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THE VEDDER LECTURES. 1875. 
 
 " T^e I<i^t by wi\i6i\ we stee I<igllt," 
 
 OR 
 
 NATURE AND THE SCRIPTURES. 
 
 A COURSE OF LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 e Cijeologiml S^minarD artir Rutgers College, 
 
 NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY. 
 
 BY 
 
 TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D, L.H.D., 
 
 UNION COLLEGE. 
 
 \Ev dpx'r) rjv 6 Aoyog. — John i. i SjS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 BOARD OF PUBLICATION OF THE R. C. A., 
 
 34 VESE Y STREET. 
 1875. 
 
3L24-0 
 
 .L55" 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, iu the year 1875, by 
 
 WILLIAM EEKRIS, Agent, 
 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, "D. C. 
 
THE 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES 
 
 1875 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The general title chosen for this little book is regarded 
 as, more than any other, suggestive of its pervading 
 thought. The study of nature alone is ever revealing 
 more mysteries than it solves. At every step the dark- 
 ness grows faster than the light. Endless links, endless 
 adaptations, ever terminating in the physical — endless 
 repetitions, in fact, of the same forms of force, — they 
 never lead us out of the labyrinth, but only extend 
 farther and farther, on every side, the limitless unknown. 
 The soul cannot rest in this. It would know the 
 meaning of nature. It earnestly asks : What is it all 
 about? The inquiry itself is a religious one, and re- 
 ligion alone can furnish the answer. However dim or 
 feeble this may be, it immediately elevates us above the 
 depressing effects of mere physical knowledge. But 
 religion without revelation, or faith in some kind of 
 communion with the Infinite mind, is a shadow. Hence, 
 the idea never lost sight of in these discourses : In 
 Theology, in Christianity, in the Holy Scriptures, which 
 we receive as the Word of God, there is a grandeur of 
 thought unknown to any scheme of science, and which 
 puts the humblest believer, however uncultured and 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 unlearned, above the proudest intellect that is a stranger 
 to any such influence. As Christians we should not 
 hesitate to avow this, and firmly maintain it. We should 
 appeal directly to Christian experience, as a mighty fact 
 which science has no right to overlook. God's Word, 
 if it be indeed God's Word, must be a Xoyog £wv kcli 
 evepyijg, a "living power." It is not to be merely 
 defended, or made the subject of tame apologies. It is 
 to be carried with us, not as an obsolete relic, carefully 
 enclosed in a guarded ark, but as our banner in front of 
 the host. With this we conquer. Without it the most 
 ingenious argumentation can only yield a seeming 
 victory. " The Majesty and Glory of God beaming in 
 the Scriptures," as some of our older divines were fond 
 of calling it ; this is to be our " Refuge and our Strength." 
 As is said in the closing sentence of the Fifth Lec- 
 ture : " The Bible itself must be brought out as the 
 best defence against infidelity, — the Bible itself, not 
 only as the great standing miracle of history, but as 
 containing unearthly ideas for which no Philosophy, no 
 Theory of Development, can ever account. To such 
 study it will reveal itself as ' the Power (the Svva^ig, or 
 healing virtue) of God. Other defences are indeed 
 important, but without this, they are shorn of the great 
 strength which can alone make them available to the 
 pulling down of strongholds and the overthrow of 
 
 the truth's unwearied foes." 
 
 T. L. 
 
 Schenectady, June 4th, 1875. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM, - - - - II 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL, £7 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. — WORLDS IN SPACE, IO3 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS IN 
 
 TIME, 141 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
 THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
 PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL, 187 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM, 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 The sharp issue — Moral dislike of the Thiestic idea on the part of some — Re- 
 luctance at wholly giving it up — Consequence of its abandonment, intellec- 
 tual as well as moral desolation — The doctrines of hell and retribution less 
 fearful— Chance and Law— Law as sequence merely — Atheism all horror — The 
 seriousness of the world problem — The ideas of holiness and justice fasci- 
 nating even in their condemnation — Atheism without hope, without secu- 
 rity — Atheism may have its after state — The idea of progress has no foun- 
 dation in such a view — Nature necessarily finite — Law of growth and decay 
 — Cyclical movement — Retrogradations — Must run round and run out — 
 Needs a renovating power — Plato and Aristotle — Argument for Diety must 
 be something plain, adapted to all minds — Motion demands a Mover — 
 Scientific cry : " Give it time enough " — On the Atheistic view the direc- 
 tion of the universal movement indeterminable. Illustrations — The Scien- 
 tific Insect crawling amid the machinery of the great Harlaam organ ; its 
 mighty music all unknown — Higher aspects of the universe — The physical 
 subordinate to the hyperphysical — Nature a means^ has no ends termi- 
 nating in itself— Mind, idea, first — The perfect, first — Melancholy view of 
 Strauss— The despairing Prometheus. 
 
 In a feature of the times which is most dreaded 
 may be discovered one of the chief sources of 
 hope for the cause of truth. We may reverently 
 thank God that it is a day of sharp and inevitable 
 issues. The most sacred truths, the foulest form 
 of error, stand face to face. Difficulties in re- 
 ligion are weakened, or utterly vanish, when we 
 see what immensely greater difficulties of irre- 
 ligion our yielding to them must finally involve. 
 Error must develop itself. It is a law of the 
 thinking soul, as sure, as steady in its progress, 
 
12 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 as certain in its results, as any alleged evolution 
 of the physical world. Error must develop 
 itself. It is especially true of religious error. It 
 has no tenacity, no holding-place. It cannot 
 stand still ; it must keep on, wandering farther 
 and farther from the light, until it comes to that 
 precipice of atheism beyond whose verge, or 
 beneath whose verge, lies 6 ^ocpog rov onorovg elg 
 al&va, " the very blackness of darkness for ever." 
 That issue is now presenting itself, short and 
 sharp. The haze which has covered " the bridge 
 of the war," as Homer calls it, — that has rendered 
 indistinct and confused the middle ground of the 
 battle-field — that has prevented our seeing truly 
 the dividing lines of the opposing hosts — is fast 
 clearing up. There is revealed a spectacle that, 
 in one sense, may indeed be called appalling, and 
 yet is full of encouragement in respect to the issue 
 of the great conflict. Natural religion is gone ; 
 the old forms of deism have departed ; difficulties 
 of Scripture, questions of inspiration and canon- 
 icity are thrown into the background ; pantheism 
 has dropped its mask; apparent extremes have 
 come together ; a false spiritualism is found to be 
 but a spectre of the grossest materialism. The 
 mirage is dissolving ; the ghosts have fled ; and 
 now there stand directly confronting each other, 
 the two mighty foes that all along through all the 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF A THEISM. \ 3 
 
 illusions, and all the obscurities of the darkened 
 battle-field, have been the only real antagonists. 
 On the one side stands Christianity, the old Chris- 
 tianity, the only Christianity that has ever had 
 power for the souls of men ; on the other, blank 
 atheism, with all the appalling desolation that 
 connects itself with the thought of a godless 
 world. As thus presented, we cannot doubt the 
 final result. Our greatly disordered humanity is, 
 indeed, full of paradoxes. The Apostle's charge 
 is true. There is something in man's moral con- 
 dition that makes painful the thought of a per- 
 sonal God when brought very nigh the soul. 
 How to preserve something of the theistic idea, 
 and yet avoid this disturbing moral conscious- 
 ness, has been the problem ever since Adam 
 " hid himself from the presence of the Lord God 
 in the trees of the Garden." All history has 
 shown how from this effort came nature-worship, 
 pantheism, thence polytheism and foul idolatry. 
 In this fallen and falling tendency, the divine 
 idea is ever becoming more and more deformed 
 on the one hand, or dimmed on the other, — ever 
 more and more assimilated to ourselves in gross- 
 ness, or philosophically refined away into an ab- 
 straction, an idea, a cause, a power, a bare force, 
 divested, as far as possible, of all moral attributes. 
 And yet there is a struggle against its total 
 
14 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 abandonment, when we are brought face to face 
 with that sharp decision. When it nears that 
 awful verge, humanity — the common humanity, 
 as distinguished from that of the frigid specu- 
 latist, the common humanity, with its hopes 
 and fears, its weariness and dissatisfaction — starts 
 back with shuddering awe. It cannot take that 
 last plunge, that reckless leap into total darkness. 
 Religion cannot indeed be thought of by it with- 
 out the accompaniment of fearful ideas ; but here 
 is something still more fearful. Much as it may 
 have disliked the moral and retributive as insep- 
 arable from the personal aspect of the divine 
 character, it cannot bear the thought of a uni- 
 verse without a creator, without a governing 
 mind, without a providence, without a judge 
 of right and wrong, making an eternal dis- 
 tinction between them, approving the one and 
 condemning the other with an intensity to which 
 the strongest human approval and condemnation 
 can bear no comparison. It cannot part finally 
 with the idea so deeply planted in the human 
 soul, entering into all the mythologies, dramatic- 
 ally and epically represented in the world's 
 highest ideals, that good must conquer evil, that 
 right must triumph over wrong, that truth must 
 prevail to the discomfiture of error, that there is 
 to be an eschatology, whatever difficulties of 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. i$ 
 
 place and time may be connected with such a 
 thought — a latter-day development, somehow, 
 and somewhere, that shall clear up the confusion 
 and darkness that now cover the face of nature 
 and the history of man. It may not logically 
 reason out the position, but it feels unerringly 
 that the total loss of the idea of God brings with 
 it an effacement of all these distinctions. There 
 is no virtue, no holiness, no right. There is no 
 truth ; it has no reality except as God's truth, as 
 the emanation of an eternal mind, or its image as 
 reflected in the finite comprehensions of the 
 human soul. Facts may remain, or those se- 
 quences of facts which some call laws, but they 
 represent nothing ; they have no meaning, no 
 idea. The intellectual universe is as truly gone 
 as the moral. It is in the latter aspect, however, 
 that the thought most readily comes home to us, 
 and in all its withering desolation : The cosmos, 
 like a vessel tossed in infinite space, driven we 
 know not where on the currents of time, with 
 no hand at the helm, no eye upon the compass, 
 no course assigned or assignable, no reason con- 
 ceivable why it should not ultimately drift in 
 one direction as well as in another : Man, like 
 a bubble appearing for a moment on the top 
 of the nightly wave, mirroring for a moment 
 the heaven of stars above, then vanishing into 
 
r 6 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the void and formless deep. And then, too, 
 there is the terribleness of nature, when there 
 has wholly departed the belief in any power 
 that can either protect us against it, or in any 
 wisdom that can give us a reason, or furnish 
 the ground of any conceivable reason, why we 
 suffer from it, or why we should struggle with 
 its irresistible forces. It is the thought of a 
 universe without a guardian, without a Father, 
 without anything to shield us from the direst 
 woes that chance may bring, or a nature infini- 
 tesimally known in its parts, and utterly un- 
 known in its great whole of power — a nature 
 which we see to be full of the most awful ca- 
 tastrophes as they have appeared in the past, 
 and which, for aught we know, may be im- 
 measurably exceeded in the future. This may 
 be called an overdrawn picture of gloom, but 
 it hardly goes beyond that given by Strauss 
 himself in his latest most melancholy book. It 
 is true that, though having no better hope for 
 himself than that of absorption into nature, he 
 grasps at some idea of progress or order, tend- 
 ing to the good of the race or of the universe ; 
 but this, as we shall endeavor to show, he is 
 compelled to borrow from another school, and 
 his use of it is only evidence of his despair. 
 Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann are more 
 
THE EEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. iy 
 
 bold, or more unshrinking, in their conclusions. 
 " Far better would it have been for this world," 
 says the former, " if no living creature had 
 ever dwelt upon it." " The universe," says- 
 Von Hartmann, " is miserable throughout." What* 
 a verification of the Apostle's language : ddeot 
 kv rw KoofiGi — " Having no hope and without God 
 in the world." 
 
 Men shrink from this when fairly seen in its 
 awful desolation. The old religious fear is more 
 tolerable. Hell becomes less horrible to the 
 thought than such a hopeless atheism. There 
 may be a reason for such an idea of fearful retri- 
 bution, even if it be true, as some assert, that 
 men have invented it for themselves. It is direct- 
 ly connected with the thought of moral distinc- 
 tions, with their dread consequences when re- 
 garded as truly entering into the divine govern- 
 ment. A personal God, not indifferent to right 
 and wrong ; if not indifferent, then making an in- 
 finite difference — approving the one and con- 
 demning the other with an intensity of interest 
 as much greater than that of any human estimate 
 as the ways of the infinite God are above those 
 of all finite intelligences ; there is reason in 
 this, even as a possibility ; and wherever reason 
 enters, there is alleviation, something on which 
 the soul can rest, finding, as it does, its own 
 
1 8 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 highest worth in such a moral destiny, even with 
 all its alarming consequences. The thought of a 
 personal God, not indifferent to sin — this once 
 fixed in the mind and clearly held, the transition 
 is direct to all the most startling verities of the 
 Christian system. Retribution, atonement, grace, 
 redemption, a great perdition, a great salvation, 
 a great and divine Saviour, all become credible 
 when there is truly realized the idea of sin. 
 They all rise as it rises in the moral estimate, 
 they all fall as it falls. When it goes out, they 
 become incredible. Atheism, or what is morally 
 equivalent to it, the rejection of the personal idea, 
 is the ultimate antithesis of the old churchly 
 belief, and one who commences the deviation 
 should calmly estimate, in the start, the distance 
 to which it must inevitably lead him. 
 
 To the mere scientist, or the mere speculative 
 thinker of any class, atheism may not show its 
 most frightful face. He is so taken up with him- 
 self, so intent upon regarding the universe as de- 
 claring the glory of the astronomer or the 
 naturalist, that he has little or no thought for 
 anything beyond. His eyes are holdenfrom see- 
 ing that whatever belittles religion, belittles 
 science and philosophy as well, rendering all 
 human knowledge and all human aspiration as 
 aimless and as valueless as it is ephemeral. His 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. ig 
 
 absorption in the physical blinds him to the true 
 dignity of man as related to something - above 
 him, and transcending nature. In this state of 
 mind, atheistic ideas may not distress him. So, 
 too, the deep-seated, yet almost unconscious fear 
 of a personal Deity may even awaken an instinc- 
 tive feeling of relief in anything that veils it from 
 the view. We are not afraid of Nature, terrible 
 as she is, as long as the thought seems to screen 
 us from a greater terror. There is a feeling that 
 we can, somehow, take care of ourselves as 
 against her. Her earthquakes, her pestilences, 
 her upheavals, her terrific devastations, that have 
 left such traces in the past, as they may 
 come again in the future — all these carry with 
 them no such dread, either in kind or degree, as 
 that of falling into " the hands of the living 
 God." And yet, with all this, there is an appall- 
 ing hideousness in blank atheism when it fairly 
 confronts our soberest thought. We cannot 
 composedly resign ourselves to the notion of in- 
 evitable chance, introducing all conceivable 
 forms and modes of being — all measure of pos- 
 sibilities being excluded by the absence of any 
 ruling mind, and the consequent impossibility of 
 conceiving any limitations to the rule of contin- 
 gency- The survival of the strongest, even ad- 
 mitting that some such rule of forces might come 
 
20 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 in without the chance of reversal, may be the 
 survival of the worst. The predominance of cer- 
 tain tendencies in the start must be wholly con- 
 tingent, if it is wholly mindless, and that charac- 
 ter cannot be lost in any subsequent movement. 
 If it is chance in the beginning, it is chance 
 throughout. As a whole, it might have been 
 anj^thing else, although in a tendency once origi- 
 nated, some partial movements may be con- 
 trolled by others, and thus seem to have the ap- 
 pearance of means and ends. There is, indeed, 
 an effort sometimes made to evade this. Chance 
 is an odious term. The intellect, we may say, 
 repels it, as well as the moral emotions. It is 
 wholly idealess; it altogether eludes our think- 
 ing, unless we attempt to transform it in some- 
 thing else. It has been said, therefore, that 
 chance is excluded by the idea of law, and that 
 it is not so much in itself the antithesis of mind, as 
 it is the opposite of method, order, recurring se- 
 quence. There has been lately a labored attempt 
 to prove this ; but those who assert it use words 
 without meaning. Law as applied to nature, 
 may indeed be said to be a figure : but is it not 
 one to which we are forced if we would connect 
 with our language any conceptions whatever? 
 No more in the physical than in the moral and 
 the political, can we separate law from the idea 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 2 I 
 
 of a law-giver ; and we must either wholly fall 
 away from such idea, or we must trace it up, 
 through man, through nature, to a pure personal^ 
 mind. Without such a starting-point, the law 
 itself, if we continue to call it so, the movement, 
 the direction, in distinction from any other 
 movement or direction, is a pure contingency. 
 It is not difficult, we think, to detect the fallacy 
 here. Had chance, among the infinite chances, 
 produced any other state or system of things 
 than that which now exists, it would, as far as 
 we know, have been equally law, that is, equally 
 entitled to that name as given to the sequence 
 of facts. Had it been any other state of things, 
 it would have had series of events capable of 
 some kind of correlation. It would have had 
 near sequences, remote sequences, intermediate 
 sequences, hidden sequences, perhaps, we could 
 not trace, and then they might have been called 
 hidden laws received hypothetically, and after- 
 wards verified, or modified, when there were dis- 
 covered the intervening steps or links, as we 
 would then call them. But these sequences, these 
 connections with no other discoverable nexus 
 than contiguity, might also have been something 
 else, and no reason can be given why they 
 would not, in that case also, have been laws 
 as well as those that are found. Whatever is, 
 
22 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 is law, in whatever way events may follow. Law 
 becomes sequence, and nothing more. We 
 only cheat ourselves when we attempt to dis- 
 guise it under another name. Every effort to 
 get out of this utterly fails, until we connect 
 them with mind, either near or remote, and then 
 alone does this unthinkable conception of chance, 
 TVX 7 !, mere happening, cease to haunt our souls. 
 On the materialistic hypothesis, the very ideas 
 in our minds, through which we seem to rec- 
 ognize something more than sequence in events 
 — such as the ideas of order, relation, causality — 
 are themselves but products of this mindless, 
 Godless power, and thus themselves as much 
 contingencies as the outward sequences to which 
 they are applied. Order might have been dis- 
 order if the atomic apparatus of our thinking 
 had been so disposed. The positive philosophy, 
 neither as first set forth by Comte, nor as de- 
 lusively modified by Spencer and Mill, has any 
 recognition of them as eternal, and necessary 
 ideas. And so, as between chance and mind, it 
 has no right to recognize any intervening 
 power. Law has really no place in such a 
 scheme, except as the gliost of that divine idea 
 which the atheistic materialist imagines he has 
 slain. 
 
