LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. LAY SEEMONS LAY SEEMONS <^^ OF Pi5/,.j$5 JAK' 1 9 mi BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH ilontfon MACMILLAN AND CO. 1881 TO AETHUE MITCHELL M.D., LL.D. FELLOW OF THE EOYAL SOCIETY OF ANTIQUAEIES SCOTLAND, COMMISSIONER OF LUNACY FOE SCOTLAND, AN EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVANT, A SOUND ARCHAEOLOGIST, AND A MAN WISE IN THE BEST WISDOM OF LIFE, THESE DISCOUESES ARE WITH SINCERE ESTEEM DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR PREFACE. These Discourses originated in a series of Sabbath evening Addresses, which, at the request of the late excellent Maurice Lothian, I delivered to the Young Men's Association connected with Dr. Guthrie's congre- gation. One or two of the Discourses delivered there, written out after delivery, appear here ; others were delivered on other occasions to different audiences ; some published in Good Words, one in the Contemporary Beview ; and all of them submitted to a severe process of thorough study, revision, and, where necessary, en- largement. I have called them Sermons, not Lectures, because, though some of them were delivered in the form of popular lecture, they have all a direct practical drift, and are intended either to apply Christian Ethics or to expound Christian doctrine in reference to matters of special interest in the present age of theological disturbance and religious transition. viii PREFACE. I may mention that I am in no wise walking out of the proper sphere of my studies in taking up theo- logical subjects, having been educated for the Church, and habitually prosecuted the study of the Scriptures in the original tongues as one of the most fruitful fields of scholarly activity. College, Edinburgh, October 1881. CONTENTS. I. PAGE The Creation op the World ..... 1 II. The Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Lord's Day . 81 III. Faith . . . . . . . . .113 IV. The Utilisation of Evil . . . . . .138 V. Landlords and Land Laws . . . . .157 VI. The Politics of Christianity . . . . .191 X CONTENTS. VII. PAOE The Dignity of Labour . . . . . .221 VIII. The Scottish Covenanters ..... 236 IX. On Symbolism, Ceremonialism, Formalism, and the New Creature . . . . . . .299 APPENDIX. The Metaphysics of Genesis I. .... 333 THE CEEATION OY THE WORLD. (Genesis i. 1-31 ; ii. 1-3.) I HAVE often thought of that strange misfortune of human nature — or wonderful condition of all nature, should we not rather say ? — by which a high power of a good thing so readily becomes a bad thing, and the superlative degree of a great advantage turns over, by a slight touch, into a great disadvantage. Without light, for instance, as we all know, no picture is possible ; but much light certainly spoils the picture ; nay, the greatest skill of the greatest artists is shown in nothing so much as in the cunning management of darkness. Money, again, is a good thing, a very good thing, an indispensable thing : so Aristotle taught on the banks of the Ilissus more than two thousand years ago ; so venerable and thoughtful pundits teach on the banks of the Ganges at the present hour; so cunning Greeks, and canny Scots, and vigorous Englishmen, always have believed, and always will believe, with a most persistent orthodoxy. Yet mountains of money, we see every day, B 2 LAY SERMONS. often serve no other purpose than to smother and to bury the best humanity of the man who has made it ; and as for those who do not make it, but only get it, there is no surer receipt for riding post-haste to perdi- tion than to give a young man of a certain average quality of blood, at a certain stage of his existence, a thousand pounds or two in his pocket. So it has often struck me, in reference to Christianity, that a great many people at the present day really do not know how good a thing it is, merely for tliis reason, that they have got so much of it that their eyes are over-flooded and their ears over-echoed with it ; that they are constantly living in the very atmosphere and breath of it ; so that, as the German proverb says, they " cannot see the wood for trees." The first Christians liad unquestionably this grand advantage over us, which arose out of their great disadvantage ; they saw the gospel directly confronted with idolatry; the God-man Christ Jesus against a sensual Bacchus and a carnal Venus ; light in miracu- lous radiance made more manifest by the pitchy dark- ness through which it shot. It is difficult for some of us in these latter days to get a glimpse of Christianity as the grandest phenomenon in the history of the moral world ; we take out our sectarian spectacles and micro- scopes, and we scan our special form of Christianity — our Episcopacy, our Presbyterianism, our Independency, our Popery — most minutely; but we find the utmost difficulty in getting out of this habit of over-nice in- spection, and adapting our eye to a larger range of CREATION OF THE WORLD. 3 vision. We become, so to speak, short -sighted in spiritual matters, and we see only the fingers and the nails of the great statue of divine Truth, not the whole figure. Nay, worse ; there are some of us who have got into an evil habit of looking exclusively at the small spots and scratches which our microscopic habits have taught us to discover on the fair nails of the statue ; and we seem vastly conceited with this dis- covery. There is nothing which seems to delight a certain class of minds so much as finding faults in beautiful things ; as Coleridge tells a story of a smart Cockney who could see nothing in Dannecker's beauti- ful statue of Ariadne at Frankfort, but a few blue spots in the marble, " very like Stilton cheese " ! Comments not very different in spirit, I fear, are often made on the Divine image of moral beauty presented to us in the gospel, and on some of the more prominent pass- ages of the Bible. Among others, the first chapter of Genesis, which has always appeared to me a perfect model of sublime and simple wisdom, has come in for its fair share of microscopic inspection, and of short- sighted misconception. It has been curiously dissected in parts, but not looked at as a whole, or comprehended in its grand