:M;^?^m':-:^"-^:::^^ 
 
ANALOGIES IN THE PROGRESS OF 
 NATURE AND GRACE. 
 
'Aei TTore 
 Xp6vi.a /j.h TO. Twv dewv ttwj, is tc'Xos 5' ovk dffdeprj. — EuRIP. Ion. 
 
 Geos ^dcjKev avrl deXrov tov Koct/xop.— ^. ChrySOSTOM. 
 
 La Nature est une image de la Grace. — Pascal. 
 
ANALOGIES IN THE PROGRESS 
 OF NATURE AND GRACE. 
 
 FOUR SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 (BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR 1 867). 
 
 TO WHICH ARE ADDED TWO SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE 
 BRITISH ASSOCIATION IN 1866 AND 1867. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. C. PEITCHARD, M.A. FR.S. 
 
 PFR3IDENT OP THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, HULSEAN LF.CTURER IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE AND LATE FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLKOB. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: 
 DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. 
 
 LONDON: BELL AND DALDY. 
 1868. 
 
erarabrttJgc : 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY. M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
PEIHGETOH A^ 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 The Slowness of the Creative Process. 
 
 Isaiah xi. 9; 2 Peter hi. 8. 
 
 They shall not hurt 7ior destroy in all my holy motintain : for 
 the earth shall be full oj the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 waters cover the sea. 
 
 But, beloved, he not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is, 
 with the Lord, as a thousand years, and a thousand years 
 as one day. ...•••• 
 
 LECTURE 11. 
 The Slowness op Intellectual Progress. . . 18 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Slowness of Moral Progress. ... 37 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 The Ultimate Triumph of the Gospel. 
 
 Isaiah xl 9; St Mark iv. 33. 
 
 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for 
 the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as 
 the waters cover the sea. 
 
 And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as 
 they were able to hear it. . • • - • 
 
 b 2 
 
vi Contents. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and of Revelation, 
 eccles. iii. 14, 15. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall he for ever; nothing 
 can be put to it, nor anything taken from it: and God 
 doeth it, that men should fear before Him. That which 
 hath been is now ; and that which is to be hath already 
 been. ........ 79 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 The Analogy of Intellectual Pkogress to Religious 
 Growth. 
 
 Luke xix. 26. 
 I say unto you, Unto e'cery one that hath shall be given. . 103 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Note A. 0?i the Origin of Species by Natural Selection . 123 
 
 Note B. On Prayer . . . . . .129 
 
 Note C. 77ie Philosopher followed— after many days . 137 
 
 Note D. Are Christiari Ethics an advance on Aficient Ethics.^ 138 
 
 Note E. On the words translated ^ Faith' and ^TrusV in 
 
 the Old Testament . . . . . .141 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 The Hulsean Lectures contained in the present 
 Volume were not written so much with the view 
 of defending Revealed Religion from objections said 
 to be drawn from modern Science, as to shew that 
 Revealed Religion and the Scheme of Nature, phy- 
 sical and social, are in correlation the one to the 
 other, and form the continuity of one Divine plan. 
 After reviewing the vast and unexpected results of 
 modern investigations, they seem to me to be just so 
 many contributions to the indirect evidences of the 
 Christian Faith; the lines of discovery all con- 
 verging to one point, and indicating that the God 
 of Nature and He "Who is revealed as God in the 
 Old and the New Testament, are one and the same. 
 
 For instance, the deposition of the Coal fields 
 in ages past, practically formed one long continuous 
 2orop]iecy of the advent of an intelligent being who, 
 in the fullness of time, was to receive the command, 
 'Subdue the Earth' Then again the curious for- 
 mation of many of the marbles, and gems, and 
 minerals, was surely the prolepsis, or the prophecy, 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 of a being endued with an acute apprehension of 
 the glory and the beauty of colour and of form. 
 Moreover, the relations of all nature, animated and 
 inorganic, and the observable yet complicated mo- 
 tions of the heavenly bodies, are all correlated to 
 the marvellous intellectual faculties of Man, who 
 is placed in their midst, and is to render them 
 subservient to his necessities, his convenience, or 
 his enjoyment. I have pointed out how the A^ery 
 existence of such faculties is a prophecy of their 
 immortality. 
 
 Nevertheless, from the time of Galileo to the 
 present day, devout and well informed men, perhaps 
 even the majority of devout men, have been troubled 
 more or less with the apprehension, that physical 
 enquiries are not friendly to those religious con- 
 victions which they not unreasonably hold dearer 
 than life itself In the following Lectures, I have 
 not entered upon the cause or causes of these ill 
 founded apprehensions, but I have endeavoured to 
 shew from the very nature of the case, how ground- 
 less they are, and ever must be. 
 
 And this I have endeavoured to do, not by 
 building up an imaginary or theoretical state of 
 things, but by urging that we may see from the 
 sacred records themselves, how the Divine Method 
 actually adopted has been, to reveal to man only 
 so much of the nature and will of God, as His 
 creatures at the time could bear ; and, even under 
 
Preface, ix 
 
 this limitation, to reveal such things only, as were 
 beyond the reach of man's faculties to discover for 
 himself Principles of Relativity and of Economy 
 of Action, appear to have governed the Divine 
 procedure in the Revelations contained in the 
 Sacred books; they are up to, and not beyond, the 
 capacity of the recipient, and never exceed the 
 necessities of the case. The same principles also are 
 very observable in the teachings and miracles of 
 Christ. 
 
 These things being so, that is to say, these 
 principles of Relativity and Economy of Action 
 being true principles actually carried out ; moreover 
 the Divine Revelation of the Gospel having actually 
 superseded the Revelation of the Mosaic Economy, 
 itself equally Divine; it appears to me that both 
 the Theologian and the Investigator of Nature, are, 
 at the least, quite as much detached from the Reve- 
 lation given to the Patriarchs, as they assuredly are 
 detached from the Revelation of the Mosaic Dis- 
 pensation. Viewed in this light, the Revelations 
 of the Science of the day, afforded by the righteous 
 use of God's natural gifts, can no more come into 
 colhsion with the Science (if there be such) in the 
 patriarchal revelations, than the Gospel can come 
 into collision with the Mosaic Economy. In each 
 dispensation, the old things have passed away ; each 
 was perfect in its own relativity ; each had its own 
 divine beneficent work to do ; but that work is done. 
 
x Freface. 
 
 There is a continuity in the relativity of these Divine 
 revelations. 
 
 And this I think is a fair and reasonable reply 
 to any objections which may be drawn from the 
 presumed incompatibihty of the Mosaic Cosmogony 
 with the disclosures of modern knowledge. I think 
 it is sufficient to remove those apprehensions on 
 the score of religion, felt by many devout persons, 
 and of which I have already spoken ; and, what is 
 more important still, I think the consideration of 
 Relativity and of Economy of the Divine Action, 
 completely detach Theology and Science from each 
 other, each leaving the other free to pursue the 
 investigations proper to itself, not only without 
 latent fear of mutual contradiction, but with the 
 conviction that the truths of each center in Him, 
 and will one day be seen to center in Him, Who 
 is the Truth itself. 
 
 If I shall have succeeded in convincing other 
 minds as I have convinced my own, that there is no 
 necessary bond between the Science of modern times 
 and the Science of the Patriarchal Dispensation, 
 then I might reasonably be excused from adding 
 more. There are however many devout persons 
 who will still ask, Is it true that the Eevelations 
 in the Mosaic Cosmogony are not in accordance 
 with modern knowledge ? The proper and sufficient 
 reply, appears to me to be this : How could you 
 expect them to be wholly accordant 1 The Divine 
 
Preface. 
 
 XI 
 
 Kevelations hitherto have always borne a certain 
 relativity to the capacity of the recipient, and have 
 never embraced knowledge within the reach of hu- 
 man research. But the question will be repeated, Is 
 there a discordance? Speaking, I trust, in a most 
 reverential spirit, and with that caution and hu- 
 mility which the case demands, I feel bound to 
 say that no interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmo- 
 gony, regarded as a description of the actual order 
 and actual duration of the creative steps, has yet 
 been proposed, which is at all satisfactory to those 
 who by study and preparation of mind are most 
 capable of forming a correct opinion \ 
 
 I think I may add, that an account which did 
 assign the actual order and the actual duration of 
 the successive creative steps, would not have been 
 within the comprehension of a rude and unscientific 
 age, and, to such an age, would have been rather 
 the obscuration than the revelation of intelligible 
 truths. Moreover experience has shewn that the 
 Creator has endued his intelligent creatures with 
 intellectual powers, certainly adequate to discover 
 the order of the successive creative steps, and, 
 it may be, even to approximate to their dura- 
 
 1 Tliis was most distinctly stated by Professor W\ A. Miller in his 
 recent address before the Congress of the Clergy at Wolverhampton 
 in October, 1867. There are few philosophers whose opinions on this 
 subject are more w^orthy of attention than Professor Miller's: his well- 
 known attainments, moderation, and devoutness, command and received 
 a respectful hearing. 
 
xii Preface, 
 
 tion in time. To this latter point I shall again 
 
 return. 
 
 If I must proceed to further particulars, it shall 
 
 be with reverence and hesitation : not because I am 
 
 in the least degree undecided in my own opinion, but 
 
 because I have neither the right nor the desire to 
 
 speak dogmatically on so important and difficult a 
 
 question. What I have written I desire to be 
 
 regarded simply as a dutiful contribution to the 
 
 supply of a public need : 
 
 Si quid ego adjuero, curamve levasso, 
 Ecquid erit pretii. 
 
 In the first place, I may be permitted to observe, 
 that the Sacred Record of Creation, or, as I do not 
 hesitate to believe it to be, the Divine Hevelation, is 
 not couched in the first person : it is not the Divine 
 Creator Himself who speaks : whatever else it may 
 be, it is a narrative in which the narrator is not the 
 agent. In the second place, I observe that we learn 
 from the Sacred Record itself, that on many occa- 
 sions it was the Divine method to communicate 
 knowledge, not within the reach of man's natural 
 powers, by visions and by dreams. I shall not stop 
 to give instances, they are familiar and they are 
 abundant. 
 
 I would ask, then. Is it not highly probable that 
 the account of the creative work would be revealed, 
 if revealed at all, in the same way as other super- 
 human knowledge was revealed to Abraham, to 
 
Preface, xiii 
 
 Jacob, to Samuel, to Ezekiel, to St John ? If it 
 was so revealed, was it not given by means of a 
 vision or a series of visions? If so, then might 
 we not, under the circumstances of the case, expect 
 that the whole vision would be broken up into 
 its several parts, and be presented in such an order 
 as ivoidd he most suitable to the ca^pacity of the an- 
 cient 'prophet, and to the capacities of those to tvhom 
 he ivas to narrate the heavenly vision ? In other 
 words, Is it not conceivable that there was no origi- 
 nal intention, on the part of the E-evealer, to assign 
 to the order of the visions, the order of the actual 
 fact? 
 
 Again, if we conceive a series of visions on one 
 and the same day or night, each exhibiting to the 
 inspired prophet some one of the six creative pro- 
 cesses, each vision commencing in gloom, then break- 
 ing forth into a visible picture, and then fading 
 away, would not the natural, not to say the inevit- 
 able, description be ' evening was, and morning was, 
 one day;' * evening was, and morning was, a second 
 day ; ' and so on to the end of the description ? In 
 this point of view, would not the term ^ day' neces- 
 sarily apply to the apimrent duration of each step 
 in the visional series, and hear no reference whatever 
 to the duration of the actual creative step ? 
 
 Admitting as I do, the foregoing hypothesis or 
 interpretation, to be, to my own mind, at least an 
 approximation to the truth of the case, tlien I see 
 
xiv Preface. 
 
 therein nothing which jars or can jar, either against 
 the revelations of Science, or against what I learn 
 from the Sacred Scriptures, to have been the Divine 
 procedure on other occasions when God has been 
 pleased to communicate with man'. I see therein 
 an instance, among ten thousand other instances, of 
 the Great Father taking His child by the hand and, 
 with the wisdom of love, leading him unto as much 
 of the truth as his mind has the strength to bear. 
 He has many things to say to His child, bufc the 
 child cannot bear them now. 
 
 It is here that I stop ; for it is by no means the 
 main intention of the Lectures and Sermons in this 
 Volume to enter upon the discussion of such topics. 
 But before I quit the subject, I wish it to be clearly 
 
 ^ Some of my readers, perhaps many of them, will be all the better 
 satisfied with the orthodoxy of the interpretation which I have proposed, 
 when tliey learn that some such an hypothesis does not jar on the mind 
 of so devout and sensitive a Theologian as Dr Pusey. In the very able 
 and very interesting Essay which he read to the Church Congress at 
 A^rwich in 1865, Dr Pusey writes as follows :—" Apart from details, I 
 see no reason why the idea, familiar to the readers of Hugh Miller, that 
 God spread before the mind of Moses pictures of His creative operation, 
 out of time, should be less accordant with the mind of God the Holy 
 Ghost than any other. A divine of very reverent mind has suggested to 
 me the analogy, that tbe closing book of Revelations unfolds the future 
 in a series of visions, without denning the time of the events in the 
 future, whether contemporaneous or successive. The solemn rhythm, 
 the ])icture character of the whole, would preclude one from laying down, 
 that the past facts of creation were not exhibited to Moses in the same 
 way as visions of a real future were opened to tlie later prophets, inde- 
 pendently of time." It may be proper for me to add that the interpreta- 
 tion which I have proposed, in its details, differs very widely from that 
 by Hugli Miller: it approximates more nearly to, though it is not 
 identical with, that proposed by the Eev. E. Huxtable, in his reply to 
 Mr Goodwin's Essay. 
 
Preface, xv 
 
 understood that I do not propose the foregoing inter- 
 pretation as being in any great respect new:, parts of 
 it will be found scattered in various writers who 
 have preceded nie, but I have endeavoured to give, 
 and T think I have given, a cohesion to the whole. 
 
 Regarding however the necessity or the advisa- 
 bility of at present offering any fresh contribution to 
 the exegesis of this difficult portion of the Sacred 
 Scriptures, I shall excuse myself by laying before 
 the reader the opinions of two eminent writers, 
 neither of whom is chargeable with deficiency in 
 reverence, or caution, or information. 
 
 The late honoured and lamented Dr Whewell, 
 under the heading of a Section, '^ When should old 
 Interpretations he given up ? " writes as follows* : 
 '' But the question then occurs. What is the proper 
 season for a religious and enlightened commentator 
 to make such a change in the current interpretation 
 of sacred Scripture? At what period ought the 
 established exposition of a passage to be given up, 
 and a new mode of understanding the passage, such 
 as is, or seems to be, required by new discoveries 
 respecting the laws of nature, accepted in its place ? 
 It is plain, that to introduce such an alteration 
 lightly and hastily would be a procedure fraught 
 with inconvenience ; for if the change were made in 
 such a manner, it might be afterwards discovered 
 
 1 Whe well's History of Scientific Ideas, Vol. ii. p. 305: the whole 
 section is worth perusal- 
 
xvi Preface. 
 
 that it had been adopted without sufficient reason, 
 and that it was necessary to reinstate the old exposi- 
 tion. And the minds of the readers of Scripture, 
 always to a certain extent and for a time disturbed 
 by the subversion of their long-established notions, 
 would be distressed without any need, and might be 
 seriously unsettled. While, on the other hand, a too 
 protracted and obstinate resistance to the innovation, 
 on the part of the scriptural expositors, would tend 
 to identify, at least in the minds of many, the 
 authority of the Scripture with the truth of the ex- 
 position ; and therefore would bring discredit upon 
 the revealed word, when the established interpreta- 
 tion was finally proved to be untenable." 
 
 Bishop Butler thus expresses his opinion^: — 
 "And as it is owned the whole scheme of Scrip- 
 ture is not yet understood ; so, if it ever comes to be 
 understood, before the restitution of all things, and 
 without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the 
 same way as natural knowledge is come at ; by the 
 continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, 
 and by particular persons attending to, comparing 
 and pursuing, intimations scattered up and down it, 
 which are overlooked and disregarded by the gene- 
 rality of the world. For, this is the way in which 
 all improvements are made ; by thoughtful men 
 tracing on obscure hints, as it were, dropped us by 
 nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our 
 
 ^ Analogy, Part ii. ch. iii. 
 
Preface. xvii 
 
 minds by chance. Nor is it at all incredible, that a 
 book, which has been so long in the possession of 
 mankind, should contain many truths as yet undis- 
 covered. For all the same phenomena, and the same 
 faculties of investigation, from which such great dis- 
 coveries in natural knowledge have been made in the 
 present and last age, were equally in the possession 
 of mankind several thousand years before. And 
 possibly it might be intended, that events, as they 
 come to pass, should open and ascertain the meaning 
 of several parts of Scripture." 
 
 I retire behind the -^gis of their ample shields. 
 
 I have rigidly abstained from adding notes to the 
 Hulsean Lectures : the range of the subjects therein 
 introduced from Theology and from Physics, is so 
 considerable, that notes once commenced would soon 
 proceed to an inconvenient extent. In this place, 
 however, I may be excused for introducing the quo- 
 tation from the writings of Condorcet', to which I 
 have alluded in the fourth Lecture. He says : — 
 
 ^^ Le degre de vertu auquel un homme pent at- 
 teindre un jour, est aussi inconcevable pour nous, 
 que celui auquel la force du genie pent etre portee. 
 Qui sait par example, s'il n'arrivera pas un terns oil 
 nos interets et nos passions n'auront sur les jugemens 
 qui dirigent la volonte, pas plus d'influence que nous 
 les voyons en avoir aujourd'hui sur nos opinions 
 scientifiques ; ou toute action contraire au droit d'un 
 
 1 CEuvres de Condor cet, par Arago, Vol. vi. p. GS2, Taris, 1847. 
 
xviii Preface. 
 
 autre, sera aussi physiquement impossible, qu'une 
 barbarie comraise de sang froid Test aujourd'hui a la 
 plupart des hommes." 
 
 An opinion such as this, however arrived at, 
 written be it remembered in the Reign of Terror, 
 may convey a solace to some minds less brave than 
 Condorcet's, when they fall into despondency at the 
 circumstances which now surround us, as a Church 
 or a Nation. 
 
 The Note written in 1866, on Mr Darwin's hypo- 
 thesis of Natural Selection, has been somewhat modi- 
 fied: the reasons are both curious and instructive. 
 That eminent Philosopher had, in the first edition of 
 his work, expressed an opinion, since withdrawn, that 
 the denudation of the weald' had probably required 
 the enormous period of some 300 millions of years. 
 This implied the existence of the earth provided with 
 an ocean, for at least a million of a million years ! 
 Subsequently to the expression of this opinion, 
 shared, it must be said, by other competent geolo- 
 gists, it became apparent, from certain very recondite 
 investigations of Professor Adams, M. Delaunay, and 
 others, that the length of the day, contrary to the 
 previous conclusions of Laplace, was now, through 
 tidal action, increasing at the rate possibly of from 
 three to six seconds in a million years. This slight 
 alteration is of course quite insensible during the 
 limits of modern astronomical observations, but would 
 accumulate to so very sensible an amount, during 
 
Preface. xix 
 
 the long periods of the earth's existence in its pre- 
 sent form assumed by Mr Darwin, as to render that 
 protracted existence wholly impossible. Whether 
 this reckoning of time by the million of millions 
 of years may be necessary for the modification and 
 development of species by Natural Selection, is not 
 now the question : the assumption of these incon- 
 ceivable periods of time being withdrawn, the astro- 
 nomical consequences are not tenable. 
 
 Since the earliest publication of Mr Darwin's 
 (notwithstanding certain objections) most instructive 
 work, Sir Charles Lyell has very recently entered 
 upon the subject of the possible duration of the 
 earth since the Laurentian formations, to the present 
 time\ Of course the estimate is rough, and the 
 data are not very definite, nevertheless the proces^ 
 appears to be philosophical, and the conclusion is not 
 known to contradict any other results of science. 
 This period is roughly estimated at between 200 and 
 300 millions of years. Sir William Thompson, from 
 considerations of the annual amount of Solar radia- 
 tion, makes the following estimate : " It seems on the 
 whole most probable, that the Sun has not illuminated 
 the earth for 100 millions of years, and almost certain 
 that he has not done so for 500 millions of years. As 
 for the future, we may say with equal certainty, that 
 the inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy 
 the light and heat essential to their life, for many 
 ^ Lyeli's Principles «/ Geology, Vol. i. p. :i01, Ed. 10. 
 
XX Preface. 
 
 millions of years longer, unless sources now ujihiown 
 to us are prepared in the great storehouse of Crea- 
 tion !^^ I do not know that, practically speaking, 
 we are much concerned with periods of duration such 
 as these. No objection that I am aware of, can be 
 drawn from the science of Astronomy to a duration 
 such as that of a hundred millions of years. A 
 million of millions of years is quite another conside- 
 ration, although the shorter period as entirely evades 
 our conceptions as the longer. It is reassuring to 
 find the geological -<:Eons reduce themselves to some 
 reasonable compass, and it is very instructive to 
 observe the conclusions of the naturalist on such a 
 subject as that of the earth's age, in fair accordance 
 Tvith those, drawn independently, from recondite 
 physical considerations. 
 
 Before dismissing the note on Natural Selection, 
 I may be pardoned for expressing the satisfaction I 
 have felt at the confirmation of my objection to 
 Mr Darwin's reasoning, in the Duke of Arg3'le's 
 Eeign of Laiv. His Grace argues generally from the 
 prevalent correlation of external circumstances to 
 the various organs of animal life : my argument, on 
 similar grounds, was confined to the particular case 
 of the human eye. I am glad also to find myself in 
 accord with so philosophical a mind, with regard to 
 the evidences of mind in the creative work, afforded 
 by the systematic prevalence of beauty ; to this I 
 have added the prevalence also of the joy of existence. 
 
Preface. 
 
 XXI 
 
 It is impossible for any thoughtful person, and least 
 of all for a clergyman, not to notice the zealous 
 attenipts now making by some of the ablest minds 
 among the laity to uphold the truth of the Christian 
 Kevelation against the attacks of the bold, insinuat- 
 ing, and fashionable positivism of the day. So long as 
 highly gifted statesmen and jurists, such as the Duke 
 of Argyle, Mr Gladstone, Vice-Chancellor Wood, 
 and many others, thus publickly avow their religious 
 convictions, the boast that Christianity is effete, is 
 sufficiently confuted by facts patent to all eyes not 
 wilfully shut. 
 
 In the note on Prayer, I have, after the example 
 of some of the ancient Fathers, treated the second 
 Alcibiades as the work of Plato. I am aware of the 
 objections which have been made to its authenticity, 
 mainly on the score of an anachronism which it con- 
 tains. But I presume it was not Plato's object 
 to represent his dramatic dialogues as actualities: 
 and the second Alcibiades is not the only dialogue 
 which is chargeable with an anachronism. Under 
 any circumstances, the extreme antiquity of the 
 production is unquestionable, and the illustration of 
 my argument is unimpaired. Mr Grote and others 
 consider that, by the teacher who was to inform the 
 statesman's mind, Socrates himself is intended: if 
 so, undoubtedly one part of my argument fails ; but 
 I greatly prefer the more ancient interpretation 
 which I have adopted, and I am convinced that the 
 
 c 2 
 
xxii Preface. 
 
 perception of the late Professor Whewell was not 
 only finer, but more accurate ; that accomplished 
 philosopher says : ^' Socrates is, by a sort of myste- 
 rious implication, half identified with a divine 
 teacher." 
 
 The only note which I have added in the ap- 
 pendix to the Nottingham Sermon, is one which 
 possibly may interest the Thelogian. In considering 
 the continuity of Faith which pervades the Old and 
 the New Testament, I was struck by the persistency 
 with which the Septuagint translators render the 
 Hebrew words equivalent to Trust, in the Old Tes- 
 tament, by the very inadequate Greek word equiva- 
 lent to Hope. I think 1 have accounted for it on a 
 principle which may have a much wider application. 
 
 With regard to the Sermon preached at Notting- 
 ham, it was written immediately after the delivery of 
 Mr Grove's address to the British Association. Those 
 who had the privilege of then hearing, or who have 
 subsequently read, Mr Grove's discourse, will at once 
 perceive that his remarks on the System of Nature 
 suggested mine on the scheme of Divine Eevelation. 
 That eminent philosopher pointed out, with a grace- 
 ful comprehensiveness peculiarly his own, how a Law 
 of Continuity pervades and embraces the whole 
 physical universe, so far at least as our knowledge 
 of it at present extends. There are no gaps, no sud- 
 den leaps in Nature, he observed, probably not even 
 in the interplanetary spaces themselves. Modern 
 
Preface. xxiii 
 
 discovery seems to indicate with more or less dis- 
 tinctness tliat the sun and the larger planets are in 
 their turns succeeded by smaller asteroids, and these 
 again by zones of revolving meteoric or planetary 
 dust, the position of many of these zones being at 
 least partially determined, and the times and places 
 when they become entangled and inflamed in our 
 atmosphere being more or less accurately known. 
 Saturn, again, has his systems of rings, probably 
 consisting of meteoric matter, and the sun is sur- 
 rounded by that mysterious substance from whence 
 proceeds the zodiacal light. All these systems of 
 matter, moreover, are either identical in composition, 
 or at all events contain many terrestrial elements 
 in common. Naturalists also tell us that the same 
 sort of unbroken gradation or Continuity exists in 
 the organic world ; species melting into species, they 
 say, so that the further our knowledge extends, the 
 more difficult it is to decide where one ends and 
 another begins. Nevertheless I think it must be 
 admitted that the continuity is broken in the case of 
 the introduction of Man upon the earth: there is 
 in his case a leap into consciousness, and in this 
 respect there is a gap between him and the lower 
 animals. 
 
 The evidence that such is probably the consti- 
 tution of the things we see, was perhaps never more 
 clearly and succinctly detailed than in the discourse 
 to which I refer. While listening to this account 
 
xxiv Pi^eface. 
 
 of the constitution of Nature, Origen's remark, 
 quoted by Bishop Butler, could scarcely fail to 
 occur to the mind of any person at all versed in 
 theology, and it certainly occurred to mine. Butler, 
 indeed, for the purposes of his treatise, somewhat 
 narrows the scope of what that most philosophical 
 of ancient divines intends to imply, for the version 
 which he gives is this : '^ He tvho believes the Scrip- 
 tures to have proceeded from the author of Nature, 
 may well expect to find the same sort of difficulties 
 in them as are found in the constitution of Nature^'' 
 Origen's remark, however, does not appear to be 
 restricted to the question of difficulties alone, but 
 to include any and all generic relations of created 
 things which may be discovered by human research. 
 Had he spoken in the language of our day, he would 
 probably have said, " There is a Continuity between 
 the Scheme of Nature and the Scheme of Bevela- 
 tion, as recorded in the Scriptures." 
 
 In this point of view, and so far as the very re- 
 stricted limits assigned to me would permit, I have 
 endeavoured to show how the great scheme of re- 
 demption may be regarded as a grand continuation, 
 or rather as the divine climax, of that system of 
 intervention and vicarious suffering which not only 
 pervades the natural world, but without which mer- 
 ciful alleviation, that world would become a scene of 
 hopeless misery. Butler, as is well known, has 
 
 ^ Ajialogy, Introduction. 
 
Preface, xxv 
 
 already shown the same thing, under the idea of 
 Analogy, which I here present under the thought of 
 gradation or continuity. I then proceed to show 
 how faith in the Redeemer is a grand continuation 
 also, or rather is a divine climax of that principle 
 of trustfulness in each other, which forms the very 
 cement of the social fabric. Lastly, I haA^e given 
 my reasons for representing the restoration or sanc- 
 tification of man's moral character through communion 
 with God, as in the main a sacred extension of that 
 Imitative Principle acting through association, which 
 it has pleased God to implant in our nature for many 
 wise and moral purposes, and which in this case He 
 adorns with His especial Grace. 
 
 I do not pretend that there is anything essen- 
 tially new in these thoughts ; if there were, this very 
 novelty would have been, to me at least, a sufficient 
 reason for a very careful reconsideration. But then 
 the grouping, I believe, is new, just as the grouping 
 of certain acknowledged principles in the scheme 
 of nature, under the term Continuity, is unquestion- 
 ably new on the part of Mr Grove. I think also, 
 that this mode of viewing the scheme of Kevelation, 
 as contained in tiie Holy Scriptures, is not without 
 considerable importance. For surely it must be a 
 matter of great interest to the Christian student, 
 to see how each fresh accession of human knowledge 
 which God has permitted (and as I think has in- 
 tended) His creatures to make, regarding the natu- 
 
XX vi Preface. 
 
 ral world, not seldom serves also to illustrate and 
 confirm our faith in that scheme of Divine Govern- 
 ment which is revealed to us in the Bible. It was 
 mainly this consideration which induced me to select 
 this new topic of Continuity, as the proper subject 
 for an address from the pulpit to the members of 
 the British Association for the Advancement of Sci- 
 ence ; and I have to express my gratitude for the 
 patient and respectful hearing which they gave to 
 my remarks. 
 