 There have been briefly stated some of the 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 23 
 
 things which may render atheism not only toler- 
 able, but even desirable, for certain minds. But, 
 after all, to the sober human thought it is an ap- 
 palling conception, and men will not long remain 
 under its gloomy shadow. When we are com- 
 pelled to look the monster in the face, it is all 
 horror. The sternest system of moral retribution 
 ever connected with a theistic creed, challenges 
 a preference. As has already been said, hell is 
 less frightful than a Godless nature. There may 
 be a reason for a condition of awful severity. It 
 connects itself with the ideas of justice, of benev- 
 olence, of acting for a reason, and that reason 
 the highest good of rational and moral being. 
 We cannot bear to lose these ideas, though feel- 
 ing that we take them at an awful risk. Our 
 own reason and our own experience are sufficient 
 to convince us of the possibility of something far 
 beyond us here. It is not difficult for us to ad- 
 mit that our own moral state may be a fallen one, 
 or such that we cannot estimate aright the 
 heights and depths of the moral system of the 
 universe. The human mind gets a glimpse of 
 the idea that great glory, great exaltation, are 
 connected with such a view, and that these are 
 necessarily associated with the thought of great 
 peril. Life thus viewed becomes a fearful thing. 
 We tremble when we think in what an awfully 
 
24 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 serious world we live ; and yet there is a fascina- 
 tion for the human mind, even for the depraved 
 human mind, in the idea of an infinite justice and 
 an infinite holiness, though involving the thought 
 of infinite severity towards the unholy and the 
 unjust. Commensurate with it is that other idea 
 of infinite goodness which the rational soul 
 affirms as a necessary attribute in the conception 
 of Deity, even though the sense-evidence of its 
 manifestation may be overpowered by an im- 
 mense balance of seeming evil in the world in 
 which we dwell, or even did we find ourselves in 
 a department of the universe where nothing 
 could be discerned but unalleviated and uncom- 
 pensated woe. There is something sublimely 
 terrible to man in the idea of this perfect divine 
 holiness. It so condemns us, whilst giving such 
 an awful dignity to our being in its moral rela- 
 tions to such an attribute. It transcends all other 
 moral ascriptions. The Holy One ! There is 
 no language of the Bible, no epithet of Deity 
 that has such an awe for us. And yet, as I have 
 said, it has a fascination for the contemplative 
 spirit, even when deeply conscious of its own un- 
 holiness. The thought is perfectly conceivable : 
 a human soul, fearful in respect to its own 
 moral condition, trembling even under the dread 
 of condemnation, yet preferring this personal 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 25 
 
 risk to the utter loss of that glorious conception 
 of the ineffable righteousness, so grand even for 
 the intellect, could we separate it from the moral 
 emotion. The "correlation of forces," the high- 
 est power the materialist admits ! How it pales 
 before the sublimity of this theistic language : 
 " The Righteous Governor of the Universe." 
 The Holy One " in whose sight even the heavens 
 are not pure." There is, indeed, a fearfulness in 
 the theistic thought, an awe even in its aspect 
 of beneficence ; but it is, at the same time, the 
 ground of all hope, as it is of all human dignit}^ 
 We cannot do without it. We cannot lower it, 
 though it so condemns us. 
 
 But atheism is without hope, without glory, 
 as it is without reason. It has its own terrors, 
 with nothing to calm them. It gives the soul no 
 security against the direst conceivable evils, 
 whilst it takes away every moral ground or rea- 
 son for believing in any ultimate triumph of 
 truth and goodness. Such a hope illumines the 
 darkest aspect of theism : " Clouds and dark- 
 ness are round about God, but righteousness and 
 judgment are the foundation of His throne." 
 There is a reason for everything. In the godless 
 view there is a reason for nothing. Every de- 
 structive movement is conceivable, possible, and 
 even probable, — only give it time enough, as a 
 
26 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 class of scientists are so fond of saying. There 
 may be retrogradations, deteriorations, — if we 
 may use such words where there is no standard 
 according to which they may be reckoned, no 
 hyperphysical measure by which they may be 
 determined. There may be a progress, seem- 
 ingly such, yet only a progress in horror. 
 There is no security, even, against the direst 
 forms of evil that are feared or fancied as con- 
 nected with the religious view itself. This awful, 
 unknown nature may have its devil and its hell. 
 As it has produced monsters in the past, so may 
 it continue to produce monsters in the future. 
 It may supersede man by the evolution of a new 
 race, transcending in depravity, as it transcends 
 in strength and demonic sagacity, the one that for 
 six thousand years — twenty thousand, say some 
 — has made this world a Golgotha of crime and 
 misery. If we follow on the analogy, we cannot 
 refuse to admit that there may be evolved a 
 state of things which shall throw into the shade 
 the enormities of all preceding periods. Take 
 away the ideas for which we are indebted to re- 
 ligion and revelation ; view man simply as a 
 product of nature, with no other hopes than 
 nature gives, and we are safe in saying that no 
 one of the geological ages has surpassed in de- 
 structive enormity, in irrational waste of life, 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 2 J 
 
 the human cycle. Had we remained gorillas, the 
 earth would not have been so filled with blood — 
 with crimes against nature exceeding in horror 
 all actions that beasts could commit. My 
 hearers will not mistake me here, nor misunder- 
 stand the hypothesis of total and hopeless irre- 
 ligion on which such statements of human facts 
 and human possibilities are grounded. We may 
 take a step beyond this. Paradoxical as the lan- 
 guage seems, nature may produce a false God. 
 Give it time enough and there may come out of 
 the physical evolutions some dire consciousness, 
 corresponding to that awful being whom the 
 infidel imagination gives us in its deformed cari- 
 cature of the Scriptural Deity — a power vast, 
 malignant, irresistible, having in it the concen- 
 trated evil drawn from all the productive forces 
 of the universe. Given a past eternity for 
 nature's working, she may have long since pro- 
 duced such a being, having his seat of power 
 somewhere in the infinite space, and extending 
 to remotest distances his malignant rule. And 
 so, too, in regard to another life, another state of 
 being for man. Irreligion sometimes boasts that 
 she has slain that chimera of superstition. 
 Man may now eat and drink without that haunt- 
 ing fear of something after death. But neither for 
 this does atheism give security. The human 
 
2 8 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 protoplasm may live on, carrying with it the hu- 
 man consciousness, the human identity. It is 
 one of the forces of the universe, and may pre- 
 serve its individuality in other conditions, or as 
 correlated to other forces. Science can give no 
 security against this, or against any evils its 
 changed physical condition may involve. It may 
 still be true that the conscious sensualist " lifts 
 up his eyes, being in torment" — the torment of 
 an unknown physical hell. 
 
 Or we may take another view coming out of 
 that doctrine of atoms to which atheism has 
 run for shelter since the days of Democritus. 
 Although the microscope has never made an ap- 
 proach to this mysterious domain, never having 
 brought to light an atom, or a molecule, or even a 
 molecular combination, yet here, in this utterly 
 unknown region, a certain kind of science finds 
 life, consciousness, memory, thought, imagination, 
 reason, will — all that constitutes personality or in- 
 dividuality in our present state of being. We 
 are what the atoms make us, nothing more. 
 And this, too, their making, resolves itself into 
 site, number, relation — in a word, arrangement of 
 constituent atomic points. We can conceive of 
 nothing else ; and here the thinking of the com- 
 mon mind is as clear and trustworthy as that of 
 the most scientific, since to both this atomic 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF. A THEISM. 2 g 
 
 world is alike unknown. All that we can say is 
 that the doctrine gives no security against that 
 dreaded idea that man may live again — may live 
 in pain, in agonies inconceivable. Take time 
 enough, and apply to it the mathematical 
 doctrine of chances, there arises not merely a 
 possibility, but a high probability, growing ever- 
 more nearer to an absolute certainty, if this 
 atomic hypothesis of the origin of life have any 
 truth. Of any individual man now existing it 
 says that his spiritual powers are but the results 
 of such or such a combination of these elements 
 of all being. They make him what he is, and he 
 has no other being. From them come not only 
 his flowing body, but his thought, mind, will, 
 consciousness — yea, even what he calls his rea- 
 son, though that, too, is only position, arrange- 
 ment, number, as much as his sense or his very 
 flesh. Now, in the infinite tide of surging ma- 
 terial being, these atoms, or precisely similar 
 atoms, may come together again. It is extreme- 
 ly probable, on the doctrine of chances, that they 
 will come together again — the when or the where 
 in no way affecting the estimate or the identity of 
 the being. They come together just as they were, 
 whether a moment before, or at a time which the 
 longest decimal notation fails to estimate — they 
 come together at last, and there he is again, the 
 
30 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 same consciousness, the same memory, or, so far 
 as these constitute identity (and we cannot con- 
 ceive of it separate from them), the same identi- 
 cal being, carrying with him all the misery of his 
 former existence, enhanced by the absence of all 
 security against ten thousand fold greater misery 
 in the future. There is no hand at the helm of 
 the universe, and there is no telling, no conceiv- 
 ing the horrors into which it may drift. 
 
 But there is the idea of progress, say some — 
 progress continually tending towards a better 
 state, towards a higher order, a higher happi- 
 ness, a higher intelligence — in a word, a higher 
 good. Some such dream meets us, now and 
 then, in the writings of Herbert Spencer. But 
 what is meant here by higher and lower? To 
 determine this, in respect to any movement, we 
 w T ant a standard, a rule, a direction, out of and 
 higher than such movement. If there is nothing 
 transcending nature, nothing outside of nature, 
 nothing for which nature itself exists, how then 
 are we to measure it, or ascertain its tendencies ? 
 We are in the balloon ; no star above is seen ; 
 how know we whither it is going? We have no 
 sighting point for our survey. Progress towards 
 what? This must always remain the question. 
 And then, even if we can get a measure, or fix a 
 direction, what assurance against retrograda- 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 31 
 
 tions or deteriorations ? Everything in the 
 smaller nature, or natures, that fall under the eye 
 of our science, presents the turning or cyclical 
 aspect. Birth, growth, decay, death, dissolution, 
 we can conceive a reason for them as explained 
 by the relation of things to a sphere above 
 nature ; we can believe that they have a counter- 
 acted or a regulator, or a compensation, or some 
 clearly-explained end in some higher system of 
 ideas. Without this, however, there is no resist- 
 ing the analogy that drives us on to extend this 
 law of growth and decay, of cyclical change, to 
 the universal nature as well as to the smaller 
 natures that always exhibit it as far as our induc- 
 tion extends. The whole cosmos may wax old 
 and decay. Scientists were once puzzled with 
 the apparent anomalies of the solar system, such 
 as change in aphelion and perihelion, shortening 
 of orbits in one direction, undue lengthening of 
 them in another, all indications of disorder that 
 might terminate in remediless decay and final 
 ruin. La Place, it is said, showed the contrary 
 of this — that is, he proved the perpetual stabil- 
 ity of the solar system. Apparent disorders 
 had their maxima and minima, and thus the great 
 order would go on for ever. But, admitting that 
 he had shown this, or something like it, in re- 
 gard to the solar system as a thing by itself, 
 
32 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 separated from the universal cosmos, and having 
 its own correlation of forces — admitting that all 
 its apparent irregularities were counteracting 
 checks to each other, so that none of its mem- 
 bers would, by means of them, ever get too far 
 from the sun, and thus be thrown off as wander- 
 ers in space, or too near, and thus be drawn into 
 the vortex of its consuming fires — admitting all 
 this, we say, his purely mathematical argument, 
 though holding true of the data immediately 
 before him, did not take into account other dis- 
 orders, other decays, other redundancies, other 
 retrogressions that might have their causal force 
 in the internal constitution of each member. Ac- 
 cording to the present nebular and ring hypothe- 
 sis, they had been for countless ages throwing off 
 their heat, radiating into infinite space, cooling, 
 condensing, diminishing in magnitude, increasing 
 in density, changing their relative distances and 
 attractions. The great central body had, during 
 the same countless ages, been undergoing in- 
 calculable transformations. It was, therefore, an 
 argument purely mathematical, purely hypothet- 
 ical, based on assumed magnitudes, masses, 
 densities, and mean distances, as they are now 
 seen, or supposed to be. It did not take into ac- 
 count — it could not take into account — other dis- 
 ordering influences that might come from the 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 33 
 
 unnumbered bodies floating in infinite space 
 outside the solar system. It overlooked the 
 vaster revolutions and evolutions in which our 
 sj^stem and our earth must participate, however 
 slow the changes that might thereby be pro- 
 duced in the relations of its parts, or however 
 imperceptible the motions determinative, at any 
 time, of its own absolute place in the universe. 
 These are views to which the most modern 
 observation is now forcing us. If trustworthy, 
 they give us a glimpse of an immeasurable un- 
 known, in relation to which our science, now so 
 greatly lauded, is truly a smaller thing than w T as 
 the knowledge of Ptolemy, as compared with 
 that which was revealed in the first discoveries 
 of the telescope. The ancient centre is again un- 
 settled, but the true centre is as far as ever from 
 being fixed. As thus compared, infinitesimal is 
 the enlargement of our knowledge, infinitesimal 
 is any fancied increase in the value of our cosmic- 
 al speculations. One word, one promise, one 
 whispered hope that we can believe in as coming 
 to us from the Infinite Father, is more than worth 
 it all. We have learned distances, motions, — we 
 have a dream of correlated forces ; that is the 
 sum of our attainment. It is almost wholly 
 mathematical. La Place, with his Mechanique 
 Celeste, is as small here as Hipparchus. In one 
 
34 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 sense he is far behind Pythagoras with his 
 sublime imagination of the " music of the 
 spheres." 
 