drift and universal significance ; it has been tortured into all shapes by all sorts of impertinent scientific appliances, instead of being looked at as a revelation of the great lines of theological and philo- sophical truth ; it has been confronted with Playfair and Hutton, and the minute shell- fish of Murchison's 4 LAY SERMONS. Silurian rocks, not, as it ought to have been, with Homer, and Hesiod, and Thales, and Heraclitus, or the portentous cosmogonies of the Indian Puranas. It is my intention, in the present paper, to present the Mosaic account of the creation in its natural grand points of contrast with the heathen mythologies and philosophies which it supplanted ; to show by what profound, though plain, statements of eternal wisdom, it has declared for all times and all places a philosophy of the divine architecture of the world, beyond which the human mind can never reach ; and to accustom the thoughtful reader to look seriously upon this most venerable of all documents, in its own natural aspect and attitude, placed where it properly stands in the moral and intellectual history of the world, not, as it may appear, after having been forced into all sorts of unnatural positions, by curious speculations of merely physical science, which, whether true or false, do not in the slightest degree affect its theological import. What, then, I ask, are the grand truths, philoso- phical or theological (for philosophy and theology at the fountain-head are one), which this document reveals ? It appears to me that they naturally arrange themselves under the following heads : — I. In the first place we have the philosophy of Creation. And here we must first ask what the Mosaic record means by this word. It is a word, as commonly used, which goes into depths which a man CREATION OF THE WORLD. 5 with human thought can no more fathom, than with human legs he can tread the pathless air. Creation, we say, is " to make something out of nothing ; " and this is the meaning of the word which, with a few exceptions, we believe, has always been accepted by the Christian Church. But the creation of something out of nothing, though it may be concluded from specu- lative reasons, and is generally supposed to be enun- ciated in the words of the Apostle (Hebrews xi. 3), is an abstract metaphysical truth, and does not .naturally lie in the scope of the Scriptures, given as they were mainly for the purposes of practical piety, and for intel- lectual enlightenment only so far as this is necessary to achieve that end. We shall not, therefore, be sur- prised to find that the idea of creation out of nothing, however it may have entered the system of Christian doctrine, certainly does not lie in the words or in the scope of the Mosaic account of creation. By creation, Moses means only the creation of order out of con- fusion : this is certain, both from the whole drift of the document, and from the meaning of the Hebrew word hara (identical with our word hear ; Greek, <^epa) ; Latin, fero, pario ; Sanscrit, hJiri), as expounded by Gesenius and other lexicographers. Sanscrit scholars tell us that there is not in the whole vocabulary of the Brahmanic language, copious as it is, a single word answering to our word matter;'^ this I beKeve. Equally ^ See the learned and ingenious exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis, lately published by Dr. Ballantyne. 6 LAY SEEMOXS. certain is it to me that in the Hebrew language there is no word answering to our idea of " to create out of nothing ; " for this plain reason, that the grand ex- cellence of the Hebrew theology lies in its avoidance of all subtle and unprofitable questions, and founding godly action on the faith of those unquestioned divine truths which every soundly-constituted intellect can comprehend. If there is one point more than another which distinguishes the tlieology of Moses from that of the Vedas, and some of the Greek philosophers, it is this — its essential and per\^ading practicality. Theo- logical truths exciting only to subtle speculation, and leading to no practical result, are not propounded by Moses. Creation out of nothing, however true, is a barren truth for us ; for, with our finite faculties, we cannot comprehend it, and even if we did, we could make no use of the conception. But the other meaning of creation, which Moses enunciates, though it does not puzzle our idle wit, tells us something which, while it is absolutely and eternally true, is clearly comprehen- sible by every rational being, and is capable of being turned to use by us at every moment of our existence. Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence. Everything that exists in the world, everytliing that has either been made by God, or has been produced by man, of any CREATION OF THE WORLD. 7 permanent value, is only some manifestation of order in its thousandfold possibilities. Everything that has a shape is a manifestation of order; shape is only a consistent arrangement of parts; shapelessness is found only in the whirling columns that sweep across African Saharas; but even these columns have their curious balance, which calculators of forces might fore- tell, and the individual grains of sand of which they are composed reveal mathematical miracles to the microscope. Every blade of grass in the field is measured ; the green cups and the coloured crowns of every flower are cviriously counted; the stars of the firmament wheel in cunningly calculated orbits ; even the storms have their laws. In human doings and human productions we see everywhere the same mani- festation. Well-ordered stones make architecture; well-ordered social regvilations make a constitution and a police ; well-ordered ideas make good logic ; well- ordered words make good writing ; well-ordered imagi- nations and emotions make good poetry ; well-ordered facts make science. Disorder, on the other hand, makes nothing at all, but unmakes everything. Stones in disorder produce ruins ; an ill-ordered social condi- tion is decline, revolution, or anarchy ; ill-ordered ideas are absurdity ; ill-ordered words are neither sense nor grammar; ill-ordered imaginations and emotions are madness ; ill-ordered facts are