 It may not here be out of place to observe, that 
 the word Continuity is not the only philosophical 
 term for which we are indebted to Mr Grove. This 
 term he has applied to the jplan of nature throughout 
 its known extent ; but he has also proposed another 
 word, which groups together the forces of nature 
 in a singularly happy and expressive manner. These 
 forces co-exist, interlace, osculate with each other ; 
 they are capable of evolution in a definite manner, 
 the one from the other. The associations of matter 
 with motion, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and 
 chemical action, are all (in the language of Mr Grove) 
 CORRELATED, and within prescribed limits, are inter- 
 changeable in quality and in quantity. This Corre- 
 lation of the physical forces may, I think, be re- 
 garded as, upon the whole, the most remarkable 
 discovery since the discussion of the Law of Gravi- 
 tation by Newton ; and there are not wanting 
 reasons to expect that even the attraction of gravita- 
 
Preface, xxvii 
 
 tion itself may be found to be a link in the same 
 physical chain. Now, since it is thus shown that 
 the Divine Governor of the universe has seen fit to 
 bind, in a bond of Correlation, the forces acting in 
 that part of His dominions which are seen ; ought 
 we not, in the spirit of Ori gen's remark, to look for 
 a similar Correlation between those principles or 
 laws, which have their proper functions in that 
 part of the Divine Government, which, though 
 not seen, is revealed ? If we seek for it, we shall 
 find it. 
 
 Where, for instance, do the laws of Providence 
 end, and where do the laws of Grace begin ? are 
 not both of them phases of the same Divine loving 
 care? Does not the one pre-suppose the other? 
 And a similar remark holds good regarding the func- 
 tions of Faith, and Hope, and Love, and Obedience. 
 Is not Hope the twin-sister of Faith ? And is not 
 Obedience the daughter of Love^ ? And what be- 
 comes of Obedience when Faith is under a cloud ? 
 And in the great scheme of Man's redemption, does 
 not an Apostle tell us that Justification and Sancti- 
 fication co-exist and interlace ? and may not this fact 
 go far to explain the interminable and sometimes 
 unloving discussions regarding their true origin and 
 their distinctive functions ? 
 
 Hence the sagacious remark made by Origen some 
 fifteen centuries ago, like the expressions of other 
 
 ^ See Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. 
 
xxviii Preface, 
 
 great comprehensive truths, proves to be prophetic, 
 and reaches to us and embraces our children. And 
 this leads me to observe how unnecessary and how 
 suicidal is that timidity, not to use a stronger term, 
 with which many religious persons, and I regret to 
 add, some divines among us, receive the successive 
 disclosures of the constitution of natural things, which 
 of late years have come upon us in thick abundance. 
 Unnecessary, because each new fact, each new truth, 
 when fairly presented to the mind, if only it be 
 a truth, cannot fail to become a new illustration of 
 Him Whom they know to be The Truth, and Whom 
 they profess to love. For my own part, and I hope 
 I say it with no affectation, and I am sure I say 
 it with no reserve, from the results of modern re- 
 search, I have gathered additional reasons for resting 
 in the simplicity of the ancient Christian Faith, and 
 in modern discoveries, I have found many a new 
 and unexpected trace of the Creator's majesty, of 
 His power, His wisdom, and His love. Some in- 
 stances of what I mean will, it is hoped, be found 
 in the Sermon which follows these remarks. May I 
 be permitted to say, that if the progress of know- 
 ledge shall, on a calm and impartial review, induce 
 Theologians somewhat to modify, here and there, a 
 popular, or hasty, or merely human interpretation 
 of one or two portions of the Divine Revelation, 
 I am quite sure that, with this increase of intel- 
 ligent perception of the Will of God, there must 
 
Preface. xxix 
 
 be associated the exaltation of our reverential 
 love of His Word. At least I, for one, have 
 found it so. 
 
 But it seems to me to be worth considerinor 
 
 o 
 
 whether this suspicious timidity regarding science 
 and scientific men, may not after all be grounded 
 on an entire mistake. For after all, is it true tha^ 
 the pursuit of science has any inherent tendency to- 
 wards religious scepticism? I would venture to ask 
 whether Kepler, or Newton, or Leibnitz, or Euler, 
 or Linnoeus, or Cuvier, were sceptics? If it were 
 not that obvious reasons forbid it, I could put, with- 
 out misgiving, the same question in reference to the 
 great majority in the long phalanx of living men, 
 who are devoting God's noble gift of genius to the 
 elucidation of God's works. I do not say that the 
 fashionable Positivism of the day has not found some 
 adherents among men of science, as it has found 
 many among educated men of every class. But it 
 is pre'OCcupatio7i of mind, rather than science, which 
 is, and ever has been, the prolific parent of scepticism 
 and of indifterence in religion. Are not the pre- 
 occupations of high position, the pre- occupations of 
 ambition, of literature, of money-getting and of mo- 
 ney-spending, of conceit, of sensual habits, and even 
 of idleness, at least as unfriendly to the hearty ac- 
 ceptance of the Christian Bevelation, as are the pre- 
 occupations of scientific pursuits? I trust I am not 
 guilty of speaking in a presumptuous spirit, if I ven- 
 
XXX Preface. 
 
 ture to remark that enormous mischief has arisen 
 from ill-judged, unmerited, and often very ignorant 
 attacks which have been made upon the supposed 
 tendencies of science, and the supposed scepticism of 
 scientific men, from the pulpit, in religious circles, 
 and in religious publications. It is agreeable to no 
 man to be pointed at with the finger of suspicion ; 
 and men of sensitive and independent minds will 
 leave, and within my own knowledge have left, an 
 injudicious or ill-tempered ministration of God's 
 Word, not from natural distaste for revealed truth, 
 but where they have found themselves, and the at 
 least innocent pursuits they love, made the object of 
 covert, and unkind, and ignorant comment. It can 
 be no exaggeration to say, that such an alienation of 
 even one highly gifted and influential mind is no- 
 thing short of a public loss, and that, therefore, the 
 timidity in question is practically suicidal. 
 
 On the other hand, it cannot be doubted, and it 
 may not be concealed, that there is a 7'eticence, and I 
 wish I were wrong in adding there is a growing reti- 
 cence, observable in the modern writings of some 
 able men, which is both disappointing and painful to 
 religious minds. It is a reticence regarding that 
 Eternal Father, Who, even on principles of natural 
 religion alone, is the Prime Cause, and the Governor 
 of that universe, the frame-work of which is the ob- 
 ject of the researches of these thoughtful men. It 
 may be that one cause of this reticence is, the natural 
 
Preface. xxxi 
 
 reaction from certain violations of good taste and 
 propriety, which at one time abounded in the (after 
 all, well-meant) writings of second-hand writers and 
 religious sciolists. It may be that another cause is 
 to be found in that these great writers have in their 
 own minds intentionally distinguished the subjective 
 from the objective, separating the things of sight 
 from the things of faith, and withholding the expres- 
 sion of their emotions, while explaining the grounds 
 of their convictions : but whatever iiie causes may be, 
 the fact remains, and as I have said, it is both disap- 
 pointing and painful. I will only venture to add 
 one observation more upon this subject, and I am 
 sure that the great writers to whom with unfeigned 
 respect I allude, will bear me out in the justness of 
 the remark — and it is this; the giants of old, who 
 were the pioneers of modern knowledge, the Keplers 
 for instance, the Newtons, the Bernoullis, the Eulers 
 of ancient fame, had no such reticence. Why should 
 the sons be more reticent than the fathers? As a 
 brilliant exam^ile of the outspoken conviction of a 
 great mind, I cannot do better than conclude with a 
 few passages out of that magnificent Scholium with 
 which Newton closes the Principia, and if I give 
 the original, it is because I despair of making or of 
 finding a version which could reproduce the eloquence 
 of Newton's words : — '' Elegantissima hoecce solis, pla- 
 netarum et cometarum compageSj non nisi consilio et 
 
xxxii Preface. 
 
 dominio entis intelligentis et potentis oriri potuit. Et 
 si stellce Jixce sint centra similium systematumy hcec 
 omnia simili consilio consiructa suherunt Unius do- 
 minion,. Hie omnia regit nan ut anima mundi, sed ut 
 Universorum Dominus. Et propter dominium suum, 
 Dominus Deus UavTOKpdrwp did solet. Nam Deus est 
 vox relativa, et ad servos refertur; et deitas est domi- 
 natio Dei, non in corpus proprium, uti sentiunt quibus 
 Deus est anima mundi, sed in servos. Deus summus 
 est ens ceternum, infinitum, absolute perfectum...Non 
 est ceternitas et infinitas, sed ceternus et infinitus; non 
 est duratio et spatium, sed durat et adest...Ut cwcus 
 non hahet ideam colorum, sic nos ideam non habemus 
 modorum, quibus Deus sapientissimus sentit et intel- 
 ligit omnia.,. Corpore omni etfigurd corpored prorsus 
 destituitur, ideoque videri non potest, nee audiri, nee 
 tangi, nee sub specie rei alicujus corporece coli debet... 
 Hunc cognoscimus solummodo per proprietates ejus et 
 attributa, et per sapientissimas et optimas rerum 
 structuras et causas finales, et admiramur ob perfec- 
 tiones; veneramur autem et colimus ob dominium. 
 Colimus e7iim ut servi, et Deus sine dominio, provi- 
 dentid, et causis finalibus nihil aliud est quamfatum 
 et natura. A cceca necessitate metaphysicd, quce 
 eadem est et semper et ubique, nulla oritur rerum, 
 variatio. Tota rerum conditarum pro locis ac tern- 
 poribus diversitas, ab ideis et voluntate entis neces- 
 sario existerttis solummodo oriri potuit,,.Et hcec de 
 
Preface, xxxiii 
 
 DeOj de quo utique ex phcenomenis disserere, ad 
 philosopMam naturalem pertinet" 
 
 Tn the notes, I have given what appear to me 
 vaHd reasons, drawn from philosophical considera- 
 tions, why I cannot accept Mr Darwin's Theory 
 of Natural Selection, as an explanation of the de- 
 velopment of the human Eye from some greatly 
 inferior organization. If the arguments are correct 
 they extend to other organs also. In the strictures 
 on this theory, I trust not a word will be found in- 
 consistent with that respectful admiration which I, 
 in common with most educated men, entertain for 
 the author of some of the most charming books in 
 our language. I hope Dr Tyndall also will find no 
 just cause for complaint in the manner of my taking 
 exception to some of his recent remarks on Prayer. 
 
 The great mental agitation on subjects connected 
 with Keligion, for which this age is remarkable, so 
 far from furnishing a reasonable cause for despon- 
 dency, may fairly be viewed as a providential oppor- 
 tunity for learned and high-placed divines to exhibit 
 and enforce such new aspects of truth as they may 
 consider to have been heretofore overlooked'. It 
 was in this light that Augustine habitually regarded 
 the controversies of his day. It is Anathema, and 
 not moderation in argument, that is a sure sign 
 
 ^ See Dean Hook's Oxford Sermons, 1837, No. 3. 
 
xxxiv Preface. 
 
 either of a falling or a weakly supported cause. In 
 contending with an opponent, nothing is gained by 
 that assumption of a tone of superiority, or by that 
 "look of offence, which though harmless in effect, 
 nevertheless," in the words of the greatest of ancient 
 historians^, "is troublesome and painful to those 
 who endure it." 
 
 1 Thucyd. Lib. ii. Cap. 37. 
 
 Cambridge, Jan. 31, 1868. 
 
\ k 
 
 V 
 
 PROPERTF^ 
 
 PfilUGETG 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE SLOfrXESS OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS. 
 
 * 
 
 IsATAH XI. 9; 2 Peter III. 8. 
 
 Thei/ shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : for 
 
 the earth shall he full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 
 waters cover the sea. 
 But, beloved, he not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is, 
 
 tuith the Lord, as a thousand years, and a thousand years 
 
 as one day. 
 
 Throughout the long roll of many centuries, the 
 thoughts contained in this promise of the prophet, 
 and in this caution of the apostle, have animated the 
 hopes, or sustained the patience, of God's true chil- 
 dren, in all their sad variety of pain. The promise 
 that the seed of the Avouian should bruise the 
 serpent's head ushered in the first dispensation of 
 God's grace to man. Its reiteration in the last 
 words of the Lord Jesus to His redeemed, " Behold, 
 I come quickly," closes the Canon of the Hol}^ 
 Books. It was the hope tliafc the Messiah of their 
 covenant God should come, to restore the land and 
 the government to Israel, which alone dried the 
 tears of those who had sat down to weep by the 
 
 1 
 
2 The hope of a future kingdom [lect. 
 
 waters of Babylon, hanging their harps upon the 
 trees that were therein. It was substantially the 
 light of the same hope, in another and a brighter 
 form, which alone illuminated the dreary catacombs 
 servino- at once for the tomb and the sanctuary, 
 and, by God's providence, for the cradle of the 
 early Church struggling in her agony. And once 
 more, in times nearer to our own, it was the settled 
 conviction that Christ their king would, in his own 
 good time, come to them in royal form, claiming 
 and avenging his own, which nerved the Waldenses 
 to suppress their moans, and to look with undaunted 
 eye upon their slaughtered saints, 
 
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese who roll'd 
 Mother with infant down the rocks. 
 
 By this hope then the Church of God, in all ages, 
 has been, and is now, saved, and that not alone in 
 her fiercer trials and rarer emergencies, but it is the 
 unclouded confidence that Christ the king shall one 
 day reign in righteousness and peace, which shines 
 as the one light within the Christian's dwelling 
 amidst bereavement or anguish or poverty or op- 
 pression or the canker of earthly hopes ; or in serener 
 times is cherished as a lamp to the Christian's feet and 
 a lantern to his path, guiding and cheering him in the 
 noiseless tenour of a holy life. I may add, it is the 
 hope of this second Advent of Christ which is com- 
 memorated throughout Christendom this very day. 
 Meanwhile, where is the promise of His coming? 
 
I.] ivhey^ein dwelleth righteousness. 3 
 
 For since the Fathers fell asleep all things continue 
 as they were from the beginning of the creation. 
 This was the insidious taunt which assailed the faith 
 and tried the constancy of the early Church. They 
 could count among their members not many wise 
 men after the flesh. For the most part they had 
 accepted the truth as it is in Jesus, not so much 
 through the force of argument as through the per- 
 suasion of the logic of the affections and the }'earn- 
 ings of spiritual need ; hence for them, the best, if 
 not the only shield against these fiery darts of the 
 evil one, was the sacred experience of the regenerate 
 heart, the witness of the Divine Spirit testifying to 
 their spirits that they were the sons of God : it was 
 impossible to doubt that He who had said to them, 
 ^^ I will come to you again," was a faithful Saviour, 
 and they could hardly forget His words, ^'in pa- 
 tience possess ye your souls." 
 
 But if this hope deferred was a sore trial to the 
 Christians of old, how has the force of that trial be- 
 come redoubled to ourselves after the lapse of 1800 
 years ! For the fact cannot be evaded, (and I have 
 no desire to evade the fact) that the Lord of the 
 Church still ''delayeth His coming." It cannot be 
 denied that the Religion of the Cross, that truest 
 and highest 'knowledge of the Lord,' so far from 
 'covering the earth,' as yet extends not even in a 
 nominal form over a fifth part of its population ; 
 and the familiar records of every day force upon us 
 
 1—2 
 
4 The slow advance of Christianity [lect. 
 
 the unwelcome conviction that of no part of Chris- 
 tendom can it be said with truth, they neither ' hurt 
 nor destroy in God's holy mountain.' To add to this 
 severe but necessary trial of the militant Church, 
 there is now superadded this gratuitous exaggeration 
 of her trouble, that men who pass for the philoso- 
 phers of the day would fain persuade us that the 
 true reason of the slow progress, or as they would 
 invidiously term it, the failure of Christianity, lies in 
 the fact, that the religion of Christ, like other systems, 
 has had its little day, has run its natural course, and 
 in its turn, like other systems, has become obsolete. 
 If this thought has any sting in it for ourselves, the 
 smart perhaps may come from the consciousness of our 
 own personal share in the hindrance to the progress 
 of the Faith of Christ. But this is not all. There 
 are those who sit in the sccit of the interpreters of 
 nature who loudly assert, not alone that all things 
 have continued ever as they were of old, but that 
 by the force of inevitable law all that appertains to 
 the world of matter and to the world of intellect, 
 and to the world of emotion, 
 
 " whatever stirs this mortal frame," 
 
 must have continued, and must continue, as it 
 was since the beginning of the creation. These 
 bold interpreters of nature, it would be unbecoming 
 to use a stronger term, would fain have us believe 
 that they have extracted from their mistress her 
 choicest secret ; and the secret is, that she every- 
 
I-] no sign that Christianity is effete. 5 
 
 where raises her voice in protest against miracles, 
 and ever has been, and must ever be, inexorable to 
 the pleadings of human prayer. 
 
 If these allegations of the opponents of Christi- 
 anity were indeed true, then I need scarcely say, 
 of aJl men, v/e Christians must be most pitiable. 
 But what is the reply to these calumnies of our 
 faith, drawn, as they are said to be, from this al- 
 leged monotonous uniformity, this inflexible con- 
 stancy of nature ? The replies, I conceive, are two- 
 fold in their bearing. To one of them I have al- 
 ready referred, and it is one which requires no 
 learning, save the learning of the heart to under- 
 stand or to supply. It is true that no one can fully 
 appreciate its force w^ho has not found, or has not 
 desired to find, Hhe secret of the Lord,' be he the 
 learned, or be he the unlettered man. That reply 
 was expressed in two short words by one of the ablest 
 and most thoughtful philosophers who have lived 
 in the respect and the affections of Englishmen in 
 modern times. Speaking of the truth of the Christian 
 faith as demonstrated by its formal evidences, Cole- 
 ridge said with an emphasis which will sink the 
 deeper the more it is considered : '^ Do not talk to me 
 of the Evidences of Christianity ; — Try it." And there 
 is many a simple man and many a gifted man among 
 us who could say, I have tried this faith, this effete, 
 this obsolete faith, as some would presume to call it, 
 and I have found that it fills me with peace ; peace 
 
6 Deliberate slowness of development [lect. 
 
 with tlie known wliich surrounds me, peace with the 
 great unknown Father who is above and beyond 
 me; it refreshes me with hope, it animates me with 
 love, it endues me with inner strength to eschew 
 the evil and to choose the good. ^^ I know in whom I 
 have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to 
 keep that which I have committed unto Him, until 
 that day." This is one reply which satisfies the 
 man's individual self. 
 
 But for us — for us who are surrounded by all 
 the appliances of learning, and furnished with the 
 fruitful results of ancient and modern thought; for 
 us whose calling of God it is to go forth to the 
 great outer world, clothed not alone in a panoply for 
 ourselves, but who, having kindled our torch within 
 the shrine of truth, are responsible for the sharing 
 and the diffusion of its light to those who sitting in 
 darkness and the shadows of doubt cry out, ^^ Come 
 over and help us" — what, I ask, are such as we to 
 say to such as these ? I answer, we may say at 
 once and in general, slowness of progress is no 
 sign o f failure ; on the contrary, slowness of pro- 
 gress in all that is enduring, is the great Law of the 
 Universe. The creature is impatient, the Creator is 
 deliberate. The creature, whose sum of earthly life 
 is bounded by the threescore years and ten, hurries 
 to and fro in the restlessness of his will ; the Creator 
 sitting in quietude upon His eternal throne upholdeth 
 all things in the majestic leisureness of unbounded 
 
I.] the law of Divine Creation, 7 
 
 power. With Him ' a thousand years are as one day/ 
 I think I shall be able to convince you that it is to 
 overlookincy this law of slow and deliberate action 
 in the Divine government of nature, that we may 
 trace no slight part of the mental distress which 
 harasses many thouglitful men at the present day. 
 For this reason, I propose this continuity of the 
 law of slowness of progress, pervading the physical, 
 the mental, and the moral universe — I propose the 
 analogies of this prevalent leisureness of the Divine 
 action, so far as we are able to trace it and under- 
 stand it, as the staple and the main argument 
 of at least two of the Lectures which I am to 
 deliver from this pulpit. It is to this that I shall 
 shortly return. 
 
 And next, as to the undisturbed constancy, the 
 monotonous uniformity of nature, which at every 
 stage of its progress is said by some WTiters to pro- 
 test against the intrusion of miracle, and to render 
 illogical the interposition of prayer ; — when I think of 
 the scheme of nature, so far as it is comprehended by 
 us in this 19th century, my mind at once reverts to 
 the grand, majestic, ceaseless march of the sun with 
 all that host of material systems which he holds toge- 
 ther under the influence of his power. To us men, 
 measuring as we must measure by our earthly C3^cles 
 and by our tiny units of space, this stately march of 
 the solar universe seems uniform in its rate, and defi- 
 nite in the point towards which it tends. But surely 
 
8 The stately motion of the solar system [lect. 
 
 this uniformity of rate and this straight definite 
 line of progress are only apparent, and arise solely 
 from the incalculable sweep of the cosmical curve 
 in which this universe moves, and from mere terres- 
 trial time, as yet too brief to observe a deflection. 
 Wait with the patience of God, and this vast uni- 
 verse will have visited other regions of the infini- 
 tude of space ; new, and it may be inconceivable cir- 
 cumstances, will have intervened ; new combinations 
 of other forces will have been introduced ; and the 
 rate and the line of the stately progress will all be 
 changed. And as it is impossible to indicate at 
 what point of its cosmical orbit this Universe may 
 not enter into new circumstances and be subject to 
 new forces, thus giving rise to hitherto unknown 
 resultants — to Miracles, if you please to assign to 
 them that name — so it seems illogical to say that 
 the occurrence of such results during any particular 
 era of the world's existence is inconceivahle. So 
 this earth and all that is on it and surrounds it, 
 this nature, as we call it, is after all changeful in 
 its constancy, and various in its uniformity. Con- 
 stant and uniform alone in this, that it is under 
 the care of God, with whom alone is ' no variableness 
 neither shadow of turning.' 
 
 And surely this steady, various march of the 
 vast material Cosmos can hardly fail to be a type 
 of the moral universe circling around the centre of 
 infinite perfection in some marvellous orbit which 
 
I.] analogous to intellectual and moral progress. 9 
 
 is ever approaching and approaching the throne of 
 God, yet never nigh. 
 
 With thoughts hke these possessing our minds 
 we are now prepared for the consideration of the 
 main subject on which I desire to engage your atten- 
 tion, viz. contimdty of slowness of -progress as a law of 
 created things. I think that walking by the hght of 
 human knowledofe — a knowledo^e which we ouofht 
 never to forget has come to us through God's bless- 
 ing on His own great gift of genius wherewith He 
 has inspired favoured men, loyal to the responsibihty 
 of their caUing — I say, walking by the light of 
 science we shall find, iri the first place, many indica- 
 tions of deliberate slowness of progress in the suc- 
 cessive stages of the creation of the earth, ultimately 
 fittinof it with a marvellous and a lovinof foresio-ht for 
 the abode of Man. And, in the second place, after 
 Man has appeared upon this elaborate earth, Man 
 with all his latent vast capacity, I am sure we shall 
 trace a similar slowness of progress in the develop- 
 ment of his intellectual powers, and in his acquisition 
 and storing up of human knowledge ; and surely this 
 knowledge is a creation also — the creation of the mind. 
 
 And I would then ask, if we shall have succeeded 
 in tracing slowness of progress as a primordial law, 
 which the great Creator has imposed upon himself 
 both in the material and in the intellectual parts 
 of His creation, would you not, in the third place, 
 expect to find a similar slowness of progress in 
 
10 The estahlishment of such analogies [lect. 
 
 the moral development of man, in the restoration, 
 in the building up his moral being into the image 
 of God ? would you not in fact expect to find a 
 slowness of progress in the acceptance of Christianity 
 in the hearts and minds of God's redeemed, if a 
 revelation told you, as it assuredly does tell you, that 
 the religion of Christ is the only means of perfecting 
 their moral nature in the sight of a Holy Creator ? 
 
 Or, putting this argument into another form, 
 if we find, as we do find, this progress of the 
 Christian faith slow, it may be even mysteriously 
 slow, shall we not say that this is in analogy, 
 in continuity, with those other arrangements for the 
 progress of the material creation, and for the de- 
 velopment of man's intellectual being, both of 
 which we admit originate with God ? 
 
 Now this is the main argument which I shall 
 propose for your consideration : no doubt it will 
 have p few ramifications, and I may be compelled to 
 deduce from it a corollary or two not perhaps wholly 
 expected from the premises on which the argument 
 itself is founded. I think for instance it will be found 
 to throw some light upon the interpretation which 
 ought to be put upon certain portions of the divine 
 revelation contained in the Holy Scriptures, not 
 merely because the interpretation may be found 
 rational and consistent, but because it has become 
 necessary. And if the mode of interpretation I 
 allude to be true, then I think it will remove from 
 
T.] an indication of unity of 'plan. 11 
 
 some minds a load which has long oppressed them, 
 as certainly it has removed it from my own. 
 
 Moreover as we proceed with this argument, we 
 shall now and then find occasion to pause for a 
 moment from the observation of the law of continuity 
 in slowness of progress, to trace the marks of exquisite 
 beauty which never fail to accompany the growth of 
 the things created, and to observe the joy of life, in 
 the midst of which, and by means of which, these 
 creations themselves proceed. — td/i^- ^ 
 
 My brethren, if this stately slowness, amidst 
 beauty and life, be a law of nature, one effect of 
 such considerations upon any heart prepared and at- 
 tuned by the Spirit of God must be, that even in 
 the midst of the noise and tumult and hurry of the 
 comings and goings in the world, that heart will once 
 more hear the voice of Christ the Saviour, ^' Come ye 
 aside with me into a quiet place, and rest awhile." 
 Even so. Lord, abide with us. 
 
 I. And now, for the purposes of illustrating our 
 argument, I must ask you for a moment to summon 
 forth that divine creative faculty wherewith God has 
 lovingly endued us for the clearer apprehension of his 
 manifold works. In imagination I must ask you to 
 ascend with me some old Silurian hill on the primoeval 
 earth, ages upon ages before God had fitted it for the 
 abode of man. Picture to yourselves some mighty 
 stream like the Ganges or the Amazon rolling its 
 waters from far distant mountams into an ancient sea. 
 
12 The Flora and Fauna of the Coal-Jields. [lect. 
 
 You observe the broad interminable belt of forest, 
 which, stretching inland further than the eye can reach, 
 rises in wild luxuriance from the swamps which fringe 
 the stream. You may trace there the majestic pine, 
 the graceful fern, the erect gigantic moss, fluted and 
 towerinof columnar reeds, and a stranofe fantastic 
 undergrowth, unknown to the flora of the age of 
 man. The oak and the elm, the sycamore and the noble 
 acacias of the west, you will not find, for as yet they 
 are not created. There are no cattle grazing ^upon 
 a thousand hills,' for God as yet has not clothed those 
 hills with grass. In the thick jungle of these primaeval 
 forests you v/ill not hear " the young lions roaring 
 after their prey," for as yet there is no meat pro- 
 vided for such by God. Those forests are tuneless of 
 the glad carols of the birds, for as yet ' the herb 
 yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after 
 his kind ' are not created for their food. Apart from 
 the low croak of the reptile, and it may be the shrill 
 chirp of many an insect, there is the hush of the 
 silence of non-existence amidst those matted fronds, 
 save when the voice of the Lord is heard in the 
 thunder or the wind. 
 
 And if in the strength of this creative gift, 
 you still keep ^^our stand upon your watch-place for 
 ages beyond your power to count, you will see nothing 
 but the decay and the renewal of that interminable 
 umbrageous belt. The ferns will fade, the gigantic 
 moss and the columnar reed will shrivel, and the 
 
I.] Extreme sloivness of the formation. 13 
 
 pines will decay and fall to their mother earth, but 
 all this only to make way for another and more 
 luxuriant OTowth. And so for ao^es. 
 
 At lenorth the scene chano-es, and throuo^h some 
 mighty pulsation, some throb of the earth's bosom, 
 ordained of God^ you see the waters of the broad 
 swampy margin deepen and deepen, and then pile 
 upon pile of forest growth and forest decay are 
 submerged and gone. But w^iit aw^hile for the lapse 
 of years : I know not how many, lor science as yet 
 has found no unit for the measure of cycles such 
 as these. Y/hatever the periods may be, the divine 
 faculty wdthin us concentrates and apprehends them 
 all as but a whiff of vaporous time. A¥ait awhile, 
 and then upon the broad silted margin of the ever- 
 lasting stream, piles upon piles of other forests again 
 rise and decay, and by slow successive pulsations of 
 the uncompleted earth in their turn disappear beneath 
 the swollen tide. 
 