 But waiving all that as utterly beyond our 
 reach, let us proceed to other and more general 
 considerations. We remember how this view of 
 La Place in respect to the stability of the solar 
 system was hailed by the Christian world. It 
 was, however, on the ground of its furnishing, 
 or its being supposed to furnish, to those who 
 needed it, an argument for a divine idea, a divine 
 care, in the originating and in the adjustment of 
 our solar system. It was the work of the great 
 geometrician, as Socrates styles him. Not so La 
 Place himself. He may have smilingly accepted 
 the gratitude of the pleased religionist, but he 
 saw no hand of God in the cosmos. The heav- 
 ens told the glory of the French astronomer, 
 not of the Great Architect above. Their interest 
 lay in furnishing the diagram, the black-board, 
 as we may style it, for his mathematical specula- 
 tions. They were filled only with sines and 
 cosines, tangents, differentials, integrals, infinite 
 series, relations simply of number, figure, dis- 
 tance, motion, space ; empty of all else. To him 
 this principle of counteracting order, of assumed 
 stability, belonged to nature itself; and that was 
 something he could never prove. An inherent 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 35 
 
 power of recovery, or of rising- from a really 
 lower to a really higher state, an inherent rectifi- 
 cation of a real disorder, without aid from a 
 plane above the natural — such a property as this 
 no science could ever demonstrate. The might- 
 iest application of the calculus fails here. Mathe- 
 matical theory and induction are both unable to 
 show that any great section of nature, much less 
 the great whole of nature, is exempt from the 
 principle of growth, maximum, decay — in a 
 word, of a necessary finiteness, which the smaller 
 inductions have invariably proved to belong to 
 every partial nature, from the plant to the grow- 
 ing, decaying, and disruptured planet. The 
 condition of growth seems to necessitate that 
 of decay. The force required to keep an organ- 
 ism at its maximum must be greater than that 
 required to reach it ; since all beyond must be 
 an addition, a coming of more from less, which 
 is the same with something from nothing. The 
 coiled spring must first relax its tension, and 
 then return with more or less rapidity in its 
 recoil to its former state. So that which has no 
 other origin than a nebula in its lowest state of 
 material existence, and no other law of its being 
 than the condensation, or the unwinding of that 
 nebula, whichever view we take, forbids the idea 
 of eternal progress, or of unchanging movement 
 
36 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 in either direction. It must have its cycle, re- 
 turning through all changes, either to perish, or 
 to make again the same revolution, thus accom- 
 plishing a cycle of cycles, in which each maxi- 
 mum is continually less than the preceding, until 
 it goes out, or is lost, or assumes some new form 
 in the great whole of forces, therein to repeat a 
 series of similar perishing revolutions. Whatever 
 grows may decay — must decay. So induction 
 teaches, if it is to be our only guide. Now it is a 
 peculiar feature of the modern scientific infidel- 
 ity, that it assumes this of the universe. The cos- 
 mos grows as well as the fungus. Solar systems, 
 stellar systems, all came out of that lowest state 
 called the nebula. Science can show no leap in 
 the process of growth and decay, no point where 
 perpetuity necessarily comes in, or the analogy 
 permits us to stop short of the idea that there is in 
 nature, even as a whole, a necessary finiteness of 
 force, however vast the extent of space through 
 which its manifestations may be dispersed. It 
 must run round, and finally run out, whether to 
 come up again, or come out again, as the old Stoics 
 maintained in their doctrine of rarefactions, or to 
 be no more for ever. The necessarily infinite 
 alone remaineth ad eternum, whilst all things 
 below the infinite must have the measure and the 
 uses that it appointeth to them. " The grass 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 37 
 
 withereth, the flower fadeth," nature comes and 
 goes, but " the Word of the Lord abideth for ever." 
 All that is not God is necessarily finite, except as 
 He sustains, restores, perpetuates. 
 
 The reasoning of Plato here, and to some ex- 
 tent of Aristotle, can never be refuted. I refer 
 to the great argument of the latter philosopher 
 by which he proves the necessity of the dttLvrjTog, 
 the Immovable, as a principle lying above mo- 
 tion and the movable ; in other words, an infinite 
 mind, an eternal thought, as the only ground of 
 stability in the universe. So Plato shows that 
 the existence of antagonisms, or the generation 
 of opposites, or correlations of forces in nature, 
 must come from something above the plane of 
 the physical. For although such seeming equi- 
 libriums may be produced, as it were, by partial 
 currents, or counteracting eddies, in the same 
 movement, yet nature as a whole can never of 
 herself generate a direction above that, or the 
 opposite of that, in which she is tending - , and 
 which, unless counteracted or regulated by a 
 power from without, must inevitably bring her 
 to a suicidal end. It is idle to say that these 
 men, great thinkers as they were, had not 
 science enough to warrant them in making such 
 declarations. The whole question lies above any 
 sphere of science, or fact induction, even were 
 
38 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 not the comparative difference here between the 
 ancient and modern knowledge the infinitesi- 
 mal we have shown it to be. The illustrations, 
 too, presented by these old authorities, are as 
 good as any that are furnished by the vocabu- 
 lary of our modern progress. If genesis, devel- 
 opment, says Plato, or what we call evolution, 
 or progressive movement, were ever evdela, 
 straight onwards, in one direction, it must 
 finally tend to extinction. Whatever the princi- 
 ple, be it rarefaction or condensation, sepa- 
 ration or combination, cold or heat, cooling or 
 heating, it must, in the one case, reach a state 
 where all cohesion, all organization ceases, or, 
 in the other, come to a stand in which all life, 
 all motion, terminates in absolute immobility. 
 Or, to use his own most expressive language, 
 " things would cease becoming and genesis would 
 be at an end." In more modern terms, the cor- 
 relation of forces, if given an eternity to work 
 in, would at last produce an absolute equilib- 
 rium, a state of rest which is the maximum of 
 force, even as motion, on the other hand, or re- 
 garded as a departure from this state, is ever 
 a spending or letting out of force, and must 
 terminate in the absolute nothingness of iner- 
 tia. Hence, that the cosmos may live, says the phi- 
 losopher, there must be at some point or points, 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 39 
 
 a KafiTrrjj or turning round, a deviation from the 
 progress or tendency in which it is going, a 
 change from one law or from one movement to 
 another, and this can be no product of that law, 
 or that movement, from which it is turned. 
 There may be such a seeming law of cyclicity, 
 or self-regulating cyclical return, in the partial 
 natures; but in them it must come from other 
 partial natures without, which, at certain points, 
 connect with and counteract, thus causing par- 
 tial deviations. As applied, however, to a na- 
 ture regarded as universal, and having nothing 
 outside of it, this idea, of course, cannot be ad- 
 mitted. There, the result of such a right on- 
 ward movement is demonstratively inevitable. 
 Nothing can save from it but the supposition 
 of dynamical laws, that is, principles of motion 
 and force, utterly different from those our best 
 science acknowledges in physical and cosmical 
 investigations. Gravitation must destroy itself, 
 if there be no principle, higher, remoter, stronger, 
 in the universe. 
 
 The perverseness of an atheistic science may 
 drive us to a mode of argument that seems 
 labored and abstract ; but it is in order to meet 
 this perverseness on its own ground. The truth 
 must be something more simple than this — 
 something which the common, healthy mind 
 
40 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 perceives, as well as the most reflective and 
 logical. It cannot be that God, who made the 
 human intellect, could have intended that the 
 proof of His own existence, of His own intel- 
 lect, we may say, should be so difficult, or so 
 little obvious, as to allow the soul to have, 
 even for a moment, an excuse for its scepticism. 
 We should never depart from the intuitive idea 
 that in motion, in change of any kind, in the 
 least phenomenal deviation of anything (whether 
 whole or part) from a former state, there is 
 evidence of will somewhere in space and time, 
 of a purpose and a volition without which such 
 deviation never would have been, however many, 
 or however undiscoverable, the connecting links 
 of causation. We should hold to this as a 
 proof preceding any that we draw from the 
 more recondite field of organic life. In truth, 
 once admit motion, self-motion, to be a prop- 
 erty of matter, and it is not easy to deny that 
 life also may be such. It is not easy to dis- 
 tinguish between life and self-motion. Hence 
 Aristotle, in the argument referred to, begins at 
 the beginning. Motion demands a mover, and 
 that ultimately a prime mover, itself unmoved 
 and immovable, or a will originating motion, 
 itself outside of any moving chain of cause and 
 effect. In the same way the argument of Soc- 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 41 
 
 rates against the atheists in the Tenth book of 
 the Laws. Motion is proof of soul. In an after- 
 state, clearer perhaps intellectually, because 
 purer morally, we may wonder at ourselves for 
 ever allowing this intuition to be obscured. 
 Then may we feel, as we have never felt before, 
 the reasonableness of that chiding, though gen- 
 tle remonstrance : " O ye of little faith, where- 
 fore did you doubt ? " 
 
 The sceptical scientists are very fond of draw- 
 ing on time. If any form of " evolution " be 
 insisted on, or of *' natural selection," or any 
 adjustment of atoms driven by chance, and after 
 infinite misses and infinite incongruities falling, 
 at last, into something to which we give the 
 name of order — the demand is ever for time, 
 more time. If we do not see species coming out 
 of species, or any of the half-way transition pro- 
 cesses, then science becomes humble again ; we 
 are reminded of the limited observations neces- 
 sarily inadequate for such a vast induction. Only 
 grant time enough, and we can prove the pos- 
 sible happening of anything conceivable. Now 
 this accommodating demand may be turned the 
 other way, and to the confusion of those who 
 are most fond of making it. They would keep 
 it within some bounds of the decimal notation. 
 Billions, trillions, decillions, might, perhaps, 
 
42 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 satisfy their very modest hypotheses. But as 
 against them, we may draw at once on the 
 bank of eternity. How long before we reach it, 
 or even make an approach to it, ought an infinite, 
 ever right-onward moving nature to have passed 
 over the finite, the very finite, progress to which 
 we see she has now arrived. Or, whatever may 
 be the direction she is taking, at what an 
 ancient time in the long-past eternity, must she 
 have to come to its ultimatum, if there be no 
 hand to make the turn of which Socrates speaks. 
 How many ages ago must there have been reached 
 the immovable equilibrium or the irrecoverable 
 dispersion? An eternity before our day must 
 this binding or loosing — for motion is ever the 
 spending of force — have brought all things to 
 their maximum of solidity or their minimum of 
 rarefaction ; in both of which states all life per- 
 ishes, all motion and resistance as the very con- 
 ditions of manifested sentient being. The machine 
 has run down, or run out. It is a consequence 
 of that finiteness which necessarily belongs to 
 everything moving in time and space. At such a 
 juncture, the Platonic myth in the Politicus sup- 
 poses the hand of Deity again to take the helm. 
 On the hypothesis that excludes such a control- 
 ling and restoring idea, nature, or the physical 
 universe, has come to a dead-lock from which 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 43 
 
 there is no renewal. If we take it in one direc- 
 tion, the result, as has been already said, is a 
 balance of forces, a static equilibrium of resistance, 
 which is only another name for absolute rest. If 
 we follow it in the other, the only idea left is that 
 of utter dispersion, which is only another form 
 of absolute inertia. Thus are we driven to the 
 thought of a power. outside of and above nature, 
 a power demanded for its conservation and res- 
 toration as much as for its primal origin. " Of 
 old hast thou founded the earth ; the heavens are 
 the work of Thy hands. They perish, but Thou 
 remainest. As a garment do they wear out ; 
 Thou renewest them, and they are renewed. 
 But Thou art HE (the same), and of Thy times 
 there is no end." 
 
 But, aside from any such reasoning, the doc- 
 trine of progress, in which the atheistic scientist 
 takes refuge to escape the horror of his own con- 
 clusions, or this tendency to a higher and better 
 state which Matthew Arnold describes as "a 
 making for righteousness," is all a sheer assump- 
 tion. How do they know whither nature, the 
 universal nature, is going, or whether it be up or 
 down ? Certainly not from any induction. The 
 atheist, or scientific atheist, is very fond of talking 
 of the vast extent of the cosmos ; he very confi- 
 dently compares his own views in this respect 
 
44 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 with what he deems the religious narrowness ; 
 but as related to the whole, of which he so pre- 
 sumptiously judges, what is the mighty difference 
 between his knowledge of the universe, as taken 
 in all directions, and that of the most ignorant 
 religionist of ancient or modern times? We 
 speak, of course, comparatively. Franklin's wise 
 ephemeron, drawing his inferences as to all sur- 
 rounding being from the vernal or autumnal 
 changes in the leaf on which he sits, would pre- 
 sent the most apt illustration of this folly. Or 
 we may imagine the tiny insect crawling in the 
 great Haarlem organ. He may be a most scien- 
 tific insect, possessing the keenest sense, endowed 
 with a vision surpassing all the powers of the 
 microscope. There is nothing in his minuteness 
 at war with the supposition of his having a most 
 mathematical brain, which nature, or the colloca- 
 tion of the atoms, or some nice adjustment in the 
 correlation of his vital forces, may have bounti- 
 fully given to him. There he sits, with all the ma- 
 terials for a Mechanique Celeste in the smaller, 
 that La Place possessed for the supposed wider 
 sphere. He is intent on the study of strings and 
 pipes, and the most minute adaptations of the 
 mighty apparatus, so far as his angle of vision can 
 take in an almost infinitesimal part. He sees the 
 valves open and shut ; he traces, for an inch or 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF A THEISM. 
 
 45 
 
 two, the cords by which these effects seem pro- 
 duced ; he begins to classify them and to talk of 
 laws, thus turning phenomena into forces, and 
 dignifying mere sequences with the name of 
 causes. His induction may rise to the conception 
 of mightier pipes, of more distant keys, of 
 deeper valves, of hidden strings; but he never in 
 this way gets out of the machine. It is, all 
 through, as far as he can see, adaptation for the 
 sake of adaptation, evolution for the sake of evo- 
 lution. But what is it all about? Sometimes, 
 as Tyndall occasionally confesses, he may have 
 his hour of weakness. Now and then his cere- 
 bral organization may become strangely impress- 
 ed with the idea of something haunting the ma- 
 chinery, or that there is " a spirit in the wheels " 
 — a blowing, or breathing in the pipes, which 
 none of the sense-causalties before him can ex- 
 plain. There comes the faint consciousness of 
 some vibrating tremor in the vast surrounding- 
 apparatus. It startles him with the idea of some- 
 thing greater than he sees. It may be the hope 
 of a grander being, or a sense of danger filling 
 him with alarm. There is something more 
 serious in the machine than he had imagined. Is 
 it a dream — a dream that he is dreaming, it may 
 be — and from which he shall awake to a higher 
 consciousness? There may come, as from a far 
 
46 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 distance, the faint sound of a mighty music, of a 
 glorious anthem rolling above. Or there may 
 arise in his insect soul, or in some way be given 
 to it, the idea of a higher world, a more real 
 world, to which this intricate valvular apparatus 
 may be subservient, and from which it derives all 
 its value. But this he soon dismisses as utterly 
 unscientific. He returns again to " common 
 sense," to confidence in his sharp eye, his grop- 
 ing touch. " The things that are seen ;" they are 
 the only realities after all. " The things unseen " 
 — all that is supersensual — they belong to the 
 world of phantoms which experimental science 
 — the only science — can never admit. 
 
 The illustration is a fair one. From induction 
 alone it is impossible to determine whether this 
 physical apparatus in which we are involved, out 
 of which we are evolved, and into which our 
 seeming individuality is soon to be resolved again, 
 is really tending to order or disorder, or towards 
 anything we might indulge our fancy in calling 
 higher or lower states of being. The very terms 
 point to something out of the physical, above the 
 physical — something which measures nature, but 
 can never be measured by it. 
 
 Such a comparison is unimpeachable as long as 
 we take for its basis any conceivable ratio be- 
 tween the infinitesimally known and the infinite 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 47 
 
 unknown. To vary the illustration, however, let 
 us suppose an almost invisible insect crawling 
 upon the dome of St. Peter's. He possesses a 
 sense of vision keener than the human. His 
 microscopic eye does, indeed, see chasms, and 
 roughnesses, and inequalities, which may disap- 
 pear to a survey made from a higher standpoint ; 
 but what does it tell him of the purpose for which 
 that vast structure was reared ? What does it 
 tell him of its transcending spiritual significance ? 
 Or, to confine the thought to what might be 
 deemed, in strictness, the more proper scientific 
 field, what does it tell him even of the space or 
 mathematical direction of his seeming progress, 
 or whether he is moving on a surface ascending 
 or descending, concave or convex, or whether, 
 taken as a whole, it may be called plane or 
 spherical, or at what rate the vast arc, to which 
 his short vision can draw no tangential line, may 
 be changing its mighty curvature. 
 
 Equally preposterous is the claim that is made 
 to determine, by any scientific induction, the move- 
 ment and direction of the cosmos in any higher 
 aspect that we may call spiritual, moral, meta- 
 physical, ideal — or even in that lower view which 
 excludes all but the physical as exhibited solely 
 in the phenomena of motion and force. Even if 
 the things immediately around us presented no 
 
48 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 anomalies or unevennesses, no apparent retrogres- 
 sions or deteriorations, what help do our second 
 of time and our inch of space give us towards 
 determining anv present state, or future tenden- 
 cies, or final evolution, of that great whole of 
 being of which we form, physically, so insignifi- 
 cant a part? The believer may legitimately 
 connect such an idea of progress with that of a 
 physical world subordinate to a moral probation, 
 and the theatre, ultimately, of a high moral pro- 
 duction. This is in true harmony with the 
 thought of the cosmos as the work, through 
 whatever process of origination and continuance, 
 of a personal Deity, infinitely strong, infinitely 
 wise, infinitely just and good. It matters not 
 whether we say this comes from revelation, or 
 has some claim to be regarded as an a priori 
 idea of the human soul, or whether we regard 
 both these supposed sources as substantially the 
 same. If the latter, or the a priori view is pre- 
 ferred, it would denote simply something mir- 
 rored in the finite from the infinite mind, or a 
 reflection from that image of God of which the 
 Scriptures speak. On either view, naturalistic, 
 theological, or metaphysical, thought, ideas, are<z 
 priori somehow, and somewhere. One position 
 is that they existed in a necessary, an eternal, 
 and an infinite mind, before they came into the 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 49 
 
 human, carrying with them some recognizing 
 glimpse of their necessity and infinity. The 
 other likewise necessitates what may be called an 
 a priori being, but of an infinitely lower kind. It 
 would consist in those arrangements of atoms/ 
 and those correlations of forces, which, when 
 brought out in the lucky confluences of im- 
 measurable time, might constitute the individ- 
 ual man. We all had our primeval being in 
 the nebula ; we were all born out of it, as it will^ 
 be to all of us the grave of our existence. But 
 with a priori or necessary ideas in any other 
 sense, the positivist has nothing to do. He de- 
 nies their existence. He assigns them to the 
 chimaera region of metaphysics and theology. 
 He goes by experiment, in a word, by sense, ac- 
 knowledging no higher source for any human 
 thought. When he talks, therefore, of progress, 
 as Spencer is compelled to do, or of an inherent 
 " tendency that makes for righteousness," to use 
 some of Mathew Arnold's favorite lingo, he goes 
 entirely out of the sphere to which the funda- 
 mentals of his philosophy necessarily limit all 
 human knowledge. He is trespassing on another 
 province of which, at other times he affects to 
 speak with contempt. 
 