chaos. What then is this wonderful enchanter called ordek ? What exactly do we mean by it ? If we look into it more narrowly 8 LAY SERMONS. we shall find that it implies the separation, di\'ision, and distribution of things according to their qualities, in certain definite well -calculated times and spaces. Number and measure are of the essence of it. The sands of the desert cannot be numbered — at least not by us ; relatively to our faculties they are mere chaos. But the soldiers of a well-ordered army, arranged in rank and file, can be numbered, and their thousands told, with as much ease as the units of a small sum, if only the arrangement be completed. So then order consists in dividing a confused multitude of individual elements into groups that bear a natural resemblance to one another in kind, in number, and in measure. A squad of full-grown soldiers, five in front, and three in depth, like the band of the old Greek chorus, is per- fect order; each unit being like the other, and the whole being composed of parts that bear a definite relation of equality or proportion to the whole ; the many under the controlling power of order have be- come one, and with that unity have acquired a distinct character, and are capable of answering a definite pur- pose. This, and this only, is the difference between an avalanche of shattered rocks on the storm-battered sides of Mont Blanc or Ben Muic-Dhuibh, and the stable piles of the Memphian pyramids, or the chaste columns of the Parthenon ; between what the great Scotch poet paints as " Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world," CREATION OF THE WORLD. 9 and tlie beautiful procession of things which Moses describes as marching forth into existence at the fiat of the Omnipotent. So it is with forms. Forces also are subject to the same law. Take a kettle of boiling water. Look at the steam coming out of its neck ; how it bubbles and blows and puffs and whiffs and wheezes, and makes all sorts of irregular inorganic movements and noises. The atoms of which that vapour is com- posed are, as the chemist well knows, composed of ele- ments that come not together at random, but are subject to a calculation as nice and exact as those which measure the orbits of the stars, and the flux and reflux of the tides ; but the vapoury mass itself, as it issues from the kettle, is a blind force, not produced with any object other than that of disengaging itself, and not productive of any result such as well-ordered forces are daily seen to produce. "Well ! take that same hot vapour, spitting and spurting in its wild unlicensed way, and confine it in a cylinder ; then by the calculated injection of cold water, cause it to contract and expand at certain inter- vals ; and the originally blind force, made subject now to calculation and order and law, becomes a serviceable power, which, acting on a series of pistons, beams, and wheels, becomes a steam-engine ! — a machine which, like a Briareus with a hundred arms, can achieve all sorts of weighty work, with a touch as light as the hand of a little child playing with a hoop. And thus an idle puff of evanescent vapour becomes the great wonder and wonder-worker of the age ; the greatest mechanical 10 LAY SERMONS. wonder, perliaps, of all ages that have been since the world began. Such are the triumphs of order. ^ II. In the second jjlace, we have the Cause of Ceeation. If aU things, knowable and cognisaljle, are only different forms of order, the question arises, Hoiu is crrder produced .? Kow, in order to look with proper reverence at the profound simplicity with which Moses has answered this question, the best thing we can do is to inquire, first, how the great popular oracles of ancient times answered it. "What does Homer say ? — " Ocean the prime generator of gods, and Tethys the mother.'' i What does Hesiod say, who was a greater authority in these matters with the Greeks, because he was a doctor of di%'inity — or all that the good Boeotians had for one — about eight hundred years before Christ, and wrote a genealogy of the gods, meant to instruct the Greeks in those very matters in which we are now instructed by the first chapter of Genesis. Well, this Bceotian theo- loger says : — " In the beginning was Chaos : and after Chaos primeval Earth Lroad-breasted, the firm foundation of aU that existeth ; Mirrky Tartarus then in the hroad--wayed Earth's aljy.?mal Deep recesses ; then Love, the fairest of all the Immortals, Love, that loosens the firm-knit limb, and sweetly subdueth "Widest of men to her ^vill, and gods that rule in Olympus, Then from Chaos was Eeebcs bom, and the sable-vested 1 Eiad, xiv. 201. CKEATION OF THE WORLD. 11 Night ; from Night came Ether, and glorious Day into being, Born from Niglit, when Erebus knew her with kindly embrace- ment. Earth, then, like to herself in breadth produced the expanded Starry Heaven, to curtain the Earth, and provide for Immortals Lucid seats on the brazen floors of unshaken Olympus ; Also from Earth the Mountains came forth, the lofty, the rugged, Dear to Oread Nymphs who haimt the rocky retirement. Then the billowy Sea, the bare, the briny, the barren. Fatherless, born of herself ; but after, in kindly erabracement She to Heaven brought forth the vast deep-eddying Ocean ; Likewise Cqeus, and Crius, Iapetus, and HYPERfoN, Theia, Rhea, and Themis, and Memory, mother of Muses, Phcebe, with golden diadem bound, and beautiful Tethys." Along with this specimen of cosmogonic speculation from the most intellectual people of the West, we shall wisely set down the corresponding conclusions of the most celebrated people of the early East — the Babylon- ians. Their doctrine concerning the creation of the world we have from three sou'rces, — from the works of Berosus, a learned Chaldean historian, who flourished in the time of Alexander the Great ; from the report of Damascius, a subtle Greek speculator, who wrote a work about the principles of things some four hundred years after our era ; and, lastly, from certain tablets of the ancient Cuneiform writing, the decipherment of which has encircled with such a halo of glory the philo- logy of the nineteenth century. I set them down here in this order. 