 Now if in spirit you saw all this, and only 
 this, would you be able to decipher the meaning 
 of the riddle ? Would you imagine for instance, 
 that all this mysterious prodigality of decay was a 
 divine elaborate contrivance for the production and 
 storing of fuel for the service of races of beings yet 
 unborn ? As you witnessed the successive growths 
 and submergence of those forests, could you foresee 
 or conceive in w-hat way such an arrangement of 
 things could one day materially conduce to the 
 
14 The intention of the creation [lect. 
 
 development of the genius of intelligent creatures 
 who were destined to be in remote futurity the 
 last and chiefest denizens of the earth ? And if 
 some bright messenger from the throne of God 
 stood at your side, and at the beginning of the 
 vision had told you how in other forests of far 
 different growth, the fowls of heaven would one day 
 ^make their nests, and sing among the branches;' 
 if he had told you that cattle would graze upon a 
 thousand hills, and that ' by the springs in the valleys 
 the wild asses should quench their thirst ;' if he 
 had told you that God would place upon the earth 
 a being clothed in the majestic image of His own 
 mind to be the Lord and master of created things; 
 then I think that at the first you would receive 
 the revelation though in wonder yet in thankful- 
 ness of spirit, and you would wait in the fulness of 
 hope for the accomplishment of the promise. But 
 if the vision proceeded through incalculable time, 
 and for ages you had seen nothing but what, for 
 want of better knowledge, seemed to you an end- 
 less prodigality of waste, would you in your impa- 
 tience be tempted to say. Surely that bright mes- 
 senger of God spoke to ine in parables, for I see 
 nothing, and for ages I have seen nothing but a 
 constant inflexible uniformity of nature : as for the 
 grass which he told me was to cover the hills, and 
 the thousands of cattle which were to fill the plains, 
 all such creations would be inconceivable miraculous 
 
I.] not surmisable before completion. 15 
 
 interruptions of that nature wliicli for thousands of 
 centuries I have observed unbroken in its course. 
 And as for the advent of that being who is to be 
 the Lord of that new earth, 'where now is the 
 promise of his coming, for since the beginning of 
 the creation all things continue as they were V 
 
 My brethren, I have not been amusing you with 
 some fantastic creation of the brain, but I have 
 been reminding you of the mode of the Divine 
 action during one stage of the Creation. And there 
 are many like it. Be it remembered that to this 
 knowledge of the Lord's ways we have attained 
 through the righteous and loyal use of the Lord's 
 gift. And one conclusion that we may draw from 
 that knowledge is this, that God's mode of action 
 in the material creation has been and is deliberate 
 and slow, majestic in the composure of its leisure- 
 ness. There is also another inference which I think 
 naturally flows from the argument before us ; it is 
 one full of hope and encouragement to man, and 
 with that I shall conclude. The inference is this ; — 
 as the material universe, so far as we see it, at 
 length came forth from the Creator perfect in rela- 
 tion to its purposes, fraught with beauty and ' very 
 good,' so also we may expect the progress of the 
 immaterial, the intellectual part of us, though or- 
 dained to be equally deliberate and equally slow, 
 will go on and on, embracing in intelligent percep- 
 tion one after another of the wonderful works of 
 
16 Delay no reason for despondency, [lect. 
 
 God, improving and improving, not alone in the 
 clearness and amount of its intelligence, but in the 
 comprehensiveness of its grasp and the grandeur of 
 its capacity. 
 
 And in like manner, notwithstanding there is so 
 much to grieve and to disappoint in the sin, and the 
 misery, and the degradation, and the perversion of 
 God's gifts, which we see around us; notwithstand- 
 ing the acknowledged slowness of the j^i'ogi^ess of 
 Christianity; nevertheless, what I am permitted to 
 see of the ultimately perfect results of a slow and 
 deliberate action in other parts of the Creation, 
 checks in me, and I hope in you, all despondency 
 for the fate of our holy religion ; it removes all doubt 
 that the Gospel of the Cross of Christ, possibly by its 
 own divine native force, shall ultimately triumph ; and 
 it animates us w^ith a confident hope that the Spirit 
 of Christ Jesus shall in the end subdue every heart 
 to Himself, and then ^ the earth shall be filled with 
 the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover 
 the sea.' 
 
 While I have been speaking to you on these 
 great topics, my brethren, it cannot but be that the 
 thoughts of many hearts have been revealed to them- 
 selves. And are they not such as these ? Wherefore 
 this hurry of mine, and this feverish haste for the 
 result ? Is this work I am about, the work which 
 my Father has given me to do? — then like all 
 God's other works it is to be done w^ith constancy. 
 
I.] Impatience and prejudication checked. 17 
 
 with forethought, with deliberate patience. I will 
 cast my bread U230ii tlie waters, not looking for the 
 harvest to-morrow or the next day, but in the ful- 
 ness of faith not doubting that I shall find it ^ after 
 many days.' 
 
 And I think something of the same tenour must 
 have been passing among the thoughts of those of 
 you who now sit where I well remember sitting a 
 generation of men ago. Judging from my own heart 
 and from my own recollection, young men stand in 
 need of an ever-present heavenly help to check some- 
 times impatience, sometimes despondency, some- 
 times a proneness to judge before the time. To- 
 day we have been considering the patience of God. 
 In your finite measure, strive to walk in His foot- 
 steps. ' Commit thy way unto Him, and He shall 
 bring it to pass. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently 
 for Him.' If there is one frame of mind stronger 
 and happier than another, it is the mind 'stayed 
 on God.' In the great Saviour's name, Pray for 
 
 THAT. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE SLOWNESS OF INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 
 
 Isaiah XI. 9 ; 2 Peter III. 8. 
 
 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : for 
 
 the earth shall he full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 
 waters cover the sea. 
 But beloved, he not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is, 
 
 tuith the Lord, as a thousand years, and a thousand years 
 
 as one day. 
 
 The main subject before us is the analogy of slowness 
 of progress in the Divine plan both of Nature and of 
 Grace so far as we are able to apprehend it. I here 
 use the word Nature in its larger sense, that is, not 
 only as comprehending the material fabric of things 
 created, but as including the human mind with its 
 capacities, its energies, and its relations. And I 
 speak of Grace as synonymous with the revelation 
 accorded to us in the inspired books of the two cove- 
 nants of God. If this continuity, if this analogy of a 
 majestic leisurely progress be established, then an- 
 other link will have been added to the golden chain 
 of circumstantial evidence, which leads ultimately to 
 the throne of the infinite, and enforces the conclusion 
 
LECT. rr.] Recapitulation of the argument. 19 
 
 that the God of Nature and the God of the Old and 
 of the New Testament is one and the same. 
 
 Last Sunday, I asked you to recal to mind the 
 grandeur and the slowness of the process by which it 
 was the will of the Creator to contrive and build up 
 this beautiful world for the habitation and the service 
 and the joy of man ; — a divine work not executed 
 after the fashion of the uncertain, feverish, spasmodic 
 haste, with which for the most part we finite crea- 
 tures construct our schemes, but every part of it 
 manifesting the composure and quiet confidence of a 
 Mind possessing resources unfailing, time unlimited, 
 beneficence unrestrained. On one point at least we 
 have the ' sure word of prophecy,' that as stage after 
 stage of the creative process passed before the con- 
 templation of the Creator, even He, the Omniscient, 
 the Omnipotent, pronounced it 'very good/ And I 
 think I learn from the same Divine record, how the 
 attendant spirits of the hierarchy of heaven Hhe 
 morning stars sang together, and the sons of God 
 shouted in joy,' taking up the chorus, it is very good. 
 
 You will remember that the one particular stage 
 of the Divine creative process which I took for the 
 illustration of our argument was that in which the 
 Creator, by the word of His power, was slowly but 
 surely providing and filling those vast storehouses of 
 mineral fuel which ages after would become a neces- 
 sity for the dense and civilized populations of the 
 earth. And I had another reason for selecting this 
 
 2—2 
 
20 The formation of the coal-fields [lect. 
 
 one particular stage out of many others which would 
 have served equally well for the argument before us, 
 and it was this. In the long cycles of the growth, the 
 decay, and the submergence of those primaeval forests, 
 there may be heard by the mind's ear, by the ear of 
 faith, a divine prophetic voice, that in far off time 
 there would come to man — shall I call it a permission 
 — shall I call it a command, to go forth and ^subdue the 
 earth.' When that command at length came from 
 the mouth of God, they who heard it knew not the 
 means ordained for its accomplishment. Again six 
 thousand years roll away, and in the debris of those 
 ancient forests, elaborated by a chemistry beyond the 
 reach of man, there is found a store of potential 
 energy whereby man subdues the earth and its wa- 
 ters and its winds, and compels, in a measure, even 
 the fires of heaven to do the biddings of his genius. 
 So, to my thoughts, and I trust also to yours, those old 
 forests of the unformed earth become a heavenly sign, 
 and by far the most ancient of prophecies; a prophecy 
 reiterated ages afterwards in Genesis; a prophecy 
 this day before your eyes in process of fulfilment. 
 
 My brethren, if I have detained you long upon 
 thBse topics, it is because I hope I am not mistaken 
 in their importance. It is by weapons said (but un- 
 truly said) to be furnished from the armoury of mo- 
 dern knowledge, that not alone the religion of the 
 Cross of Christ, but the very existence of a personal 
 Author and a personal Governor of Nature is assailed 
 
il] prophetic of 'Subdue the earth' 21 
 
 or ignored ; and therefore it seems well for us from 
 that same armoury, to take down the shield forged 
 and divinely tempered in the fires of a truer science, 
 by which those spurious weapons are shattered and 
 rebound. To ourselves also there arises an additional 
 interest, in that whatever amount of truth there is in 
 the argument so far as it is yet pursued, very much 
 of it is derived from the labours, divinely blessed, of 
 one*, who in honour still goes in and out among us, 
 venerable by the weight of his years, and venerated 
 in the light of our love. 
 
 (a) I proceed now to another point in the analogy 
 before us. I have been so far speaking of deliberate 
 slowness in the divine creative work, and I have now 
 a few words to add regarding other analogies; con- 
 nected with the beauty and the joy of Ufe which 
 everywhere accompany and pervade the process of 
 creation itself These lesser analogies are indeed sub- 
 sidiary to the other and the greater one, but still they 
 are too important to be overlooked; and I think I 
 shall be able to shew that their co-existence in the 
 material, the intellectual, and the moral constituents 
 of the wide creation, is not fanciful but actual 
 and substantial. They form the continuity of one 
 plan. 
 
 There now arises the difficulty of a choice in the 
 midst of a superabundance of material : a well in- 
 structed mind dwelling on such thoughts, soon 
 
 ^ Adam Sedgwick; in tlic fiftictli year of his Geological Lectures. 
 
22 The mountain-lime-stone and the chalk [lect. 
 
 becomes oppressed with the exceeding weight of 
 glory which herein surrounds him. When the Son 
 of God came to visit us in great humihty for our 
 redemption, it was impossible that His glory should 
 be hid : wherever he was found, a virtue went forth 
 from Him, diffusing peace, healing the sick, and 
 disclosing the traces of His divinity. So also, when- 
 ever in humility of heart and with instructed eye we 
 follow the footsteps of the Eternal Father in His 
 creative work, there we find not alone power and 
 foresight and skill, but in the beauty and joy of 
 life, on every side abounding, we discern the marks 
 of a Father's tenderness and love. I dwell not now 
 on the gracefulness wherewith He clothed those 
 primaeval ferns, and adorned them with the little 
 jewels on their fronds; nor will I stop to speak 
 of the joy of that busy, beautiful, multitudinous life 
 which swarmed in those ancient seas, slowly building 
 up those marbles of the mountain limestone which 
 now serve for the pleasure and the use of man. From 
 these I pass to the undulating downs of the South of 
 England or to those even nearer to ourselves, rising 
 sometimes to mountainous dimensions; and I ask you 
 to reflect that there exists not a scrap, not an atom 
 of the long line of those massive hills which has not 
 been elaborated in the tissues of living beings, 
 and by them extracted from the waters of an ocean, 
 which but for that beneficent process would have 
 become inimical to other life. And those beings 
 
ir.] formed through the agency of life. 23 
 
 were happy : — liappy up to the measure of their ca- 
 pacity ; — sportive in the joy of existence. 
 
 (/3) And then look at the pierced microscopic urns\ 
 curiously fashioned as a part of themselves and for 
 their protection. Look at their vast variety, at 
 their matchless shapes; — yet, a score cf them might 
 float in the eye of a needle. How many of them, 
 think 3^ou, formed the hills? But what means all 
 this prodigality of beauty and life and joy? Is it 
 because the Divine Architect cannot work without 
 the splendour of His Majesty impressing a glory on 
 the meanest of His creations ? Or did He who gave 
 the Old Law ' by the disposition of angels/ did He 
 bid His angels sculpture those tiny vases, and design 
 those beautiful forms ? Was it they who pencilled 
 the leaves, and who painted the plumage of the 
 birds ? And if you object that no eye of intelli- 
 gence beheld those primaeval atoms of life, beautiful 
 in their existence, I answer, not so ; for in the fulness 
 of God's time you and I have seen them ; we have 
 exhumed them from their ancient tombs ; we have 
 seen them by the cunning, foreordained contrivance 
 of man, and cold indeed must have been our spirits 
 if we rose from the sight without the winged thought 
 of a grateful heart ascending to the throne of the 
 Eternal, adoring Him for these traces of the tender- 
 ness of a Father's care. 
 
 In this way it pleased the Creator to form the 
 
 1 The microscopic foramiiiifera. 
 
24 Intellectual progress in the main is slow, [lect. 
 
 hills; and the picture is a fair one. But I have not 
 been speaking of these things merely because the pic- 
 ture is fair ; I should have no right to do so ; but I 
 have dwelt so long upon them, because He who thus 
 created the material hills, formed also the human 
 mind, and God has clothed that mind also with 
 ineffable beauty, and He has endued it with the 
 power of creating and of re-creating, and of accumu- 
 lating its creations, and of apprehending other created 
 things, and He has conferred on it the inexpressible 
 joy of intellectual life. And God who formed the 
 hills and the human mind, has also formed in man 
 a soul, the seat of his emotions, his affections ; and 
 when God for His Son's sake, breathes by His 
 Spirit a regenerated life into the soul, then it is that 
 it lives a true life in works of obedience and love, 
 and is filled with a joy and a peace passing all un- 
 derstanding in the knowledge and communion of God. 
 II. We proceed now to the Second great element 
 in the analogies before us; namely, to observe the 
 slowness of the progress and of the accumulation 
 of knowledge, acquired through the medium of the 
 intellect. And then, subsidiary to this, which forms 
 our present analogy, I shall ask you, in passing, to 
 mark also the lesser analogies observable in the 
 beauty of the divinely constructed instrument itself, 
 and in the joy of life which it has pleased its Om- 
 nipotent Constructor shall accompany the righteous 
 exercise of its powers. 
 
II.] notwithstanding occasional ouihiirsts. 25 
 
 It is quite natural that of those whom I address^ 
 some may demur to the proposition that the progress 
 of the creative results of the intellect has all along, 
 and by the Divine pre-arrangement, resembled, in 
 the slowness of their evolution, the stately deliberate 
 rising into being of the material world. The objec- 
 tion will probably be felt by two very different classes 
 of mind, on two very opposite grounds. To some, 
 the thought of this imputed tardiness, may seem to 
 imply that I ungratefully forget the imperishable 
 possessions bequeathed to us by the mighty intellects 
 of ages long since passed away. Others, actuated by 
 a different frame of mind, may conclude that I leave 
 out of the account the astonishing rapidity of the ac- 
 quisition and the accumulation of physical knowledge 
 which seems ordained to be a distinctive mark of 
 the present era, and which one of the ablest of our 
 Statesmen^ recently declared in the Senate, has 
 
 * " I will not now attempt to inquire into the causes, the particular 
 causes, which have brought about that great advance. But I think 
 I may say there is one sovereign cause which is at the bottom of every- 
 thing, and that is, the increased application of science to social life. 
 That I believe to be the main cause of the vast changes we have seen 
 in the condition and feelings of classes. We are all familiar with the 
 material results which the application of science has produced. They 
 are prodigious ; but, to my mind, the moral results are not less startling. 
 The revolution in locomotion, which would strike us every day as a 
 miracle if we were not familiar with it, has given the great body of the 
 inhabitants of this country in some degree the enlightening advantages 
 of travel. The mode in which steam power is applied to the printing- 
 press in these days produces effects more startling than the first dis- 
 covery of printing in the 15th century. It is science that has raised 
 wages ; it is science that has increased the desires and the opportunities 
 
2G The earliest intellectual efforts confined to [lect. 
 
 influenced the necessity of the great political mea- 
 sure of the day. 
 
 With regard to the intellectual achievement of 
 the men of old, I would remark, that for very 
 many ages after the gathering of mankind into 
 distinct societies, the mental efforts of gifted men 
 were confined, and I think necessarily and inten- 
 tionally confined, to what is ethical, imaginative, 
 and emotional in its character. In those remote 
 ages, in that childhood of the world, surely it 
 was of far greater moment for man to subdue Mm' 
 self J his habits and his manners, than essential to 
 his well being to subdue the earth. Now the wea- 
 pons for such a warfare are, thanks be to God, not 
 necessarily forged in fires lighted only by some re- 
 condite application of the reasoning powers. Even 
 now in this nineteenth century, it is said that the 
 ballad and (I will add) the hymn possess a far more 
 penetrating force than any marvel of physical dis- 
 covery, or any essay of deepest philosophy, not alone 
 to animate man to resolve and to act, but to nerve 
 him to resist and to endure. 
 
 Viewed in this light, we can never too grate- 
 fully acknowledge the wisdom and the goodness of 
 God, in providing and transmitting for the service 
 of His church in every age, those matchless records 
 of domestic life, that sacred bread consecrated on 
 
 of men; and it is science that has ennobled labour and has elevated the 
 condition of the working classes." Speech of Mr Disraeli on tJie intro- 
 duction of the Reform Bill, Feb. 1867. 
 
II.] the ethical J the imaginative, and the emotional. 27 
 
 the altar within the home, which formed the spi- 
 ritual food of the old patriarchal life. The trials of 
 Abraham, triumphant in his faith — the chequered 
 life of Jacob, often irresolute in obedience, yet 
 never wholly surrendering his love to his covenant 
 God — the inimitable tale of Joseph gathering stores 
 of wisdom in the school of suffering, and impreg- 
 nating his whole being with trustfulness in Pro- 
 vidence, from observing with the eye of faith the 
 orderly vicissitudes of the lives about him, and hear- 
 ing with the ear of faith the whisperings within him 
 — these matchless stories you and I listened to in 
 fond amazement soon as v/e sat on our mother's 
 knees, and there learned to lisp the sacred name of 
 Jesus. This divine biography has become to many 
 of ourselves, as to the men of old, a sure talisman 
 for the years of our maturer trials ; sometimes repro- 
 ducing itself in acts of bravery, or of self-denial, 
 or of confidence in God. 
 
 And then there is the sublime poetry, the 
 divine philosophy of the book of Job, fitting ac- 
 companiments or preludes to the magnificent burning 
 imagery of the Hebrew Prophets. In all this most 
 ancient literature, there is I feel throughout, the 
 breathing of the Divinity ; but I contend also that 
 there are unmistakeable evidences therein of the 
 advanced condition of the human mind, viewed in 
 its ethical, its imaginative, and its emotional phase, 
 some two or three thousand years ago. 
 
28 Modern science useless to the Ancients, [lect. 
 
 Neither must we disallow that God left Him- 
 self not wholly without a witness among those 
 who, for some inscrutable purposes, were the less 
 favoured nations of mankind. The salutary effects 
 upon the minds and manners of the young Athe- 
 nians for instance, in committing to memory 
 the songs of Homer, or in listening to the grand 
 harmonies of their lyric and dramatic poets, ought 
 never to be ignored by any man who is seek- 
 ing to trace the ways of God with the ancient 
 world. In the far East also, we have lately learnt, 
 that coeval with, or even anterior to the poets of 
 Greece, God was not unknown to the people in 
 the stanzas of the sublime old Ar-yan Hymns. In 
 the attempt therefore to estabhsh the great analogies 
 before us we are bound to take such phenomena, 
 or as I would venture to call them such divine 
 pre -arrangements, into the account. To me they 
 suggest not so much imperfection of result, as the 
 beneficent inter-adaptations of the childhood of an- 
 cient social life. 
 
 And if you seek for more than this you must 
 remember that, in the day when these phases of 
 the human mind flourished in their beauty, the 
 steam-hammer and the Atlantic cable would have 
 been as utter an anachronism, and as impossible 
 a prolepsis, as the mammal would have been in the 
 primaeval forests of the yet unformed earth. 
 
 In forming our estimate of ancient intellectual 
 
II.] Two thousand years between Plato and Newton, 20 
 
 progress, it must not be forgotten, that even admit- 
 ting the correctness of our chronology, mankind must 
 have existed at least beyond three thousand years 
 upon the earth before Pythagoras taught them the 
 fundamental theorem of the first elements of Geo- 
 metry. Yet this science depends on no skilful 
 observation with the mechanism of elaborate instru- 
 ments, but, on the quiet introspection, the contem- 
 plation of the mind alone. 
 
 And if you point to the Athenian sages, worthy 
 as they are of all modern respect and of modern 
 study, and unsurpassed as we must admit them 
 to be by the acutest and most eloquent writers of 
 this nineteenth century, nevertheless I fear the ad- 
 mission is owing to the fact that after the lapse 
 of six thousand years neither the ancient nor the 
 modern thinkers have been able to penetrate far 
 into the law of the structure and of the operations of 
 the human mind. Herein the modern philosopher is 
 now not much further advanced than was the ancient 
 sage. These all have been weaving 
 
 systems, each in its degree 
 Substantial, and all crumbling in their turn^ 
 
 It required, in the counsels of God, full two thou- 
 sand years after Plato, before Newton was permitted 
 to discover and establish the law of gravitation ; and 
 I, for one, am animated by at least the hope, I 
 might even venture to call it the conviction, that in 
 
 1 Wordsworth, Excursion, Bk. iv. 
 
30 Many preparations precede discovery, [lect. 
 
 the day which He has prepared, God will illu- 
 minate the mind of some favoured servant to unveiV 
 the psychological secrets which Plato and his succes- 
 sors hitherto have missed. Should it be in our day, 
 who of us would not say with the Athenian states- 
 man, When the discoverer comes I will be his lover 
 and his follower^ ? I pass by then the great poets, 
 the ethical and historical writers of antiquity : they 
 were God's great instruments for subduing the emo- 
 tions and the manners of the childhood of mankind. 
 As yet the time to learn the knowledge of God in 
 His material work, and thereby literally to subdue 
 the earth, had not arrived. 
 
 It was a saying of Kepler's, conceived no doubt 
 in his own quaint mind with greater reverence than 
 his words imply, that it pleased God to wait 6000 
 years for an astronomer. And Kepler was right in 
 the thing that he meant. For, judging from what 
 we are permitted to see of the ways of God, it was 
 not in the pre-arrangements of Divine Providence to 
 endue Kepler and his greater successor, the author 
 of the Principia, with genius and patience, until such 
 time as materials should exist fitted for the right 
 exercise of the penetrating understandings where- 
 with they were inspired. I think you may always 
 find, if you look for it, some anterior preparation 
 both for the time of each great discovery and in 
 the minds of the discoverers themselves. It is 
 
 ^ Plato, Alcib. II. ad finem. 
 
n.] and the discoveines are suited to the times. 31 
 
 mainly to the exigences of a dense population and 
 the struggles of men to share in the advantageous 
 positions and conveniences of social life, that in this 
 nineteenth century we owe those astonishing appli- 
 cations of the most subtle speculations of the philo- 
 sopher to the commonest appliances of art. 
 
 Perhaps it is unknown to you that the incredible 
 smallness of cost at which copies of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures are multiplied sometimes to the amount of mil- 
 lions, in this very University, is owing mainly to a 
 process of the most refined chemistry, and to a mate- 
 rial, both of which were unknown to our immediate 
 fathers. To the previous studies of Black we men of 
 this day are at length indebted for that form of the 
 mighty ""earth-subduing engine which was the subse- 
 quent contrivance of Watt. Without Wollaston's 
 ingenious manipulation of platina some half century 
 ago, it is scarcely too much to say that at this 
 moment the two terrestrial hemispheres would not as 
 yet have been linked together by the Atlantic cable ; 
 photography would have been to us as a fading 
 toy ; and that marvellous philosophy by which we 
 are permitted to analyze the materials of the sun 
 and of the stars would have been numbered among 
 the dreams of some credulous enthusiast. 
 
 These boons, bestowed by the Great Father upon 
 His children, have come to us only in the fulness 
 of time. It is only after the lapse of 6000 years 
 that God's inteUigent creatures are beginning to 
 
32 Discoveries reveal to us the Will of God, [lect. 
 
 apprehend some little of their Creator's command- 
 ment, so ' exceeding broad/ Subdue the earth. By 
 a rare alchemy, guided by a rarer genius, man now 
 converts the clays ^ of the fields into instruments of 
 research to measure the courses of the stars ; from 
 the materials of the hills ^ he evolves a light, vying 
 with the brilliance of the sun, and with the elements 
 of water he melts and he moulds at his will, masses'^ 
 of a stubborn metal which heretofore had refused to 
 yield to the fires of the hottest furnace. 
 
 But why do I venture to speak of such things as 
 these from so sacred a place, and on this the best day 
 of all the seven ? My brethren, believe me it is not 
 alone because in some form or other these topics are 
 necessary for the establishing of the great analogies 
 before us, but because I am convinced that few 
 things conduce more to the maintenance of a child- 
 like, reverential walk as in the presence of the 
 Great Father, than tracing and acknowledging the 
 finger of His power in the w^orks which proceed 
 from His gift of intellect to man. I well know that 
 Divine grace is a higher effluence, and for sinful 
 man a more needful effluence from God than genius ; 
 I know moreover that all knowledge is to us but 
 loss in comparison with the excellence of the know-* 
 ledge of Christ Jesus our Lord ; nevertheless each 
 fresh discovery of a great fact or a great truth, is 
 
 1 Aluniinium (Bronze). 
 
 ^ Magnesium. 
 
 ^ The processes of M.^Devilie in the manufacture of Platina. 
 
II.] Discovery not inspired nor accidental. 83 
 
 a disclosure of some fresh instance of the goodness 
 and greatness of God, and is as the setting of a new 
 and imperishable jewel in the diadem of Him who 
 is Eternal Truth. 
 
 Two worlds are ours: 'tis only sin 
 
 Forbids us to descry 
 The mystic heaven and earth within, 
 
 Plain as the sea and sky. 
 
 Thou who hast given me eyes to see, 
 
 And love this sight so fair. 
 Give me a heart to find out Thee, 
 
 And read Thee everywhere: 
 
 ******* 
 
 And a mind to blend with outward life 
 While walking at thy side. 
 
 An opinion has recently been stated by an 
 eminent divine, who for his piety has deservedly 
 gained the ear of the Church, that the discovery of 
 Gravitation was, after all, the result of an accident. 
 Another theological writer of even greater reputa- 
 tion appears to be convinced that the flash of genius 
 which accompanies a great invention, arises from the 
 momentary help of a divine inspiration. I do not 
 deny, nay the Scriptures constantly aftirm, and the 
 eye of faith as constantly discerns, the pervading in- 
 fluence of God's ever-present help. Nevertheless 
 I think that a closer and more extended observation 
 would have led both these excellent divines to ano- 
 ther conclusion, and one far nearer to the truth of 
 the fact. For, such accidents as a great discovery 
 never fall to the lot of the idle mind, never to the 
 
 3 
 
34 Discoveries have their preludes. [lect. 
 
 unobservant, never to the unprepared. And as to 
 the flash of genius, the Great Father has so con- 
 stituted the minds of His children, that it is only 
 after revolving and revolving, it is only after the long 
 and patient trial and rejection of many a combi- 
 nation, that the light of the discovery at last breaks 
 in upon the thoughts. And at the last it comes like 
 a flash, simply because each newly discovered truth 
 resembles a point rather than a line or a surface, 
 and when first really discerned is discovered as 
 a wliole. 
 
 The truth I am convinced is, that the knowledge 
 of God in His manifold works is part of a scheme 
 preordained by wisdom and love, imperfectly com- 
 prehended by us who are in the midst and form 
 a part of it, and proceeding to its destined inscru- 
 table end in the slow stateliness of a kingly march. 
 As the appointed fulness of time approaches for 
 each fresh disclosure of the Creator's Majesty and 
 the Creator's "Will in His creation, you will always 
 find that a mysterious and ill-defined tension per- 
 vades the minds of thinking men, and the wave of 
 thought proceeds in its uneasy throbbing course, 
 until at length reaching the haven of some prepared 
 and disciplined and gifted intellect, it there breaks 
 up into sparkles of light and truth. In this way, 
 the knowledge of God in His works has proceeded, 
 and I doubt not will continue to proceed, until at 
 length it shall encircle and cover the earth as the 
 
II.] The story of Wilhelm Struve of Pulkowa, 35 
 
 waters cover the sea. And still there is an ocean 
 and an ocean beyond : — methinks Angels are there, 
 and Christ's redeemed will join them. 
 
 And now for our conclusion for to-day. It is 
 recorded of the great Struve of Pulkowa — and al- 
 though what I am about to say greatly concerns 
 each one of us, still to you, my younger brethren, I 
 think it speaks with a peculiar emphasis ; — it is, I 
 say, recorded of Struve the Astronomer of Dorpat 
 and Pulkowa, that towards the close of a long and 
 honourable life, and when the decline of his physical 
 powers had set in, most of the numerous dialects 
 and languages which he had acquired in the course 
 of a laborious youth, recurred to his memory in so 
 unimpaired a form, that he could repeat to his 
 friends long passages from the Hebrew Prophets 
 and from the writers of Greece and Pome, and con- 
 verse in many dialects of the north, which for thirty 
 or forty years before he had never used. The years 
 and the scenes of his childhood were arranged before 
 him as in a picture or a map. Such, young men, is 
 that bright undying intellect with which you are en- 
 trusted, an effluence from the breath of God. ^ When 
 I consider, I am afraid.' Surely you are looking to 
 it well that nothing which can hurt or defile, stamps 
 its indelible mark on that which one day may be 
 unfolded to the gaze of your own mind, and which 
 at the Great Day WMSt be scrutinized before the 
 Throne of Christ. If the stains of sin be there, as 
 
 3—2 
 
36 The story of Wilhelm Struve, do. [lect. it. 
 
 the stains of sin are with the best of us, surely you 
 will in heart and mind wash them away with that 
 precious blood which the Great Judge himself once 
 shed for that very purpose upon the Cross. I know 
 that I am only interpreting your own thoughts, and 
 your own prayer to the Spirit of Grace when I say : 
 'Let the words of my mouth and the meditation 
 of my heart be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O 
 Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.' 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE SLOWNESS OF MORAL PROGRESS. 
 
