, intellectually viewed, 
 is something short of mathematical ; and intentionally so. 
 Christian truth makes a demand upon the will as well as 
 upon the intellect; and the will, to avoid the foreseen con- 
 sequences of assent, will often prevent the intellect from 
 doing its work, honestly and thoroughly, in investigating 
 the claims of Christ. This is a reason why so much 
 store is set upon faith in St. Paul's Epistles. Eaith is a 
 test of the moral drift of our wliole being, and not merely 
 of the soundness or acuteness of our understandings. If an 
 act of faith in Jesus Christ implied no more than an act 
 of assent to the conclusion of a demonstrated proposition ; 
 if faith were nothing higher and nobler than the forced 
 result of a victorious assault upon the human understand- 
 ing, conducted by columns and batteries of mathematical 
 evidence ; then all that is said about its moral and spiritual 
 worth, about its purifying and elevating power, would be 
 simply unintelligible. The most accomplished mathema- 
 
VL] are not viathematical. ~ 237 
 
 tician is not necessarily moral ; and tlie most fervent be- 
 lievers, ancient or modern, have not been always Pascals 
 and Newtons. 
 
 Our Lord did, indeed, by His miracles, and notably by 
 His resurrection, address Himself to the experience of His 
 contemporaries in enforcing His claims ; and by certain 
 portions of His teaching. He appealed no less truly to the 
 operations of their natural reason. But, in order to accept 
 Him as He is, reason and observation must be seconded by 
 the heart and the conscience. There must be a ti^ue desire 
 to know all that can be known of the Author of the law of 
 right and wrong within us. There must be a real auxiety 
 to escape from the moral anomalies of life ; a recognition, 
 and sense of human goodness ; a strong anticipation that He 
 Who is its Source cannot have left us in weakness and 
 darkness to struggle alone. Why this temper is found in 
 one man and not in another, is a question which carries us 
 back into the deepest secrets of our several moral natures ; 
 into the varying histories of our loyalty or disloyalty to 
 God's original gift of natural light. But upon the exist- 
 ence or non-existence of such moral dispositions depends 
 our way of looking at the evidence which Jesus Christ has 
 thought good to set before us on behalf of His claims. In 
 one case that evidence will appear sufficient ; insufficient 
 in another. It will be held insufficient by the man 
 who thinks to become a believing Christian, as he 
 would become a mathematician, without any reference to 
 the temper of his heart, or even in spite of its decided 
 
238 Faith in otc7'- Lord's Divi7iity the basis [IjECT. 
 
 bent against the moral teaching of the Gospel It will 
 be deemed sufficient — nay, more than sufficient — for those 
 who amid perplexities are " waiting for the consolation 
 of Israel." ^ They understand that religious truth, to be 
 embraced at all to any purpose, must be embraced, 
 not simply by a dry assent of the logical understand- 
 ing, but by a vital act of the whole inward man; by 
 moral sympathies even more earnestly than by an intel- 
 lectual grasp. Christ, our Lord, in various ways, teaches 
 us as much as this ; and Christian apologists can only 
 make that portion of the act of faith which belongs to 
 the understanding easier to it, by removing obstacles to 
 the reception of truth or by exhibiting its inward har- 
 monies. They cannot, if they would, do the work of the 
 Divine Spirit, and control the fevers, the prejudices, the 
 cowardice, the rashness of the heart. He only Who made 
 the heart can soften, or subdue, or change it. He only 
 Who made the light to shine out of darkness can so shine 
 in the hearts of men, as to "give tlie light of the know- 
 ledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 2 
 
 And they to whom He has taughtthis great lesson will know 
 and feel, that believing in the Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, 
 we stand, as it were, upon the heights of Pisgah ; and that 
 a new and vast prospect, grateful to eyes that are wearied 
 with the long glare of the desert, is opening before us. 
 Before us is a land of vineyards and oliveyards; a land 
 flowing with milk and honey. It is a region of repose 
 
 1 S. Luke ii. 25. 2 2 Cor. iv. 6. 
 
YL] of practical religion. 239 
 
 for faith and love ; it is an atmosphere where communion 
 with God is easy and natural. It is the proper home of 
 spirituality and benevolence, of that internal and external 
 practice of religion, day by day, which is so altogether 
 higher and better a thing than the profoiindest study of 
 its theory. For the Divinity of the Son of God is the 
 adequate warrant of all His promises ; of the power of His 
 death ; of the gift of His Spirit ; of the efficacy of His 
 sacraments ; of the converting and hallowing power of His 
 written word ; of the Divine character of that society of 
 souls which, by His Spirit, He has organized into His 
 Church since the Day of Pentecost. How vast in their 
 range, how interesting in their idea and scope, how ener- 
 getically practical in their bearings on all earnest life, 
 are these great Christian doctrines which form the hills 
 and vales of our Gospel Land of Promise ! We strain our 
 eyes ; we would fain go forward to study their beauties, 
 to try, if it might be, to understand and to surmount their 
 difficulties. But it cannot be ; — at least now. If only we 
 sincerely cling by faith and love to our Divine and Human 
 Lord, all else will follow. For the present, like the 
 Magdalen, we can but hold Him by the feet, and entreat 
 Him to teach us that personal devotedness to Himself, 
 which is the secret and soul of genuine religion; since 
 without it the love of God soon dies away into an attenu- 
 ated mysticism, while the love of man is eventually hol- 
 lowed out into a mechanical philanthropy. Thinking of 
 Him, praying to Him, working for Him day by day, as 
 
240 Conclusion. [Lect. 
 
 our living, tender, mighty, and wise Friend, we strengthen 
 our hold upon the one certain bond between earth and 
 heaven; upon Him through AVhom, in all our feebleness and 
 sin, we have real access in one Spirit unto the Father.^ 
 
 Personal devotion to Jesus Christ is the exercise of 
 thouglit, and of affection, steadily directed upon His ador- 
 able Person. But it is also the exercise of will: it is pre- 
 eminently practical. There is much to be abstained from 
 for His sake; there is much to be done and to be endured; 
 there is some danger, perhaps, of our doing nothing very 
 definite, where the opportunities of action are so various 
 and so complex. And, therefore, that you may do some- 
 thing for Jesus Christ now and here, you are asked to 
 support with your alms the St. James' Penitentiary. Its 
 object is to carry out our Lord's work in the w^orld as the 
 Healer of souls, whom sin has separated from God, by 
 bringing them back to purity and peace through a re- 
 covered union with Himself It has been said that Peni- 
 tentiaries are too costly a method of restoration from sin. 
 They who speak thus can have thought little to any pur- 
 pose about either the malignity of moral evil, or the mean- 
 ing of the Self-sacrifice of the Son of God. The institu- 
 tion Avhich I have named has done and is doing good, and, 
 as we trust, lasting work among our unhappy sisters, who 
 may well be so much less guilty in the eyes of the 
 1 Eph. ii. 18. 
 
VL] Conchtsioii, 241 
 
 Eternal Justice than are many upon whom, in this present 
 world, and often to their own endless loss, the breath of 
 censure never falls. Be our case what it may, we surely 
 do well to support an undertaking which honours our 
 Lord, by its disinterested work of unwearied compassion ; 
 and which, while labouring for the social recovery of our 
 poor countrywomen, aims much more directly at promoting 
 the eternal well-being of their souls, — as capable as our 
 own of enjoying, through the Divine Mediator, the pre- 
 sent and future blessings of religion. 
 
 ^