12 LAY SERMONS. Beeosus. " There was a time in wldcli what existed was mere darkness and water ; and in the darkness and the water animals of strange and monstrous forms were produced. Men were bom, some with two wings, and some with four wings and two faces, and with one body and two heads, one of a man, and one of a woman. " And there were other men, -vs-ith goats' legs and goats' horns ; others with horses' hoofs ; others had the hinder part of their bodies as the body of horses, and the front of men, like what the Greeks call Hippocentaurs ; and there were also produced buUs with the heads of men, and dogs with four bodies, but with fishes' tails ; also dog-headed horses, and men and other animals with the heads and bodies of horses, and the tails of fish ; and other animals, of all kinds of strange shapes. In addi- tion to these there were fish and creeping things and serpents. There were other animals of strange and mysterious form, as they are to be seen represented in the temple of Belus. They say, further, that a woman ruled over all these, whose name was Omorca, or, as it is called in the Chaldean language, Thalatth, which in Greek is OdXarra, the sea. "Things being in this condition, Belus came and clove the woman through the middle in two. Of the one half of her he made the earth, and of the other half he made the heavens, and caused all the animals to CREATION OF THE WOELD. 13 perish. Then the annalist goes on to say that these things were allegories of what exists in nature : the whole of things being water, and animals being pro- duced in it. This god, he further declares, cut off his own head ; and the other gods mingled the blood with the clay, and therewith formed men ; and from this cause they are intelligent, and participate in the Divine mind. Further, they say that Belus, which they inter- pret as Zeu? or Jove, separated the earth from the heavens, and arranged the universe, but that the animals, not being able to endure the power of the air, perished ; whereupon, seeing the world waste and uninhabited, he ordered one of the gods to produce other animals, able to endure the light ; and Belus created the sun and the moon and the five planets." ^ Damascius. " Of the Barbarians the Babylonians seem to make no mention of one original first cause of the universe, but give us two — Tauthe and Apason, the latter the husband of the former, and this female power they call the mother of the gods. From this pair they say a son was born, called Moumin", which I conceive to be the intelligible world, proceeding from two principles. From the same pair another offspring came forth, named Lache and Lachos ; and again, from the same another pair, KissARE and Assofos, from whom were born three, ^ Berosi qure supersuiit. Edit. Richter. Lips. 1825, p. 49. 14 LAY SERMONS. Anos, and Illinos, and Aos ; from which Aos and Dauke a son was born, Belus, whom they call the demiurge or artificer of the universe." ^ Chaldean Account of the Creation, the first tablet. 1. When the upper region was not yet called Heaven, 2. And the lower region was not yet called Earth, 3. And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms, 4. Then the Chaos of Waters gave birth to all of them, 5. And the waters were gathered into one place. 6. No men yet dwelt together ; no animals yet wandered about ; 7. None of the gods had yet been born. 8. Their names were not spoken ; their attributes were not known. 9. Then the eldest of the gods — 10. Lakhma and Lakhama — were born, 1 1 . And grew up, 1 2. AssAR and Kissar were born next, 13. And lived through long periods. 14. ANU. THE FIFTH TABLET. 1. He constructed dwellings for the great gods. 2. He fixed up constellations, whose figures were like animals. 3. He made the year ; into four quarters he divided it. 4. Twelve months he established, with their constellations, three by three. 5. And for the days of the year he appointed festivals. 1 DamcLseii qusestioiies de i>rincipiis. Edit. Kop})., 1826, p. 384. CREATION OF THE WORLD. 15 6. He made dwellings for the planets, for their rising and setting. 7. And that nothing should go amiss, and that the course of none should be retarded, 8. He placed with them the dwellings of Bel and Hea. 9. He opened great gates on every side ; 10. He made strong the portals, on the left hand and on the right ; 11. In the centre he placed Luminaries. 12. The Moon he appointed to rule the night, 13. And to wander through the night until the dawn of day. 14. Every month without fail he made holy assembly days. 15. In the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night, 16. It shot forth its horn to illuminate the Heavens. 17. On the seventh day he appointed a holy day, 18. And to cease from all business he commanded, 19. Then arose the Sun in the horizon of Heaven in glory.^ Now, these are curious, and in some views beautiful, passages ; but when we reflect seriously, and begin to ask what wisdom they contain, we feel a terrible void — a void as terrible as the chaos which is the first link in this strange genealogy. Our pious desire to know what may be known of things supersensible is rudely baffled ; and ^ Records of the Past, vol. ix. Assyrian texts. Translator — H. Fox Talbot, F.R.S. This translator, however, is not confirmed by Smith and Sayce in the indication of the Jeioish Sabbath, which he flatters himself to have discovered in the I7th and 18th lines. These lines appear thus in Sayce's edition of Smith's Chaldean account of Genesis, Loudon, 1880: — (17) "On the seventh day thy circle — the moon's — begins to fill ; (18) but open in darkness will remain the half on the riglit ; " and on this 18th line Professor Sayce remarks that the ver- sion given is Dr. Oppert's, but the line is so mutilated as to make any attempt at translation extremely doubtful. 