 Isaiah XL 9; 2 Peter III. 8. 
 
 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : for 
 
 the earth shall he full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 
 waters cover the sea. 
 But, beloved, he not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is, 
 
 tuith the Lord, as a thousand years, and a thousand years 
 
 as one day. 
 
 Thus far we have established the analogy be- 
 tween the stately processes of the material creation 
 and the progress of the knowledge of the Creator, 
 derived through the contemplation of His works by 
 the intellect of man. By creation you will all along 
 have understood that I mean, not that solemn exer- 
 cise of the Divine power by which the Creator evoked 
 into being matter and force ; — though whatever else 
 matter and force may be^ they are at least the exhi- 
 bitions of God's will; — nor am I, in the term crea- 
 tion, in any degree referring to the grand specu- 
 lations or guesses of the elder Herschel or of his 
 great cotemporary, who endeavoured, it may be with 
 little success, to reduce those thoughts to the domain 
 
38 Physical knowledge useless to the [lect. 
 
 of his own subtle geometry ; but I am speaking of 
 those successive stages in the divine plan of the 
 earth's development whereby there was at every stage 
 a fitting existence of beauty and life and happiness, 
 each stage forming only the necessary platform for the 
 next, until the whole beneficent arrangement culmi- 
 nated in this fair earth of ours, compacted and fitted 
 for a being endued with latent vast capacities, who 
 by the contemplation of what he beheld, and the sub- 
 jugation of the earth to his own necessities or conve- 
 nience, was ordained gradually to raise his intellectual 
 being to a higher and a nobler life. Man, the first 
 creature upon that earth conscious of his own exist- 
 ence, and carrying within him the credentials of his 
 affinity to God. 
 
 But this accumulation of the knowledge of God 
 in His works, this development of the plenitude of 
 intellectual life we have seen was ordained to be slow, 
 so that the fable of Minerva starting into being armed 
 in all the maturity of her beauty, was the conception 
 rather of a childish than a sagacious philosophy. 
 Nevertheless I know it has occasioned perplexity, not 
 to say pain, to some minds, to feel that men so gifted, 
 so earnest, so loyally industrious as Plato and Ari- 
 stotle for instance, were not permitted to share in at 
 least some small portion of that insight of the mecha- 
 nism of nature which we moderns enjoy. The true 
 reply seems to be that the possibility of such an 
 anticipation of physical knowledge, implies the build- 
 
III.] ancients, but a necessity to ourselves. 39 
 
 ing up of an imaginary world wholly different from 
 what the world is, or perhaps could be. To have 
 placed gravitation, for instance, before the mind of 
 Plato or his cotemporaries, would have been not 
 very far different from placing a delicate balance in 
 the lap of an infant, or a chronometer in the hands of 
 a company of children. We must be content to 
 regard the present state of things as a scheme, or 
 even as part of a scheme still going on and imper- 
 fectly comprehended, and our wisdom is to abstain 
 from the bootless task of building up imaginary 
 worlds. Those ancient sages in their own day were 
 true to their own calling, and that calhng came from 
 God; had they failed to obey the call, our modern 
 vantage ground would have been on a far lower 
 level ; and, on the other hand, I for one beheve the 
 days will come when our knowledge and our ap- 
 pliances and our inventions will seem to our suc- 
 cessors worthy of that pity which sometimes we 
 complacently bestow on the men of old. 
 
 If an illustration were needed of this providential 
 concomitancy of invention and discovery with the 
 rise of new necessities in man, I know not where a 
 happier one could be found than in a circumstance 
 now passing before our eyes and in which there are 
 some points of peculiar interest to ourselves. When 
 Captain Cook, about a century ago, first visited 
 the wild shores and the wilder Maoris of New 
 Zealand, very many months had been required to 
 
40 Modern jphysical Knowledge a testimony [lect. 
 
 complete the tedious voyage, and yet that slowness 
 of transit occasioned no complaint as dispropor- 
 tioned to the exigences of the day. But now that 
 many thousands of our countrymen have colonized 
 those islands of the Antipodes, carrying with them 
 our language, our literature, and our Bible — and 
 where these are, there is liberty and there the know- 
 ledge of God — in this day of the spread of popula- 
 tion and the extension of commerce, associated with 
 many a concomitant development of science, a brief 
 passage of seven short weeks will suffice for our own 
 Auo-ustine of the South to reach the scenes of his 
 distant mission ; and the same incredibly rapid voy- 
 age will restore him (we trust) to the Church of his 
 native land, here to continue at the call of his coun- 
 trymen, a work not less laborious, nor less important, 
 and as we pray, not less apostolic. 
 
 (a) I now pass to a brief consideration of those 
 lesser and subsidiary analogies of which I spoke last 
 Sunday. They come to us naturally and like under- 
 tones or harmonics to the fundamental note of the 
 greater thought. And herein what first impresses 
 my own mind at this moment is the creative power 
 of the human intellect ; creative in the sense I 
 explained at the commencement of the discourse ; 
 a power divinely implanted, a heavenly gift involving 
 responsibility to the Giver. I say then every truth 
 evolved by the intellect, every fresh accession of 
 the knowledge of God in His works or His ways. 
 
III.] to GocVs love. 41 
 
 partakes far more of tlie nature of a permanent crea- 
 tion than do those massive hills which the corals 
 or the molluscs or the diatoms elaborated in their 
 tissues, and filtered from the ancient seas. The hills 
 shall one day be dissolved, but the truth shall remain ; 
 the sun may grow dark and this earth and all that 
 is therein may be burnt up and exhale into a vapour, 
 but the knowledge of what God is, and of what 
 God has done, must shine and exist for ever. 
 
 It might indeed have pleased the Divine Creator, 
 as great poets and great artists and great theolo- 
 gians, true to the light of their day, once supposed, — 
 it might have pleased the Divine Creator, by the fiat 
 of His will, to call the mountains into sudden being, 
 and with that one irresistible word * Hitherto' he 
 might have bidden the waters, in the tide of one 
 vast wave, retire to their destined bounds. The 
 thought of a magnificent embodiment of instan- 
 taneous obedience such as this may impress our- 
 selves, and very properly did impress the men 
 before us, with a sense of the awful majesty, the 
 irresistible might of Him who issued the command ; 
 but I think I discern much more of the true linea- 
 ments of the Eternal Father, such as the Divine Son 
 in lowly form manifested Him in the streets of Naza- 
 reth, in the homes of Bethany, and on the slopes of 
 Olivet, when I observe His benign will has been 
 to construct so much of this fair earth not by the 
 fiat of His irresistible word, but through the gentler 
 
42 God clothes in hemity those who cannot [lect. 
 
 processes of quiet life and pleasurable existence. 
 I think I see more of power under the control of 
 wisdom, more of tenderness doing the will of a most 
 loving mind. In the one case there would have 
 been written on the portals of the Creation, God is 
 Power. In Creation as it is, I hear evangelic whis- 
 perings from the still small voice that God is Love. 
 
 And just after the spirit of the same law it 
 seems to me that God has clothed the human intel- 
 lect with a creative power. He has endued it with 
 desires, longings, appetencies, and these all by a 
 beneficent arrangement are ever craving for satis- 
 faction; and there is but one object that can pro- 
 vide this satisfaction, and that object is knowledge, 
 the knowledge of truth — and truth is of God. And 
 so, as these elements of truth pass one after another 
 through the ethereal tissues of the human mind 
 and are elaborated there, joy is diffused throughout 
 the spirit of the man, the joy of intellectual life, 
 and encouragement and strength are laid in store 
 for fresh attempts. Thus knowledge is built up : 
 the knowledge of God in His Works, through 
 the medium of happiness and life. A temple of 
 unfading Glory to the God of Truth. 
 
 There yet remains another point connected with 
 the divine plan for the development of the intellec- 
 tual powers which seems to me too important to omit 
 even in this cursory glance, which is all that the oc- 
 casion admits. It again stands related partly to that 
 
III.] clothe themselves, Man must work. 43 
 
 ancient command ^' subdue the earth/' and partly to 
 the contrast between the methods in which the Uni- 
 versal Father clothes and provides and cares for His 
 unintelligent creatures, and the methods by which, 
 with a loving forethought, He not only enables but 
 compels man to clothe and provide and care for him- 
 self. The lilies of the field and the beasts of the 
 forest are endued with no faculties to toil or to spin, 
 but God feeds the one with food convenient, and the 
 others He clothes in their beautiful array. To man 
 alone God has given the hand to toil and the mind to 
 construct the machine wherewith he may spin and he 
 may weave, and it is by this appointed toiling and 
 spinning and inventing, that the energies and facul- 
 ties of his mind are ordained to be evoked and en- 
 larged. For his fuel and his metals he must delve 
 the earth, and contrive all curious appliances in the 
 efibrt. If he would measure the earth or cross the 
 seas, he must bring every faculty of his intellect to 
 the task, he must master recondite sciences, and 
 even gauge the stars. Surely this contrast between 
 man and the beasts that perish must have often 
 struck you as you read that magnificent Ode on the 
 Creation in the 104th Psalm. You remember how 
 the inspired poet describes, with touches of inimi- 
 table beauty, the beasts of the field and the fowls of 
 the air as all waiting upon God for their clothing, 
 for their food, and for their habitations : ' that Thou 
 givest them,' he says, ^they gather. Thou openest 
 
44 Human ingenuity anticipated by Divine, [lect. 
 
 Thine hand, and they are filled with good'; and then 
 into the sacred poem the Psalmist at last introduces 
 Man, Man the Lord of this fair Creation, but in 
 how different a guise ! we feel as well as see the 
 picture; 'The young lions seek their meat from God,' 
 but 'Man,' he says, 'Man goeth forth to his work 
 and to his labour till the evening,' for it is by his 
 labour that his mind, no less than his hand, is to be 
 ' filled with good.' 
 
 (/3) Contrast now for a moment one or two of the 
 latest results of the genius and the toil of man 
 effected only after the lapse and the efforts of many 
 centuries; contrast them, I say, with what the Great 
 Father, ages upon ages ago, provided for His lower 
 creatures, who had no power to fashion it for them- 
 selves. Think, for instance, of that latest, saddest, 
 yet most necessary contrivance of man, think of his 
 war-ships sheathed in plates of armour — you have 
 here the results of the concentration and of the tax- 
 ings and strainings of his intellect for many years; 
 yet in the old Devonian seas, nigh to the dawn of 
 terrestrial time, there swam many a creature clothed 
 by its Maker in an armour relatively as strong, and 
 as compactly and as ornately set as the iron plating 
 of our ships. Man, in the nineteenth century, cor- 
 rugates his iron for lightness and for strength, but 
 he is anticipated by what God has provided in the 
 microscopic feathers of a moth which flitted among 
 the primeval ferns. By a most recondite chemistry 
 
III.] Through toil the intellect approaches God. 45 
 
 we men of this day produce wondrous pigments and 
 dyes of a surpassing hue, but a beetle which crept by 
 the side of the ancient moth, and working in no la- 
 boratory of his own, puts the chemist well nigh to 
 shame. Thus it is that the Universal Father who 
 houses and clothes and feeds the ravens beyond the 
 fashion of a regal bounty, impels with a loving com- 
 pulsion the being whom He made ^a little lower 
 than the angels' to labour and to clothe and to house 
 himself Not that the results of his labour termi- 
 nate in the mere tissues of his loom, or in the gran- 
 deur of his palaces, or in the curious art, or in the 
 sagacious discovery, but that, the exertion of intelli- 
 gence is appointed to be one great means of ap- 
 proximating the mind of the creature by a gradual 
 ascent to the mind of the Creator. Here then Hes 
 the true intent, here lies the blessing, the true dig- 
 nity of intellectual toil. It is 
 
 A road 
 To bring us daily nearer God. 
 
 Surely then the life of this spiritual ethereal intellect 
 thus cared for, thus elaborated, thus informed with 
 the mind of God, cannot be limited to the threescore 
 years and ten. Can this bright intellect which peers 
 more and more into the glory of the Divine; which 
 apprehends the same truths which are apprehended 
 by the Infinite, which feels itself ever in contact with 
 the unsubstantial, the immaterial ; with its powers 
 ever growing, its conceptions ever deepening, its as- 
 
46 Revelation tells us lohat Nature cannot tell. [lect. 
 
 pirations ever enlarging; — is it conceivable, that the 
 continuity of such an existence can be snapped in a 
 moment? In passionate hope, 'in groanings that 
 cannot be uttered,' it clings, it appeals to the Throne 
 of its Creator and its Father, 'Though He slay 
 me, yet will I trust Him.' Though breathless it 
 must breathe. 
 
 III. Thus far our thoughts have been confined 
 to such knowledge of God as may be derived from 
 the intellectual contemplation of His works in Nature, 
 and we see that He is pleased to work now after the 
 same model as it pleased Him to work in primseval 
 times. In this volume of the book of Nature we 
 read many pages regarding His power, and His 
 beneficent forethought, nay we believe we observe 
 many traces even of His tenderness, and we find there 
 some reasons for at least the hope that our true 
 being is immortal. But there are deeper and more 
 anxious questions than even these, and to these 
 Nature when questioned returns no reply. Does 
 this Great Being care for me? For me as distin- 
 guished from all other ? Will He hear my prayer ? 
 Can such as I am hold communion with such as He 
 is? Have I truly a life beyond the grave, and if 
 a life, what life? 
 
 We know indeed that these questions, and others 
 like them, are all answered in a collection of sacred 
 Books, professing to record with undeviating accu- 
 racy a series of Revelations which God from time 
 
III.] Revelation is sloioly progressive. 47 
 
 to time has made to man, informing him of as much 
 of His Divine Nature, and of as much of His Will 
 and of His relation to His responsible creatures 
 as it is good, or it may be, even as much as it 
 is possible for them to know. But the question 
 then arises, do these Bevelations of this higher and 
 moral conception of God proceed in a manner ana- 
 logical with the modes in which He has certainly 
 been pleased to convey the lower and intellectual 
 conceptions ? I think we shall find the analogy 
 complete. In the successive Kevelations contained 
 in the Sacred Books, equally with the other pre- 
 arrangements made for the intellectual advancement 
 of man, we find a slow and a stately progress, ever 
 adapted to the necessities and capacities of the 
 recipients, ever associated with happiness and life, 
 and ever surrounded with the concomitant of beauty. 
 
 To substantiate this assertion by a chronological 
 series of precise quotations from the Holy Scriptures 
 would exhaust our time and weary our patience. 
 "We must therefore be contented with a sketch, and 
 even that sketch I intend to be rather suggestive 
 to the thoughts of others than a complete exposition 
 of even my own sentiments. 
 
 The first revelation then to which I shall refer, 
 is that given to man in the days of the Pa- 
 triarchs — it is that of God in the family. An 
 unseen but ever-present Divine Being watching over 
 its members by His Providence, and by a gracious 
 
48 Spirit of the old divine Economies. [lect. 
 
 condescension entering into a covenant with them 
 that if they would keep His statutes He would 
 never fail to do them good, and ultimately would 
 make their seed a blessing to all the families of 
 mankind. What those statutes were, we know not, 
 possibly they were divinely written on the intui- 
 tions of their hearts. I think I find no earlier form 
 of Revelation than this : if our thoughts move 
 onwards two thousand years and recur to Bethany, 
 and to the one perfect Divine Man who there 
 lived and moved as the friend in the family, per- 
 haps this form of Revelation may be regarded even 
 as the last ; but how far transcendent in the clear- 
 ness of its heavenly light ! 
 
 It is possible also that in those two great names 
 by which God was known in the earliest times, 
 Elohim and Jehovah, we may trace some progress 
 in the knowledge of God, rising from the earlier 
 conception of power, to the higher thought of Divine 
 eternity of being ; but that is a chapter yet to be 
 written in theology. 
 
 From God revealed in the family, we pass, after 
 the lapse of centuries, to God the unseen yet formal 
 Governor of the nation. And now comes in the 
 written law, and with the law, the ever-present 
 sense of sin ; and the ordinance of a grand priestly 
 ceremonial for the putting away of sin, and with 
 the priestly ceremonial, an onward looking for some 
 great reality of which the multiplicity of varied 
 
in.] Revelations of God to Moses. ^]9 
 
 sacrifice could only be a shadow and a type. The 
 ' schoolmaster' in fact, which was ultimately 'to lead 
 to Christ.' It was now that God was pleased to 
 reveal to His favoured servant that magnificent con- 
 ception of His essence which became the treasure 
 of the Church of God, until the higher and the 
 final manifestation made by His Son in the days 
 of His flesh. " Thou canst not see my face and 
 live, but I will cause all my goodness to pass 
 before thee/' and the Lord j)assed by before him and 
 proclaimed '' The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and 
 gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness 
 and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving 
 iniquity, transgression and sin." And for my own 
 part I know few things in the Old Testament 
 more touching than the language of the beau- 
 tiful metaphors in which Moses records his final 
 experience of God's watchfulness and fatherly care 
 over his people during the years of their discipline 
 in the wilderness. ' The Lord kept them,' he said, 
 ' as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her 
 nest, fluttereth over her young, spraadeth abroad 
 her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, 
 so Jehovah alone did lead them.' 
 
 Such then I conceive to be the spirit of the old 
 Revelation which God was pleased to give of Himself 
 and of His will under the Mosaic Economy. And 
 here I may say in passing that I think the true 
 key to the solution of the chief difficulties which 
 
 4 
 
50 Progress of Revelation in Deuteronomy, [lect. 
 
 some persons say they have felt regarding the 
 authenticity of Deuteronomy is to remember that 
 Moses therein is recording^ the results of the ex- 
 perience of the forty years of his government of the 
 Israelites, and of the practical working of the Divine 
 Law. Many new circumstances had arisen during 
 the wanderings of the people, many new experiences 
 had been gained, and no wonder if in wisdom some 
 Divine enactments were at leno^th to be modified, 
 and others were to be added now at the end of their 
 journey. Surely it was in accordance with the 
 natural course of things and with the progress of 
 the Divine Eevelation that it should be so. To me 
 it seems a fatal mistake to regard the Divine Reve- 
 lation of God's will as at any time beyond the 
 requirements and capacities of the age, or ever 
 intended to be stationary and complete, until in the 
 fulness of time Christ came in the flesh, once for all 
 to manifest the Father to His children. Viewed 
 in this light, in the light that is of its containing 
 the experience of the busy and observant life of its 
 human author, I could no more believe Deutero- 
 nomy to be a pious fraud of some later prophet, 
 than I could believe Newton to have written his 
 Principia as a parody on the laws of Nature. In 
 a question of this sort, which after all is one of 
 internal evidence, I would not greatly distrust the 
 far-reaching insight of a well-disciplined heart, 
 while I should bear in mind that the criticism of 
 
III.] The Divine beauty of the Psalms. 51 
 
 philology may be fallacious, and certainly as yet is 
 incomplete. 
 
 The Revelations of God's will in the Law and 
 in the Mosaic ritual are now left for many years to 
 work their way into the hearts and manners of the 
 people. As usual in every nation, and our own, 
 alas, is far from an exception, the old war between 
 selfishness and the love of God soon begins to be 
 waged, with many an oscillation on either side. On 
 the whole the tide of the knowledge of God among 
 the people advances, and in due time culminates 
 in those Divine Sonors of the sweet Psalmist of 
 Israel which have become a sacred possession of 
 the Church of God in every age. But w^e must 
 remember that it was four hundred years from the 
 song of Moses to the greater hymns of David. 
 Breathed into David's heart by the breath of God, 
 what wonder if they find a home and express the 
 feelings in all other hearts touched by the same 
 Spirit of Grace ? There are no such burning words 
 as theirs wherein to pour forth the yearnings of 
 the heart for the knowledge and the presence of 
 God. From the Spirit of God those songs arose, 
 to the throne of God those songs return. They 
 ascend to Him in the times of our distress, in 
 the times of our doubts, and in the hours of our 
 thanksgiving and our joy. In the darkest, saddest, 
 greatest hour this earth ever witnessed, they fur- 
 nished the language for the dying emotions of Him, 
 
 4—2 
 
52 The Prophets almost anticipate [lect. 
 
 who upon tlie Cross, was taking away the sins of the 
 world. 
 
 And now there comes a long sad time of declen- 
 sion and even of apostasy among God's people, in 
 spite of the abundance of the revelation. It may be 
 that prosperity was the touchstone shewing that the 
 baser metal had not yet been removed from their 
 hearts. All of us know that sympathy with joy 
 requires a higher frame of mind than sympathy with 
 grief, and assuredly prosperity reveals the thoughts 
 of many hearts more than the battle with adversity. 
 And so Israel in his prosperity fell into sin, and sin 
 brings disorder in its train. One of the greatest of 
 Israel's teachers ascribes his fall to those same three 
 things which are the occasion of many a fall among 
 ourselves — ' pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of 
 idleness.' And now their covenant God, ever mind- 
 ful of His ancient promise, sends to His people one 
 after another of the long line of those wonderful 
 men, the Hebrew Prophets. The importunity with 
 which He sent them, God himself describes in the 
 strong but touching metaplior '^ rising up early 
 I spake unto you." With lips touched by the 
 burning coal from the altar of God, they inveigh 
 with a matchless fervour against the sin which 
 was cankering the heart of the people ; they speak 
 of the purity of God and of the purity of spirit 
 which alone can see Him ; they insist upon the 
 service of the heart and on the utter vanity of mere 
 
III.] the very teachings of the Gospel, 53 
 
 ceremonial rite. ''I delight not/' says Jehovah, speak- 
 ing through the mouth of the chiefest of their 
 number, "I delight not in the blood of bullocks 
 or of lambs or of he-goats ; incense is an abomina- 
 tion unto me ; your appointed feasts my soul hateth ; 
 wash you, make you clean, cease to do evil, learn 
 to do well." They almost anticipate the very teach- 
 ings of the Gospel. And these continue for nearly 
 three hundred years, and then the Old Testament 
 is closed and there is no prophet more. The reve- 
 lation of God in the old covenant is complete. It 
 began in Eden, it grew clearer and clearer for a few 
 thousand years till it reached the streaks of the 
 dawn in Malachi. It still required the lapse of cen- 
 turies before the Sun of Righteousness arose with 
 healing in his wings. 
 
 To such as you, my brethren, and in a review so 
 brief, it is unnecessary for me to speak of the pro- 
 mise of the Hope of Israel which always accompanied 
 the revelation and shared in every accession to its 
 clearness. But there is another thought which in 
 your presence I think I have no right to evade, but 
 which certainly I shall refer to with diffidence. What 
 knowledge, what hope had the Ancient Saints of a 
 future life ? This is' a question which in these days 
 of free enquiry has distressed many an anxious mind. 
 I admit the traces of such a hope are few and indis- 
 tinct, yet they are not wholly wanting. I will not 
 now stop to cite them, but I would rather endeavour 
 
54 Immortality inferred from the close [lect. 
 
 to account for the absence of their more definite ex- 
 pression. I have already said, at an earHer part of 
 this discourse, that the main religious thought in the 
 patriarchal dispensation must have been that of an 
 invisible Divine Being ever present and in covenant 
 with the family. The very tents in which they lived, 
 the altar which stood in their midst, must day by 
 day have reminded them that it was the call of their 
 covenant God which had placed them in the land of 
 their pilgrimage ; as they journeyed from place to 
 place, in every crisis of their histories, ever and anon 
 there was the vision of their God, whether at Mamre, 
 or Bethel, or Hebron. And when the great family, 
 the clan, became a nation, then there was the sense 
 of the presence of their own Covenant God in the 
 nation. They felt His presence in the Miracles 
 before Pharaoh; they felt His presence on that 
 night of death and of deliverance, 'much to be 
 remembered ; ' with the eye of faith they saw Him 
 in the Pillar of Fire and in the cloud, they saw Him 
 in the Tabernacle, they saw Him in the holy rites 
 of their religion, they saw Him in their sacred books, 
 they saw Him in their Prophets. Now could a 
 people thus circumstanced, even so much as suspect 
 the possibihty of a break in the continuity of the 
 relation between themselves and this their ever- 
 existing Covenant God? Is it imaginable that a 
 people, the daily language of whose choicer spirits 
 was MY God, Thou God of my Fathers, could suppose 
 
III.] relation of man to an ever-present God. 55 
 
 this divine relation with all the hopes which it in- 
 ferred^ closed for ever with the close of the three- 
 score years and ten^ suddenly vanishing in the cold 
 isolation of the grave ? I confess myself unable to 
 conceive it. 
 
 Is this then the thought to which our Saviour 
 refers, when He said in reply to tlie Sadducees, 
 ^'God is not the God of the dead, but of ths 
 living " ? I think it is at least a part of its meaning. 
 You remember also when the disciples saw their 
 risen Lord on the shore of the lake by the side 
 of the mysterious fire and the meal prepared — none 
 of them ventured to ask Him, Who art Thou'? 
 knowing it was the Lord. Does this also express 
 in some deoTee the feelinQ:s of the saints of old 
 regarding their immortality ? I think it does. 
 
 The time permits but few words more, and I 
 conclude. 
 
 We have seen how the Revelation of God in 
 His grace to man proceeded under the old cove- 
 nant with that same slow but effectual progress 
 which is equally observable in the Revelation of 
 God in His works, and during the completion of 
 those manifold works themselves. These all bear 
 the impress of one and the same Omniscient, 
 Omnipotent, loving mind, working the good plea- 
 sure of His will in a secure, and definite, and 
 stately plan. I know not, brethren, what impression 
 may have possessed your own feelings while in spirit 
 
56 True greatness of the redeemed man. [lect. in. 
 
 we have together traversed so many fair provinces 
 of nature and of grace, but the one thought which 
 has never for long been absent from my own mind 
 is that expressed so touchingly by David after 
 long survey of the bright host of heaven from 
 his native hills ; ^ Lord, what is man, that Thou art 
 mindful of him, and the Son of man, that Thou 
 visitest him?' There must be something inherently 
 great in a Being for whom the Lord of the uni- 
 verse has cared with all this care ; not indeed 
 man in his ruin, but man such as he is when 
 viewed in the light which streams from Bethlehem, 
 from Olivet, and from the cross upon Moriah ; 
 man redeemed, man restored to his true, his better 
 self, man sanctified, man with the Christ within the 
 heart, man the child of God, man the Heir of 
 glory. Surely nothing that is mean or paltry or 
 depraved can have a Natural home within the 
 spirit of such a being. "Whatsoever things are true, 
 whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things 
 are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any 
 praise, he will think on these things. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE ULTIMATE TRIUMPH OF THE GOSPEL. 
 
 Isaiah XI. 9; St. Makk IY. 33. 
 
 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : for 
 the earth shall he full of the knowledge of tJie Lord, as the 
 waters cover the sea. 
 
 And with many such parables spake he the word unto them^ 
 as they ivere able to hear it. 
 
 In the last discourse I said that occasionally the 
 Hebrew prophets almost anticipated the very teach- 
 ings of the Gospel. This qualified form of statement 
 I adopted not without design. For you will find 
 scattered up and down the prophetical writings and 
 among the inspired outpourings of the Psalms^ many 
 expressions, which if you do not examine them with 
 a scrupulous eye, might be mistaken for the pure 
 manifestations of Christianity itself. In like manner 
 also in the writings of some heathen sages and poets 
 both of the eastern and western worlds, there exist 
 moral sentiments presenting a phase of so much 
 beauty and truth that it has been asserted again and 
 again, though always unadvisedly, that no advance 
 has been made in ethical philosophy during two 
 
58 The Gospel scheme final to man. [lect. 
 
 thousand years. I cannot doubt that this inter- 
 calation of evangelic truth has formed a part of 
 the divine plan for the moral welfare of mankind, 
 inasmuch as we have the testimony of St Paul 
 that thereby God has never left ' himself without 
 a witness in the world/ and before that witness the 
 thoughts of men in all ages have accused or else 
 excused themselves. These gropings after moral 
 truth have in their degree resembled the preludes 
 and foreshadowings of thought, which we have seen 
 invariably precede invention or discovery in the in- 
 tellectual world. Fragments of truth they are, and 
 scattered lights from the throne of God, which it was 
 part of the divine arrangement for Christ Jesus to 
 adjust and complete into integral portions of the 
 Imaofe of the Father, whom He was commissioned 
 to declare to man. 
 