 It would have been more wise, it may be 
 thought, to have taken for the subject of this lec- 
 3 
 
50 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ture a nearer and more threatening form of infi- 
 delity. But atheism is the goal to which it all 
 is running, even as all irreligion is a dislike to the 
 idea of a personal God. We may rejoice, how- 
 ever, that it carries its antidote along with it. 
 There is nothing, perhaps, that will ultimately 
 better subserve the cause of religious belief than 
 the last published work of Strauss. After re- 
 iterated denials, and long struggles with the 
 vortex into which he saw himself irresistibly 
 drawn, it is pure atheism at last — blank, unquali- 
 fied atheism. The English scientific sceptics 
 seem drawing back, but Strauss has pushed on to 
 the ultimatum, and it stands before us in all its 
 horrors. Nothing that I have said of the awful 
 desolation of a soul that comes fairly to see what 
 it is to be " without hope and without God in the 
 world," presents such an appalling picture as he 
 himself has given us after announcing his utter 
 loss of faith in God. All his philosophy, all his 
 logic, all his scholarship, yield their latest fruit, 
 their only fruit, in such an utterance as this : " In 
 the enormous machine of the universe, amid the 
 incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels 
 ■ — amid the deafening crash of its ponderous 
 stamps and hammers — in the midst of this terrific 
 commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless crea- 
 ture, finds himself placed — not secure for a 
 
THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 
 
 51 
 
 moment, that on some unguarded motion, a 
 wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer 
 crush him to powder. This sense of abandon- 
 ment is at first something awful." Yes, we may 
 say, not only at first, but evermore, the more it is 
 contemplated, growing denser in its gloom, more 
 suggestive of that fearful language of the Scrip- 
 ture, " the blackness of darkness forever." In 
 other places Strauss would modify the horror 
 of such a view by throwing himself upon some 
 of those a priori ideas of ultimate order, to which, 
 as we have seen, Tie and his confreres have no 
 right. But in this terrific passage, he reminds us 
 of that wild, despairing farewell to nature, which 
 the prince of Grecian dramatists puts into the 
 mouth of the Jove-defying Titan, as amidst 
 storm and earthquake he goes down into the 
 unfathomable subterranean deeps : 
 
 a) firjTpbg efirjg oe(3ag, 0) rcdvrodv 
 didrip tcoivbv (f)dog elXioacjv, 
 eoopdg fi' d>g endina redox***- 
 
 O thou, my awful mother earth, and thou, 
 
 Aetherial sphere unrolling evermore 
 
 The common light ! Behold ye my dark doom ? 
 
 There is no escape from the terrible machinery 
 which Strauss so vividly depicts, and all the hor- 
 rors it involves — these horrors, too, made im- 
 mensely greater for man from the fact that he 
 
52 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 has the Promethean fire of reason to contemplate 
 his inevitable ruin, and just science enough to 
 show him how very little his science avails to 
 save him from these "jagged wheels," or how 
 very little his feeble reforms — opening the way 
 often to a more dire disorder — or his transient 
 " victories over nature," as he calls them, can 
 avert the greatest, and sometimes the least, of 
 her catastrophes. The thought of the immor- 
 tality of the race, even if there were any hope or 
 consolation in that, is as groundless as any other 
 part of this sad speculation. What do " the mer- 
 ciless wheels" or " ponderous hammers" care 
 for races ? Of how many, in the past, has the die 
 been broken and cast away ! The race, as well 
 as the individual, may be caught on some of these 
 "jagged points," or crushed by the defacing 
 " stamps " of these remorseless evolutions. We 
 fly for refuge to the merciful anthropopathisms 
 of the Bible : " He knoweth our frame ; He re- 
 members that we are dust; He careth for us." 
 But what does nature know or care ? It is all 
 darkness — all horror. No retributions of religion 
 are so terrible as this atheistic creed ; no super- 
 stition presents so fearful a ground of alarm ; for 
 with these is ever associated some consoling idea 
 of propitiation. A stern Judge, an unyielding 
 moral law, a fearful danger as arising out of a 
 
THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 53 
 
 relation having" so much of moral dignity — these 
 have in them, for a rational being, more of hope, 
 less of pain and despair, than the crushing 
 thought of having been brought into being, and 
 made to suffer, for no end at all. Whoever sets 
 out on the road that must, ultimately lead to this, 
 let him count the cost. Let him consult his 
 guide-book, whatever it may be, to understand 
 what he must come to when he makes his de- 
 parture from the more serious forms of religious 
 belief for the sake of easier creeds. What has 
 been said will not be in vain, if such an impres- 
 sion shall have been left on any mind. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 Aversion to the idea — Anthropopathism of the common infidel argument 
 against a particular Providence — The alleged impossibility of the super- 
 natural — The Divine constancy in nature — Moral power of a miracle — Men 
 not afraid of nature — The soothing idea of physical law — Nature a screen 
 between fallen man and Deity — Still, a fascination in the idea of the super- 
 natural — Two kinds of incredibility : that of the sense, and that of the rea- 
 son — Illustrations — The scene of the crucifixion — Moral reasons as affecting 
 credibility — Moral power of the Biblical supernatural — Illustrations from 
 Old Testament ; from the New — Song of the Angels at the Nativity — Com- 
 parison between the Bible supernatural and that of all other " sacred 
 books " and mythologies — Continual presence in the Bible of the moral 
 sublime — The total absence of the supernatural, in such a disordered world 
 as ours, would be the greatest wonder — The soul's demand for some extra- 
 ordinary Divine manifestations — Childish argument : Nature all, therefore 
 nothing above or beside nature — An eternal evolution self-evolved — Ab- 
 surdities involved in such a view — The highest in the lowest — More out of 
 • less — Impossibility of the supernatural the staple of the rationalistic exe- 
 gesis — The subjective truthfulness of the Bible involves the objective 
 reality. ' 
 
 A chief characteristic of the most modern 
 form of unbelief is its strong aversion to the idea 
 of the supernatural. It has lately taken a step 
 beyond all former ones, in denying even its pos- 
 sibility. This cannot be called a feature of athe- 
 ism strictly, for there all distinction between the 
 natural and the supernatural wholly disappears 
 with the divine idea. It is only, therefore, as 
 connected with some form of professed theism 
 that it is entitled to our attention : A God, so 
 styled, but who interferes not now with nature, 
 3* (57) 
 
58 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 never will interfere, never has interfered, except, 
 perhaps, at some indefinitely remote beginning 
 brought in merely as a logical makeweight to 
 some system of causation rising in the least con- 
 ceivable degree above chance. The argument 
 here sometimes assumes a quasi-religious form. 
 God is too great to interfere with an order He 
 has once established. He is too wise to inter- 
 rupt a work so skilfully planned in the beginning. 
 A particular providence, or any care for the 
 individual, except as provided for in the great 
 whole of things, is inconsistent with His sover- 
 eign dignity. He rules the world by laws. 
 They are His ministers ; any interference with 
 them would imply a defect of knowledge or 
 power in their selection and appointment. Thus 
 viewed, all alleged miraculous intervention is 
 petty, however grand it may sometimes seem to 
 our finite view. Thus it is the divine honor 
 they would defend as against the belittling con- 
 ceptions of the narrow religionist. Sometimes 
 it " apes humility." Man, especially the individ- 
 ual man, is too insignificant. It is presumptious 
 in him to think that he is an object of the Divine 
 concern, or that the settled course of things can 
 ever be, in the least, affected by his wants and 
 his prayers ; it is all a wretched anthropopathy. 
 Now. to this it might easily be replied that the 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. $g 
 
 anthropomorphic reasoning is all the other way. 
 It is our philosophic pietist who is making God 
 altogether such an one as himself, needing ma- 
 chinery for the accomplishment of his purposes, 
 and incapable of caring for the small, because oc- 
 cupied with the great totalities. Man can think 
 of but one thing at a time, and this measure he 
 applies to God, not perceiving that to depart one 
 step from it gives an infinite range that may em- 
 brace an infinite multiplicity of objects as well as 
 the smallest number. He fails to see that in- 
 finity and almightinessdo, of themselves, demand 
 the power of entering into the finite, of knowing 
 it in its minutest aspects, of surveying it con- 
 stantly in its partialities as well as in its totalities ; 
 in a word, of exercising the finite act when 
 it pleases God, and even of thinking the finite 
 thought, or feeling the finite feeling, whenever 
 he chooses thus to enter into the mundane or the 
 human sphere. One who cannot do this, cannot 
 do " all things," as Job confesses, and is, there- 
 fore, neither almighty nor infinite. The infinite 
 Word becomes flesh and dwells among us; the 
 eternal Logos is ever sounding on in nature 
 as when first uttered ; it speaks in its minutest 
 finities as well as in its greatest wholes. This is 
 the grand Scripture doctrine which science fails 
 to reach ; this is the sublime equilibrium in the 
 
60 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 Divine character which the Scripture every- 
 where so boldly maintains, and from which 
 philosophy is ever wavering. A science unphilo- 
 sophical as it is irreligious, repudiates it. It can- 
 not rise to the conception of worlds transcending 
 the physical, of spheres of being higher than na- 
 ture, for which nature is made, for which its order 
 is sustained, and for which it maybe interrupted, 
 if such a deviation of causality be demanded by 
 a higher order and a higher law. 
 
 It would not be difficult thus to reply to the 
 argument against miracles, or against a particu- 
 lar providence, as maintained by this semblance 
 of theism. But the position now taken presents 
 a somewhat different aspect. It is nothing less 
 than a bold denial of the very possibility of the 
 supernatural. The older English school of un- 
 believers never exactly reached this point. 
 Hume's denial of miracles had reference solely 
 to their incredibility on the ground of any sense 
 evidence, the difficulty of proving them by any 
 human testimony whose falsity would not be 
 more credible than the alleged miracle itself. In 
 other words, it was improbable, most improbable ; 
 unreasonable, apparently, but not impossible. 
 This latter position is now taken with a blind 
 hardihood that does not pretend to reason. It 
 very cheaply assumes it as too plain for argu- 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 6 1 
 
 ment. No man of sense — we might take their 
 word if confined to its most literal meaning — no 
 man of sense, they say, can believe in the super- 
 natural. The manner of the assertion, moreover, 
 betrays feeling, a hearty dislike of the idea 
 rather than the calm, philosophic temperament, 
 or supreme love of truth that is so boasted of. 
 The mask is thrown off. There is, indeed, a dis- 
 honest clinging to some fancied remnant of the 
 theistic conception, but for all moral and religious 
 purposes, it is that sinking of God in nature 
 which no evasions of naming can differentiate 
 from the blank atheistic denial. The older view, 
 we may say, conceded a divine power over na- 
 ture, though ever holding its exercise to be un- 
 divine and unreasonable ; the latter denies the 
 very power itself, because God and nature are 
 one. The supernatural, therefore, is not only un- 
 reasonable, but impossible. 
 
 Both have their origin in fear — in that aversion 
 to the thought of a personal God so deeply 
 seated in the fallen human soul. It is not a 
 speculative repugnance. It cannot be shown that 
 there is anything irrational in the conception of 
 an inconceivably great personality regarded as 
 having power, intelligence, and will. The 
 ground of fear is in the moral element which it 
 is so difficult to keep separate from such a con- 
 
62 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ception. Especially does this moral dread arise 
 when the thought is entertained of some 
 separated, isolated act, as it were, in which this 
 personal relation of God to finite beings brings 
 with it a sense of nearness, and so presents itself 
 to us that we cannot thrust the thought away. 
 In other words, this moral element most closely, 
 and most immediately, connects itself with the 
 sight, the belief, or even the conception of any 
 miraculous or nature-transcending power. In 
 proof of this, the appeal may be safely made to 
 the human consciousness ; though even evangeli- 
 cal men, so styled, have sometimes taken a differ- 
 ent view. The value of miracles, it is maintain- 
 ed, is simply in their attestation. They have 
 their place as credentials given to the first de- 
 liverers of a divine mission; they have simply a 
 convincing and a silencing, but not strictly a 
 moral power. The truth once given, or seen in 
 its own intrinsic evidence, the sign that simply 
 called attention to it, is no longer needed. We 
 believe without it, it has been said ; we believe 
 better without it, and, therefore, nothing is really 
 lost by overlooking the marvelous, or the al- 
 leged supernatural in the Scriptures ; the essence 
 of the truth remains. 
 
 It is true that miracles, if frequent, might lose 
 their moral power, just as nature has done. 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL 63 
 
 Had man continued hoi)*, she, too, would have 
 been religious, testifying to the " eternal power 
 and Godhead " more powerfully than any mirac- 
 ulous or extraordinary display. The divine con- 
 stancy in nature would then have furnished the 
 adorable element. The change in the moral con- 
 dition has wholly changed this aspect. Nature 
 has become our screen, our veil from the insuf- 
 ferable brightness, our hiding-place from the 
 terror of that idea of personality from which we 
 shrink, even as Adam hid himself from the Lord 
 God in the trees of the garden. God must now 
 come to him in the thunder voice of supernatu- 
 ral manifestation ; but even the effect of this 
 would be lost in its frequency. Men would watch 
 for sequences, they would hunt up coincidences, 
 they would give them the soothing name of law, 
 and thus would they make a new screen between 
 themselves and God. We can see a reason why 
 miracles should be rare ; why more frequent in 
 one age than in another ; why they have charac- 
 terized certain periods, especially those that be- 
 long to the earliest training of the human race ; 
 why at times they seem wholly withdrawn, and 
 again appear with startling manifestations. The 
 miracle may, indeed, be regarded chiefly in the 
 light of an attestation demanded by some new 
 message from above the sphere of the natural, or 
 
64 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 to arouse an age sinking - into the grossest mate- 
 rialism. But still, along with its attesting it has 
 ever its intrinsic moral power. Let there once 
 be witnessed something which we are compelled 
 to ascribe to a supernatural causation, and a new 
 feeling, a religious feeling, is at once aroused, 
 even though the attesting phenomena should be 
 of the slightest kind. A personal will is showing 
 itself; God is near; even the most devout soul 
 has a new and startling sense of some divine 
 presence. It is not the fear of the supernatural 
 in itself. The same or a similar feeling may be 
 awakened sometimes by witnessing remarkable 
 phenomena, less usual, or more astounding, in 
 nature itself, and when we think we know the 
 causal sequences. In general, we are not afraid 
 of nature ; we are not afraid of law, that idol 
 of our own creation which we are so fond of 
 separating from the idea of a personal lawgiver. 
 We can somehow take care of ourselves as 
 against these ; we feel more safe with them 
 than with the thought of a personal providence ; 
 they do not so alarm us as the idea of falling into 
 " the hands of the Living God." Even when 
 there comes that awful cry of " the pestilence 
 that walketh in darkness," we find an opiate in 
 the idea of nature ; we are relieved when our 
 men of science talk to us so wisely of physical 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 65 
 
 law. " Take heart," it is only something in the 
 air or the water. That comforts, though we 
 know nothing more. Especially is it so if the 
 invading malady be more slow in its course, 
 and its steps more visible, though actually more 
 destructive than others that frighten us less. 
 This is the secret of that £>anic that accom- 
 panies the dreaded name of cholera. It is some- 
 thing in the air, or in the water, to be sure. 
 That gives some relief; but then it comes so 
 suddenly, it strikes so irregularly, its move- 
 ments are so inexplicable, its probabilities so 
 baffle our most studied calculus ; in a word, we 
 are so helpless, we can do so little for ourselves, 
 or for each other. If there is law in it, it is 
 very much the same as though it were not. 
 Something irresistible at least, something mys- 
 terious and unknown, is very near us. Hence at 
 such times all men are religious, whether they 
 choose to avow it or not. The speaker calls to 
 mind a scientific man of some note who lately 
 figured at a Tyndal dinner, and how frightened 
 he was in the cholera season of 1849. How far 
 it was a religious fear may not be confidently 
 said ; but certainly his science, much as it has 
 been lauded, gave very little assurance to him- 
 self or others. He was a physician, too, confess- 
 ing and bewailing the utter inadequacy of his 
 