16 LAY SERMONS. we see plainly that we have been fooled in expecting wisdom from this quarter ; certainly they from whom we asked bread have given us a stone. Let us take the Greek first ; and at the first glance it becomes plain that the old doctor of Boeotian theology does not touch the important question at all which we have now raised — What is the cause of order ? He only tells you that before order was chaos, and that light was evolved out of darkness. This is all very true as a historical sequence — ^just as true as that a chicken comes out of an ^gg, or a child out of the womb. But the point of cause is not touched on at all ; for the egg is certainly not the cause of the chicken, as we all know that it required a hen previously to produce the egg. As little, when I take a phosphorus match, and by rubbing it on the hearthstone, produce light, can it be said that this darkness, out of which the light came, caused the light ; it only preceded it. Hesiod and Homer, it will be observed, do not at all agree in the first link that they set forth in the great chain of existing things. The secular poet says that all the gods are produced from Ocean and Tethys — the male and female powers of water ; the theological doctor, that Chaos and Earth were first; that Chaos had no productive power; but that from Earth were produced Tartarus, Night, Day, Heaven, Ocean, etc., and by descent from them, as the sequel of the poem teaches, Jove, Apollo, Juno, Venus, and all the heavenly Powers. But in one thing they both agree : they speak of an evolution and a develop- CREATION OF THE WORLD. 17 ment by the ordinary method of generation, which, as we all know, is not a cause but a process. When grain is put into the hopper of a mill, it will certainly be drawn in, and by a constant action of wisely-arranged machinery come out changed into well -ground meal. But the clear perception of this process does not help me a single step to the comprehension of that other question. How came the mill to be so curiously contrived, and whence came the grain that was put into the hopper ? Or again, if in a large manufactory you see a little wheel which takes its motion from the teeth of a hvj: wheel, and that big wheel takes its motion from a yet bigger wheel, and that wheel again from a rolling cylinder, and that cylinder from a perpendicular shaft, and that shaft from a horizontal beam ; in such a case you would never dream for a moment of confounding the different steps by which the motion is conveyed with the source of the motion ; you must go on till you come to the steam and the water, and the boiler and the fire, and beyond that also you must go till you come to James Watt. The cause of the motion of the little wheel with which you commenced is the mind of James Watt, directing, for a certain purpose, the elastic force of the aeriform water, which we call steam. So we say to wise old Homer, whose writings the Greeks fondly conceited themselves to contain all wisdom, What do you mean when you say that Ocean is the prime generator of gods? Do you mean only that, according to the old adage, " water is best," not be- c 18 LAY SERMONS. cause the inventors of that proverb were total abstainers, but because that without water no living organism can exist (turn water into a solid — as at the poles — and all vegetation ceases) ; and, therefore, that the existence of water is the first condition of all vital being on this earth ? This we wilHngly believe ; but it is only one important fact connected with a great process ; for when you are singing the praises of water, Heraclitus, the son of Blyson, a grave old gentleman who philoso- phised at Ephesus about four hundred years after Homer, bethinks himself that as all water becomes solid by the abstraction of heat, so the existence of water is possible only under the supposition that Fire previously exists. Fire, therefore, or heat, or, if you pre- fer a learned Latin word, caloric, is the first principle or cause of all things. Well, this seems to go a little bit farther than either Homer or Hesiod ; but, after all, our thinking appetite has got nothing that it can feed on ; for what is Fire ? And whatever it be, what virtue has it to produce order ? Does it not rather, in our expe- rience, tend as much to produce disorder ? Is it not one of the great agents of dissolution, destruction, and death ? Strange ! Nevertheless the chemist comes in and tells me very dogmatically, that w^hatever heat may be, it acts, in his department at least, in a very orderly way ; for the elements to whose mutual action it is necessary, will not unite except in certain fixed and definite proportions, the recognition of which is now necessary to the most rudimentary knowledge of CREATION OF THE WORLD. 19 chemistry. Water, to whose atomical composition we previously alluded, is made up of two gases or airs — oxygen and hydrogen — which, in forming that com- pound, will unite only in the proportion of two bulks of the latter to one of the former. And in the same way of all other bodies. The elements of which they are composed are combined, under the expansive action of heat, in certain curiously calculated proportions. And in this way we seem plainly to arrive at the old doctrine of Pythagoras, promulgated about 550 before Christ, that number or measure is the first principle of all things. But this also is only a fact, not a cause. For the cause of Number, which indeed is only another name for order, and for that cunning proportion among the atoms of compound bodies which the great Dalton discovered, we must go a step beyond Dalton, a step beyond Pythagoras, a step beyond Heraclitus, a step beyond Homer. Will the Babylonian help us to make this step? Scarcely. Belus, no doubt, is the great plastic artificer — Srj/jLiovp'yo'; — who disposes the primi- tive jumble of things into the existing beautiful order, by the action, one must suppose, though it is not ex- pressly said, of a designing intellect ; but whence came Belus ? Like Zeus in the Greek mythology, he is not a primitive self-existent power, but the product of pre- existent forces ; he is more indeed than Jove, whom the Greeks worshipped as the supreme head of the existing order of affairs, physical and moral, but not as the author of that order. Belus seems really, in some 20 LAY SERMONS. sense, to be the author of the world which he governs ; but like an heir to an entailed, neglected, mismanaged, and bankruj)t estate, he receives it rather as an inherit- ance to recreate and to remodel, than as a possession lorded from the first by no one