 At length then we have arrived at the final reve- 
 lation of God's will to man. Final, because it is not, 
 like the precepts of the patriarchal covenant, written 
 by the finger of God on the intuitions of the mind, 
 and transmitted by a family tradition ; nor again is 
 it, like the Mosaic Law, digested and written, partly 
 as a code, and partly as the directory of a ritual ; but 
 the dispensation of the Gospel is final to us because 
 it is the record and the embodiment of a life at once 
 human and divine, and exposed in both these ele- 
 ments of the human and the divine, to the clear gaze 
 of man. Final also because in that one perfect divine 
 
IV.] Manifestation of the true man hy Christ. 59 
 
 life all the great promises and types and prophecies 
 during the four thousand years of the former cove- 
 nants converge and are fulfilled. The Son of God 
 in great humility clothes himself in the form of the 
 Son of Man : in the language of the most precise of 
 our creeds, ^He takes the manhood into God.' As 
 the Son of God, Christ in his life manifests the 
 character of the Eternal Father up to the extent that 
 our human faculties can bear : ^ He that hath seen 
 me/ says He, * hath seen the Father.' As the Son 
 of Man, Christ in all points being made like unto 
 his brethren, is in all points tempted as they are 
 tempted, yet exhibits the model of a perfect, sinless 
 human being. For three and thirty years he con- 
 sorts with men. Being found in fashion as a child 
 he throws the mantle of its true sanctity over child- 
 hood, so that the mother as she gazes upon her 
 babe, recognizes its affinity to God: in the form 
 of a boy he exhibits and enforces the true sanctity 
 of boyhood : in the full maturity of a human being 
 he sanctifies and combines the gentler graces of 
 womanhood in union with the sterner and more 
 penetrating virtues of the man. To crown the 
 whole he permits this pure and spotless life by 
 wicked hands to be brought to an end in a cruel 
 death, partly as the test and consummation of the 
 self-sacrifice of his matchless love, ^for greater love 
 hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for 
 his friend ;' and partly as that mysterious expiatory 
 
60 Manifestation of the true God hy Christ, [lect. 
 
 victim which in the severe counsels of God was 
 necessary for the taking away of sin. The Cross had 
 been the one great fact pre-shadowed since the world 
 began; the Cross will form the one great retrospect 
 as long as the kingdom of God endures. ' Without 
 the shedding of blood there could be no remission.' 
 You ask me — you ask yourselves — Why so ? The 
 heart may guess, but is speechless in the expression 
 of its guess. ' Which things the angels desire to look 
 into ! ' We bow the head, we wonder and we adore. 
 But it ends not here. In life the Holy Jesus 
 had done battle with the Prince of Evil: the 
 Tempter had come to him in every form in which 
 he comes to the sons of men, but he was foiled in 
 his attempts, for there was ' nothing ' in Him ; no 
 canker spot of sin, on which he could fasten, as 
 there is in the sons of men — in you and in me. 
 In death and the grave the contest is renewed, but 
 Jesus wrested the keys of hell and of death from 
 the power of darkness ; ' for it was not possible He 
 could be holden' of it, and in His resurrection we 
 have the foreshadowing of our own. For a few 
 days he once more went in and out among his dis- 
 ciples, not now as before in the form of a famihar 
 friend, but at rarer intervals and with a significant 
 reserve, sufficient indeed for them to see the wounds 
 on His hands, on His side, and His feet — sufficient 
 for them to recognize the power and tenderness and 
 lovin<T forethouolit, so often felt and so well remem- 
 
IV. J Ohse7^vahle progress in Christian morality. 61 
 
 bered, but insufficient to gratify the slightest move- 
 ments of a curious spirit. Afc length He leads 
 them out to the spot that had become the most 
 sacred to their memories, and there in the act of 
 blessing them a cloud removes Him out of their 
 bodily sight, and a thin film penetrable by the eye 
 of faith is all that separated them or which separates 
 us from the abode of His glory. From that abode, 
 unseen but ever nigh, He has never ceased to dis- 
 tribute the gifts of His Spirit among those who seek 
 Him ; the gift of penitence, of pardon, of inner 
 strength, of joy, of peace ; the gift of sacramental 
 grace in the holy rite, the gift of the foretaste of the 
 life of heaven. 
 
 Thus then this Gospel wherein the true God and 
 the true Man are manifested ; this Gospel wherein 
 Life and Immortality are brought to light ; this 
 Gospel, I say, is the culmination of God's never- 
 ceasing acts of grace to His sinful creatures, after 
 the lapse of four thousand years. 
 
 Twenty more centuries have now nearly rolled 
 away, and what has been and what is now its recep- 
 tion in the world ? They who are familiar with the 
 gross and predominant pollution of the heathen world, 
 they who read the terrible description which St Paul 
 gives of it in his Epistle to the Romans, and then 
 compare those appalling sins with the present moral 
 condition, sad though it be, of the more highly civilized 
 portions of the world, cannot, I think, fail to thank 
 
62 Observable progress in Christian institutions, [lect. 
 
 God and take courage when they view the progress 
 of Christianity, slow as it has been. They who con- 
 fine their survey to the habits of men in the narrower 
 circles which surround their own homes may in the 
 weakness of their hearts be ready to despair. One 
 small boat on an inconspicuous lake in a narrow 
 corner of the world, once sufficed to contain the whole 
 Christian Church. Can any one venture to number 
 those who now in their hearts bow to the name of 
 Jesus ? Put the matter to the test, can you, after all 
 your despondency, think of any one familiar spot in 
 this fair land of ours, within a radius shall I say 
 of ten miles, or of five, or even of a single mile, 
 where you cannot find the blessed light of a Christian 
 example ? I confess, I cannot. 
 
 In all the polished philosophic writings of an- 
 cient times you cannot find so much as the word 
 which expresses the thought of 'sin' or of * holi- 
 ness' in reference to God. Is there a village now 
 within the civilization of Europe where those words 
 in the pregnancy of their meaning may not be 
 heard as surely as the Lord's day returns. True, 
 it required the force of Christianity during some 
 nineteen centuries to abolish slavery ; but it is 
 abolished, or it is hiding its head in the shame of 
 stealth. It required many hundred years for the 
 establishment of a hospital in Christendom; but 
 hospitals are established, and they abound. It re- 
 quired more than double that period to evolve the 
 
IV.] This "progress sloiv but unquestionable. 63 
 
 idea of a Sunday school, yet they are more numerous 
 now than the villag^es of Eno^land. Ifc seems to us 
 late in the day of Christianity, when John Howard 
 first understood the exceeding breadth of his Lord's 
 words, ' I was sick and in prison, and ye visited 
 me.' I presume there is scarcely a prison in Eu- 
 rope now unvisited by some rays from the light of 
 Christian charity. It seems late in the day for 
 Christians to have understood their Lord's com- 
 mand, Go ye forth into every nation, and make 
 disciples for me — nevertheless late as is the day, 
 the municipal revenues of the richest city in the 
 world would not suffice to maintain the Christian 
 missions of the present hour. It is too true that 
 as yet the sword is far from beaten into the 
 sickle — nevertheless wars cannot now be under- 
 taken on the wanton grounds urged for their ex- 
 cuse durino^ even the last few centuries : and when 
 they are undertaken there is now at least the 
 semblance, and I believe the reality, of searching 
 for every expedient which may alleviate the cruelty 
 of the result. The respect for human life, as the 
 life of a man redeemed, as the life of one not 
 beyond the reach of the Spirit of Christ, is increas- 
 ingly felt by the families and governments of every 
 state in Europe ; assuredly it is the case amongst 
 ourselves. I will attempt no further detail lest I 
 weary you. While I have been speaking, the daily 
 scenes with which you are familiar, the recollection 
 
64 The progress must proceed to completion, [lect. 
 
 of the importunity with which you are assailed for 
 the aid of your purse, or for the aid of your 
 thoughts and of your personal exertion in the 
 cause of Christ, forbid you to despair that the 
 Christian faith is either stagnant or effete. 
 
 But then its progress is slow, — that I grant ; it 
 seems to us as very slow. But we are apt to judge 
 from the narrow sphere of our own observation, and 
 because we- are ourselves conscious of little more than 
 tossings and upheavings of the waters around us, 
 it by no means follows that the great tide-wave 
 of Christianity is not on the advance. Surely the 
 tide is stationary when the waters are free from 
 swell. But would you desire, would you ask for 
 a miracle ? Then I know of no promise or pro- 
 phecy or analogy which could warrant the expecta- 
 tion or the prayer. The Christian faith claims to 
 be a holy scheme of wisdom and love originating 
 with God. If so, then in the slowness of its pro- 
 gress it resembles, as we have seen, God's other pre- 
 arrangements in the creation of the world and in the 
 development of the intellectual creations of mankind. 
 You remember how the old Boman general received 
 the thanks of his countrymen because in the hour of 
 their low estate he did not despair of the safety 
 of the commonwealth ; depend upon it, it is no 
 sign of a Christian loyalty to despair of the pro- 
 gress of the Church of God. Depend upon it the 
 prophecy of Isaiah will be fulfilled, and the Earth 
 
IV.] The Mosaic Economrj adapted to its age. 65 
 
 one day will be filled with the knowledge of the 
 Lord as the waters cover the sea, although unto 
 the Lord that one day is as a thousand years. 
 
 This consideration of the successive and distant 
 intervals at which it has pleased the Eternal Father 
 to communicate successive revelations of His will, — 
 revelations, be it remembered, always increasing in 
 clearness and in extent, and always adapted to the 
 capacities of the recipients, — furnishes, I think, some 
 clue to the manner in which we may properly in- 
 terpret the scope of the revelations themselves. 
 It was to this point I briefly referred in my first 
 discourse, and the present is, I think, the proper 
 place for a further explanation. 
 
 If you will reflect upon the general nature of 
 the Mosaic Dispensation, you will, I think, come 
 to the conclusion that it was adapted, wisely and 
 divinely adapted, to a somewhat rude and pre- 
 paratory stage of civilization. The allowance of 
 polygamy, the judicial provision of facilities for 
 divorce, the tacit permission of slavery, the enact- 
 ment of a law of exact retaliation ; the institution 
 of a vast burden of ceremonial rites through which 
 alone God could be approached, the erection of 
 the thick, double, significant veil which as yet se- 
 parated the visions of the sanctuary from the eyes 
 of the people, the enactment of a Sabbath which, 
 in its first positive enrolment in law, implied simply 
 a day of enforced cessation from all employment ; 
 
 5 
 
66 The Mosaic Economy adajjted to its age. [lect. 
 
 1 say, all these divine arrangements, viewed in the 
 brighter Gospel light which God has permitted to 
 dawn after the experience of three thousand years, 
 indicate the comparatively low social and moral 
 condition of the people for whom such enactments 
 were necessary to raise them to a higher and holier 
 life. I stop not now to enquire what was the con- 
 temporaneous sad condition of the heathen world. 
 This law was holy and honourable and perfect 
 for the purposes for which it was enacted ; never- 
 theless, in the very process of completing its in- 
 tended work upon the hearts and consciences of 
 the people, it was preparing the way for the future 
 adoption of some higher and more spiritual and 
 more holy code. It contained within itself the 
 seeds of its own dissolution. Much of this Law 
 Christ annulled, partly by fulfilling its typical sig- 
 nificance and partly by enacting those final and more 
 spiritual sanctions for which the Mosaic Law was 
 the preparation and the guide. ' Ye have heard 
 that it hath been said. An eye for an eye, and a 
 tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye 
 resist not evil.* This is the sample of the way in 
 which Christ introduces the brighter and the eternal 
 light. 
 
 Thus it is, I think, observable that God under 
 the old law was gradually leading His people into 
 'The Truth' through the medium of truth which 
 was rather relative than absolute. Eespect was had 
 
IV.] Its truths not absolute, hut relative. 07 
 
 to the capacity of the recipients ; many enactments 
 bore a reference to what Christ Himself calls the 
 'hardness' of the hearts of the people. Moses re- 
 peatedly applies to them the strong but expressive 
 metaphor, *a stiff-necked people/ St Paul expressly 
 told the Athenians there had been a moral iofnorance 
 at which in His infinite wisdom ' God winked/ Nor 
 must we forget the language of the Divine Saviour 
 Himself when it is written of Him, as in one of 
 our texts, *He spake the word unto them as they 
 were able to hear it/ and again He says, ' I have 
 many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
 them now.' 
 
 Thus far then in relation to the nature and scope 
 of the divine truth contained in the Kevelation it- 
 self; and now a word or two regarding the mode 
 or the instrument whereby that truth is communi- 
 cated or revealed. Throughout the material world 
 thoughtful men have discerned the application of 
 a 'principle of least action.' No forces are intro- 
 duced which are either unnecessary or do not pro- 
 duce their full effects. As there is no haste, so 
 also there is no waste in Nature. There is a stately 
 reserve, a kingly dignity, as the Creator passes along 
 the realms of His creation. Analogy would lead us 
 to enquire with reverence whether a similar economy 
 of action is not also observable whenever it has 
 been the Divine will to reveal truth to man. In 
 reply, we find that the Divine interposition, so far 
 
G8 Man responsible for intellectual gifts, [lect. 
 
 as we can trace it, is exerted just up to, and not 
 beyond, the necessities of the case. Just as it was 
 human hands which removed the stone from the 
 grave of Lazarus, just as it was human hands which 
 loosened the sad drapery^ of death, so in Hke manner 
 it seems to me that God has not been pleased by 
 any direct interposition to reveal truths to man which 
 were within the reach of his capacity to discover 
 for himself. 
 
 God has given to man a piercing intellect which 
 reaches to the heights above and penetrates to the 
 depths beneath ; He has endowed him with an ima- 
 gination which brings all rich and varied phantasies 
 before his contemplation ; He has bestowed upon him 
 a judgment which reduces these ideal flittings into 
 order and logical combination; to these gifts He has 
 superadded the understanding, which comprehends 
 the interadaptations of things ; and for all these facul- 
 ties God will bring, and daily does bring, the man who 
 has received them into judgment. I know full well 
 that no Astronomer could have predicted the appa- 
 rition of the Star of Bethlehem; I know full well 
 that no physiologist could have detected within the 
 human tissues the story of eternal life ; I know that 
 no moralist could have preconceived the sad glories 
 which stream from the Cross on Calvary; never- 
 theless there are lower and human truths within the 
 
 ^ For another possible instance see The Parable of the Grave- 
 clothes by Mr Beard. Deighton, Bell, and Co. 
 
IV.] Laws of Relativity and Economy of Action. 69 
 
 scope of the natural faculties of man ; and depend 
 upon it He who pre-arranged these faculties, and 
 pre-ordained the limits of their domain, will not in 
 weakness or in impatience supersede them. 
 
 Now apply tliese two principles, namely, first, the 
 Law of Adaptation to the capacity of the recipient, 
 or, as you may call it, the Law of Relativity; and 
 secondly, the Law of Economy of Action ; — I say 
 apply these two principles calmly and without preju- 
 dice or prepossession to the interpretation of some 
 portions of the most ancient Scriptures, and then 
 ask yourselves whether these earliest divine revela- 
 tions of truth stand to yourselves, now living in the 
 nineteenth century of the Christian Dispensation, in 
 any closer relation than do the relative truths of 
 the Mosaic economy. I will say no more; and what 
 I have said herein I presume to be nothing more 
 than the suggestion of, I hope, a thoughtful and a 
 reverential mind, proposed for the consideration of 
 the great Doctors of the Christian Church. He who 
 from his heart and from a well-instructed mind re- 
 gards the earliest revelations as intended for absolute 
 truth to be literally received by all men in all ages, 
 'to God he regardeth them' as absolute truth, and 
 ' he giveth God thanks : ' he who regardeth them as 
 relative truths intended for the godly edification of 
 a rude age and within its capacity to hear, Ho God 
 he regardeth them' as relative truth, and he too 
 ' giveth God thanks.' ' Let every man be fully per- 
 
70 The Gospel is to ' bring us to God.' [lect. 
 
 suaded in his own mind;' and happy is he who 
 condemneth not himself in the thing that he re- 
 gardeth. 
 
 Gladly from these thorny heights we descend to 
 the green pastures and the still waters w^here God 
 restoreth the souls of His children. 
 
 In the discourse of last Sunday I spoke of the 
 pleasure, the joy of life which accompanies the 
 successful exercise of the intellectual powers : a pre- 
 ordained beneficent arrangement whereby man is 
 impelled and encouraged to seek for and accumu- 
 late the knowledo^e of God in His works, and at 
 the same time to intensify and strengthen the life 
 of the powers themselves. I noticed it as analo- 
 gous to that instinct whereby, in the ages that are 
 gone, God's lower creatures, in the maintenance and 
 joy of life, were impelled to perform their appoint- 
 ed functions in the arrangement of the earth for 
 the service of man. This analogy we shall find is 
 again repeated in the constitution and the exercise 
 of our moral faculties. 
 
 For the great object of the Gospel, as expressed 
 by St Peter in the fewest words, is ' to bring us 
 to God;' to build up the human character into 
 the imao-e of Christ. Now the natural constitution 
 of man is such that he is ever feeling after God 
 if haply he may find Him. So said the great 
 Apostle, to the Athenian philosophers, standing on 
 that hill where their great teachers had stood cen- 
 
IV.] Jorj in the Christian life. 71 
 
 turies before, musing on that sarae thing. No man, 
 with this craving, this feeling after God within 
 him, can have jieace in his heart, until God is 
 found : and there, my brethren, there lies the secret 
 clue to very much, if not to all, of the weariness, the 
 uneasiness, the dissatisfaction, the ill temper in the 
 world. These all originate in the ceaseless craving, 
 the angry gnawing of a moral appetite, or passion, or 
 affection, call it which you please, while its proper 
 object remains half unknown, half unsought, and 
 wholly unattained. When that one and only object 
 of the inevitable, irrepressible affection is reached, 
 then there is peace — 'the peace of God.' 'AVliere 
 the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' The 
 Christian is then come, and not till then, to his 
 true self, to his true life ; for thus I read ; * this is 
 eternal life, to know the true God and Jesus Christ 
 whom He has sent.' 
 
 Every true step that the Christian henceforth 
 takes is associated with joy. I am not saying that 
 there is no feeling of deep compunction for the days 
 of grace which have been lost, or for the sin which 
 drew, and which always draws, that thick veil be- 
 tween God and his heart ; but I am saying that 
 when God has been found by the sinner as his 
 Father, to whom in Christ Jesus he is reconciled ; 
 when the tenderness, the forbearance, the loving- 
 kindness of God his Father, as manifested in the 
 person of Christ, have been revealed to his spirit, 
 
72 Joy in the Christian life. [lect. 
 
 then his life becomes a life of liberty and joy. 
 Not that henceforth, he is freed from the discipline 
 of sorrow ; far, very far from that ; but when sor- 
 row comes to him, he knows the wise and loving 
 will which has ordained it, and then the sorrow also 
 turns to his salvation, in the peaceable fruit of 
 righteousness. 
 
 Thus the Christian's life, growing in grace and 
 in the knowledge of God, proceeds in joy ; the light 
 of his life again diffusing other light and other joy 
 around him ; for men see his good works, and they 
 cannot ignore their heavenly source. In this way 
 the Church of God is built up by slow, but secure 
 degrees, in the midst of a peace which passeth 
 all understanding, in the diffusion of a joy which 
 is inexpressible and full of glory. 
 
 Am I, perchance, speaking to one brother who 
 wonders what I mean ? if so, let him in simplicity 
 of spirit study the record of the experience of 
 St Paul ; ' and God will reveal even this to him.' 
 
 But in conclusion, what is to be the final issue 
 of all this stately divine plan, thus progressive in 
 the midst of life and the pleasure of existence ? — 
 'King Agrippa, belie vest thou the prophets V — that 
 was the question once put in an hour, the memory 
 and the thrill of which are still undiminished after 
 the lapse of nearly 2000 years. That question will be 
 put again and again in various forms. The reply 
 at this moment is, I beHeve, that the earth will 
 
IV.] Condorcet's 'prophecy. 73 
 
 indeed be one day 'full of the knowledge of the 
 Lord as the waters cover the sea,' and that men will 
 then neither 'hurt nor destroy in all God's Holy 
 Mountain.' 
 
 Towards the end of the last century there was 
 an accomplished philosopher in a neighbouring 
 country who in the highest posts of literary office had 
 served it well, and had encouraged and advanced 
 the various branches of the learning of the times. 
 These were days of the public denial of God, and 
 hence upon the men of those days there came the 
 inevitable Nemesis of violence and riot. The man 
 of whom I speak, and of whom his country was not 
 worthy, w^as proscribed and fled into concealment. 
 
 In a solitary chamber with one only friend to 
 visit him, this remarkable man after many months 
 of seclusion, without access to a single book, sat 
 down to the task of writing the progress of the 
 human mind from the dawn of history : that work 
 accomplished, he began to record his hopes and 
 conceptions of its future destiny. He was a man of 
 great practical experience and endued with a genius 
 well tutored by adversity : would that I could say 
 that he accepted the Christian Faith even in the 
 mutilated form in which they who said they had 
 the keys of knowledge presented it to his mind. 
 
 Condorcet lived in this lonely chamber, thus, 
 alas! unilluminated by the Christian's hope, just long 
 enough to complete the outHne of his great work, 
 
74 Grace triumphant through gifts from God, [lect. 
 
 and then he was compelled to fly, and to perish 
 with a miserable death in the midst of his flight : 
 
 deserted in his utmost need 
 By those his former bounty fed. 
 
 Now what think you was the conclusion to which 
 this accomplished solitary man arrived regarding 
 the hope of the spread of goodness and knowledge 
 among mankind ? He concluded that an amount 
 of knowledge, and a force of genius, and a perfec- 
 tion of virtue, quite inconceivable to ourselves at 
 present, would one day in the far vista of time 
 certainly prevail throughout the nations of a densely 
 populated world. Change these words into the 
 'knowledge of the Lord,' and they approximate to 
 the prophecy of Isaiah. Did Condorcet unconsci- 
 ously see the shadows of the angels' wings who are 
 sent from the throne of God for its accomplishment ? 
 
 Accomplished that prophecy must be, but not 
 by the means which the Philosopher conceived. 
 'Not by power, nor by might, but by my Spirit, saith 
 the Lord.' So to this end the Divine Lord of His 
 Church sends to one man the gift of suggestion, to 
 another the gift of combination, by the same spirit ; 
 to one man He sends the genius of quick intuition, 
 to another the genius of patient investigation, by 
 the same spirit ; to one man is given by the spirit, 
 the word of wisdom, to another faith, to another 
 prophecy, for the perfecting of the saints, for the 
 edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in 
 
IV.] Grace triumphant through gifts from God. 75 
 
 the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
 Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure 
 of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Till the 
 earth shall be full of the knowledge of the 
 Lord as the waters cover the sea. 
 
 If, by thy decree, 
 The consummation that will come by stealth 
 Be yet far distant, let thy Word prevail, 
 Oh ! let thy Word prevail, to take away 
 The sting of human nature. Spread the law, 
 As it is written in thy holy book, 
 Throughout all lands ; let every nation hear 
 The high behest, and every heart obey ; 
 [Both for the love of purity, and hope 
 Which it affords, to such as do thy will 
 And persevere in good, that they shall rise 
 To have a nearer view of thee, in heaven.] 
 — Father of good ! this prayer in bounty grant, 
 In mercy grant it, to thy wretched sons. 
 Then, nor till then, shall persecution cease. 
 And cruel wars expire. The way is marked. 
 The guide appointed, and the ransom paid. 
 
 Wordsworth, Excursion, Bk. ix. 
 
CONTINUITY OF THE SCHEMES OF NATURE 
 AND OF REVELATION. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE 
 
 THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION 
 AT NOTTINGHAM IN 1866. 
 
Xprj [lev Toi ye rov ana^ napabe^a^evov rov Kucravros Tov Koo-fiov etvai 
 ravras ras ypa(f)as ireTre'to-Bai, otl o(ra nepl Tt]s KTia-ews dnavrq. to7s ^Tjrovo-t 
 TOV TV€p\ avrrji Xoyov, Tavfa K.a\ nepl tS)V ypa(f)(ou. — OriGEN, PhiloCClL 
 
 2i2. ^ AvayKoiov ovv 1(ttl Trepip^veLv toos av Tis {J-aOrj cos del npos Oeovs 
 Koi rrpos dvOpcoTrovs diaKclcrdaL. 
 
 AA. n6re ovv Trapearai 6 xP^vos ovtos, to ScoKparey; Koi ris 6 
 TraLdevaav ; .... 2i2. Ovtos cotiv ^ /aeXei Trepi aov. — Plato, 
 Alcib. II. . , . , Fhcedo, § 60, 61 Re2niblic, § 427. 
 
SERMON L 
 
 CONTINUITY OF THE SCHEMES OF NATURE AND 
 OF REVELATION. 
 
 EccLES. III. 14, 15. 
 
 7 hiow that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall he for ever; 
 nothing can he put to it, nor anything taken from it : and 
 God doeth it, that men shoidd fear hefore Him. That 
 which hath heen is noiu ; and that luhich is to he hath 
 already heen. 
 
 These words would be sufficiently striking even if 
 they were the language of an ordinary man. 
 Coming from a man pre-eminent for wisdom, and 
 opportunity, and experience, from one whose mind 
 moreover was illuminated by the inspiration of God, 
 our text assumes an aspect of more than common 
 importance. 
 
 It is possible, indeed, that to some of my hearers 
 our text may suggest unwelcome thoughts of the 
 fixedness of human individual destiny : you may 
 imagine for a moment that Solomon therein de- 
 scribes man as entangled in the meshes of an iron 
 necessity which he cannot evade ; man, not so 
 much the sport, as the victim of his circumstances ; 
 man, as playing in his little day his predestined 
 
80 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 part, just as other men in their generations be- 
 fore him played their own — for is it not said by 
 the Royal Preacher, " I know that what God doeth 
 he doeth it for ever ; that which hath been is now, 
 and that which is to be hath already been"? But 
 I hope to speak to you to-night of an interpretation 
 of these remarkable words truer, and deeper, and 
 more hopeful. True, I shall have to speak to you 
 of permanent, inevitable laws imposed by the Omni- 
 potent Creator upon the very constitution of His 
 creature's being, and on all the various circum- 
 stances which surround him or affect him : but then 
 these laws are devised in consummate wisdom, and 
 are executed in unswerving love; these laws of our 
 moral, our spiritual being, are to us the expres- 
 sions of a holy Father's will, they are the explana- 
 tions of the scheme of His righteous government ; 
 they are to us, and within the limits of our mental 
 powers, the unfolding of the plan on which the 
 creation of mind, and spirit, and matter, was devised 
 and is still sustained. 
 
 So far from forging the links of an iron ne- 
 cessity for the thraldom of man, the permanence 
 and invariability of these laws secure the charter 
 of man s liberty of action, they constitute him a 
 responsible creature, they lie at the foundation of 
 his dearest hopes. It is alone because these laws 
 of nature and of being are permanent, that man 
 is enabled to foresee the consequence of his doings ; 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 81 
 
 it is on the security of this ground that he acts 
 with foresight and with confidence, forming and 
 persevering in his plans in the fuhiess of hope. 
 Nay, your Town is at this time thronged with a 
 concourse of thoughtful and sagacious men, not 
 solely for the interchange of kindly greetings, but 
 to aid and encourage each other in the search for 
 truths which they know are ordained of God, for 
 purposes beyond those of to-day or of to-morrow, 
 and concerning which they know that, '' Whatsoever 
 God doeth, He doeth it ybr ever; nothing can be 
 put to it or taken from it : and God doeth it that 
 men should fear Him." 
 
 What I want to show you, or to bring to 
 your remembrance to-night, is this ; — I want to 
 convince you, if you need the conviction, that 
 those great cardinal facts, or doctrines as we call 
 them, of the Christian faith, which are made known 
 to us by revelation from God, are analogous to, 
 or I might even say are extensions of, those other 
 ordinary facts or principl-'^s, by the application of 
 which it is ordained of God that you and I live 
 our hourly life, and that human society coheres day 
 by day. I do not, indeed, mean to say that, by 
 any stretch of thought, the unaided mind of man 
 could have devised or have conceived a scheme so 
 mighty as that of the redemption of the great human 
 family (for instance) through the agency of a cru- 
 cified Redeemer; I do not mean to say that man, 
 
82 Continuity of the Laius of [serm. 
 
 of himself and out of himself alone, could have 
 originated the thought of salvation from the conse- 
 quences and from the power of sin, by faith in that 
 Redeemer. But I do mean to say, that so soon as 
 these cardinal facts of the Christian faith have been 
 taught us, on examination we find they are all of a 
 piece, and all in consistency with those other wise and 
 beneficent arrangements, which we discern in the 
 world around us and within us. Herein, I say, are 
 verified the words of our text, ^^That which hath 
 been is now, and that which is to be hath already 
 been." 
 
 Brethren, I need scarcely say that a subject such 
 as this will require and deserve all your attention, 
 and will demand more than all my care; do you 
 therefore pray, and let me pray to the Divine Spirit 
 of Grace, that He may 
 
 "What in us is dark, illumine; 
 Wliat is low, raise and support." 
 
 I purpose then, under this point of view, to con- 
 sider, 
 
 I. The Redemption of mankind by a suffering 
 Redeemer. 
 
 II. The Salvation of man from sin, and from its 
 consequences, by faith in that Redeemer. 
 
 III. The Sanctification of man's character, i. e. 
 the development of his moral being in righteousness, 
 by the operation of the Divine Spirit, and through 
 prayer. 
 
I.] Nature and Bevelation. 83 
 
 And my aim, as I have said, will be to show 
 you that these cardinal facts or chief doctrines of 
 revelation, are majestic instances of that same sort 
 of CONTINUITY of the Divine plan in the moral and 
 spiritual world, which we have in this town so lately 
 and so ably been taught to observe in the universe 
 of matter. All these several arrangements, I say, 
 are but consistent and continuous parts of one 
 Divine magnificent plan, ordained of old by the 
 Eternal Father ; ^' nothing can be put to it, nor 
 anything taken from it ; that which hath been is 
 now, and that which is to be hath been already." 
 
 I. And first, as touching Redemption by a suffer- 
 ing Redeemer. 
 
 Society, the whole fabric of the moral world, is 
 carried on, and is held together by a law, by a 
 scheme of natural intervention or mediation ; I think 
 you could scarcely name a joy you have ever felt, 
 or a trouble from which you have ever escaped, 
 which you cannot trace to the intervention of another, 
 and not rarely to an intervention effected with pain 
 to the intervener. 
 