66 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 skill to furnish any help. He gave up the pa- 
 tient. He should not, perhaps, be blamed for 
 that ; but then it should have taught him after- 
 wards to be a little more merciful to his weaker 
 fellow-creatures who lacked his scientific bra- 
 very, and who thought that there might possibly 
 be some help in prayer. In these great and ter- 
 rific manifestations, even of what we believe to 
 be strictly physical forces, the awe of the super- 
 natural is upon us. No amount of science gives 
 assurance when the thunder crash is near, and 
 the lightning bolt is falling at our feet, or its 
 lurid flame is rising from our stricken place of 
 shelter. It is the sense of helplessness which 
 alarms, whilst it renders the ordinary distinction 
 between the natural and the supernatural so 
 powerless in soothing our fears. Calm reason- 
 ing, could we be calm, would tell us that the prob- 
 abilities of harm are, in the long run, far greater 
 from other physical causes that excite less emo- 
 tion ; but all that fails to give quiet. In a word, 
 God is felt to be close at hand ; our thought of the 
 irresistible immediately takes the personal form, 
 and no amount of science can drive it away. Now, 
 in a still higher measure would this be felt at the 
 sight of some appearance which we feel our- 
 selves compelled to ascribe to a power above na- 
 ture, or to a personal will near by, and intending 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 6? 
 
 the very thing our eyes behold. This moral 
 power of a miracle as bringing nigh the thought 
 of a personal God, is strikingly exemplified in 
 the language of Peter at the sight of the mirac- 
 ulous draught of fishes, when he fell upon his 
 knees and besought the Holy One to depart from 
 him : e%eXde an' kfiov, " Go away from me for I am 
 a sinner man, O Lord." Still more strange is it 
 that it should be so, when the supernatural inter- 
 vention is one of beneficence and salvation. Even 
 that does not divest it of its moral awe ; as when 
 the waves were dashing over the ship, and the 
 sleeping Christ awoke to still the storm. " They 
 were astonished," say Matthew and Luke ; 
 " they were greatly afraid," says the more graph- 
 ic Mark, and, on this occasion, with the deeper 
 insight, — " They feared a great fear," and " They 
 said one to another" u Who then is this." rig apa, 
 as though the familiar Saviour had suddenly be- 
 come strange and unknown ; or as Matthew gives 
 it, no-anog konv ovrog, " What kind of a being is 
 this," whom " the winds and sea obey ! " 
 
 In a world of holy unfallen beings, as has been 
 already said, it would be the sight of nature's 
 constancy which would chiefly inspire 'the re- 
 ligious feeling, but without that of personal dread. 
 There would be no lessening of awe and sub- 
 limity in the contemplation of the physical move- 
 
68 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ments, no burying- of the divine idea, the ever- 
 speaking word, the ever-living personal thought, 
 in the dead notions of law and necessary se- 
 quence. Ever new, ever wonderful, ever har- 
 monious would be the cosmical anthem — all mi- 
 randa, if not miracula in the special sense we 
 now attach to the controverted term. It would 
 be a departure from such order, real or seeming, 
 that would then suggest the godless thought, or 
 carry with it the strange atheistical idea. Instead 
 of the intervening " finger of God," as it appeared 
 to the terrified Egyptian magicians, it would 
 seem rather like a sign of returning chaos, as 
 though the hand had let go the helm of the uni- 
 verse, or the Shekinah light were going out in 
 the " Cosmical sanctuary," leaving it to darkness, 
 confusion, and disma}'. With man, in his God- 
 forgetting state, the moral influence of a miracle, 
 or of a seeming disturbance in nature, is just the 
 reverse. When science is baffled, and law has 
 ceased to soothe, and sequences seem broken, then 
 it is that we are ready to cry out, " the finger of 
 God," and to say with the ingenuous Peter : " Go 
 away from us, O Lord, for we are sinful men." 
 
 And yet with all the moral dread, there is to the 
 human mind a strange fascination in this idea of 
 the supernatural. We cannot let it go. 
 
 Startling as is the thought of a personal God, 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 69 
 
 when it comes nigh to us, there are times when it 
 is more tolerable to the thoughtful mind, even 
 when not religious, than the iron-bound fixedness 
 of an eternal, never -interrupted, never -to -be 
 interrupted chain of physical sequences : A nature 
 without beginning as it is without end, a fearful 
 " perpetual motion," a horrible machine, such as 
 Strauss describes, an everlasting syntagma, mind- 
 less, idealess, caring nothing for us, ever grind- 
 ing on with its merciless laws — cause and effect 
 — cause and effect, for ever evermore — suggest- 
 ing nothing else than an eternal flow of se- 
 quences, in which we ourselves are indissolubly 
 bound, with no hope of any existence ever rising 
 above nature, or ever capable of drifting out of 
 its right onward currents, or its circling vortexes. 
 The thought is suffocating. Whatever may be 
 the dread of religion in some of its aspects, we 
 may well fly to it as a refuge from this stifling 
 horror. Even superstition may be rationally wel- 
 comed as some relief from such a nightmare of 
 the soul. It is in such an appeal to the deeper 
 human consciousness we find a reply to both 
 classes referred to — those who would represent a 
 belief in the supernatural as simply alien and in- 
 credible, and those who go a step beyond, main- 
 taining that the very idea involves an impossi- 
 bility. 
 
JO VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 In regard to the first, a distinction should be 
 made between two kinds of incredibility — that of 
 the sense, and that of the reason. The first re- 
 solves itself into mere strangeness of event. 
 There is no reason why it might not be, except 
 that we have never seen it, and that stands to us 
 in place of a reason. It need not be said how 
 many events and phenomena, indubitable parts 
 of nature as now known, would have to be re- 
 jected, if this mode of reasoning were strictly 
 carried out by those who had never seen such 
 phenomena, or to whose observations of nature 
 they seemed to be in opposition. This has been 
 much insisted upon by the opposers of Hume 
 and the infidels of the eighteenth century. It is 
 simply presented here as an illustration of that 
 lower form of incredibility which I have styled the 
 incredibility of the sense. Due weight is indeed 
 to be given to it in argument. It justly demands 
 unusual evidence for unusual events, whether 
 alleged to be natural or supernatural — in some 
 cases the very naturalness itself being prima 
 facie more wonderful, that is, more incredible, 
 than a supernatural causation. A strong reason, 
 moral, spiritual, metaphysical, aesthetical even, 
 may make the quiescence of nature, in a given 
 case, more strange, that is, more incredible than 
 its disturbance. The positive school, as it is 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. yi 
 
 called, makes sense the only arbiter, and with 
 them perhaps, there is, in this matter, no further 
 reasoning. They have settled it that there are 
 no supersensual ideas, no intuitions, no aspira- 
 tions — in a word, no supersensual world of being 
 controlling all below, and for which all below 
 has its existence. All such ideas are themselves 
 supernatural, and therefore, in their view, in- 
 credible. For those, however, who believe in 
 them, these higher faculties of the soul must be 
 regarded as having also their claim to be heard. 
 Viewed as separate from sense, or considered on 
 a scale of higher probabilities, they, too, have an 
 intrinsic reasonableness, demanding, in a given 
 case, the strongest evidence on the other side, or 
 against the happening of what they may seem to 
 require, even though involving a disturbance of 
 the usual sequence of events. 
 
 And this is what we mean by the credibility or 
 incredibility of the reason. It is that view, or 
 those considerations which, aside from any 
 strangeness of the sense, would warrant us in 
 pronouncing an alleged event, whether of an 
 ordinary or extraordinary kind, rational and 
 therefore credible. It is not an assuming of its 
 reality, but only of such a connection with a 
 higher state of things perfectly rational and con- 
 ceivable, as might change the scale and prepon- 
 
72 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 derance of evidence as addressed to the sense- 
 transcending faculties. Take the vivid gospel 
 narrative of the crucifixion. Keep the mind 
 fixed upon the central fact as presenting the, 
 essential idea. A holy man — the holiest man 
 ever known on this sin-polluted earth — suspended 
 on the cross. By wicked hands is He taken, 
 crucified, and slain. He is enduring inconceiv- 
 able agony. His malignant murderers are feast- 
 ing their eyes upon the spectacle. They taunt 
 Him with His helplessness, saying : " Come down 
 now from the cross, if Thou be indeed the Christ, 
 the Son of God." It is a challenge to the Eternal 
 Father. It is a charging Him with indifference 
 towards the holy sufferer. In bitter mockery 
 they give him vinegar to drink, mingled with 
 gall. His dying thirst unquenched, He utters a 
 mighty wailing cry of desolation, and gives up 
 the ghost. Now connect this awful scene with 
 the perfectly rational conception of a Holy One in 
 the heavens — One who loves righteousness and 
 hates wrong with a divine intensity — One who 
 possesses almighty power and infinite goodness. 
 He is beholding this demonic spectacle ; it lies 
 right beneath His holy eye. Nature is under 
 His control, as it is, though in a far less degree, 
 under the supernatural control of man. Now we 
 cannot say that He will certainly interfere with 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 73 
 
 it; we may not deny His existence, or doubt His 
 power, or charge Him with indifference, if He 
 does not supernaturally interfere with it. He 
 may even have great moral or nature-transcend- 
 ing purposes that may prevent His interfering 
 with it, or making any special manifestation re- 
 specting it. Good men have been put to death 
 most unjustly ; they have died in agonies of 
 flame and crucifixion ; they have suffered, and 
 nature has been silent ; no sign has come from the 
 superhuman or supernatural sphere. So there 
 may be reasons why God should not interfere 
 with it in this case, or even give any sign of His 
 beholding or His displeasure. It is, therefore, 
 not incredible that the sun should shine calmly 
 in the heavens, or go placidly down in presence 
 of such a scene, or that nature should give no 
 visible intimation of its sympathy, or of any sym- 
 pathy on the part of Him who sits above. We 
 may say, too, that should such sign be given, it 
 would be strange to the sense, and, so far, have 
 about it a sense-incredibility. But is there not 
 a strangeness, an incredibility, in the other aspect, 
 that may overpower this sense-incredibility, or 
 become so strong, in a given case, as to make it 
 more easy to believe that the rocks should be 
 rent, that the earth should tremble, or that the 
 sun should be darkened, than that nature and the 
 4 
 
74 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 infinitely Holy One who sits above in the high 
 and holy place, should manifest no sympathy, no 
 sign even of His witnessing presence. It must 
 he a moral reason in either case, whether for the 
 wondrous appearing, or for what may be the still 
 more wondrous withholding. The appeal is 
 made to a higher faculty than the sense. There 
 may be answers to it ; but surely these higher 
 powers, the reason, the conscience — in a word, 
 the consideration of a sphere of being above the 
 physical, should have their weight in judging of 
 the question, and the w T hole measure of credi- 
 bility. It is the exceeding greatness of the moral 
 reason connected with the alleged event which 
 may be regarded as affecting the scale, so as to 
 make it easy of belief to the mind deeply im- 
 pressed with it. In other words, for souls acces- 
 sible to this higher evidence, the moral strange- 
 ness in the one aspect might more than balance 
 the physical strangeness so much insisted on in 
 the other and narrower view. 
 
 A moral reason, or an impressive moral fact, 
 joined w T ith an alleged miraculous or supernatu- 
 ral event; every thinking mind must see that this 
 being the case or not, must have an important 
 bearing on the question of credibility. It is here 
 we find the striking difference between the Bible 
 marvelous and the Bible supernatural, and that 
 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 75 
 
 of all other religions and mythologies with which 
 some are so fond of comparing it. There is a 
 moral sublimity about it found nowhere else, and 
 which gross ignorance alone, or still more gross 
 unfairness, can refuse to acknowledge. Compare 
 the Bible myths, if any insist upon so calling 
 them, with Greek m} T ths, or Hindoo myths, or 
 Scandinavian myths, or any wonders fancied or 
 deciphered from Egyptian or Assyrian monu- 
 ments. The literary men among us who have so 
 much to say about the Vedas, and the Shastras, 
 and the primitive fire-worship, and the "tracing 
 to these sources of all Christian theology," and 
 of all scriptural mythology — let them bring on 
 their authorities. If their ignorance of the Vedas, 
 and of the Eastern Scriptures, is not greater than 
 their ignorance of the Bible, let them cite book, 
 chapter, section, verse, and lay them side by side 
 with the Old and New Testaments. ' Or let them 
 bring the best things their knowledge, their taste, 
 their criticism, or their philosophy can select 
 from these vaunted sources, and then let the 
 Christian — even the unlearned Christian — con- 
 front them, singly or collectively, with spiritual 
 gems, and spiritual wonders, gathered from our 
 holy book. Nothing could be more decisive ; 
 nothing would so effectually put an end to this 
 shallow literary babble now breeding so much 
 
j6 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ignorant scepticism; nothing would so thoroughly 
 dissipate the foolish prating about Christ and 
 Confucius, Christ and Buddha, which is now kept 
 up by our wise lecturers, and on the slightest 
 connections, whether it be the discovery of a 
 Babylonian tablet with its monstrous imagery, 
 and still more monstrous record, if rightly de- 
 ciphered, or the finding of a fire-hook dug up 
 from the site of ancient Troy. Especially may 
 such a challenge be made in respect to the Bible 
 supernatural as compared with that which is 
 found in the mythological writings, hymns, or 
 traditions of all other nations. If anything can 
 be called universal, innate, common to all relig- 
 ious and even to all serious human thought, it 
 is this tendency to the reception of the super- 
 natural. The inference from it is a most impor- 
 tant one, and we commend it to those who have 
 so much to say about the natural and the univer- 
 sal religion. But it is this striking difference be- 
 tween the Bible supernatural and all other won- 
 ders to which special attention is here asked. 
 Note the monstrosity, the grotesqueness, the sheer 
 fancifulness, the absence of satisfying moral rea- 
 sons, that everywhere characterize the heatHen 
 mythologies. It is not only that moral reasons 
 are absent, but that there is in them, for the most 
 part, no reason at all. It is this more than any- 
 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 77 
 
 thing else that constitutes their incredibility. 
 How different the Bible marvelous ! The moral 
 is everywhere, not only present, but predomi- 
 nant. This so takes possession of the mind that 
 the physical strangeness falls in the background, 
 if it does not wholly disappear. Hence it is that 
 the Bible supernatural comes to seem natural, if 
 we may express it thus paradoxically. It is a 
 nodus vindice dignus. It seems just the right 
 thing, the fit and proper thing, the thing to be 
 expected, the thing whose absence, it might 
 almost be said, would seem stran s e in the midst 
 of such sublime moral accompaniments. It is 
 an ignorant slander, as uttered by some of our 
 literary men, that the Christian reads his Bible 
 with the same unreasoning confidence in its 
 wonders as the Hindoo feels in the perusal of his 
 sacred books, or in reciting his traditional 
 legends. They know nothing about the Bible 
 who say this, as indeed they know very little 
 about the writings with which they so flippantly 
 compare it. Crude monstrosities, unmeaning 
 transformations, grotesque developments, hideous 
 physical generations, which some take great pains 
 to call incarnations in order to cast dishonor 
 upon the Scripture doctrine of the Logos — grossly 
 animal metamorphoses, all taking place without 
 any moral reason, without any reason at all, 
 
78 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 without even any known physical analogy, are 
 thus unblushingly compared with the Christian 
 and Biblical marvelous, in which the very impres- 
 sion of the miraculous disappears before the 
 moral and spiritual awe. This explains why 
 these Bible wonders, when read by the most in- 
 tellectual and cultured minds — equal in this 
 respect to the highest of those who make the 
 charge — carry with them such a marvelous air of 
 truthfulness, such a serene and majestic impres- 
 sion of reality. It is this state of soul, and the 
 discernment of this peculiar character in the 
 Holy Scripture, that makes the wide differ- 
 ence between men like Augustine, Anselm, 
 Hooker, Bacon, Cudworth, Edwards, Hall, Cole- 
 ridge, Foster, Neander, Maurice, Newman, Isaac 
 Taylor, Montalambert, Guizot, on the one side, 
 and the admired writers in some of our monthlies 
 on the other. Certainly the men I have men- 
 tioned, with all the hindrances of their age that 
 may be conceded in respect to some of them, 
 were as well qualified to discern the monstrous, 
 the legendary, the absurd, as Mr. Emerson, or 
 Mr. Oliver Wendell Homes, or Mr. Bayard 
 Taylor, with all the reputation for genius and 
 talent which is conceded to them. 
 