but himself. In fact, so far as one can see from our fragmentary notices, the Supreme God of the Babylonians, no less than the Jove of the Greeks, is conceived in the first place as the effective result of a historical sequence, rather than as the prime figure in a chain of metaphysical causation. And we may say generally, I imagine, that in all polytheistic mythologies the purely theological or metaphysical question of the original cause of the creation lies outside of the popular conception of the gods, who demand our fear and our acknowledgment directly as the unseen con- trolling agents of those mysterious phenomenal forces, on which the happiness of human beings to such a gi'eat extent depends. Their earliest cosmogonic poetry, accordingly, would give them no answer to a question which the popular intellect had never raised. The utmost that the Bceotian theologer could do, was to bring in "Epco'i Ho^o?, love or desire, as the fourth term in his list of original forces ; but Jl6do<; was not a creative god eminently — only a name to express in a personal figure that miraculous blind instinct by which men are led to the reproduction of their kind. Gods and men, somehow or other, are produced by a transcen- dental process of generative evolution, of which love or DESIRE is the motive force, as water is the motive force CREATION OF THE WORLD. 21 of a mill-wlieel. And the dualism of male and female, which lies at the bottom equally of the Babylonian and the Hellenic cosmogony, plainly shows that the whole scheme has been devised after the analogy of the common process of generation in our little dependent world, without ascending to the idea of an independent, self-existent Cause of the Creation, such as we are now seeking for. That they might have found out such a cause without much difficulty, had they been inclined, there seems no reason to doubt ; for, as Paul says (Eomans i. 20), the visible things of the universe stand out as a living blazon of the invisible excellence behind, which only the blind can fail to perceive. But as a man will sometimes not hear even the sound of a cannon, when his faculties are diverted far off in a different direction ; so the people that formed those early cosmogonies, being in a poetical and imaginative, rather than a philosophic and metaphysical stage of being, either allowed the question of the ultimate cause of the cosmic order to drop altogether, or solved it in a half-hearted blundering sort of way, which could satisfy only the half- thinkers. Let us see then how we have to proceed now-a-days, when, brushing aside all those strange cosmogonic imaginations, we essay to find the ultimate cause of the cosmic order from observing carefully what takes place under our own eyes. We have constantly, in every action of life, to do with order and disorder ; we are constantly em- ployed in creating either the one or the other ; so we 22 ' LAY SERMOXS. cannot be at a loss to discover their cause. A father makes a present of a curious toy to his little bov. Tommy amuses himself with it for a day or two, or it may be a week or more, according to the laws of legiti- mate sport in youthful gentlemen ; but in due season he tires of it, and longs for something new ; and to make public proclamation to papa and other powerful patrons that the old toy has served its purpose, he takes it all to pieces some morning before papa is out of bed, and strews the fragmentary pegs and wheels and springs, and various -coloured beads, upon the parlour floor in motley confusion. Here we have an example of the creation of disorder. How? In the simplest way possible ! By utter thoughtlessness, and a restless, impatient activity on the part of a witless child. The boy needed no wisdom to achieve this deed. He did not purposely wish to do anything ; he only wished to undo a thing that another had done. What was necessary for the accomplishment of such a purely negative result ? Nothing but blind force. A monkey in sport, as readily as a man with a reasoning purpose, could do a business of this kind ; a maundering idiot, an unreasoning madman, as easily as an Aristotle, a ISTewton, or a Gioberti. Blind force, therefore, unreasoning, uncalculating impulse, is the author of disorder. But with the making even of the simplest toy it is quite a different afiair. We know that no most assiduous action of blind puffs and strokes will make a toy. Toys are made by in- CREATION OF THE WORLD. 23 genious, thinking minds, and by a series of pro- cesses, of which ingenious, thinking minds are the authors. We find, therefore, that mind, and mind only, disposes a few pieces of painted wood, flexible steel, and shining studs, into that finely calculated trifle which we call a toy. So we find in all other cases. A wild, raging, passion-stung rabble can pull down a palace in a few hours, which it required years of thoughtful toil in the architect to scheme, and in the builder to erect. A sudden fit of what we call fever, which is a violent irregular action of the blood and venous system, will turn into a chaotic babblement the utter- ance of a mind, whose words, before this intrusion of a disorderly force, might have hymned the poetry of the universe in a lofty epos, or directed the fate of kingdoms by a salutary ordinance. All that exists without and beyond chaos exists only by virtue of indwelling or controlling mind — mind not cognitive merely and con- templative, but active ; that is to say, intelligent force, as contrasted with blind force. Here, therefore, we have, within the space of our own direct knowledge and experience, the most indubitable proof of the real cause of order. In no branch of the many-armed activity of human life do we see any other principle than this at work — mind constantly the cause of order ; disorder as constantly proceeding from the absence of mind. Nor is there the slightest room to suppose that, while we make this conclusion safely with regard to what falls within our human sphere of action, we are making a 24 LAY SERMONS. rasli leap into the dark when we say that the presence of a like mind always and everywhere is the cause, and the only cause, of all orderly operations and results in the external