 Think of the little babe; — there it lies, joyous 
 and redolent with the promise of the activities of 
 life, yet utterly helpless and dependent upon others' 
 care. But think also of the pale face of her whose 
 strength scarce suffices to nestle her little one in 
 her nerveless arms. Nay, without my bidding, some 
 of you perforce recall to memory, how the mother's 
 
 6—2 
 
84 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 pulse ceased to beat before she could utter a 
 parent's blessing on her child. And what is all 
 this ? what is it but the redemption of a life, at the 
 cost of the sufferings of another ? 
 
 Pass onwards a few years, and trace that child 
 now walking with elastic step at his father's side — 
 but look upwards at the father's face ; you will not 
 be surprised to find many a deep farrow there, fur- 
 rows that bear testimony to the father's anxieties 
 and the father's toils — anxieties and toils, that the 
 bright boy who walks at his side may have a good 
 offset for the battle of life before him, — nay, anxie- 
 ties and toils sometimes deep and inevitable for the 
 bare supply of that child's daily bread. And what 
 means all this ? What is it but redemption again, 
 sometimes procured at the cost of labour, and suf- 
 fering, and tears ? 
 
 And when is it that you cease to hear men speak 
 of their ^^ friends " ? What other word so common 
 among us ? Need I remind you what that word 
 '^friend" practically implies? Alas! for the most 
 part it implies, not the confiding interchange of 
 thought ; not the sweet comparison of experience, 
 and of hope, and of aspiration ; not the pleasant 
 suggestions which arise from community of taste; 
 for such high privileges are reserved for those only 
 who by patient continuance in well-doing have ac- 
 quired the right and the capacity to enjoy them : 
 but that commonest of words, a '^friend," bears testi- 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 85 
 
 mony to that commonness of weakness which looks 
 for aid in another's strength ; to that commonness of 
 wants which seek their supply in another's abun- 
 dance ; it bears testimony to that commonness of 
 troubles which not rarely can be removed solely 
 at the cost of another's pains, even greater than 
 those w^hicli they assuage. There is not, there 
 cannot be, a man before me, who may not trace, 
 again and again, instances of what I mean in his own 
 personal history. *'I speak of what we know and 
 feel within." 
 
 And think again, for a moment, even of the arts 
 and conveniences of life ; of the appliances, the 
 inventions, the discoveries which God hath ordained 
 to ennoble life: such results come at no man's light 
 bidding; the discovery, the invention may come, and 
 in fact must come at last, like a flash, but the happy, 
 the final thought comes to the man of genius only 
 after days, and nights, or even years of patient endur- 
 ance in intellectual toil. And when it does come 
 to him, not seldom the health is failing, or the 
 lamp of life is flickering and burnt low ; or other 
 men step in, reaping the harvest of his toil, and 
 leaving him little more than the gleanings of the 
 field, the sowing whereof was all his own. Look 
 at the countenances of the chiefs among those able 
 men who now throng your town, and on their brows 
 you will find many a trace of the midnight struggle 
 with thought, ageing them before they have reached 
 
86 • Continidty of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 their prime. Herein is that saying true, " one soweth, 
 and another reapeth." These men labour — you and 
 I " enter into their labours." 
 
 And so I might proceed with other instances of a 
 like import. If the time allowed, I might more than 
 briefly allude to the well-known names of noble men 
 and of noble women still living among us, who, like 
 apostles and martyrs of old, count not their lives 
 dear unto them, if only they may help the helpless, 
 cheer the cheerless, raise the fallen, and impart the 
 joy of hope to the spirit of the dying. But I for- 
 bear; for one continuous system of redemption and 
 of vicarious suiiering has been ordained of God as 
 the very law and the plan of our natural being. 
 
 Now, such being the scheme, such the manner 
 after which it has pleased the Eternal Creator to 
 impart the joys, to assuage the sorrows, and to 
 enlighten the ignorance, of His creatures in this 
 their natural life, which endures but for threescore 
 years and ten ; I ask you, Is there anything which 
 can reasonably jar upon our feelings if we find that 
 the Eternal Father in His marvellous beneficence 
 has interposed after a like, though a higher manner, 
 on behalf of His children in those higher relations of 
 theirs which endure for ever ? For without this 
 interpositioUj what can man learn by his natural 
 faculties of the life to come ? "Without this interpo- 
 sition, what can he ascertain by his natural faculties 
 of the world of spirit? Does God really care for man 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 87 
 
 with an individual, with a personal care ? Will God 
 hear his prayer? Did He intend him to pray? 
 Can there be any sympathy between a pure Al- 
 mighty God and a sinful man, conscious of the 
 wilfulness of his sin? Is it possible for such a man 
 to be at one with such a God? 
 
 To these anxious questions the wisest men of 
 ancient times admitted that of themselves they could 
 give no reply. Yet, strange to say, Socrates, con- 
 fessedly the wisest of them all, more than once, and 
 as it were with the voice of prophecy, expressed his 
 strong conviction, that the God who, he said, mani- 
 festly ^ cared' for man, would one day send him a 
 teacher to instruct him. What wonder, then, if in 
 the fulness of time God should take compassion on 
 the lost, and ignorant, and pitiable condition of His 
 children, and, through the mediation of Christ and 
 His matchless example, teach the world what a good 
 man should be, and what a good man may be ? 
 What wonder, moreover, if God, through the media- 
 tion of His Divine Son, should thus give to man a 
 distinct and living manifestation of all that a finite 
 being need know, or can know, of the infinite God- 
 head ? And further still, what wonder if this 
 interposition, this mediation thus made by the Son 
 of God on man's behalf, should be accompanied by 
 the sufiering and the death of the incarnate Ee- 
 deemer ? Would it not be all of a piece, would it 
 not be in harmony, in co^jtinuity with those other 
 
88 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 numberless interventions in man's behalf, which by 
 God's natural appointment we see every day involve 
 the sufferings of the intervener? 
 
 But more still remains. Man is not only confess- 
 edly pitiable and ignorant, but he is, and he knows he 
 is, both sinful and a wilful sinner against God. What 
 shall — what can put away such sin ? What can make 
 an atonement, a reconciliation between this sinning 
 creature and this all-pure but offended God ? The 
 Eevelation of God's will to us in the Gospel of His 
 Son tells us it is the Life and the Cross of the Ee- 
 deemer Christ. If you ask me w^hy, or how such 
 things can be, I cannot tell you; at least, by no 
 means fully so. But then, in the natural world, 1 can- 
 not tell you what, in their subtle essence, are those 
 mysterious agencies called light, or heat, or electri- 
 city, or magnetism, or gravitation. Of some of their 
 relations, and of some portion of the laws under which 
 they are ordained to act, m.en of genius, after the pa- 
 tience and the failures of ages, have at length caught 
 a glimpse, and of these they have taken ample ad- 
 vantage in the appliances of life. But what these 
 agencies are in themselves, who can tell ? Neither 
 in the natural world do I know why '' like produces 
 like," nor do I know why the worlds, and the crea- 
 tures which our world contains, are constrained to 
 abide the slow process of their growth, and start not 
 at once into the fulness of their being, like Minerva 
 in her panoply. And if again I turn to the moral 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 89 
 
 world, I cannot tell you why a righteous Creator 
 permitted sin to defile the beautiful world which He 
 created. 1 cannot tell you why a loving and wise 
 Father permitted sorrow, and ignorance, and wrong, 
 to be the lot of all His children ; but as I see that in 
 the natural world He has provided the mediation 
 and suffering of one man to remove the suffering 
 or the ignortince of another ; why should I cavil 
 at a revelation which tells me that man may be 
 pardoned and reconciled to God, through the hu- 
 miliation, the life, the example, the death, the vica- 
 rious sufferings of His incarnate Son ? These things 
 angels may well desire to look into. Like the 
 Great. Ordainer of all things, 
 
 " They are higlier than heaven, what can I do ? 
 They are deeper than hell, what can I know ?" 
 
 So I will bow my head, and I will place myself 
 at the foot of the Saviour's Cross. I will wonder 
 and adore, and I will stay my mind on God. All 
 that I know is, that the law of Divine Redemption 
 is in harmony, in continuity with God's other dis- 
 pensations, and I see that herein '^whatsoever God 
 doeth, it shall be for ever. I know that what hath 
 been is now, and that which is to be hath already 
 been." 
 
 II. We now come to the great Christian scheme 
 of salvation by faith in Christ Jesus. Many are the 
 attributes which in the Gospel are assigned to faith. 
 By faith the Christian is said to stand; by faith he 
 
90 Continuity of the Laivs of [serm. 
 
 walks ; by faith he is made pure ; by faith he removes 
 mountains ; by faith he overcomes all things ; by 
 faith he lives, he is justified, and he is saved. 
 But if these attributes assigned to Faith are great, 
 so also are the cavils with which men in all ages 
 have been disposed to admit her claims, and many 
 and grievous are the charges which they have laid 
 at her door. For is it practically found, men have 
 asked — and they have the right to ask it — is it in 
 accordance with experience, that men lead holy 
 lives in proportion to the strength of their religious 
 convictions, and to the purity and perfection of 
 the creeds which they profess? The devils have 
 their convictions, yet the devils tremble and are 
 impure. What, then, is the true source of these 
 apparent contradictions? It lies mainly, I think, 
 in a mistake as to the meaning of the term faith 
 itself Let us try then to ascertain what this 
 much-vaunted, much-misunderstood principle really 
 is. And here I observe, that if there is any one 
 English expression which will fully render the mean- 
 ing of the Hebrew original, it is trustfulness of 
 spirit : the word actually adopted in the Authorized 
 Version is ^ trust'; and if I were to recount ta you 
 all the achievements attributed in the Old Testa- 
 ment to trust in Jehovah, I should hav^ to repeat 
 to you a large portion of the Old Testament itself; 
 and you would soon perceive how the results of this 
 trust in Israel's God, as there revealed, are very 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 91 
 
 much the same as those assigned in the New Testa- 
 ment to faith in God. Assigned, be it carefully ob- 
 served, no longer to faith in God simply as the 
 Creator and Governor of the world, or even as the 
 Covenant-God of the nation, but to faith in God as 
 the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, reconciled to 
 His redeemed children under the new and better 
 Covenant of the Gospel. 
 
 So far, then, we may even here observe a con- 
 tinuity in the principles of God's dispensations to 
 His creatures, as exhibited to the men of old time, 
 and to us Christians in these latter days. But I 
 wish to go further, and I wish to show you how 
 this same principle of faith, or trustfulness, is the 
 very key-stone of the arch of our social fabric, 
 the very strength of our daily natural lives. 
 
 I observe then, that as in the illustration of the 
 principle of vicarious suffering, which runs through 
 the world of nature, we took the mother's pitiable 
 condition at the birth of her child, so here, in 
 illustration of the continuity of faith, we shall take 
 the instance of the young child itself For the first 
 years of its existence its whole life is of necessity 
 a hfe of dependence and trust. In faith it seeks 
 its natural food; in faith it nestles itself in its 
 mother's breast ; in faith it strives to stand ; in 
 faith it lisps the fond names of father, aiid of 
 mother ; and, blessed be God, in this Christian land 
 in faith it sits upon its mother's lap, and with stam- 
 
92 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 mering lips learns to call upon the name of Jesus. 
 As years advance the young child walks at his 
 father's side, and, gazing in his father's face with 
 unquestioning faith, learns from him and applies 
 the first lessons of the Hfe before him. Thus the 
 young child, by the natural ordinance of God, is 
 reared and nurtured as it were in a cradle of faith, 
 and if not too indocile ho soon becomes a fitting 
 emblem (and the illustration here is not mine, you 
 will see) — he becomes an emblem of those children 
 of an elder growth, who live the life of the true 
 citizens of the kingdom of God. 
 
 But these early lessons of faith stop not here. 
 In faith and patience he painfully learns the arts of 
 maturer life. In faith he ploughs; in faith he sows; 
 in faith he gathers into barns; in faith he launches 
 into the deep ; in faith he borrows ; in faith he lends ; 
 in faith he carries on his commerce with his brother 
 man, often and of necessity confiding to his care 
 the very means for which he looks for his daily bread. 
 Need you any further illustration of what faith is, 
 and what faith achieves ? Think for a moment of 
 that wonderful thread which now, by God's good 
 pleasure, unites and associates two distant continents. 
 It was FAITH that laid that wire, overcoming the ele- 
 ments, scaling the subaqueous mountains, and span- 
 ning the unknown caverns which form the dark floor 
 of the ocean. It was faith, I say, which for days 
 and nights together, without one moment's intermis- 
 
I.J Nature and Revelation. 93 
 
 sion, kept the strong, untiring arm, and the fixed, 
 watchful eye, upon the marvellous appliances, until 
 they reached the haven where they would be, and had 
 learnt that the mother of many nations had in the 
 flash of a moment sent the greeting of love to her 
 child in the far-off west. Meanwhile, strange to say, 
 upon the shores of the East there were other and 
 less harmonious sounds to be heard than those of 
 the triumph of the victory of faith. These were the 
 sounds of wailing : Germany weeping for her chil- 
 dren because they were not; and among ourselves, 
 thousands of hearts failing them for fear of the 
 wreck of their substance \ And wherefore were 
 these sounds of mourning, and whence came this 
 fear? You may trace them to the absence of Faith. 
 Nations and men had lost their faith in each other, 
 and the offspring of Distrust are War and Panic. 
 Hand in hand and close by the side of Faith, stands 
 her sister Harmony ; when Faith departs. Chaos 
 soon takes her place. 
 
 Thus you see, my brethren, that the faith in Jesus, 
 the loving- trust, I mean, in a sympathizing, personal 
 Saviour, whereby the Christian stands; the faith in 
 Jesus whereby the sinner is purified, justified, and 
 saved, is, after all, no new principle, but rather the 
 old and abiding principle of trustfulness, which alone 
 
 1 Through the American crisis. 
 
 2 I have gladly adopted this word from Vice-Chancellor Sir W. P. 
 Wood's volume, On the Continuity of Scripture, Murray, 1867. 
 
94 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 gives cohesion to our natural life. It is the old 
 principle indeed, — but the old principle greatly 
 heightened, intensified, and sanctified by the Spirit of 
 God. It is the golden chain which unites the visible 
 world of flesh with the unseen world of spirit, as- 
 suring the child of nature that he is the redeemed 
 child of God. Here then, again, and once more, we 
 observe the continuity of the natural dispensations 
 of God's providence with the spiritual dispensation 
 of God's grace; and herein it is that we know that 
 *^what God doeth, He doeth it for ever," — that 
 which hath been is now, and that which is to be 
 hath already been. 
 
 III. And now, had the time permitted, as I had 
 hoped it would, I should have tried to show you how 
 even the great doctrine of the sanctification of man's 
 character by the Spirit of God, and acting for the 
 most part through the medium of prayer, is again 
 all of a piece, and in continuity with other eternal 
 principles which God has impressed upon our na- 
 tural being; but the subject^ is too large a one for 
 me at this late hour to draw upon your patience. 
 Nevertheless, some few thoughts must be briefly 
 expressed to you on the subject of prayer. 
 
 I need scarcely remind you that it is in and 
 through prayer that the true, the advanced Christian 
 lives. It is his soul's daily, hourly food. But, after 
 
 ^ This subject is virtually discussed in a second Sermon preached 
 before the British Association in the following year at Dundee. 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 95 
 
 all, what is this prayer ? Is there anything which at 
 all resembles it and its effects in the world of flesh 
 wherein we move ? Prayer, in its deep reality and 
 in its highest form, is the reverential intercourse 
 of the Christian's spirit with the spiritual world : 
 it is reverential communion with God, — commu- 
 nion with God (that is) as manifested in Christ 
 Jesus. Now let me ask you, what takes place 
 in the ways of a man's life, who lives much in 
 the society of his friends ? Does he not by inter- 
 course catch their modes of thought ? Does he not 
 contract their habits, and imitate their manner of 
 life ? Does not his spirit become gradually moulded 
 into theirs ? And all this result arises from a great 
 principle of imitation — a principle of imitation, which 
 God for the wisest purpose has implanted in the 
 nature of man. Just so, — only in a higher, and 
 holier, and more reverential degree, — just so with 
 the Christian through his true prayers and through 
 communion with God. Just in proportion to the 
 reality and frequency of this holy, spiritual inter- 
 course, will be the gradual approximation of his own 
 character to that of the ineffably perfect and Holy 
 Being who, through the great name of Jesus, permits 
 and encourages His redeemed children to approach 
 Him. Hence it is that we read such words as 
 ''growth in grace," and of the Christian being 
 ''built up into the measure of the stature of the 
 fulness of Christ." Need you an example of what 
 
96 Continuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 I mean ? Think for a moment of the Apostle 
 John : in him, beyond all other men, shine con- 
 spicuously the qualities of gentleness and dignity 
 and love ; and were not these especially the cha- 
 racteristics of the one, perfect, matchless, Divine 
 Man, who made the Apostle His companion, ever 
 walking at his Master's side, leaning on His bosom 
 as He sat at meat, and in the near companionship 
 catching many a sacred undertone not heard by other 
 hearts, but never ceasing to vibrate in his own. 
 
 And so it is, in his own measure and degree, 
 with every Christian who really communes with God ; 
 — his character becomes gradually moulded into the 
 character of Christ ; and thus more and more nearly 
 resembling Christ, he gradually becomes more ami- 
 able, more truthful, more self-restrained, more for- 
 giving, more forbearing, more peaceful. 
 
 I say especially, more peaceful. For, mark you, 
 what is the Law of Prayer enacted by its great 
 Lord in the kingdom of God? It is ^^men ought 
 always to pray, and not to faint;" it is ^'in every- 
 thing by prayer and supplication, with thanks- 
 giving, let your requests be made known unto 
 God : " nor must we forget, that He who is our 
 example and '^all our hope," added to His prayer: 
 "nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." 
 And then, mark you with especial care, what is the 
 Law of the Promise attached to prayer. It is not 
 that the bitter cup shall, in all cases, be put away; 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 97 
 
 it is not that the thorn in the flesh shall, in all cases, 
 be removed ; it is not that the precise petitions shall 
 be as precisely granted ; but, better far than this, the 
 Law of the Promise is, that God, if need be, will 
 give fortitude to drink the cup, strength to bear 
 the cross, orrace sufficient to endure the thorn. The 
 Christian in his agony of spirit, often prays not alone 
 unwisely for what would injure him, but sometimes 
 he asks for what it is impossible to grant ; neverthe- 
 less if only he asks in faith, even if he asks unwisely, 
 or if he asks for the impossible, still his true prayer is 
 truly granted ; for after all, and whatever the words 
 of his ignorance or of his passionate grief may be, 
 ivliat his heai't truly meant was repose of mind, a 
 restful, peaceful spirit. I say his true heart's prayer 
 is granted, for beyond all, the Law of the Promise 
 is, that the Christian shall rise from his knees peace- 
 ful; he shall become peaceful like the God of peace 
 with whose Spirit he has held communion, and at 
 whose footstool he has prayed. For thus I read 
 as the very charter of the Gospel, " Be careful for 
 nothing, but in everything by prayer and thanksgiv- 
 ing let your requests be made known unto God, 
 and the peace of God, which passeth all under- 
 standing, shall keep your hearts and minds." '' Thou 
 shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is 
 stayed on God." 
 
 In the strength of this peace of God, Stephen, 
 before the face of those who stoned him, fell asleep 
 
 7 
 
98 Co7itinuity of the Laws of [serm. 
 
 in Jesus, praying, '^Lord, lay not this sin to their 
 charge." 
 
 In this peace, Paul and Silas, thrust in the prison 
 with their feet made fast in the stocks, at midnight 
 sang praises unto God. 
 
 In this peace, Poly carp bade the executioner 
 leave him unbound at the stake, for that same 
 God, in communion with whom he had lived, would 
 nerve him, that he flinched not when he died. 
 
 In this peace, Boniface, the martyr and apostle 
 of the Germans, before setting out on his last mis- 
 sionary journey, bravely but calmly thus gave his 
 final instructions : ^' My son, place in the chest with 
 my books a linen cloth, in which, should occasion 
 arise, they may wrap my worn-out corpse." 
 
 In this peace, Luther stood before his enemies, 
 and the enemies of truth, at the Diet of Worms, 
 and, taking the Bible in his hands, exclaimed, ^^ By 
 this I stand!'' 
 
 In this peace, Rowland Taylor, of Hadley, walked 
 to the stake with head erect and hopeful eye, as a 
 man would return to the home that he loved. 
 
 In this peace, Bidley looked forward with joy to 
 the flames, and bade his sister come to his mar- 
 riage. 
 
 In this peace, thousands upon thousands of God's 
 children, far from the gaze and the applause of the 
 crowd, have kept the even tenor of a Christian life, 
 in prosperity without elation, in penury without 
 
I.] Nature and Revelation. 99 
 
 discontent, in bereavements without questionings, 
 in suffering without repining, in revihngs without 
 reviling again. 
 
 These all lived in prayer and communion with 
 God, and, Hke God, they became peaceful; and after 
 this law, so it may be with you and me, for *'/ 
 hnow that whatsoever God doeth, it shall he for ever ; 
 nothing can he "put to it, nor anything taken from it : 
 and God doeth it that men should fear hefore Him. 
 That which hath heen is now; and that which is to 
 he hath already heen." 
 
THE ANALOGY OF INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS 
 TO RELIGIOUS GROWTH. 
 
 A SEEMON 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE 
 
 THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION 
 AT DUNDEE IN 1867. 
 
 Oeb^ ^SuKiv dvTi SiXrov rhv K6(Tij.ov. — S. ChrysoSTOM. 
 "La Nature est une image de la Grace." — Pascal. 
 
TO HIS GRACE 
 
 THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH AND QUEBNSBERRY, K.G. 
 D.C.L., F.R.S., r.L.S., 
 
 PEEStDENT OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR 
 
 THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, 
 
 C^is Stxmm is, 
 
 WITH' HIS GRACE'S PERMISSION, 
 
 MOST RESPECTFULLY 
 
 INSCRIBED. 
 
SEKMOx\ II. 
 
 THE ANALOGY OF INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS TO 
 RELIGIOUS GROWTH. 
 
 Luke xix. 26. 
 
 / say unto you, Unto every one that hath shall he given. 
 
 Twelve months ago, on an occasion and before an 
 audience similar to this, I endeavoured to show that 
 the main principles divinely implanted in man for 
 the maintenance and discharge of his social rela- 
 tions, are of a like kind with those which in the 
 Holy Scriptures are declared necessary to save him 
 from the consequences and the power of sin, and 
 restore him to the favour and the image of God. 
 
 In the Redemption of Mankind, for instance, 
 by a suffering Redeemer, I trace the highest and 
 the noblest form, — the divine climax in fact, — of that 
 human, friendly help, which it is necessary for one 
 man to extend to his brother ; sometimes in order 
 to place that brother in the station that becomes him, 
 and at other times to save him from temporal ruin : 
 and I observe, moreover, that this friendly, neces- 
 sary help is commonly bestowed not without great 
 difficulty and suffering and loss to the interposer 
 
104 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 himself. The very constitution of society in fact 
 is cemented and maintained by one grand scheme of 
 Natural Mediation. 
 
 Faith, also, in a personal and ever-living Saviour, 
 I showed was no new or mysterious principle un- 
 known to the natural sympathies of man, but rather 
 is the old and abiding principle of that trustfulness 
 of one man in another, which alone gives cohesion 
 to our daily life. It is the old principle indeed, 
 but then the old principle of trustfulness in man 
 is heightened and intensified and sanctified by the 
 Spirit of God, redirected also and applied henceforth 
 to Him who, though now the Christian ^^sees Him 
 not, yet in whom believing he rejoices with joy un- 
 speakable and full of glory." 
 
 And, lastly, I endeavoured to show that the 
 sanctification, the improvement of the moral cha- 
 racter, the building up of the man within the heart, 
 in the main through the agency of meditation and 
 prayer, is a divine appointment, all of a piece and 
 in continuity with that other appointment equally 
 divine, whereby man, through an innate principle 
 of imitation, becomes assimilated in his moral cha- 
 racter to those who are the objects of his habitual 
 association and constant thought. 
 
 Thus the Laws — and here lay the whole scope 
 and tenour of the discourse — thus the Laws after 
 which we see by experience God has fashioned 
 man's nature in relation to his social temporal life. 
 
II.] to Religious Growth. 105 
 
 are in harmony and continuity with those other 
 laws^ by the operation of which Revelation declares 
 it is God's good pleasure to fit his now sinful 
 children, for their sinless, eternal inheritance in the 
 society of the redeemed. 
 
 The scope of my remarks to-day will, in some 
 sense, be the supplement, and form the conclusion, 
 of that other discourse. For I shall endeavour to 
 show you, or to remind you, that the processes 
 which in the Bible are declared to accompany and 
 to promote the Christian's growth in grace and in the 
 knowledge of Christ, — the processes, that is, which 
 accompany the sanctification, the development of our 
 moral nature, — are in strict analogy with those which 
 we find accompany growth in the knowledge of the 
 natural things around us. That is to say, I shall 
 endeavour to show how the education of the re- 
 ligious principle as proposed and provided for in 
 the Bible, is all of a piece with what experience 
 teaches us regarding the education of the intellectual 
 faculties. In other words, the processes by which 
 the Bible tells us a man can alone become morally 
 good, are pretty much the same as those by which, 
 when applied to another part of his nature, he 
 becomes intellectually great. Both combined render 
 him in the language of the noblest of our poets, 
 Dear to God, and famous to all ages. Now I 
 cannot but think that the false and fatal prejudice, 
 which, like the poisoned robe of Nessus, still clings 
 
106 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 to the minds of some good men, viz. the suspi- 
 cion that growth in human knowledge is unfriendly 
 to the Christian's growth in grace and in the 
 knowledge of Christ, — I say this suspicion may 
 be corrected or removed by the consideration of 
 such analogies as these. For the existence of such 
 analogies is sufficient to show that the means by 
 which natural knowledge is to be acquired, have 
 been as much the object of the Divine Pre-arrange- 
 ment, as have been the means provided for our moral 
 advancement. 
 
 To secure to man as much of the knowledge 
 of the divine nature, and of the divine will, as 
 his capacities admit, it has pleased God to give 
 a Kevelation contained in the pages of a Book. 
 To secure to man the knowledge of material things, 
 Chrysostom said long ago, with a prophetic saga- 
 city, ^^God has given the Universe in the place 
 of a Booh!' It is the duty of the Christian to 
 read and to reverence each. On the other hand, 
 Pascal spoke as a true philosopher when he said, 
 "Nature after all is only another form of Grace." 
 It is the wisdom of the natural philosopher neither 
 to ignore nor neglect the analogy. 
 
 Thoughts of this kind at the present day can 
 scarcely be out of place before any congregation of 
 educated Christians, but they seem to me to be 
 unavoidably suggested by the circumstances under 
 which we meet. For in the assemblage of gifted 
 
11.] to Religious Growth. 107 
 
 men who now throng your city, you will find those 
 who represent the fairest and the noblest forms of 
 human genius. Some you will find who, by pene- 
 trating intellect, have taught us how all the glitter- 
 ing hosts of the starry canopy are linked in a bond 
 of material brotherhood with one little globe which 
 they encircle. These men have constrained the 
 sun himself to solve the enigma of his mysterious 
 fires by which from the beginning he has been or- 
 dained of God to arrange and uphold all terrestrial 
 things. And at length with patient importunity the 
 same men have compelled the moon to reveal the 
 secrets of her devious course. 
 
 Others of them have delved into the solid earth, 
 and there they have learned the wondrous story, 
 how, age after age, and through myriads of ages, that 
 earth has been clothed by a loving Creator in order- 
 liness and beauty, the creatures of His bountiful 
 hands ^^ taking their pastime therein," and disport- 
 ing themselves each after the joy of his kind : and 
 when successive generations of this lavish beauty, 
 and this joy of life have passed away, when these all 
 have done their appointed ofiice, when all is prepared 
 for man and very good, then and not till then there 
 came forth the fiat of God : '' Let us make man in 
 our own image," and '^ in the image of God created 
 He him." 
 
 Others of these gifted men consume the silent 
 hours, probing the depths of thought, and searching 
 
108 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 how to number, or to measure^ or to weigh, or to 
 compute the interactions of all things inorganic, 
 from an atom to a sun. 
 
 And lastly, others among them, by an intuition 
 incommunicable, seize upon the products and evo- 
 lutions of the thoughts of other men, and by a strange 
 alchemy, transform them to the arts and practical 
 appliances of life. It is these men who have taught 
 us how to baffle the winds, and tlie waves, and the 
 tides, and have associated the remotest families of 
 the earth by the winged message of a moment. 
 Surely these are thoughts, my brethren, not unbe- 
 coming to the Christian pulpit. For these men have 
 not spoken from the impulse of their own minds alone, 
 but have been ordained of God to be the intellectual 
 seers, and prophets, and priests, and interpreters, of 
 the wonderful works of His powerful hands. I say, 
 moreover, that it is by such achievements of thought 
 that the aspirations and pursuits of thousands of 
 other men, less gifted than themselves, are raised 
 above the blinding dust and the poisonous mists 
 which beset the earth, and are carried away from 
 the whirl of the mill, from the clang of the hammer, 
 from the busy, anxious murmur of the Exchange, to 
 the contemplation of the handiwork and the glory of 
 Him, in whom we live and move and have our being. 
 