 As an evidence of this divine impress upon 
 the supernatural of the Scriptures, take the ac- 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. yg 
 
 count of Moses' vision of the burning bush, as 
 given in Exodus iii. How destitute of all the 
 higher moral emotional must be the soul that can 
 read it without a feeling of its calm, unutterable 
 sublimity ! How does every Greek legend pale 
 before it in this aspect of scenic power, even if 
 we take nothing else into the account. Brief as 
 it is, what other myth, so called, can compare 
 with it in its awful, graphic vividness. And } T et 
 what an absence of the mere wonder-making, or 
 the sensational in style ! But this is only the 
 outward accompaniment. It is the moral idea, 
 the moral reason — that which other legends so 
 much lack, unless as invented for them by un- 
 natural or far-fetched accommodation — which 
 gives it its ineffable sanctity and power. The 
 very simplicity of the narration is the strongest 
 evidence of its truthfulness ; the sensational 
 is hushed, the awe upon the soul is too 
 great for any mere emotional utterance. 4 ' And 
 Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this 
 great sight :" the flaming bush alone in the weird 
 desert — steadily " burning, but not consumed." 
 There is the moral here, the moral sublime tran- 
 scending the physical sublime, the moral awe 
 transcending the physical wonder, and making it 
 seem like nature itself attesting the presence of 
 its Lord. It has this moral power as the symbol 
 
80 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 of " the ever-living God," as connected with the 
 great name of Jehovah which some have sought 
 so ineffectually, yet with such strange zeal, to bring 
 out of the Egyptian darkness, or to deduce its 
 high spiritual significance from the most un- 
 spiritual of all the ancient mythologies. It is the 
 proclamation of the eternal self-existence, the I 
 AM, the timeless being, 6 &v, na\ b tjv, koI b epxofie- 
 vog, who is, and was, and is to come. " Burning 
 ever, but not consumed ;" what a power in this 
 language of symbol, as proved by the inadequacy 
 of other language, written or articulate, to ex- 
 press by any one of its imperfect tense forms, or 
 by aJl of them conjoined, this timeless idea ! 
 Another example of this peculiarity is presented 
 to us in the thunders of Sinai, the flaming mount, 
 the appalling darkness into which Moses ascends, 
 the awful voice, at which "the people trembled," 
 and a removed afar off," and " entreated that the 
 word should not be spoken to them any more." 
 How life-like, and yet how ineffably sublime ! 
 How much there was hereof the strictly natural, 
 the volcanic, or the electric, we may not know, nor 
 does it much concern us to inquire. The Scrip- 
 ture makes little of the distinction on which the 
 modern mind so much insists. It blends the 
 great and the terrible of both departments in its 
 representations of the power and presence of 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 8 1 
 
 God. But here conies in again the moral great- 
 ness of the scene. It is something beyond, either 
 the natural, or the supernatural regarded merely 
 in its effect upon the physical world. It is the 
 spiritual sublimity we recognize in the reason of 
 the event as transcending both. It is the occa- 
 sion of giving a law to a people chosen from 
 among the nations then fast sinking into polythe- 
 ism and idolatry — chosen and preserved as a 
 world-people, the world prophets, the keepers of 
 truth, and of the glorious Messianic promise in 
 which " all the families of the earth should be 
 blessed " — in which we are blessed — from whom 
 has come an influence beyond all the power of 
 Greek and Roman literature, and by which our 
 modern world has been so greatly elevated and 
 transformed. It is this which makes it seem easy 
 to us — rational, credible, most appropriate, most 
 harmonious, when we read the moral message of 
 which this superhuman scenery was the ac- 
 companiment : " And God spake all these words 
 saying, I am Jehovah thy God. Thou shalt 
 have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not 
 make to thee any image or any likeness of any- 
 thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the 
 earth beneath, or that is in the waters below the 
 earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to 
 them ; for I, Jehovah thy God, am a jealous God 
 4* ' 
 
82 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 — a holy God — visiting iniquity unto the third 
 and fourth generations of them that hate me, and 
 showing mercy unto thousands of them that love 
 me and keep my Commandments." It is to this 
 moral sublime that Moses appeals, Dent. iv. : 
 " For what nation is so great, that hath God so 
 nigh unto them ; and what nation is so dis- 
 tinguished that hath statutes and judgments so 
 righteous. Keep in mind the day that thou 
 stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb, and 
 ye came near and stood under the mountain, and 
 the mountain burned with fire unto the very 
 heart of the heavens, with clouds, also, and thick 
 darkness, and the Lord spake unto you out of 
 the fire; ye heard a voice, but saw no similitude. 
 Take ye, therefore, good heed unto yourselves, 
 lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you the like- 
 ness of any figure, male or female, or lest ye lift 
 up your eyes unto heaven, and behold the moon 
 and the stars, even all the host of heaven, and be 
 led to worship them — take good heed to your- 
 selves, for ye saw no manner of similitude on the 
 day when the Lord spake unto you in Horeb, 
 out of the midst of the fire." Where did the 
 legendary ever so combine the supernatural and 
 the moral, the awful and the familiar? When 
 did a Greek myth-maker, or myth-collector, when 
 did a Greek lawgiver make such an appeal to a 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 83 
 
 people, citing the most wonderful event in their 
 history as a well known statistical fact entering 
 so deeply into their moral and religious con- 
 sciousness ? And where, too, it may well be ask- 
 ed, could be found the moral ground of such a con- 
 sciousness in any of their cotemporary surround- 
 ings, if it had not come from some such stupend- 
 ous revelation ? 
 
 The Mosaic conception of Deity, the idea of 
 the timeless I AM, of the God who has no sim- 
 ilitude in heaven or earth, this from the Egyp- 
 tians ! A thought so ineffably pure and holy 
 plagiarized from a people whose imagery buries 
 out of sight every moral or spiritual conception 
 the most Bible-hating imagination could possibly 
 trace in their sensual nature-worship, and their 
 degraded animal forms. Let the rationalist, so 
 called, believe this, if he can. 
 
 Or come we down to the New Testament 
 marvelous ; take the narrative the most as- 
 tounding, the most legendary in its outer aspect 
 of them all — the guiding star of the Wise Men, 
 as Dr. Upham has so powerfully presented 
 it in his wonderful book — alons: with it the 
 Song of the Angels, the light that shone so 
 suddenly around the adoring shepherds, the 
 choral anthem that seemed to come from " the 
 heavenly places : " Gloria in excels is — "Glory to 
 
84 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 God in the highest ; on earth peace, good-will 
 to men." As the marvelous merely, as the 
 rapt ideal, how transcendingly sublime ! Where 
 do we find anything like it in other legendary 
 lore? How would it strike us, even in this 
 aspect, if it had come upon us in the reading of 
 any Greek or Hindoo myth, in some legend of Jupi- 
 ter, Hercules, Brahma, Vishnu, Thor, or Woden ? 
 But now look at it in connection with that still 
 more glorious moral conception which it attests. 
 View it as bearing witness to the incarnation of 
 the Logos, that most wondrous fact in the evo- 
 lutions of the world — that most wondrous event, 
 as then manifested in the developments of human 
 history. It is the birth of the Redeemer, the 
 hero of the Protevangel, the mighty cham- 
 pion against the powers of evil, the glorious 
 Messiah, then humanly born in Bethlehem, 
 ''least of the cities of Judah," (as earth is least, 
 it may be, among the planetary worlds,) but 
 of whose spiritual and moral kingdom there was 
 to be no end. Is it incredible, viewed in itself, 
 that to such a fact, such an ideal even, there 
 should be an attestation drawn from a higher 
 sphere — if it is not irrational to believe in such 
 higher sphere — and giving a reason and a meaning 
 to the physical wonder itself? G.loria in excelsis. 
 " Glory to God in the highest ; on earth peace, 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 85 
 
 good-will to men." This unreal ! what, then, is 
 real ? This to be thrown away as belonging to 
 the world of dreams, and the puzzling material 
 shadows that come and go, appear and disap- 
 pear, upon this low stage of being — Strauss, 
 Renan, Hume, Voltaire, Tyndall, Darwin, Hux- 
 ley, apes, gorillas — all these having a veritable 
 place in rerum natura ! " Glory to God in the 
 highest ; on earth peace, good-will to men ; " 
 such a song from the supernal sphere falling 
 upon the human sense ; it cannot be, says the 
 sceptic, it cannot be, for it was never heard 
 before, it has not been heard since, and there- 
 fore no evidence can prove it. But imagine 
 now — and it is a perfectly rational exercise of 
 this high faculty — imagine now a being who 
 had never seen a world like this, so full of evil, 
 physical evil, physical irregularity as it appears 
 — so abounding in moral obliquity, in madness, 
 crime, in all unreason, in all spritual deformity — 
 could either sense or reason credit it ? 
 
 The peculiarity to which attention is called 
 appears throughout the Bible. In all its super- 
 natural, this moral ground and moral reason 
 may be distinctly seen. There is nothing in it 
 capricious, reasonless, monstrous, or grotesque. 
 Now, whatever may be the condition of other 
 worlds, the one in which we live is certainly full of 
 
86 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 moral disorder, and there would seem to be a 
 propriety that the physical, in such a world, 
 should present some reflection of the spiritual 
 confusion. Given, then, the idea of a personal 
 God, of a holy God, loving righteousness, and 
 hating sin — a deity in whose eyes the physical is 
 subordinate to the moral, and has its value only 
 as a disciplinary and probationary aid to a higher 
 spiritual excellence ; given this, which no one 
 can caLl irrational, and we may boldly reverse 
 the position which some so confidently as- 
 sume. It would be the rarity of the super- 
 natural that would be the real wonder. The utter 
 silence of nature ; that would be the real miracle. 
 Even in such a morally disordered world, regu- 
 larity in physical phenomena would still have 
 a ground in the reason ; it would be demanded 
 for the ordinary government of rational action ; 
 but the total absence of any sign from the higher 
 sphere attesting the presence of the denied or 
 the contemned lawgiver, that would be a thing 
 most wonderful, most incredible. And to this 
 corresponds the natural feeling of the human 
 soul. Why has a belief in the supernatural, I 
 ask again, been so universal? To fallen beings 
 there is, indeed, a dread in the thought of a per- 
 sonal intervening deity, but this is overpowered, 
 at times, by the still more alarming thought 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. gf 
 
 of there being nothing above us that concerns 
 itself with the affairs of men. When crime un- 
 punished fills the land, when cruelty, injustice, 
 oppression, are everywhere triumphant; when 
 the predominance of wealth and capital are 
 crushing labor to the earth ; when the poor cry 
 out, and our boasted science of political econ- 
 omy, with all its vaunted remedial powers, is 
 found an utter failure ; when ambition, with its 
 mighty standing armies, is filling the earth with 
 groans and blood, and all the visible laws of 
 nature seem pressed into the service of those 
 who perpetrate such enormities ; when " men 
 are made as the fishes of the sea, taken with the 
 angle, caught in the net, gathered in the drag ; " 
 when all mere humanitarian reforms have proved 
 their falsity, or have exceeded in mischief the 
 very evils they were proposed to remedy ; when 
 the last great boast of democracy is showing" 
 itself a failure, as well as the monarchies and 
 aristocracies and priesthoods that preceded it ; 
 when " earth seems given into the hands of the 
 wicked " — how instinctively does the mind rise to 
 something higher than nature ! " O that Thou 
 wouldst rend the heavens and come down ; " the 
 cry is in the soul, if not uttered by the voice, or 
 its meaning distinctly conceived by the under- 
 standing. Though we may not reason clearly 
 
88 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 about it, it is felt that it is the highest reason 
 that prompts it. The politician, the editor, even 
 the infidel statesman, seem sometimes strangely 
 driven to the utterance of language that can have 
 no other meaning. It is all inconsistent, indeed, 
 hypocritical perhaps, in some of its aspects, but 
 still in deference to this irrepressible feeling. 
 There must be an interposition, somehow and 
 somewhere, in favor of right. If questioned as to 
 their distinct meaning in such utterances, they 
 would doubtless have over again the old babble 
 of intervention by social laws, or natural laws, as 
 though nature herself were gentle, long-suffering, 
 merciful, righteous, opposed to wrong ; but it is 
 an intervention after all, something that would 
 not happen in the course of things as they were 
 going on, and the idea cannot stop short of the 
 supernatural. The expectation is utterly rea- 
 sonless, or it must be supposed that somewhere 
 the switch is turned by an unseen hand ; at some 
 link or nexus in the lower sphere of nature and 
 humanity comes in the interference that receives 
 its command from the higher order and the higher 
 law. " I tremble for my country," says Jeffer- 
 son, " when I remember that God is just and 
 that His vengeance will not sleep for ever." 
 However little he may have individually meant 
 by this, it came from him impulsively as the 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 89 
 
 prophet of the human soul. Sometimes the re- 
 verse thought sorely tries the believer's faith : 
 " Art Thou not from everlasting Jehovah, my 
 God, my Holy One ? Thou art of purer'eyes 
 than to behold evil ; wherefore lookest Thou, 
 then, upon them who deal treacherously, and 
 holdest Thy peace when the wicked devoureth 
 the man that is more righteous than he ? " Even 
 to the Christian it is the rarity of the super- 
 natural that seems the real paradox : " Why 
 standest Thou afar off?" Why does not God 
 oftener speak to us? Why are the heavens so 
 still ? Instead of there being apparently so little 
 of intervention in the affairs of men, why is 
 there not a great deal more than has ever been 
 recorded either in Scripture or in mythology ? 
 The pious soul reconciles itself to it, but it is only 
 on the ground of faith, rising above both sense 
 and reason : " Clouds and darkness are round 
 about Him, but judgment and truth are the foun- 
 dation of His throne." 
 
 But the most modern infidelity, as I have said, 
 takes a step beyond this. The supernatural, it 
 affirms, is not simply incredible, difficult of belief, 
 requiring strong and rare evidence, but absolute- 
 ly impossible. It would not be easy to say on 
 what rational grounds this dictum rests. As 
 commonly used, it is a sheer assumption. It has 
 
90 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 no reason in it. It is equivalent to denying that 
 there is anything above nature, older than na- 
 ture, or from which it comes. It has no reason, 
 we say, for it is the annihilation of reason re- 
 garded as anything else than itself a product of 
 nature, as thought and consciousness are affirm- 
 ed to be. Now reason, if there be any such 
 thing, must be supreme. It must be primeval, 
 first of all. " The Logos " must be " in the be- 
 ginning " or it has no true existence. That to 
 which we give the name of reason is, on the other 
 hypothesis, but a shadow, a transient reflection 
 from the physical, and can, therefore, never rise 
 above it, or pronounce any judgment about it as 
 rational or irrational. Whenever, therefore, any 
 formal argument is attempted here, the assump- 
 tion becomes immediately manifest in all its bald- 
 ness. It comes to this : Nature is all ; there- 
 fore there can be nothing else. Most lucid enthy- 
 meme ! But that is all they can make of it. 
 They avoid any objection drawn from the human 
 faculties, by simply turning man himself into na- 
 ture. By this arbitrary and impudent assump- 
 tion, the human thought, consciousness, reason, 
 immediately become products of nature, and 
 even some divines, through a prejudice in favor of 
 their own narrow definition of the supernatural, 
 are forced to the same conclusion. Our souls are 
 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. g X 
 
 in the machinery as much as our bones. The pas- 
 sengers in the railroad train, with all their ideals, 
 all their speculations, all their politics, morals, 
 religions even, are as purely physical forces, 
 physical movements, as the grass growing in *the 
 fields by which they are so rapidly passing. The 
 engineer is himself but apart of the machinery. 
 Nay more, the very inventor of the engine, and 
 even the invention itself, is as much an inseparable 
 part of nature as the boiling water or the hissing 
 steam. When we depart, however, in the least 
 from this sheer petitio principii that yiature is all, 
 we are at once in a region that carries our rea- 
 soning fearfully far and fearfully high. If nature 
 is not all, then it may be a small portion of the 
 whole, and not only a small, but a very inferior 
 thing, whose fixedness or mutability can have 
 their value only in relation to some sphere or 
 world above. In this crude assumption nature is 
 not defined. If it is meant as only another name 
 for being in general, or for the whole system of 
 things including a supreme mind and a will as 
 well as a supreme force, then it becomes a 
 childish logomachy. It is the shallowest truism 
 when we say that the laws of the cosmos, thus 
 regarded, cannot be broken. It becomes simply 
 a name for God's government, and all rational 
 minds must assent to the proposition that in it 
 
92 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 there can be nothing capricious, nothing without 
 reason. " All things were made by the Logos, 
 and without him was there nothing made that 
 was made." If there is .any seeming deviation, 
 any interruption of the course of the visible na- 
 ture, it is in obedience to some higher law of the 
 supernatural world. We may even suppose that 
 such deviation from the ordinary visible is 
 brought about by a transcending personality, 
 acting directly upon, and through, deeply in- 
 terior laws, or forces in nature herself — such 
 springs or cogs as only operate, or approach, or 
 come in contact, when the hour is struck, though 
 lying long quiescent in the ordinary movement 
 of the clock, or silently nearing each other in that 
 far down region to which no science can pene- 
 trate. The secret of such forces may be known 
 to higher intelligences, whether God, or angels, 
 or human beings supernaturally endowed with a 
 deeper insight, and employing it, as ordinary 
 men do in their ordinary interferences with the 
 more superficial movements of nature, — turning it 
 from what it would have done, or to what it 
 would not have done, had it been left to itself. 
 Some religious minds might, perhaps, be afraid 
 of this, as confusing the distinction between the 
 natural and the supernatural. But we need not 
 concern ourselves about words here. It would 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 
 
 93 
 
 still be miraculous, wonderful, full of awe. It 
 would be all the same, so far as that moral 
 power is concerned on which we have been in- 
 sisting. It would be accompanied by the same 
 fear of something- personal above or beyond na- 
 ture. It might even be thought to carry with 
 it a greater alarm, making nature itself a more 
 fearful thing, as having, in its deep interior, 
 hidden causalties unknown to our keenest 
 science, yet furnishing a means of startling effi- 
 ciencies to beings of a higher knowledge, or to 
 forces connected with a higher human psy- 
 chology. 
 