universe. For the order which we per- ceive in the external universe is exactly similar to that which we create by our own activity ; and to suppose different or contrary causes for effects altogether similar and identical is unphilosophical, Nay, more ; the most curious machines which we can make, with the highest . power of our most highly cultivated reason, have already been made, and are already constructed in the world over which we exercise no control, exactly on the same principles as those which are the product of our thought- directed finger. The eye, as everybody knows, is a telescope. The man who doubts that the power which made the human eye is, in its manner of working, not only similar to, but absolutely identical with, the mind which invented the telescope, may as well doubt whether the little paper boat which young Bobbie or Billy launches upon the pond floats there upon the same principle by which the mighty ocean bears the armadas of England and France and America upon its bosom. Doubters of this description labour under a disease for which argument certainly is not the proper cure.-' ^ The self-evidential character of the world, as the expression of order and design in a plastic mind, is the reason why this truth has been universally recognised wherever men existed in the normal state, or unsophisticated by the perversity and puzzle-headedness of a later CREATION OF THE WORLD. 25 We have tlius arrived at the cause of order, in a very simple way, by actual experience of the fact, than which nothing, — no, not even the boasted necessity of mathe- matics, — is more certain. It is not more certain that two and two make four, or that the angle at the centre of a circle is double the angle at the circumference, generation of sophists, more anxious to show their own cleverness by making petty objections, than to repose on the deep bosom of catholic truth. How different the wretched quibbling of a Hume iu this view from the healthy instinct of Aristotle, "the great master of those who know," who assumes the catholic utterance of human instinct in this matter as the postulate of all reasonable thinking with regard to the cause of the order which is the universe. 'Apxaios fxh oZv rtj X670S TTttt TraTpios iari Traatv dvOpuTroLS ihs eK 6eov to. iravra Kal Stot deov Tjfj.ii' avviaTrjKeV ov8e/j.la di (pvcn^ aiirr] KaO' iavrriv a.vTdpK7]S iprj/J-udelcra T^y (K TovTou cruTripia$ {Dc Mitndo, 6), which is just what St. Paul says in Acts xvii. 28. See also the beautiful passage from the great thinker's exoteric works in Cicero, de Nat. dcoriim, ii. 37. The theology of Aristotle, which has to be collected from various passages of his meta- physics and physical tracts, is thus concisely and distinctly stated by BiEsi;, — " Neither the universal in separation from the individual, nor the individual for itself, can be the principle of the actual and spiritual world ; but the alone absolute principle is God, the highest self -thinking Eeason, which is unlimited energy ; His thought is DEED ; and his deeds are the vital and vivifying principle through, which only the world becomes possessed of actuality and truth " (BlEsfe, Philosophic dcs Aristoteles, Berlin, 1835, vol. i. p. 611). The self-think- ing force is called by Ai'istotle, vdrjcris voiiaews, thinking of which thought is the subject, as an artist thinks of his own self- engendered idea, and not about anything external. He shapes from his shaping thought, and acts as a god so far as the giving of actuality to concep- tion is concerned ; only, not having life in himself, he cannot confer vitality on his realised conceptions. But God is not only thought, but life, and His thought is essentially vital. 26 LAY SERMONS. than it is that a grand exhibition of curiously calculated reasonable results could not have proceeded from the action of a blind, unreasoning force, or the combination of a host of such forces. Yet must we not be surprised if the world and the wise men of the world did not at once arrive at this natural, necessary, and inevitable conclusion. In the secret consciousness of the healthy human intellect, the thought of the eternal, universal cause, no doubt, ever resides, not only as the greatest truth, but as the root of all possible truth. The wide- spread existence of Polytheistic forms of faith forms no exception to this rule. Every form of Polytheism either acknowledges one Supreme God as the preserver of order in the universe — as Jove among the Greeks ; or at least conceives the existence of certain superhuman powers, which, if they do not act always on the noblest principles, nevertheless are there, and do act in some way to preserve the recoguised order of the universe, so far as human minds in a very low state of culture are capable of recognising that order. For it must be observed that the order of the physical universe, how- ever cunning and certain, is on so great a scale, and involves so many complex relations, that unthinking and uncalculating minds may often fail to have any very clear perception of it. The cleverest monkey, with all the action of its most clever conceits, will remain at an infinite distance from the possibility of comprehending a steam-engine; and men born with- out the organ of tune shall have their ears besieged CREATION OF THE WORLD. 