 But then the Christian philosopher knows full 
 well, and the Christian minister must never forget to 
 impress it upon his flock, that man cannot live in 
 
II.] to Religious Growth. 109 
 
 the light and by the force of the intellect alone. 
 Within the human heart there broods an ever-busy 
 array of appetites, passions, and affections ; and upon 
 these the Bible declares, and experience confirms the 
 declaration, that there is impressed by nature and 
 inheritance, a wrong and a very sinful bias : Con- 
 science, indeed, sits among these appetites, passions, 
 and affections, as a judge upon his throne, and, bidden 
 or unbidden, pronounces, as with the voice of God, 
 her ceaseless verdicts ; but conscience has lost her 
 power to enforce her authority. The words of St 
 Paul here find an echo from every man's heart : 
 "The good that I would, that I do not, and the 
 evil that I would not, that I do." Who of us has 
 not felt it a thousand times, for I speak of what we 
 know and feel within. Who, then, or what shall 
 rectify this evil bias? what shall sanctify the aims 
 and objects of these emotions of the soul ? Who or 
 what shall restore to conscience the kingly authority 
 which is his right ? It is not in man, nor in man's 
 philosophy— iJ/ia^ has been tried beyond 2000 years, 
 from Plato of ancient times to Comte of this present 
 day — that philosophy has been weighed in the ba- 
 lance and found wantmg. The intellect may be able, 
 with great eloquence, to assert the riglity but the 
 intellect alone is utterly powerless to restore the 
 mighty of conscience. 
 
 Now that which the powers of intellect and 
 philosophy have failed to do, the Gospel of Christ 
 
110 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 Jesus undertakes to effect : it promises to sanctify 
 the heart of him who in his heart accepts the mes- 
 sage; it proposes to give power as well as right to 
 the conscience, it undertakes to set the man at peace 
 with God and with himself Physical knowledge has 
 made many of the men among us useful and great : 
 it is the power of God, as revealed in the Gospel of 
 His Son, which alone can make all of us happy and 
 good. 
 
 It is here that the analogy I spoke of comes in — 
 the analogy, that is, between the processes whereby 
 a man becomes intellectually great, and those pro- 
 cesses whereby he becomes morally good ; of course 
 I use the terms good and great in a sense that is 
 relative, and consistently with that lowliness and 
 consciousness of imperfection which become alike 
 the philosopher and the Christian. The life of each 
 of them, moral and intellectual, is a progress and a 
 growth ; each proceeds step by step, and every step 
 is an illustration of the text, ''To him that hath 
 shall be given :" assuredly this is the law of the 
 kingdom of mind, and on two separate occasions it 
 was proclaimed by its Divine Founder as the law 
 of the Kingdom of Grace. 
 
 For mark the commencement of the life of each; 
 compare, that is, the first conscious introduction of 
 the man into the kingdom of grace, with the first 
 introduction of the scholar into the fields of the 
 knowledge of the physical creation. In the Holy 
 
II.] to Religious Growth, 111 
 
 Scriptures the man is said, in most expressive 
 language, to he horn again ; the old man is said to 
 be put off, the new man is put on ; he who enters 
 the kingdom must first become as a little child. 
 
 Think, then, of the young child when his con- 
 sciousness first fully dawns upon him : — mark his 
 intense curiosity ; how he must needs taste, and 
 touch, and handle all things; observe his ceaseless 
 activity, and the joyousness which sometimes seems 
 to overspread his very existence ; look at his first 
 ineffectual attempts to run or to walk; note the errors 
 of judgment into which he falls as to the dimensions 
 and the distances of things ; observe the wonder and 
 the trustfulness with which he listens to those whom 
 he loves, and his early docility towards those whom 
 he trusts. 
 
 And now, having traced this picture in your 
 minds, let me ask you, have I been in reality 
 describing the feelings and early progress of the 
 Christian when he first realizes the conviction that 
 he is a redeemed child of God ? or, have I been 
 portraying the earlier days of a man's pupilage in 
 the knowledge of the works of the Divine Creator? 
 If heart answers to heart, I am quite sure that many 
 a Christian man, and many a Christian woman, who 
 listens to these words, can recall to memory his own 
 childhood in grace— a first conscious entrance into a 
 filial relationship to God the Father, through the 
 pardon and acceptance which come through Christ 
 
112 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 Jesus, — the very elements of which consisted of a 
 childhke activity, and curiosity, and joyousness, and 
 wonder, and trustfulness, and love; and least of 
 all were wanting the errors of incipient Christian 
 judgment. 
 
 The same language also apphes equally well to 
 the true scholar on his first introduction to the 
 School of Science ; there is the same intense curi- 
 osity, and activity, and joyousness. 
 
 There is the same type of childhood's unbounded 
 hope and inevitable error. 
 
 Truth, however, here leads me to notice for a 
 moment an apparent exception to this analogy. 
 For there are some highly favoured Christians the 
 language of whose spirits, by the force, it may be, 
 of holy example, or of early education, from their 
 childhood has been that of Samuel, ^' Speak, Lord, 
 for thy servant heareth." Like Timothy, some Lois 
 or Eunice instilled into their dawning minds the 
 knowledge and the love of God. In such instances, 
 perhaps as rare as they are certainly blessed, there 
 is no recollection of the first fervour of a new 
 affection, but there remain the quiet habits of a 
 pious life, which, though in truth the work of the 
 Divine Spirit, have seemed to them to be a portion 
 of their nature. But even here the exception to the 
 analogy is rather apparent than real ; for there are 
 like instances where from favourable circumstances, 
 the young child has been introduced to the know- 
 
II.] to Religious Growth. 113 
 
 ledge of the natural world about him almost with 
 the dawn of his consciousness; and the growth of 
 this love of natural knowledge has thus become, to 
 himself at least, unobserved and inevitable. 
 
 But then this fervour of the new affection in due 
 time subsides ; its purpose was to animate the 
 Christian with courage to combat with the early 
 difficulties which he soon has to encounter, before 
 experience has provided him with all the weapons 
 of his warfare, and has fully convinced him that the 
 victory must be his. If the feeling of this fervour 
 continued in its first intensity, it would soon become 
 a weakness rather than a strength, for the Christian 
 might then be lost in the contemplation of his own 
 emotions. 
 
 But now proceed onwards a step, and compare 
 the moral discipline in the world of faith, with the 
 intellectual trials which supervene upon the earlier 
 introduction to the world of science. The earliest 
 discipline through which the Christian is carried, 
 in general, is the discipline of Patience, for his 
 progress in the new, the divine, life before him 
 he soon finds is far slower than he expected; and 
 many are the temptations, the seductions, which 
 assail him, and, in general, many are the moral 
 falls from that pattern of perfect holiness which 
 in the Gospel is set for his imitation. It is not 
 long, also, before he feels the painful isolation from 
 many of his old friends, who cannot understand 
 
 8 
 
114 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 what it is wliich so strangely absorbs him, and who 
 would fain persuade him that his new life is unrea- 
 sonable and profitless. It is now, indeed, that his 
 first and his chief trials have commenced ; but if he 
 obediently follow the Divine Hand which both 
 points the way and confers the strength, then 
 patience will have her perfect work ; and patience 
 worketh experience^ and experience hope; and it is 
 by hojDe, which is only another form of faith, — it is 
 by hope that the Christian is anchored to the E.ock. 
 
 Now, I say, that very few of the words which 
 thus rapidly describe the progress of the Christian 
 in this the second stage of the development of his 
 moral being, need be changed to describe the 
 progress of the true scholar, when he has made his 
 first advance in the school of natural knowledge. 
 He finds the same need and discipline of patience, 
 the same slowness of progress; he falls into similar 
 errors, from whence he must painfully and manfully 
 emerge; he not seldom excites the same pity in 
 those who call themselves his friends. In him also 
 patience must have her perfect work, otherwise to 
 him there will come no experience, and his hope 
 will then make him ashamed. 
 
 So the life of the true student in the kingdom of 
 nature is thus far in analogy and correlative with 
 the life of the true disciple in the kingdom of grace : 
 each is a progress and a growth; each step therein 
 is a necessary preparation for the next; and in each 
 
n.] to Religious Growth. 115 
 
 is abundantly verified that cardinal law, written alike 
 on the pages of nature and of grace, — ''To him 
 that hath shall be given." 
 
 You will observe that I have been speaking of 
 the true, the sincere disciples alone, whether in the 
 School of Grace or in the School of Nature. For, 
 as there are many who, having received the seed of 
 the divine life, allow it to be choked by the care of 
 this world and the deceitfulness of riches ; or, being 
 led away by the lust of the eyes, or the lusts of the 
 flesh, or the pride of life, bring no fruit to perfection ; 
 — so there are many who linger merely on the 
 threshold of the School of Knowledge ; pleased or 
 amused, now and then, with the sound of the glories 
 that are discussed therein, but unwilling to submit 
 to that discipline without which progress is im- 
 possible. Such persons can but little understand the 
 burning of that early fervour of which I spoke as the 
 type of the first stage of the Christian life, and still 
 less can form a notion of the discipline of patience 
 which leads through experience to that assurance of 
 hope, which is the type of the second. 
 
 But now come we to those gifted favoured souls, 
 who reach the third and the maturer stage of the 
 Christian Hfe on the one hand, or the higher de- 
 velopment of the intellect on the other. In either 
 case the precious gift comes alike from God; even 
 from that Divine Spirit which divideth unto every 
 man severally as He wills. 
 
 8—2 
 
116 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 In the confirmed Christian^ his aims after as- 
 similation to the divine pattern of Christ his Saviour, 
 his instantaneous reference of all hopes, and all pro- 
 jects, and all cares to the will of God, are now not so 
 much the results of a conscious effort, as the intui- 
 tion of a habit. His life has become a prayer and 
 a thanksgiving — in him, obedience is now well-nigh 
 spontaneous : in his glad heart, ' love is an unerring 
 light, and joy its own security/ 
 
 He does God's will and knows it not. 
 
 I admit that these attainments in the Christian 
 life are rare, but then they are actual : — it was for 
 their possession by the regenerate heart, that Christ 
 died, that Evangelists wrote, and that Apostles 
 preached; for their birth, and sustenance, and 
 growth, the Church of Christ now exists in visible 
 form, with its holy sacraments and its ordinances 
 of grace ; and may I not add, it is for our own 
 nurture in these graces of the Spirit that we are 
 here met to-day ? 
 
 True, I cannot take so lofty a flight in the case 
 of the higher and more perfected form of the human 
 intellect ; for intellect comes not so nigh to the 
 throne of God as love. Nevertheless, the true 
 philosopher has his great intuitions also. He, too, 
 sees the things around, not with the eyes of un- 
 cultured ordinary men, but in all created things 
 around him, he discerns order and law, fitnesses and 
 adaptations, benignity and power. The ears of his 
 
II.] to Religious Growth. 117 
 
 spirit drink in the harmonies of nature. That which 
 in the advanced Christian partakes of the nature of 
 inspiration, in the philosopher becomes discovery. 
 There are, moreover, many quahties of the mind 
 common to them both; candour, for instance, and 
 the love of the truth ; but beyond all there is 
 — the grace of a childlike humility — for each 
 of them knows by what slow and painful steps 
 he has arrived, — the one, at the knowledge of God 
 and of his own heart, — the other, at a perception of 
 the orderly adaptations of nature and the relation of 
 things created. Each knows that his powers have 
 been to him, from first to last, a gift, and that being 
 a gift, they carry with them responsibilities. Each 
 feels in the depths of his spirit that he. has not yet 
 attained to his aspirations and his hopes, and he 
 knows that immeasurably more lies before him than 
 behind him. As a little child and as a learner, each 
 entered upon his new life; while yet a child and a 
 learner each knows that here he must quit it. 
 
 In thus rapidly tracing some few of the ana- 
 logies between the true life spiritual and the life intel- 
 lectual, it seems as if we had all along been thinking 
 of two separate beings, but in truth we have been 
 speaking of two phases of the life of one and the same 
 man ; for each one of us is endowed with affections 
 and with a mind ; to each of us God has given a 
 loving and a thinking power ; though possibly these 
 tw^o powers are, after all, only different sides of the 
 
118 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 same thing. There cannot then be any true, any ne- 
 cessary antagonism between the love of natural 
 knowledge and the love of God. And mark you, on 
 whichever side that antagonism is permitted to exist, 
 and fully up to the measure of its existence, that an- 
 tagonism is a sure sign, not of the strength, but of 
 the essential weakness, of the love. For that love of 
 God must be weak indeed which shuns, and is afraid 
 of, the contemplation of God's works; and that love 
 of natural knowledge must be languid and unworthy 
 of the name, which shuns, and is afraid of, the know- 
 ledge of the Grace of Him Who created all that can 
 be known. In this shines forth the Divine philoso- 
 phy of that Holy Book, in which it is written, ^' There 
 IS NO fI]AR in love. Perfect love casteth out fear." 
 
 But now, for one moment, and would that the 
 moment were less brief! let us imagine the graces 
 of the Christian faith to be superadded, by the gift of 
 God, to the graces of natural knowledge. Then all 
 created things assume to the eyes of that man's 
 sanctified affections a new and a holier aspect. In 
 the laws which bind all material things together, 
 his understanding, with joy, recognises the wisdom 
 of Him Who framed the law ; in the varied con- 
 trivances with which all nature teems, his mind traces 
 with a reverential love the mind of the Divine Con- 
 triver ; in the beauty and the joy with which all 
 animated things are filled his spirit reads the ten- 
 derness and the fatherly chPvracter of the Creator, 
 
II.] to Religious Oroivth. 119 
 
 — ''the very least as feeling His care, and the 
 greatest as not exempt from His power." 
 
 And if, in his brother man, he is compelled 
 sometimes to acknowledge traces of an unholy, un- 
 loving spirit, then the Christian philosopher thinks 
 not only of his own infirmities, and of that Divine 
 grace by which tliey are subdued, but he looks 
 through the unholy and unloving man, at the man's 
 true, better self; at the man as the man may he, 
 and as he hopes ivill be ; he sees the man redeemed ; 
 he sees the Christ within the man; he forgets the 
 sinner, and his spirit is at peace. 
 
 Do you hesitate, and ask me for examples of 
 this happy combination of intellectual strength with 
 the Christian spirit ? Do you ask for men who 
 rejoicing in the brightest light of the knowledge of 
 their day, rejoiced still more in the light of the 
 knowledge of God ? I will select then at once some 
 of the noblest names in the annals of science. 
 
 In the spirit of this Law, Kepler wrote, — Kepler, 
 the first and the greatest among the pioneers of 
 modern science. Not a few of Kepler's labours are 
 a prayer. 
 
 In the spirit of this Law, Pascal, endowed of 
 God with a genius second to that of no child of 
 man, bequeathed for an everlasting possession to the 
 Church of Christ, " thoughts " which burn. 
 
 In the spirit of this Law, Newton year by year 
 devoted a sum of money for the purchase and dis- 
 tribution of copies of the Bible. 
 
120 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress [serm. 
 
 In the spirit of this Law, Leibnitz, that great 
 and subtle geometer, with a zeal and a learning un- 
 surpassed, devoted the prime of his life to the assuag- 
 ing of the fatal animosities between the Lutherans 
 and the Romanists of his day, saying to each of 
 them, "Sirs, ye be brethren, be at one." 
 
 Nay, did the time and propriety permit, I could 
 remind you of the names of a host of living Christ- 
 ian Philosophers, whose writings would refute the 
 weak fond calumny that the religion of the Cross of 
 Christ has become among them as a fable of the 
 past, and obsolete. 
 
 One great name, however, still remains, and I 
 conclude. It was among the names of living men 
 when I first thought of this address to you, it is now 
 the name of one living among the blessed. It is but 
 little for me to remind you that a greater philosopher 
 than Michael Faraday has rarely been known among 
 us within the memory of recent times ; but I am bold 
 to add that never have we known a man who more 
 perfectly exhibited the meekness, the peaceableness, 
 the humility, the blamelessness, of the true child of 
 God. I am not consciously exaggerating when I 
 say that there went forth a virtue from that Christian 
 man, which made those who had come from his pres- 
 ence feel happier, and, I may venture to sa}^, even 
 better men. Think not I am thus striving to laud 
 the creature, I am rather praising the Creator by 
 whose Divine Spirit our Faraday was made what he 
 was. 
 
II.] to Religious Growth. 121 
 
 Nevertheless this great and good man never ob- 
 truded the strength of his faith upon those whom he 
 publicly addressed; upon principle he was habitually 
 reticent on such topics, because he believed they were 
 ill suited for the ordinary assemblages of men. Yet 
 on more than one occasion wlieii he had been discours- 
 ing on some of the magaificcnt prearrangements of 
 Divine Providence, so lavishly scattered in nature, I 
 have seen him struggle to repress the emotion which 
 was visibly striving for utterance; and then at the 
 last, with one single far-reaching word, he would 
 just hint at his meaning rather than express it. On 
 such occasions he only who had ears to hear, could 
 hear. 
 
 With all this gentleness and tenderness of nature, 
 Faraday nevertheless was a man of resolute decision ; 
 for his gentleness was not so much constitutional to 
 the man, as it was the result of the discipline of a 
 holy life. 
 
 For my own part, I know little that is more 
 toucliing than one habit of this great and good man's 
 ways. During the week, or a part of it, his thoughts, 
 as you know, would be occupied in those deep inves- 
 tigations of nature which will make his name hon- 
 oured wherever the annals of science are read : but 
 when the week's work was done, and often when the 
 day's work was done, he would quietly retire among 
 a few plain, and for the most part poor Christian 
 people, whose aim is to live after what they conceive 
 
122 The Analogy of Intellectual Progress. 
 
 to be the model of the primitive Apostohc church ; 
 and there, I am told, he would open the Bible and 
 expound the Scriptures with a benign tenderness, 
 and childlike simplicity, and depth of personal expe- 
 rience, which would have astonished, had it not so 
 gravely impressed, his hearers. Strange to say, 
 some of the last of these loving expositions of God's 
 Holy Word were ministered in this very town less 
 than four years ago. 
 
 For Michael Faraday it were incongruous to 
 erect a statue of marble, or of bronze. His name is 
 inscribed upon the imperishable truths which his 
 genius brought to light. Do you, who listen, thank 
 God who giveth such grace to man. Let us, who 
 survive him, and who knew him — and all who knew 
 him, knew him as a friend — let us, by imitating his 
 gentle bearing, his truthful speech, his noiseless per- 
 severance, his peaceful simplicity of life, endeavour 
 to hand down the image of his character to the 
 generation that succeeds us. In him was exhibited 
 the truth of that Divine Philosophy of the Gospel of 
 Christ, in which it is written : 
 
 Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit 
 THE Earth. 
 
 Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall 
 SEE God. 
 
A P P E N D I X 
 
 Note A. 
 
 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 
 
 I HAVE taken the liberty of expressing my admiration of Mr 
 Grove's philosophical acumen in grouping together the plan 
 and operations of nature under one felicitous term. He is, I 
 am sure, far too candid — in his address to the British Asso- 
 ciation; he has travelled over far too wide a field, and he is 
 too conscious of the difficulties attending physical researches, 
 not to be prepared for objections to at least some of his 
 I'emarks. 
 
 He appears to have accepted the Darwinian Hypothesis 
 as explaining the origin of that Continuity which undoubt- 
 edly exists in the natural world. I, for one, am unable to 
 accept that Hypothesis in its length and breadth without 
 great reserve. As an illustration of the general nature of 
 the objections which I entertain, I will take an instance 
 from that branch of physics with which it is my lot to be 
 most familiar — the Optical Structure of the Human Eye, 
 From the cornea to the retina the eye is an Optical Instru- 
 ment. But what an Instrument ! The computation of the 
 curves and distances of the refracting surfaces in this instru-» 
 ment, and the assigning of the proper law of density for 
 the several layers in its principal lens, would require the 
 application of a mathematical analysis, such as I hesitate not 
 to say was never yet possessed by a human geometer. The 
 mechanism required for instantaneously changing the forma 
 
124 Appendix. 
 
 and distances, and in one instance the magnitude, of its com- 
 ponent parts, would require a handicraft such as never yet 
 was possessed by a human mechanic. I say nothing of the 
 chemistry required for the composition of the several con- 
 stituent media. I presume Mr Darwin would admit that 
 this description is not exaggerated. Now let us attend to 
 the process of " natural selection," by which this marvellous 
 organ is said to have come into being. " I can see," says 
 Mr Darwin* " no very great difficulty (not more than in the 
 case of many other structures) in believing that natural 
 selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic 
 nerve, merely coated with pigment and invested by trans- 
 parent membranes, into an optical instrument as perfect as 
 is possessed by any member of the great Articulate Class." 
 
 But the true question is not 'merely^ how came this 
 apparatus to be coated with a non-reflecting pigment, simul- 
 taneously invested with a transparent membrane, though the 
 chances are enormously against any such accidental {V) con- 
 currence of the two conditions ; but there is another question 
 behind all this, viz. how came it that the nerve with its 
 non-reflecting pigment was so constructed as to be exactly 
 fltted to convey tlie vibrations of the strange elastic lumini- 
 ferous ether which happened to surround it ? Here are four 
 conditions of things each utterly independent of the others, 
 viz. the nerve, then its non-reflecting coating, then a trans- 
 parent medium investing it, then a most remarkable ether 
 surrounding the whole, the concurrence of all four being 
 essential to the production of vision, nevertheless we are to 
 believe that all these adjustments and adaptations are acci- 
 dentally made, retained and handed down by inheritance. 
 If there be not evidence here of the selecting, arranging, 
 controlling power of mind, will, forethought, contrivance, 
 then I feel that I have no evidence for the existence of 
 the individuality of my own being. 
 
 And next comes the mode after which this simple 
 apparatus of the coated nerve, by insensible additions 
 
 * Orif/in of Species, edit, i, pp. i88, 189. 
 
Appendix, 125 
 
 gradually but accidentally made, is said to be converted 
 at length into the eye of man. ''We ought in imagina- 
 tion to take a thick layer of transparent tissue with a 
 nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every 
 part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in 
 density, so as to separate into layers of different densities 
 and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each 
 other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly chang- 
 ing in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a 
 power always intently watching each slightly accidental 
 alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting 
 each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may, in 
 any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter 
 image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument 
 to be multiplied by the million ; and each to be preserved 
 till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be 
 destroyed. Let this process go on for millions on millions 
 of years. . . ." Now we must here ask, What is this 
 "power always intently watching each slightly accidental 
 alteration " ? A few lines further down in Mr Darwin's page 
 we read : " Natural selection will pick out with unerring 
 skill each improvement." But what is this " Natural Selec- 
 tion"? We must here take Mr Darwin's own definition: 
 ''This preservation of favourable variations, and the rejec- 
 tion of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection*." 
 
 Now to me there appear three objections, which indispose 
 me to accept the above description of the processes by which 
 the human eye could have been formed, and I will state 
 them as succinctly as I can. First, consistently with such 
 knowledge of optical combinations as I happen to possess, I 
 cannot understand how, by any series of accidental varia- 
 tions, so complicated a structure as an eye could possibly 
 have been successively improved. The chances of any acci- 
 dental variation in such an instrument being an im]jrovenient 
 are small indeed. Suppose, for instance, one of the surfaces 
 of the crystalline lens of the eye of a creature, possessing 
 
 * Griffin erf Species, p. 8i, 
 
12G Appendix. 
 
 a crystalline and cornea, to be accidentally altered, then J 
 say, that unless the form of the other surface is simulta- 
 neously altered, in one only way out of millions of possible 
 ways, the eye would not be optically iiiiproved. An alter- 
 ation also in the two surfaces of the crystalline lens, whether 
 accidental or otherwise, would involve a definite alteration in 
 the form of the cornea, or in the distance of its surface from 
 the centre of the crystalline lens, in order that the eye may 
 be optically better. All these alterations must be simul- 
 taneous and definite in amount, and these definite amounts 
 must coexist in obedience to an extremely complicated law. 
 To my apprehension then, that so complex an instrument 
 as an eye should undergo a succession of millions of improve- 
 ments, by means of a succession of millions of accidental 
 alterations, is not less improbable, than if all the letters 
 in the "Origin of Species" were placed in a box, and on 
 being shaken and poured out millions on millions of times, 
 they should at last come out together in the order in which 
 they occur in that fascinating and, in general, highly philo- 
 sophical work. 
 
 But my objections do not stop here. The improvement 
 of an organ must be an improvement relative to the new 
 circumstances by which the organ is surrounded. Suppose, 
 then, that an eye is altered for the better in relation to one 
 set of circumstances under which it is placed. By-and-bye 
 there arise a second set of circumstances, and the eye is 
 again, by Natural Selection, altered and improved rela- 
 tively to the second set of circumstances. What is there 
 to make the second set of circumstances such that the 
 second improvement (relative to them) shall be an improve- 
 ment or progress in the direction of the ultimate goal of the 
 human eye ? Why should not the second improvement be 
 a retrogression away from the ultimate organ now possessed 
 by man, and necessary to his well-being? But all this 
 suiting of the succession of circumstances is to go on, not 
 once or twice, but millions on millions of times. If this be 
 so, then not only must there be a BIAS in the order of the 
 
Appendix. 127 
 
 succession of the circumstances, or, at all events, in the vast 
 outnumbering of the unfavourable circumstances by the 
 favourable, but so strong a bias, as to remove the whole 
 process from the accidental to the intentional. The bias^ 
 implies the existence of a Law, a Mind, a Will. The process 
 becomes one not of Natural Selection, but of Selection by an 
 Intelligent Will. 
 
 In considering the state of things just described, we must 
 also take into the account, that the successive variations of 
 the eye are said to be accidental. What, then, but a 
 constantly exerted Intelligent Will, could cause the occur- 
 rence of new surrounding circumstances of such a character 
 as to meet these accidental variations, and concur ultimately 
 to produce a certain definite result, that is to say, an instru- 
 ment possessing the necessary and truly wonderful contri- 
 vances of the Human Eye? But is such a process, the 
 process, that is, of selecting new circumstances adapted to 
 previous accidental variations, to be called Providence, or 
 Miracle, or the Inversion of Providence ? 
 
 It is very satisfactory to me to find that since the first 
 publication of these notes, eighteen months ago, the Duke of 
 Argyle in his invaluable and well timed treatise on the 
 Reign of Laiuf, by approaching this subject from a different 
 and more general point of view, has arrived at conclusions 
 similar to those enunciated here. This philosophical ob- 
 server writes as follows : — 
 
 "If, then, it be true that new species are created out 
 of small variations in the form of old species, and this by 
 way of natura,! generation, there must be some bond of 
 connexion which determines those variations in a definite 
 direction, and keeps up the external correlations ^9a?"2 
 passu with the internal correlations. Natural Selection can 
 have no part in this. Natural Selection seizes on these 
 external correlations when they have come to be. But 
 
 • On this subject of bias, see a highly philosophical review of ' Quetelet On 
 Probabilities,^ in Sir John Herschel's Essar/s. 
 f B^lgn of Laiv, p. 273, ed. 3. 
 
128 Appendix. 
 
 Natural Selection cannot enter the secret chambers of the 
 womb, and there shape the new form m harmony with 
 modified conditions of external life. How, then, are these 
 external correlations provided 'for beforehand? There can 
 be but one reply. It is by utility, not acting as a physical 
 cause upon organs already in existence but acting through 
 motive as a mental purpose in contriving organs before they 
 have begun to be. And where obvious utility does result, 
 the only connecting bond which can be conceived as capable 
 of maintaining the internal correlations in harmony with the 
 external correlations, is the bond of creative will, giving 
 to organic forces a foreseen direction. It is, in short, pre- 
 cisely the same bond which in all mechanism produces har- 
 mony of structure with intended function." 
 
 On reading Mr Darwin's enchanting volume, we seem to 
 be, as it were, in the hands of a great magician, who leads us 
 up and down the Elysian fields, pointing out to us on this 
 side and on that new aspects of things which, though true, 
 were beyond the reach of our expectations; nevertheless, 
 when as we hope, we are nearing the hill-top and getting a 
 sight of the primordial genesis of organised beings, the cha- 
 riot on which he has mounted us rolls down the hill like the 
 stone of Sisyphus. 
 
 ''With hands and feet struggling, he shoved the stone 
 Up a hill-top ; but the steep well-nigh 
 Vanquished, by some great force repulsed, the mass 
 Rushed again obstinate down to the plain. 
 
 Tall trees, fniit laden, with inflected heads 
 Stooped to us ; pears, pomegranates, apples bright, 
 The luscious figs, and unctuous olive smooth, 
 Which, when with sudden grasp we would have seized, 
 Winds whirled them high into the dusky clouds." 
 
 Odyssey, Book xi. 
 
 Thus baffled, nothing that I can see remains but that we 
 take our refuge in the magnificent old words, — 
 
 In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
 
 EARTH. He spake THE WORD AND THEY WERE MADE; He 
 
 hath given them a law which shall not be broken. 
 
Appendix, 129 
 
 Note B. 
 on prayer. 
 
 *' In it did he live, 
 And by it did be live; it was bis life. 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to tbe power 
 Tbat made bim; it was blessedness and love!" 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Some months have now elapsed since Professor Tyndall, 
 in one of the public journals, put a question regarding prayer, 
 which at the time excited much attention and some animad- 
 version. In reference to the propriety of prayer to God for 
 the removal of epidemic and other diseases, Dr Tyndall asked 
 whether " Prayer had proved itself a match for vaccination?" 
 Various answers were given to this question, and to other 
 questions which this one essentially involves, I will now 
 endeavour to give my own reply. 
 