 But there are other irrationalities resulting 
 from the assumption that nature is all. The 
 statement of them may not seem obvious, since 
 the position assailed is of a kind so strange, so 
 absurdly facile, that it would seem incapable of 
 refutation as it is of defence. Let us take the in- 
 fidel scientist's own view of it as an uninterrupted, 
 or never interfered with, evolution, or coming out 
 of things — ever coming out from that which is 
 lowest in the remotest past, and to whose prim- 
 eval emptiness nothing has ever really been 
 added. Then, if nature is all, it is an eternal 
 evolution, an eternal coming out, having no other 
 end than such evolving. It is an eternal coming 
 out that never, in fact, does come out, or that 
 
94 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 goes back as fast as it does come out. There is 
 nothing finished in it, and there is excluded 
 the thought of any perfect^ or reXetov, anything 
 finished in any world above to which this eternal 
 evolution is subservient. There are no such 
 world, or worlds, above it, for which nature was 
 made, or for the sake of which it is thus evolving, 
 unwinding, until it is all spent, or, like some 
 coiled spiral, winding back again to the starting- 
 point, if starting-point is conceivable, and so on, 
 and so on, evolutions of evolutions, for ever and 
 for evermore. There are, strictly, no ends in the 
 universe transcending the working of this purely 
 physical machinery thus ever evolving for the 
 sake of evolving* There are, then, no other ends, 
 
 * A higher world than the physical necessary to explain the 
 physical : This is the idea on which we so much insist, and it is 
 gratifying to find it clearly and conclusively stated by so good 
 an authority as the editor of "The Nation," No. 517 (May 17, 
 J ^75)) P a g" e 367, where he says: "The affirmation that this 
 physical world has also a moral meaning (that is, finds its end 
 in a moral world above it), is one that no argument drawn 
 from purely physical science can impugn." It is, however, 
 but another mode of expressing a thought drawn from very 
 ancient writings. Physical science, '' the science of change 
 and motion?' as Aristotle defined it, cannot determine its own 
 place ; it cannot say what may or what may not be above it 
 in the immovable spheres. Therefore it is that this great 
 thinker assigns to it a rank below the mathematical and the 
 theological : ri fitknarov ; <j>vcjik?), 1u.a67jfj.aT tic?), Oeohoyuci? ; See the 
 question briefly stated, Arist. Metaph. Lib. x. (xi.), ch. 7. 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPER.VA TURAL. g$ 
 
 such as ends moral, artistic, ideal, ineffable. 
 There are, in truth, no ends at all. There can be 
 none ; for that which ever terminates in the pro- 
 cess of its own evolution is no end ; and if there 
 is no end, then no idea ; if no idea, then no law. 
 Not only is there no Logos in the beginning, 
 there is none that can ever be evolved. 
 
 The incredibility of the supernatural, or, in 
 other words, the just demand of strong evidence 
 in particular cases, presents a fair ground of 
 argument. That evidence, however, has been 
 supplied. In regard to its weight there is mat- 
 ter of controversy, but here believers have 
 triumphantly met the infidel arguments in the 
 old debates, and are prepared to meet them 
 again. The field of conflict has in no respect 
 changed. Such a fact as the Resurrection of 
 Christ was not, indeed, to be lightly received ; 
 but the proof demanded has been furnished, not 
 only from the overwhelming cotemporaneous 
 testimony of the most unimpeachable witnesses, 
 sealed by lives of heroic endurance, and by 
 deaths of cruel martyrdom, but from the standing 
 spiritual miracle which it has wrought in the 
 world — the supernatural, unearthly light that 
 came forth from that sepulchre, and of which our 
 own eyes and our own hearts are still witnesses. 
 That controversy, we say, stands as it did before ; 
 
9 6 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 
 but here comes up a new form of denial, all the 
 more stubborn and audacious in proportion to its 
 utter want of rational ground. The Resurrec- 
 tion of our Saviour never took place; no mirac- 
 ulous event, as recorded in the Bible, ever had 
 any objective reality. And why? Not simply 
 on the ground of strangeness, or any measurable 
 incredibility of sense, but because a miracle, a 
 wonder in nature, any deviation from her ordi- 
 nary visible course, and that, too, as falling under 
 the exceedingly limited observation of our posi- 
 tive philosopher, is absolutely impossible. This 
 is the new position that now meets us every- 
 where. It is coolly assumed by the scientist 
 without the shadow of an argument. With still 
 less of reason, if possible, it is echoed by many in 
 the literary world. But most irrational of all is 
 the use made of it by a certain class of Biblical 
 critics. This sheer assumption they take as the 
 ground of all their interpretations. For them it is 
 enough to disprove the verit}^, or the authenticity, 
 even, of any portion of the Bible, that there is in 
 it any mention of a supernatural event, whatever 
 the moral ground, or the accompanying moral 
 reasons. Anything prophetic is at once set down 
 as evidence of a later date, and rejected as a mat- 
 ter of course. Here they take their stand with a 
 stubbornness all the greater as it is opposed to the 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. gj 
 
 critical as well as to the moral reason. The super- 
 natural is impossible, and, therefore, there need 
 be no further argument about the passage. This 
 is not the place for dwelling critically on such a 
 position. It may only be said that it marks the 
 inconsistency of a certain class of men who will 
 not let the Scriptures alone, and yet deny the 
 very characteristics that would chiefly seem to 
 make them worthy of our study. It is a blind 
 overlooking of the very elements in which they 
 differ from all else called mythical or legendary. 
 It is a denial of that patent moral character which 
 is their standing peculiarity, and without which 
 they sink below the rank of myths into sheer cir- 
 cumstantial and statistical lying, a deliberate im- 
 posture — a charge which, at this day, the wisest 
 Rationalist shrinks from making against them. 
 Such is the treatment they give to a book for 
 which they profess a high respect, but which can- 
 not be thus interpreted without violating their 
 own famous canon in disregarding what is most 
 characteristic of the Bible, and its high claim 
 as a supernatural revelation. We cannot rightly 
 interpret Homer without conceding to him a 
 belief in his own mythology. But here is the 
 difference between the Scriptures and all other 
 narrations of the marvelous. Once concede a 
 subjective truthfulness to the Biblical writers, 
 5 
 
98 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 and the objective verity of details thus given be- 
 comes irresistible. The only alternative of escape 
 from it is by taking the ground which very few- 
 are now willing to take, that the Scriptures are 
 designedly and statistically false ; in other words, 
 the most circumstantial and studied imposition 
 ever presented to the credulity of mankind. 
 
 The main object in this lecture has been the 
 consideration of two main infidel assumptions, 
 the incredibility and the impossibility of the super- 
 natural. The latter, it cannot be too often re- 
 peated, is put forth without even the semblance 
 of an argument, and yet with a confidence that 
 could only be felt in a mathematical demonstra- 
 tion. Nature is all. There are no other spheres 
 of being, no ends transcending its endless and aim- 
 less evolutions. Let the narrowness, as well as the 
 audacity, of this assumption be duly considered, 
 and the whole fabric of unbelief built upon it falls 
 to the ground. It becomes a tohu and boku, empty, 
 foundationless, formless, and void. The idea of 
 possible spheres of being higher than nature, and 
 for which nature itself is made, at once sweeps it 
 all away. In the clear light of such a thought is 
 seen the utter perversity, as well as narrowness, 
 of the lower or solely physical view. " O we of 
 little faith ! wherefore did we ever doubt ?" Such 
 is the feeling when the mist clears up, and we 
 
THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. gg 
 
 get into a way of thinking so much purer and 
 easier than the one that tortures the intellect as 
 well as the affections. Depart from this, and 
 there is no stopping-place short of the horrors of 
 Strauss, with his dream of the iron wheels, that, 
 in respect to gloomy grandeur, might almost 
 seem to vie with the visions of Ezekiel or of 
 Dante. On the other hand, begin with this, and 
 all is clear. Nature has a meaning and a value. 
 It becomes itself a higher department of the uni- 
 verse just in proportion as it is raised to this 
 higher office. It gets its true meaning when thus 
 regarded as subservient to more glorious spheres 
 of being partially revealed in the Scriptures, 
 measurably thinkable by the human mind, and 
 suggestive of still higher things that " eye hath 
 not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man 
 conceived." 
 
1 
 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT — WORLDS IN SPACE. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT — WORLDS IN SPACE. 
 
 Cosmical Argument ; Worlds in Space — Astronomical Objection — Its pres- 
 sure — Trine aspect of the Universe — The believer charged with narrow 
 conceptions — The three dimensions of being — The additions physical 
 science has made to our knowledge, mainly mathematical — Question of 
 planetary life still unsettled — Ancient ideas of cosmical immensity — Rela- 
 tive distances — Emotional feeling of greatness not affected by number — 
 Idea of law in the Scriptures, and as held by the most contemplative 
 ancient minds — The stars as mighty beings — Modern conception that of 
 endless repetition : less favorable to the unity of the cosmos than the 
 ancient, though the latter was grounded on a more limited fact knowledge 
 — Idea of great world times— How affected by modern science — St. Augus- 
 tine — Reconciliations between science and the Bible — Their small value — 
 No science in the Bible, a proof of a higher inspiration — Scientific preten- 
 sions of other books called sacred — Grandeur of the Bible language — 
 Heavens in the plural — Eternities in the plural — New knowledge as a 
 ground of new interpretations — New Testament interpreting the Old — 
 Mounting or germinant senses in distinction from double senses, or the 
 cabalistical — Advance of physical knowledge may have a similar effect — 
 New expansions of old ideas. 
 
 The "astronomical objection" to Christianity, 
 as it is most commonly called, is the one prob- 
 ably that presses hardest upon the thoughtful 
 mind. It addresses itself so powerfully to the 
 imagination, and through it, at times, bewilders 
 and amazes, if it does not wholly silence, that 
 stronger faculty, the reason. It comes to us un- 
 der two aspects, to which we may give the names 
 of the stellar and the cosmical. The one con- 
 founds us with the array of worlds supposed to 
 be, like our earth, the abodes of life and ration- 
 
 (103) 
 
I0 4 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ality, and, therefore, diminishing to a great, if 
 not an infinite, degree, the importance which 
 the Scriptures seem to attach to man. The 
 other has more reference to the origin of the 
 cosmos and its vast times, as supposed to be in- 
 consistent with the scriptural account of crea- 
 tion. The first dates mainly from the discoveries 
 of the telescope. The other goes much farther 
 back. Cosmical speculations about the origin 
 of the world, the eternity of the world, its ma- 
 terial and dynamical causalities, many of them 
 strikingly similar to some that are now most rife, 
 belong to ancient times — to very ancient times. 
 Thoughtful men have been always thinking 
 about these things. Even " the infinity ol 
 worlds" was a very old speculation. We might 
 call them the space and time aspects, and it was 
 first thought best to present them in two sepa- 
 rate lectures, with separate titles. The ideas, 
 however, so intermingled themselves, that one 
 general title seemed most appropriate, though 
 regarded as embracing two principal divisions. 
 The name " cosmical," then, may be taken as the 
 common title to both lectures, or one more ap- 
 plicable still may be found in an expression I 
 have ventured to employ, though quite unusual. 
 As extending beyond both space and time, and 
 ascending to the still higher conception of rank 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. I0 5 
 
 or order of being, permit me to call it the three- 
 fold, Or TRINE ASPECT OF THE UNIVERSE,— a 
 term to be more fully explained in its applica- 
 tions. 
 
 The believer in the Bible is charged with 
 entertaining narrow views of the cosmos, or of 
 the great whole of being. Science has intro- 
 duced enlarged conceptions destructive of the old 
 faith. It is no longer possible to believe as Bacon 
 did. Even Newton can no more be cited, as 
 formerly, in proof that one may hold to the Scrip- 
 tures, and yet be a man of profound and elevated 
 thought. But there are other aspects to such a 
 charge, that might not only change, but invert its 
 force. Of Newton it might be said that he, at 
 least, lived at a time when astronomical science 
 had furnished all the important materials for the 
 boasting inference before alluded to. It may be 
 safely affirmed, that, so far as concerns the ques- 
 tion we are now contemplating, nothing that has 
 since been discovered gives the most modern 
 astronomer here any advantage over the devout 
 Cacholic Copernicus, or the pious Protestants, 
 Kepler, Euler, and Newton. Two more distant 
 planets have been barely seen ; a swarm of 
 worthless asteroids, and a few more of that still 
 inexplicable class of bodies, the comets, have been 
 added to the catalogues, but their bearing on 
 S* 
 
I06 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the question is too small for computation. It 
 could not have driven Newton from his faith in 
 the Scriptures. The new light which burst upon 
 the world through the telescope had been antici- 
 pated by Kepler. To the others, whose names 
 have been mentioned, it was clearly suggestive 
 of every enlarged conclusion that has been, or is 
 now, drawn from that discovery. 
 
 Against such a charge we need not hesitate to 
 use the shield of such authorities. But the ques- 
 tion after all remains, On which side does the nar- 
 rowness really exist ? Far be it from me to rail at 
 science or scientific men ; but certainly there 
 does sometimes reveal itself among the more 
 boasting scientists an incapacity for moral and 
 spiritual views that in their intrinsic grandeur, 
 throw all physical discovery into the shade. In 
 proof of such blindness, there might be cited this 
 exceedingly narrow notion that nature is all, and 
 that weak truism so confidently built upon it, 
 that, therefore, there can be nothing which is not 
 nature — that is, no supernatural. The charge 
 against the religionist seems plausible. No other 
 world in space than this little earth of ours ! 
 What a paltry conception! But take now an- 
 other view. Look away from this thinnest aspect 
 of mere width, this outstretching space view with 
 its possible, and, as many analogies would tend 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j Q y 
 
 to show, its probable sameness of conditions, as 
 nascent, growing, decaying, progressive, retro- 
 grading, — all alike essentially, as all springing 
 from one mother nebula, one common causal 
 development, unvaried, as they would have us 
 believe, by causes or fiats of a higher order. Look 
 above this mere physical plane of worlds beyond 
 worlds, to what we have called the rank-aspect of 
 worlds above worlds. The question then would 
 stand thus : No other world or plane of being 
 than the physical, ever returning into itself, and 
 having no ends out of itself, no aims above itself; 
 no other world, or worlds, than those we can 
 survey with our telescopes, or peer into with our 
 microscopes — no higher moral or spiritual sphere 
 for which the physical exists, and without which 
 it has no other than a physical value, that is, 
 relatively no value at all! What an exceeding 
 narrowness is here? The first is simply a defi- 
 ciency of fact knowledge, and may, therefore, be 
 enlarged ; the other blindness keeps the eye 
 closed to all that light within which reveals to 
 us the paltriness of the physical, even in its 
 largest spatial and dynamical extent, when there 
 is acknowledged nothing beyond and above it. 
 It is thus that this doctrine, which makes nature 
 all, so stultifies itself. Viewed from a higher 
 point of contemplation, it shrinks to a narrow- 
 
108 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ness, a thinness rather, beyond anything that 
 may be charged upon a limited space conception 
 of the sense universe. The vast surface width 
 that it gives the cosmos is all the more unmean- 
 ing, all the more void of reason, from its want of 
 depth and height. 
 
 As the idea of geometrical magnitude de- 
 mands for its perfection the three dimensions of 
 length, breadth, and altitude, so the true con- 
 ception of the universe does not become full and 
 satisfying, until it assumes in our minds a trine 
 aspect. Up and down are, indeed, relative terms, 
 and so Solomon must have regarded them when 
 he speaks of "the "heaven and the heaven of 
 heavens." So all thinking men from Solomon to 
 Aristotle and Newton, have ever regarded them. 
 But the ideas they typify are real. It is felt that 
 there must be, in the great system of things, a 
 profundity corresponding to the altitude, an evil 
 to the good, a darkness, too, a risk and a loss, 
 forming a counterpart to the light, the hope, and 
 the glory. The cosmical view must tend to this 
 rounded completeness, unless some lower form 
 of being obtains an interest, scientific or other- 
 wise, that relatively obscures the higher. Thus 
 it is very possible that the unscientific mind, or a 
 thoughtful soul possessing a very limited sense 
 knowledge, may have this trine conception more 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. i0 g 
 
 perfectly developed, that is, in better propor- 
 tions, than another far excelling in the amount of 
 physical science, if such science confine the 
 thoughts to one usurp ng nd absorbing view. 
 These three aspects, then, may be tersely denoted 
 as the cosmos in space, the cosmos in time, the 
 cosmos, or the universe, in its unfolded and un- 
 folding ranks of being, as ascending in their phys- 
 ical, moral, spiritual, hyperphysical scales of 
 gradation ; the first analogous to width or breadth, 
 the second to length, the third to altitude, not in 
 space- dimension, but in its ascent towards the 
 loftiest aim of all cosmical existence. 
 