27 by all the sweet, subtle forces of a Mozart and a Beethoven in vain. As there are individual men de- ficient in certain faculties and sensibilities, so there may be whole races of men whose faculty of think- ing is so little cultivated that they have very little idea of what thought means in their own narrow, meagre life ; much less are they able to rise to a clear perception of that thoughtful order of things in the great whole, which made the Greeks designate the visible universe so significantly a /cocr/io?, or garniture. Besides, many things are constantly taking place in the physical and moral world, which, to a superficial view, seem actually the result, not of reasonable calculation, but of bKnd force. Storms, hurricanes, blights, burnings, volcanic explosions, subterranean quakings of the earth, civil wars, murders, rapines, and the triumphal march of prosperous injustice, as it appears, are phenomena which, even to thoughtful minds, have often suggested horrible forecasts of Atheism and blind Necessity. Deeper thought, no doubt, always teaches the absurdity of fixing our eyes on these irregular, and, to us, incal- culable, exhibitions of force, as any foundation for systematic atheism. The connection and ultimate pur- pose of all the violent and most sweeping movements of the world can no more be comprehended by us than a fish can comprehend the currents of the ocean in which it swims, or a fly the revolutions of the wheel on which it has fixed itself. But the existence of these irregular, and, so far as their immediate and most obvious opera- 28 LAY SERMONS. tion goes, destructive phenomena, may, along with a low state of culture, easily explain the existence of a sort of atheism among various races of men. I do not see, however, any proof that absolute atheism, or the belief in an absolute unreasoning Something, without a name, as the cause of the definite reasonable Something, which we call the world, has ever prevailed extensively among the human race. The Buddhists, it has been said, are atheists. But the atheism which they profess,^ is, so far as my studies have taught me, not so much a formal denial of intellectual causality in the universe, as a fixture of the feeling of reverence upon a great human preacher of righteousness, to the neglect of the great fountain of all righteousness. This is a very different thing from the perverse scepticism of certain irreverent individuals of highly cultivated intellect, who can bring themselves to believe in no intelligent author of the universe, because, with all their cleverness, they are so shallow as not to know the difference between a cause and a sequence, or because they are so despotic in a certain intellectual selfishness as not to be willing to allow any intellect in the universe superior to their own. Such men require a moral conversion, not a logical refutation. Professed and vainglorious atheists must just be allowed to pass as ghosts which haunt the day, with which a sound living eye can hold no converse — ^ See the chapter " Buddhism " in my Natural History of Atheism. London, 1877. CREATION OF THE WORLD. 29 " Just are the ways of God, And justifiable to men ; Unless tliere be wbo think not God at all ; If any be, they walk obscure ; For of such doctrine never was there school, But the heart of tlie fool, And no man therein doctor but himself." We have now talked over some twenty-eight pages, and yet are not beyond the breadth of that significant verse : IN the beginning god created the heaven and THE EARTH. We have seen how Hesiod and Homer and Heraclitus dealt with this important matter, and how tliey failed to approach the sublime significance of that enunciation. But let us not believe that all the Greeks who sought after wisdom were so unfortunate as their first pioneers. On the contrary, the wisest Greeks declare the doctrine of the first book of Moses in the plainest terms. Of these pious heathen philosophers, the name is legion ; but we shall content ourselves with three of the most notable — Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Let their testimony, however, be preceded fitly by something perhaps older than the oldest of them, certainly of a more venerable and hoary pedigree. " The first Being," says the great Indian Epos, "the Mahabharata, is called Manasa,^ or Intellectual, and is so celebrated by great sages ; he is God without be- ginning or end, indivisible, immortal, undecaying." ^ ^ Latin, viens ; Greek, /xivos ; German, mcincn ; English, mean, mind. " Wilson's Vishnu Purana, p. 14, note. 30 LAY SERMONS. So far superior is the theology that grew up on the sacred iDanks of the Ganges to anything that Helicon, Parnassus, or Olympus could boast of in the earliest afjes of Greek wisdom. But, as we have said, the Greeks were a subtle people, whose special mission it was, as St. Paul testifies, to seek wisdom ; and that their specu- lation should long have wandered about without hitting on the grand truth, which is the only possible key-stone of all coherent thought, was not to be expected. That Orpheus, Olen, Linus, and the most ancient worshippers of Apollo, were pious theists and believers, by a healthy, poetic instinct in one original JMind, the cause of the universe, is extremely probable ; but the first philoso- phical speculator that distinctly announced to the Greeks the great truth of the first words of Moses was Anaxa- goras. This remarkable man, born at Clazomense, in Asia Minor, about the year 500 B.C., was the intimate friend of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, in whose Life, by Plutarch, we find the statement that " this philosopher was the first who taught that not Chaxce or ]!^ECESSiTT, but Mind, pure and unmixed {vovv aKparov), was the principle of the universe, this mind possessing the virtue of separating the particles in a confused compound, and forming thereby new homo- geneous wholes." This is exactly what we described above as the proper definition of order ; and the creator of this order, with the clear-sighted old Ionian thinker, is not mere attraction, or repulsion, or elective affinity, or any such juggle of words, serving to conceal ignorance, CREATION OF THE WORLD. 31 or to cloak atlieism ; but simply and directly Mind. For this satisfactory enunciation the pious philosopher had the honour of being accused of impiety by the Athenian mob ; which is pretty much like the case of the beer-toper in the humorous German drinking-song, who, coming out of a smoky tap-room into the clear moonlight, and finding the moon looking somewhat asquint, the houses all nodding, and tlie lanterns stag- gering about, concludes with great satisfaction that the whole external world is drunk, and goes forthwith back into the beer-shop as the only sober quarter of the world known to him at that moment ! But Aristotle, the great encyclopaedist, knew better who was drunk and who was sober in this matter. He says distinctly tliat all those who philosophised before about the first principle appear as mere infantile babblers, compared with the great man who first enounced vov