 In one of those exquisite Dialogues which have come 
 down to us from the wisest of the ancients for an everlasting 
 possession, Socrates is represented as meeting a great states- 
 man in the streets of Athens, on his way to the temple of 
 some god to pray. The nature of his errand was manifest 
 from the chaplet which he carried in his hand, wdiile the 
 gravity with which he kept his eyes fixed upon the ground, 
 indicated that the object of the vow he was about to offer 
 was, in the statesman's thought, one of more than ordinary 
 importance. Whether it was that Socrates well knew the 
 restless ambition of Alcibiades (for that w^as the statesman's 
 name), and therefore suspected that his friend and disciple, 
 having some unscrupulous project on foot, was now on his 
 way to conciliate the good-will of the god for its accomplish- 
 ment; or whether the mere sight of the sacrificial chaplet 
 alone, suggested the thought ; we are told that the sage im- 
 mediately stopped the statesman, and, as his w^ont ever was, 
 began to ply him with a string of questions, the drift of the 
 
 9 
 
130 Appendix. 
 
 questions now being directed to the proper objects and the 
 propriety of prayer. "Do you think/' said he, "that the 
 gods sometimes grant and sometimes refuse our prayers? 
 Do you see that there are very many foolish men, — some of 
 them foohsh even to madness, — and that such mxCn neces- 
 sarily offer to the gods very foolish prayers? Do you think 
 there is no danger, that while you ask for what you believe 
 will be for your good, you may inadvertently be seeking for 
 what, if granted, would be your ruin? And then he goes 
 on to ask him what sort of knowledge a man should properly 
 possess before it was safe for him to pray to the gods. Should 
 it not be the knowledge of what is the best? And are they 
 many, or are they few, who possess this knowledge? And 
 if they have not this knowledge, how do they know what 
 they ought to pray for?" Hereupon Alcibiades confesses him- 
 self perplexed, and says, " he inclines to leave the choice of 
 blessings to the gods." Socrates then digresses to questions 
 regarding that state of the suppliant's mind which is most 
 agreeable to the god; and after recounting an anecdote or 
 two, of how a certain costly and magnificent national ritual 
 had been disregarded by the gods, while they had lent a pro- 
 pitious ear to a very simple prayer, he quotes a few lines 
 from Homer, to the effect that "the gods care not for our 
 gifts, but they do regard the state of our souls." 
 
 The Sage then proceeds to tell the statesman that there 
 was indeed one prayer which seemed to him both wise and 
 safe; he had learned it, he says, from an old poet, who had 
 recommended it to his friends who were praying unwisely, 
 and it was to the following effect : — " Sovereign Jove, what 
 is good for us, grant, though lue ask it not; but from what is 
 dangerous, though we ask for it, King, deliver us"^!'' Even 
 to us in this nineteenth century, these are burning words, re- 
 minding us of words familiar and more burning still, and one 
 might have supposed they would have satisfied Alcibiades. 
 
 * Tied ^aaCKev rp. fxeu iadXa Kal evxojJ-^vois Kal duevKTOis 
 'Afx/xl didov, Toi. 5^ Seiva, Kal exixofiivois airoKi^ov. 
 
 Plato, Alcih. ii, p. 143. 
 
Appendix. 181 
 
 He does indeed go so far as to admit that the prayer was 
 both wise and safe, but Alcibiades was an Athenian, and 
 "the Greeks seek after wisdom." To them, all ignorance 
 was, as it still is to some modern j)hilosophers, a positive 
 evil; and this prayer, safe as it was, seemed little better than 
 an appeal to, or it might be even the offspring of, ignorance. 
 Thereupon ensues a series of questions as to human igno- 
 rance, but these I omit as not being essential to our present 
 argument; and I now come to a thought which to some of 
 my readers will appear not alone unexpected, but even start- 
 ling, as proceeding from a heathen philosopher more than 
 two thousand years ago. 
 
 "Alcibiades, you are perplexed and even disappointed, 
 but you must wait," said Socrates; "you must wait till there 
 comes some one who shall be instructed how to remove this 
 ignorance." "And when will this time come?" asks the 
 statesman; "and who shall be my teacher?" "It is even one 
 who cares for you"^" replies the sage; "as Homer says that 
 Minerva removed the mist from the eyes of Diomede, 
 
 ' That he might well discern if the shape were a god or a mortal ;' 
 
 SO must this teacher remove the mist which now envelopes 
 your mind, that you may discern what is good and what is 
 evil, which at present, methinks, you have no power to see." 
 " Well, then," said Alcibiades, " if only he makes me better, 
 let him remove the mist, or whatever else it may be, and 
 whosoever this man may be." " And he will do it," rejoins 
 Socrates; "for it is marvellous how great is the regard he 
 bears you." "It seems, then," concludes Alcibiades, "that 
 till this teacher comes, I had better defer my prayer." 
 
 Such, then, was the knowledge, such were the hopes, and 
 such was the indecision of the best-informed among the 
 ancients, on the subject of prayer. So deep, so irrepressible, 
 so unsatisfied, appears to have been the longing of the great 
 thinkers of the heathen world for the advent of some teacher 
 who should throw a light upon the relations in which men 
 
 * See the Preface ; and the quotation before this Sermon. 
 
 9—2 
 
132 Appendix. 
 
 stand to the world unseen, that the thought of it, we are 
 told, recurred to the martyr sage when there remained but 
 an hour or two before the fatal cup was to set the seal to the 
 sincerity of his Ufa. But it was not now, as before, the need 
 and the hope of a teacher who should inform him how to de- 
 mean himself before the God at the time of his prayer, or 
 even what it was safe for him to pray for, but it was now 
 rather the utterance of the longing for a teacher who should 
 deliver his friends, — not himself observe, but his friends, — 
 from the fear of death. It even might be that Socrates sus- 
 pected the two teachers would be one and the same. " It is 
 not ourselves," said his friend Cebes in the prison, " that are 
 frightened, it is rather a child Avithin us that is terrified; but, 
 alas 1 now that you are about to leave us, where shall w^e find 
 one who is master of a spell sufficient to remove this fear*?" 
 " Greece is a wide place," replies the calm, heroic old man, 
 "and there are many foreign nations also, and in search of 
 this teacher we must explore many regions, and spare neither 
 trouble nor money in the search; and you must search also 
 amongst yourselves for this gift, for, perhaps, you will not 
 easily find any one who possesses this power more than you 
 do." And these are among the last words of the wisest of 
 men, spoken while they who had the appointed office were 
 even now grinding the hemlock that was to consign him to 
 his doom. 
 
 It is here that, with a sort of jDassionate impatience, our 
 thoughts glance across the breadth of but a narrow sea, from 
 Athens and from the utterance of these dim hopes, to where 
 Malachi, the last of a long line of Hebrew prophets, at that ver}^ 
 time was speaking, as his brethren for a thousand years had 
 spoken before him, of the advent of such a teacher, yet more 
 than a teacher, and that with no stammering lips, but as if 
 he were nigh at the very door. ^' You must search for him, 
 you must spend your labour and your money in the search," 
 said the dying sage, and he said it possibly from the natural 
 convictions of his polished intellect. "Behold! He shall 
 
 • Plato, Phcedo, § 60, 61. 
 
Appendix. 133 
 
 come, the messenger whom ye seek shall come! the Sun of 
 Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings!" These 
 were the last words of the last of the expiring race of the 
 Hebrew Seers; and he spoke from the inspired emotions of 
 his heart. For four hundred years there was no more such 
 Sage, nor for four hundred yea^ was the voice heard of any 
 such Prophet. 
 
 To Doctor Tyndail's question, and what it involves, the 
 words quoted above give nearly all the answer which Natural 
 Beligion can supply. It may, however, be added that the 
 scheme of Continuity observable in nature cannot but force 
 upon our minds the contemplation of the existence of created 
 intelligences superior to ourselves, and active with a diviner 
 energy, in some other parts of the universe, or even close to 
 our paths or nigh to our beds, and so onwards and onwards, 
 until we reach the One Infinitely Intelligent and Beneficent 
 Mind, the Lord and Creator of them all. 
 
 And here, again, the scheme of Correlation steps in, 
 and inasmuch as it has been shown to apply as closely to 
 the laws of our moral nature as to the laws of our physical 
 being, it affords to us something more than the dawn of a 
 hope that inasmuch as there is implanted within our uni- 
 versal nature a principle or affection for religion, and a 
 yearning for intercourse with some spiritual essences beyond 
 ourselves, so there must be, in correlation to this affection 
 and this yearning, some proper object for that affection to 
 adore, and some spirits to reciprocate the sympathies of that 
 yearning. It is a part of the constitution of Human Nature, 
 that appetites, passions, and affections have their several 
 proper and distinctive objects : what then is the object cor- 
 relative to this universal yearning ? 
 
 Now in this darkness or this light of nature, call it which 
 you please, the Christian points to that Teacher for the ad- 
 vent of whom the ancient sao^es lonofed. To that Divine 
 Teacher's Word the Christian must listen, and that example 
 which He set, the Christian must strive to follow. It is 
 needless to say this Divine Man was pre-eminently a man of 
 
1 34 Appendix, 
 
 prayer; and if you ask how and for what He prayed, and 
 what He declared was the Law of Prayer in the new king- 
 dom which He said He came to establish, it will all be found 
 in the records of His life, and some small portion of it has 
 been indicated in the Sermon which precedes this note. The 
 remark, however, may here be added, for it bears especially 
 on the question before us: there once came an hour when 
 the a]3proach of physical suffering appalled even that Man of 
 Strength, and His prayer then was, that God His Father, if 
 possible, would remove the cup, but if not, "Thy will be 
 DONE." I could say more than this, if in reverence and pro- 
 priety I dared, for I could refer to those strong, sad, mys- 
 terious cryings upon the Cross when the Teacher whom the 
 Sages longed for, the Saviour of the World, was bruised for 
 our iniquities, and was bearing the chastisement of our sins ; 
 but the theme is too sacred, and our natural emotions are 
 neither to be tempted nor trusted here. 
 
 When, then, Dr Tyndall asks whether it is right to pray 
 for the aversion of cholera, or of smallpox, or of physical suf- 
 fering of any sort, or whether vaccination proved a match for 
 prayer, I have given the answer; partly here, and partly in 
 the Sermon. Of this much at least we are quite sure, that 
 One wiser than the questioner, in the hour of his own agony, 
 " offered up prayers with strong cryings and tears unto Him 
 who was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that 
 he feared." 
 
 But how know we that the Teacher has surely come, 
 and that His religion comes from God? For the learned we 
 appeal to the testimony of history; for the learned and un- 
 learned alike there is this better evidence — Try it*. 
 
 If it be still further urged that the scheme of nature is 
 carried on by fixed unalterable laws, and that the storm 
 whose cradle is in the Atlantic must spend its fury on the 
 very spot where the laws of heat and of vapour bid it; if it 
 be said that the path of the cholera, the cattle plague, the 
 
 * This is the practical argument somewhere proposed by Coleridge, and to 
 this I have alluded in one of the Lectures in this volume. 
 
Appendix. 135 
 
 smallpox, is as surely prepared beforehand and as inevitably 
 as is the path of the electric flash — be it so; — but whence 
 know we that intervention is impossible? • I see at this mo- 
 ment a bud on one of the trees which skirt the boundary of 
 my neighbour's land. I know that when that bud has be- 
 come a branch next year it is certain from the lav/s of nature 
 on Avhat precise spots and at what precise moments the seve- 
 ral leaves of that branch will fall. But not so ; my neighbour 
 next year may erect his haystack close by that tree, and then 
 all is changed. So there comes in the contingency of a will. 
 
 I venture to give this homely illustration of the very 
 trifling amount of the intervention which, in many cases, 
 may be all that is necessary to prevent very serious conse- 
 quences, because it is a common thing to be told that the 
 Law^s of Nature cannot be violated at the light bidding of 
 a human being. Even on natural grounds, on the ground, 
 that is, of the continuity of being, the existence of some 
 such beings as angels is at least conceivable ; and, that there 
 may be reasons and occasions for the interference of such 
 beings, not in opposition to but even in accordance with, the 
 Laws of Nature, is also equally conceivable. I need hardly 
 say that what Nature herein suggests, the Scriptures con- 
 firm. 
 
 But is not much of the life of man spent in contriving 
 interventions against those consequences which would follow 
 if the laws of nature took their own course independent of 
 the direction of his will? By the force of the genius which 
 the Creator has given him, does he not harness the winds 
 and guide the lightning, and make fire, and air, and earth, 
 and water, do the bidding of his intelligent desires? Does 
 not the law of Continuity, then, lead us to expect that the 
 Will of the Creator must be at least as free to intervene as 
 is the will of the creature? 
 
 But what then are the proper limitations to prayer ? In 
 the body of the Sermon I have already said that the Chris- 
 tian may, and, in his ignorance, or his weakness, or his 
 agony, often does, offer prayers for that which it may be im- 
 
136 Appendix. 
 
 possible to grant, or if granted, would be injurious. Never- 
 theless, even such a prayer, if offered in a filial spirit, may, 
 in its true essence, be accorded ; for it not unfrequently hap- 
 pens that, whatever may be the words or the form of the 
 prayer, the true meaning of the suppliant, is the need that 
 he feels for peace of mind, or strength, or fortitude, and 
 these heavenly gifts are among the chief objects of all ac- 
 ceptable prayer. Viewed in this light, a prayer which may 
 be acceptable to God, as coming from one of His children, 
 may be wholly unacceptable if it proceeded from another 
 whose circumstances are different. The form or substance 
 of the prayer must bear a suitable relation to the knowledge 
 of the suppliant. In any case, whether that of the philo- 
 sopher or of the unlettered man, whether the prayer be in 
 public or in private, whether it be the prayer of a nation or 
 of an individual, there can be no . doubt that the spirit, and 
 perhaps even the words of the prayer, ought to be conform- 
 able to the supplication of the Divine Saviour, and be pre- 
 sented before the Throne of Grace with the qualification : 
 " Father, if it be possible ; nevertheless, not as i will, 
 BUT as Thou wilt." 
 
 This is scarcely the place to enter, at any length, on the 
 subjective influences of prayer : it may be that they are its 
 chief, though by no means its sole intention. It may be 
 well to remember that Augustine said he prayed in order to 
 stir up a spirit of devotion. 
 
 I shall therefore conclude this long note by referring to 
 the sentiments entertained on the subject which has so long 
 detained us, by one of the most acute and independent minds 
 that ever existed. It is said of the great philosopher Cole- 
 ridge, that in one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, 
 he writes, 
 
 *' Of whose all-seeiog eye 
 
 Aught to demand were injpotence of mind!" 
 
 But in his maturer years he told one of his friends that 
 he reverted to this sentiment with strong compunction. He 
 considered that the act of praying was the very highest 
 
Appendix. 137 
 
 energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that 
 is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great 
 mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced ab- 
 solutely incapable of prayer. Two years before his death he 
 said, " Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, 
 with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will 
 listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing 
 He pleaseth thereupon, — this is the last, the greatest achieve- 
 ment of the Christian warfare upon earth. Teach us to 
 pray, O Lord." And then he burst into a flood of tears. 
 
 Note C. 
 the philosopher followed — after many days. 
 
 Mr Grove, in page 35 of his Address, says : — " The fair 
 question is, Does the newly -proposed view remove more diffi- 
 culties, require fewer assumptions, and present more consis- 
 tency with observed facts than that which it seeks to super- 
 sede ? If so, the philosopher will adopt it, and the world will 
 follow the philosopher — after many days." 
 
 This thought, which it is presumed will be accepted by 
 all who are competent to form an opinion, provided a suffi- 
 ciently comprehensive meaning is attached to the word 
 Philosopher so as not to exclude the Theologian, was so 
 beautifully expressed by Plato in one of his exquisite alle- 
 gories, some two thousand years ago, that for the sake of 
 the general reader, I will here reproduce it. "Let us 
 figure to ourselves a number of persons chained from their 
 birth in a subterranean cavern, with their backs to the 
 entrance of the cavern, and a fire burning behind them, 
 between which and the prisoners runs a roadway, flanked 
 by a wall high enough to conceal the persons who pass 
 along the road, while it allows the shadows of things 
 which they carry on their heads to be thrown by the fire 
 on the wall of the cavern facing the prisoners, to whom 
 
138 Appendix, 
 
 these shadows, and the voices of the carriers, will appear 
 the only realities. Now, suppose that one of them has been 
 ■unbound and taken up to the light of day, and gradually 
 habituated to the objects around him, till he has learned 
 properly to appreciate them. Such a man is to the prisoners 
 what the rightly-educated philosopher is to the mass of half- 
 educated men. If he returns to the cavern and resumes his 
 old seat and occupations, he will, at first, be the laughing- 
 stock of the place, just as the philosopher is the laughing- 
 stock of the multitude. But once re-habituated to the 
 darkness of the cavern, his knowledge of the objects which 
 throw the shadows, will enable him to surpass the prisoners 
 on their ow^n ground. . . *." 
 
 Note D. 
 'are christian ethics an advance on ancient ethics ? 
 
 The foregoing free version of a part of the Platonic 
 dialogue, brings me to the last remark, which I shall venture 
 to make on the President's Address. In page 37 he says : — 
 " In Ethics we have scarcely, if at all, advanced beyond the 
 highest intellects of Greece or Italy . . . ." Certainly no clearer 
 or truer view could be given of the tendency of the advance- 
 ment of learning than the one put into the mouth of Socrates 
 as quoted above. But is it true that no advance has been 
 made in ethics since the days of Plato ? These notes extend 
 to so great a length that I shall confine myself to the follow- 
 ing few and intentionally very brief remarks, or rather 
 hints : — 
 
 I. Deuteronomy was written a thousand years before 
 the birth of Socrates ; and a long line of inspired Hebrew 
 poets had completed their prophecies before Aristotle even 
 commenced his writings. Nevertheless I think the old 
 Hebrew ethics will bear something more than a very favour- 
 • Plato, Republic, Book vii. 
 
Apioendix. 139 
 
 able comparison with any system of moral philosophy that 
 was ever debated within sight of the Acropolis, up to the 
 day when Paul, at Athens, read the inscription ''to an 
 UNKNOWN God." 
 
 11. Are not the following ethical principles greatly in 
 advance of the teachings of the highest intellects of Greece ? 
 
 Render to no man evil for evil* 
 
 Love your enemies. 
 
 Honour all men. 
 
 All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto 
 you, do ye even so to them. 
 
 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the 
 Church, and gave Himself for it. 
 
 Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is 
 perfect. And, until the Man of sorrows set the example, who 
 had ever gone about "doing good'^'l 
 
 In contrast with these Christian maxims, may be placed 
 the fact, that Plato extols the Athenians for their hatred of 
 foreigners "f*; Aristotle calls abstinence from the retaliation of 
 evil, the mark of a slavish spirit J; and it is well known how 
 the disciple and biographer of Socrates reckons the infliction 
 of injuries upon an enemy, among the most manly of the 
 virtues §. 
 
 In what I have so far said, I have purposely confined 
 myself to the Greek writer on Ethics. A very accomplished 
 author II, while he agrees in the main with the above esti- 
 mate of Plato and Aristotle, expresses the opinion that the 
 case may be somewhat different with the Roman moralist 
 Seneca. Mr Cope says that certain expressions such as 
 'Amicis jucundus, inimicis mitis et facilis.' * Opem ferre 
 
 * Compare this with Aristotle, Ethics, Book v. Chap, v., where he says: 
 " for a man not to retaliate evil, appears to be slavishness of mind." The play 
 upon the word Gratitude in the next clause, proves that the great ethical philo- 
 sopher includes private retaliation, as well as public justice. 
 
 t Menexenua, § 17. But see Whewell. t Ethics, Chap. v. Book v. 
 
 § XenophoD, Anabasis. 
 
 II A Reviexo of Aristotle's Ethics, (Deighton, Bell, and Co., Cambridge), pp. 
 55^ 56. t»y t^e Rev. E. M. Cope, Senior Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College. 
 
140 Appendix. 
 
 etiam iDimicis.' * Yincit malos pertinax bonitas.' And espe- 
 cially ' Non est quod irascaris ; ignosce illis, omnes insani- 
 unt :' " come so near to the Christian precepts, that in this 
 case, at least, Christianity has nothing that can be called 
 absolutely original, and has done little more than extend 
 and enlarge moral conceptions, which had by one at least 
 been previously entertained." Mr Cope adds that the ex- 
 pression, ' Sed non est quod irascaris, ignosce illis, omnes 
 insaniunt ' has been compared by M. Fleury with ' Father 
 forgive them, they know not what they do' (!!). If the two 
 expressions are in reality comparable, then I confess I am 
 incapable of appreciating moral differences. 
 
 The reader will probably be as much amazed as I am if 
 he will translate for himself the entire passage from Seneca, 
 of which the quotation above forms a part : I will not venture 
 on the English expression of certain of the clauses which in 
 the original are painful: "Catoni populus Romanus prseturam 
 negavit, consulatum pernegavit. Ingrati publice sumus. se 
 quisque interroget : nemo non aliquem queritur ingratum. 
 atqui non potest fieri, ut omnes querantur, nisi querendum 
 est de omnibus : omnes ergo ingrati sunt : [ingrati] tantum ? 
 et cupidi omnes et maligni omnes et timidi omnes, illi in 
 primis qui videntur audaces. adice, et ambitiosi omnes sunt 
 et inpii omnes. Sed non est quod irascaris. ignosce illis: 
 omnes insaniunt. Nolo te ad incerta revocare, ut dicam : 
 vide quam ingrata sit juventus : quis non patri suo supre- 
 mum diem, ut innocens sit, optat ? ut moderatus sit, exspec- 
 tat ? ut pius, cogitat ? Quotus quisque uxoris optimoe mor- 
 tem timet, ut non et computet?" Sen. de Beneficiis, Lib. V. 
 c. 17. Does this approach the Divine Morality of the 
 Gospel ? Is this the conception of Christian ethics ? I, for 
 one, could as easily acquiesce in the correctness of Mr Buckle's 
 conception of the Pauline Epistles, when he writes, ''that 
 some of the most beautiful passages in the Apostolic writings 
 are quotations from Pagan authors, is well known (?!!) to 
 every scholar." !! 
 
 But in forming an estimate of the superiority of Chris- 
 
Appendix. 141 
 
 tian over Ancient Ethics, there are two circumstances to be 
 borne in mind over and above the ethical principles themselves. 
 First, it is a great peculiarity of Christianity, that it presents 
 the model of a Life for the Christian's imitation. Secondly, 
 it undertakes to provide a transforming power, whereby its 
 precepts may be spontaneously obeyed. For in proportion 
 to the degree in which the Christian realizes his calling, he 
 surrenders his will and his affections to a living Christ, ever 
 present to his vision by the eye of faith ; and hence not only 
 are the unlovely passions and emotions of his natural heart 
 subdued by the expulsive power of a new affection, but by 
 virtue of the bond which unites himself to Christ, he becomes 
 united to his fellow-Christians by the strongest of ties. Nay, 
 this feeling, thus divinely inspired, is more comprehensive 
 still; for, just as the well-instructed man sees in flowers, and 
 shrubs, and trees, not the sickly, stunted vegetation, which 
 may chance to be before him, but rather the luxuriance 
 natural to them in a happier climate and a more congenial 
 soil, so the Christian, by virtue of his faith, sees in every man, 
 the man redeemed, he sees the Christ within the man; to 
 him every man becomes a brother, and by an inborn prin- 
 ciple, he becomes a law to himself, spontaneously rendering 
 to no man evil for evil, loving his enemies, and honouring all 
 men. Such are Christian ethics in their truth and purity. 
 When the great Athenian moralist was forming his ideal 
 state, he proposed, for all the ordinances and sanctions of 
 religion, to refer to the Oracle at the Omphalos of the 
 world*; to the Christian, that Omphalos is the CROSS OF 
 CHRIST. 
 
 Note E. 
 
 on the words translated ' faith ' and * trust' in the 
 old testament. 
 
 In the Nottingham Sermon I have insisted on the 
 identity of idea conveyed by the w^ord Trust, in the Old 
 
 * Republic, Book iv. 
 
142 Appendix. 
 
 Testament, with that conveyed by the word Faith, in the 
 New Testament. There is, however, a certain shade of 
 difference between them well worth the reader's observa- 
 tion; and this difference, together with the manner in which 
 the Hebrew words associated with trust, are translated in 
 the Septuagint, will furnish the matter of this note. 
 
 The English w^ord Faith occurs twice only in the Old 
 Testament, and in neither instance has it the distinctive 
 meaning of the New Testament faith. It occurs first in 
 Deut. xxxii. 20, 'Children in whom is no faith;' i.e. who are 
 not to be relied on. It occurs secondly in the well-known 
 passage, Hab. ii. 4, 'The just shall live by his faith.' 
 Although this passage is quoted twice by St Paul, and 
 again once in the Epistle to the Hebrews; nevertheless, the 
 word faith in the original language undoubtedly means 
 steadfastness: the thought, in fact, very closely resembles 
 that in Matt. x. 22, ' He that endureth to the end, shall be 
 saved.' It is presumable that the Apostle Paul quotes the 
 passage from the Old Testament partly on account of the 
 general suitability of the words, and partly because the 
 original thought of steadfastness (or enduring to the end), 
 implies an antecedent ti^ust in Jehovah. 
 
 The Hebrew word H^^D^? thus translated above, Deut. 
 xxxii. 20, and Hab. ii. 4, by the word faith, occurs forty-nine 
 times in the Old Testament. Etymologically, its meaning is 
 steadfastness, something firm and to be relied on; in the 
 English version it is most frequently rendered by faith- 
 fulness ; it is five times applied to an office just as we speak 
 of a trust. This word is also applied to the hands of Moses 
 when they were supported by Aaron and Hur; his hands 
 were 'hands of steadiness.' 
 
 On the whole then, it may be said, that out of the forty- 
 nine times in which the Hebrew word occurs, it on no one 
 occasion signifies reliance upon, or trust in a person. In 
 the single passage, Hab. ii. 4, it may contain or imply the 
 idea of an antecedent trustfulness of spirit. 
 
 Nevertheless, this Mil^JbX is the Hebrew word rendered 
 
Aiopendix. 143 
 
 in the Septuagint about twenty times by the Greek ttlo-tl^ 
 (faith), and I cannot find any other Hebrew word thus ren- 
 dered by the Greek translators. 
 
 The question then arises, are there no words in the Old 
 Testament which really signify trust, or confidence, in the 
 sense of reliance on a person, or on a thing? The repl}^ 
 may be, without great exaggeration, the Old Testament is 
 full of such terms, and yet these words are on no occasion 
 translated by ttlo-tc^. The object of this note is to call atten- 
 tion to the fact, and if possible, to explain it. 
 
 In Hebrew there is a verb, and its correlative substantive, 
 which occur above one hundred and fifty times in the Old 
 Testament in the definite meaning of the English words 
 trust, confidence, reliance. The verb is TWQ"^, to trust in, to 
 confide in; the substantive is nb5& trust, confidence. Their 
 meaning is fixed and definite, and yet these words are not 
 rendered in the Septuagint by Trt'crrt?, but very commonly 
 by eXTTi? (Jiope). There is also another word Jlpn, signifying 
 properly to hasten, and used in the sense of to flee for refuge, 
 ex. gr. under the wings of God, and hence to trust in; it is 
 rendered in the English Version thirty-four times by 'trust:' 
 yet not once in the Septuagint by irlari^, but frequently 
 by e'XTTt?. Can we fairl}^ account for this avoidance of the 
 word iviG-TL^, and this use of the word eXTTi? by the Greek 
 translators? I think we can. 
 
 So long as the Jewish Theocracy continued, there was 
 a constant sense of the presence of the Divine King in the 
 midst of His people. It is to this fact that in page 90, I 
 have referred the absence of any frequent mention of a 
 future life by the saints of old ; for I presume (pace Bp. 
 Warburton) that under their peculiar circumstances, the 
 thought of a future life was rather an unquestioned and 
 settled principle, than an article of religious belief, or an ob- 
 ject of hope. When, however, the long line of the Prophets 
 ceased in Malachi, and thus that last sensible evidence of the 
 presence of the Divine King among His people w^as removed, 
 then it became necessary to express articles of Jewish faith 
 
144 Appendix. 
 
 in words, and the fact of a future life became a dogma or a 
 doctrine. I need hardly say that when that belief was of 
 necessity expressed verbally as a dogma, then by an unhappy 
 principle in our nature, up rose Sadducees and denied it. 
 
 Just on the same general principle, the feeling of a Jew, 
 which, during the Theocracy, had been one of simple trust in 
 a present Jehovah, or a fleeing to him for shelter; after 
 Malachi, became associated in his mind, first with belief in 
 an unseen God, and then followed by reliance on His aid. 
 During the Theocracy the pious Jew never stopped to ask 
 himself whether he believed in God, he trusted Him at once. 
 After Malachi, that which had been a sure and present con- 
 fidence, soon degenerated into a liope. 
 
 And herein I think we have a sufficient explanation how 
 it came about that the Septuagint translators selected words 
 so distinctly associated with belief as T^^il and H^^^?!? 
 for translation by itio-tis;) while they rendered other words 
 distinctly associated with simple trust, viz. HD^ , Hb?^ and 
 T^DT^i by such comparatively inadequate words as iXTrl^co and 
 eXTTi?. An Alexandrine Jew would hope where David would 
 trust I suspect that the same principle admits of a more 
 general application. 
 
 There is an admirable note on a portion of this subject 
 by Professor Lightfoot in his Commentary on the Epistle to 
 the Galatians, p. 153, Ed. ii. The reader is strongly advised 
 to consult it : he will, however, perceive that I have ventured 
 to differ somewhat from the learned Professor in not admit- 
 ting any 'hovering' in the word HJ^^^:^. There is also an 
 excellent paper by the Rev. T. T. Perowne, in the Christian 
 Advocate, for April, 1867; which is worth consulting. 
 
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