 The physical in its space aspect is, indeed, the 
 lowest of all, and yet it is the one out of which 
 this charge of narrowness, as made against the 
 Bible and the religious thinking, has most com- 
 monly arisen. Since the invention of the tele- 
 scope, worlds in space, or bodies in space, has 
 been the challenging scientific wonder. It is 
 this which has so greatly weakened, it is said, the 
 old religious belief. It would not be easy to 
 show, however, that even here it had the effect 
 contended for, or that this " opening of the walls 
 of the world," which the science of Lucretius 
 boasted of as loudly as our own, extends greatly 
 beyond what we may call the mere mathematical 
 interest. What real ideas of life, and action, and 
 
HO VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 rationality, and varied orders of being, has it dis- 
 closed to us ? In all these respects, in answer to 
 all questions prompted by them, the heavens are 
 as silent as of old. The earth is still the centre 
 — the centre of human interest, if not of topical 
 revolution. It is not intended to underrate the 
 ideas thus gained, but they are far from being 
 the greatest. The telescope has revealed to us — 
 what? Distance, number, motion, dynamical 
 relations. This, with' some few hints in respect 
 to gases given to us by the spectrum, sums up 
 about all the additions made to our knowledge 
 since the days of Galileo. It has an interest in- 
 deed, but of a narrow kind, of a lower rank as 
 compared with those questions of destiny, and of 
 the aim of God's eternal kingdom, for whose 
 solution we are most anxious, and without which 
 other knowledge is a tantalizing darkness, creat- 
 ing at each step more mystery than it explains. 
 Worlds have been discovered— so the term is 
 now used as applied to stellar or planetary 
 bodies ; but it is impossible to prove that these 
 worlds, so called, are abodes of life, either in its 
 higher or its lower forms. There are not a few 
 indications to the contrary. There are appear- 
 ances indicating that a good proportion of these 
 cosmical bodies, whether stellar, planetary, or 
 cometary, are mere wastes in respect to the 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 Ill 
 
 
 higher aspects of being. There is no certain 
 knowledge, no probable knowledge of there being 
 in many of them, or in any of them, the very first 
 rudiments of vital organization, any more than in 
 our earth during the millions of ages that geolo- 
 gists assign to its primordial existence, whether 
 gaseous, fluid, or solid. W he well sets this forth 
 in a remark, whose force strikes us at once : " It 
 is no more incredible," says he, "that there 
 should be immense space without life in any of 
 the bodies that occupy it, than that there should 
 be an immense time during which one body that 
 we "know was in the same azoic condition." 
 
 The thoughtful ancient mind regarded the 
 cosmical bodies as being at immense distances, 
 and, therefore, of immense magnitudes, some of 
 them, probably, larger than our earth. There is 
 evidence that the mind went out freely in this 
 expansive direction. The idea was not depend- 
 ent on any reduction of these distances to deci- 
 mal numbers, that, beyond a limit by no means 
 great, have only a notional or mathematical in- 
 terest. In regard to the conceptual greatness 
 nothing is gained by them, since 10,000, or 
 10,000,000, are equally beyond the conceptive 
 power. Old thinkers, without this, talked even 
 of " the infinity of worlds." With some it was 
 a favorite speculation. "As well think of one 
 
112 VEDDER LECT RES. 
 
 head of wheat in a boundless field," says Metro- 
 dorus, " as of one world in infinite space." " The 
 atria" says Plutarch, " the rational causalities, are 
 infinite, and the effects must correspond ;" there 
 was no reason for the one that would not prove 
 the existence of the many. The ancient mind 
 had quite a fair estimate, too, of the proportional 
 distances of the planets, though they had no means 
 of bringing them into earthly measurements of 
 miles and inches as deduced from any known 
 earthly parallax. The telescope has helped us 
 here. More perfect instruments, and more perfect 
 observations have given us earthly base lines, and 
 we now say it is so many millions of miles, and 
 these miles we can bring into feet, and, more 
 wondrous still ! even into barleycorns ; but the 
 essential knowledge, and the essential reasoning 
 from distance, remain very much the same. The 
 conceptual feeling of vastness is not increased by 
 the notional estimate. By giving a dispropor- 
 tioned prominence to the mathematical interest, 
 it may be that the emotional has been actually 
 diminished. According to the best evidence of 
 antiquity, Pythagoras held the Copernican sys- 
 tem, as it is now called, in its completeness, 
 whilst Plato held it partially. Aristotle, in his book, 
 " De Coelo," condemns it as built upon fanciful or 
 a priori reasoning. It placed the sun in the cen- 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 "3 
 
 tre, he says, because the fire was the worthier, 
 as it was the more ethereal or heavenly element. 
 This was opposed to observation and sense induc- 
 tion, on which he reasoned as the Bacon of his 
 times. On the Pythagorean system, he maintained, 
 there certainly ought to be an annual parallax of 
 the fixed stars, or some of them. The absence 
 of such parallax, therefore, showed the theory to 
 be false, or else these distances were not merely 
 great, very great, as he held them to be, but 
 inconceivable, vast beyond any measure of com- 
 putation. We are yet engaged in attempts at 
 solving that problem. I may be permitted to 
 refer to this here, as presenting a singular fact in 
 the history of science and philosophy : The 
 visionary view, the a priori view, as the Stagirite 
 calls it, has led to truth, whilst the method of 
 exact science — for Aristotle's argument is founded 
 on legitimate sense induction — landed him and 
 his followers, for many ages, into what is now 
 known to be error. Sense, in its keener instru- 
 mental forms, has come at last to support the 
 visionary view. This theory of Pythagoras in 
 respect to the solar system was connected with 
 his other sublime doctrine of the universal har- 
 mony, or as he preferred to style it, the music of 
 the spheres. There was grandeur in this out- 
 stretching idea, which the telescope is only par- 
 
ii4 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 tially verifying ; there was a sublime emotion in 
 it, of more value than any science which lacks 
 it, however exact it may claim to be. And so 
 when David, surveying the nightly heavens, ex- 
 claimed : " Lord, what is man? " Or when Isaiah 
 said : " Lift up your eyes on high, and behold 
 all these ; who bringeth out their host, who 
 calleth them all by name ; it is because He is 
 strong that not one of them faileth," — it is very 
 possible that there may have been a spiritual 
 interest far beyond 2J\y that La Place may have 
 felt. To the latter, the heavens were simply 
 his orrery, his diagram for the better exhibition 
 of his mathematical analysis. It shocks all our 
 better thinking to believe that this French 
 atheist had a higher view of the universe, and 
 of the power that rules it than these great re- 
 ligious souls of antiquity, even with their lim- 
 ited knowledge of distance and mathematical 
 relation. 
 
 And so, too, in regard to the idea of law, 
 of which we boast as though it were a purely 
 modern thought. They had the substantial knowl- 
 edge, and that, too, in its purest form. They 
 knew that there must be a cosmical law, even 
 as the cosmos was one. The very name im- 
 plies unity of organization, and this is the very 
 essence of law. They believed that there was 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 115 
 
 an order in the heavens, in the universal sys- 
 tem of thing's, long before epicycles, or vor- 
 tices, or gravitation, or correlated forces had 
 been ever heard of: " For ever, O Jehovah, Thy 
 word is settled in the heights ; " " all things 
 stand according to Thine ordinance." That 
 there was such a law, a harmony, " making 
 peace in God's high places," a unity in the uni- 
 verse, whatever might be its space extent, this 
 was deemed of higher and more religious value 
 than any knowledge of its numerical details not 
 inspired by this nobler conception. Whether 
 its energy was inversely as the squares, or as 
 the cubes of the distances, or what those dis- 
 tances were in earthly measurements, — of all this 
 they knew but little, even as we know but little 
 more ; but they had a transcending knowledge, 
 a far higher thought of it, when they recognized 
 it as God's law, God's voice in nature, His Word 
 first uttered in nature's origination, and still 
 sounding on as the security for nature's contin- 
 uance. Hence they gave it this name so pecu- 
 liar to the Scritures, but having its shadow in 
 the ancient Greek or Egyptian doctrine of the 
 Logos. What many style law, using it as a 
 wholly impersonal term, denoting no real causal 
 power, but only a series of dead sequences, the 
 Bible calls " The Word of God that runneth 
 
Il6 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 very swiftly," pervading as well as sustaining all, 
 and in wkick, as Paul affirms in his echo of this 
 older doctrine (Coloss. i. 15,) ra rcdvra avveoTTjue, 
 all things consist or stand together. It was but 
 another echo of the old Shemitic thought when 
 Socrates, following Pythagoras, calls it " the 
 harmony that binds together all things in heaven 
 and earth." " He maketh peace in His high 
 places," concordiam in sublimibus suis. Cicero but 
 catches the same idea when he says, orta simul 
 est lex cum mente divina, which Hooker only 
 translates in that much-lauded utterance of his : 
 " Law has its seat in the bosom of God." Mod- 
 ern thought has enlarged our conception of the 
 universe, it is said ; but how is this done ? It is 
 by making matter first, the nebula first, the 
 lowest first, and law, love, and reason, all its 
 junior products. Aristotle reverses this. To aaXov 
 to dyadov, to votjtov, the Fair, the Good, the Idea, 
 they are first ; they, through vovg, mind, or intel- 
 ligence, move Love, as Love is the great mover 
 of all : Kivet de (bg epufievov, " it moves it as being 
 loved?' * This remarkable declaration, which 
 
 * " He moves it as being loved." Cudworth following 
 Proclus in his commentary, gives a wrong rendering of this, 
 making it too imaginative, or Platonic, as some would call 
 it. He refers the participle epu/uevov to Deity, or the mover, 
 instead of the cosmos. It is the world, or the created " Soul 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 
 
 11/ 
 
 might have been expected from the semi-poet- 
 ical Plato, moves our wonder as proceeding- from 
 this pure, unimaginative, passionless intellec- 
 tuality. We find it in the xi. book, sec. 7 of 
 his Metaphysica, or " Things above nature :'' Ktvel 
 6e (bg epufievov. It is in his argument concerning 
 the First Mover and the first moving things ; 
 dry, some would call it, but having a beauty in 
 its very terseness. Law is resolved into the 
 higher idea of love : the world moves because it 
 is loved of the First Mover. Its charm, as well 
 
 of the world," he would represent as " enamoured with the 
 Supreme Mind, and thus, in imitation of it, continually turn- 
 ing round the heavens." It is the love of the cosmos, or 
 its admiration of the " First Fair and First Good," or the 
 world drawn rather than impelled. This is beautiful, but it 
 is not the idea of the sober Aristotle. It is rather the love 
 of the Mover towards tbe cosmos, or to its harmonious 
 movement, which is the first moving power. Thus, "the 
 Good " (the 'Ayadov) is higher in the eternal order of being 
 than ~Sovc, or Intellect. In one sense it is the 'Ayadov, the 
 Good that gives being to the intelligible ; or as the Sun in 
 Plato's splendid comparison {Republic, vi. 58, E) " gives to 
 things not only their visibility, but also their generation, so 
 does that highest thing, the Good (in other places called 
 love), not only cause the cognoscibility of things, but also 
 their very ''essences and beings.'' {Intellectual System of 
 the Universe, Chap, iv., Sec. xxiii.) When carefully studied, 
 however, the ideas of Aristotle and Plato come to the same 
 thing : the first moving dpxh is not merely something older 
 than matter or force; it is Love, or u the Good," higher 
 even than mind or idea. 
 
Il8 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 as its power, is in its conciseness ; to opeferbv teal to 
 voTjrbv klveI ov KivovfiEvov: " The desire and the 
 thought, in other words, Love and Idea, must 
 be the first movers, themselves the product of no 
 preceding motion." Or according to another 
 statement in the same chapter, mind, vovg, is the 
 mover of the physical world ; but vovg may be 
 said to be moved by votjtov, mens by intellectum, 
 mind by truth. Here he stops, but the next step 
 would have carried him to the " Principium," in 
 whom mind and truth, ideal truth, eternal truth, 
 which we cannot think of either as non-existent 
 or as separate from a personal mind, are one and 
 the same. This is the Primum Movens, the Logos 
 that was with God and was God. But as it 
 stands, Aristotle's argument is irrefragable : Love 
 is the First Born in the eternal generation he 
 describes. Love and Idea, the Good, and Mind 
 eternally beholding it, are above all motion. 
 They are causes, not effects. 
 
 In another chapter (xiii. 4) he reasons, in a 
 similar manner, against those old materialists 
 who maintained that the most imperfect of all 
 things was first, even as their modern brethren 
 do in their nebular theory ; in other words, 
 mindless matter first, — force, the force of noth- 
 ing, first, — contingency first ; and then, as things 
 went on (I am giving his very language in his 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ng 
 
 account of these old atheists) npoeXdovorjg rrjg r&v 
 ovtcjv (f)vo£G)g, the good and fair, mind and idea, 
 did somehow appear." He charges them with 
 bringing more out of less, which is the same as 
 something out of nothing, and compares them 
 with the mythologizers who made Night and 
 Erebus the source of all things, from whom are 
 born both gods and men. 
 
 But in regard to that lower conception, the 
 space magnitude, or space relations, or dynamical 
 importance of bodies in the universe, it is all idle 
 to say that these old minds simply conceived of 
 the stars as glow-worm points of light twink- 
 ling uselessly in a solid firmament, or sky, just 
 above their heads. Solomon's sublime prayer, 
 " The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot con- 
 tain thee, cannot bear thee," as the Hebrew ex- 
 presses it, presents a conception transcending 
 anything derived from the modern astronomy as 
 given in our books. David's exclamation shows 
 that he connected the heavenly bodies with ideas 
 vastly transcending man's lowly earthly condi- 
 tion. Without this the sublime rapture becomes 
 inexplicable. Of the stars as bodies inhabited, 
 just as our earth is inhabited, these old worship- 
 ers may not have thought. Such an idea is, 
 indeed, found in the Greek poetry, and it may or 
 may not have been in the Hebrew mind. There 
 
120 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 is no proof to the contrary, as there is no irra- 
 tionality in the thought that it may have oc- 
 curred to many a meditative soul in the earlier 
 times. It is still but an imagination with us, and 
 there was much to excite the same imagination 
 even before science had got an earthly unit of 
 measurement. There is other proof besides the 
 writings of Aristotle that the ancient men, orien- 
 tal and occidental, regarded the heavenly bodies 
 as being of immense magnitude, and at incalcu- 
 lable distances. This, however, is quite clear, 
 that they connected with the stars most mighty 
 and glorious existences. " One star differed from 
 another star in glory," but each represented a 
 transcending power in the kingdom of God. It 
 was itself the outshining of an exalted being, or 
 the abode of an exalted being ; and there is as 
 much grandeur in that idea, giving as high a con- 
 ception of the greatness of the universe as would 
 come from the thought of a vast numerical popu- 
 lation, whether of mollusks, mastodons, or giants. 
 They were " the Hosts of Heaven," and hence that 
 sublime epithet Jehovah Tsebaoth used in refer- 
 ence to space and rank, as Melek Olamim. King of 
 the Eternities, was employed to denote the time 
 aspect of God's kingdom. These mighty stellar 
 powers might have infinite diversity, spiritual as 
 well as dynamic, whereas the modern idea seems 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 121 
 
 tending to an infinite sameness. Our space worlds 
 are but endless repetitions. It is supposed, and 
 that, too, by a fair analogy, that they grow 
 as our earth has grown, and that vast numbers 
 of them are now passing through the same' 
 chaotic, life-lacking stages. Seldom do we meet 
 with the thought, as expressed in the scientific 
 world, that any of them have got above us. To 
 science in general man is the etre supreme. 
 Through him the world is just coming into con- 
 sciousness. The same conclusions some are de- 
 riving from the spectrum ; the same gases, the 
 same elementary substances, lead to the idea 
 of sameness in material organization, and this to 
 that of sameness of life in its successive stages — 
 like the earlier inhabitants of our earth as adapted 
 to similar conditions. In this limited scientific 
 space conception of being, repetition is a pre- 
 dominant idea. It suggests a level plane with- 
 out any towering superiorities, or it resolves 
 itself into an endless succession of material tacts, 
 forming a series having eventually no other vari- 
 ations than those of space, numerical quantity, 
 forces, motions, mathematically diversified posi- 
 tions, and relations of atoms. In a word, motion 
 and force, if the two ideas can be separated ; these 
 are the only things, res, realities. If we want to 
 get any other sounds from this flat, tuneless 
 
122 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 homophony, we must look elsewhere. We must 
 go to Scripture, or call in the aid of some higher 
 ideas, the seeds of which we may find in our own 
 souls. Science gives no evidence of spiritual 
 dignities. With some it is even a boast that she 
 does not find them. 
 
 Which of these two views of the stellar inhabi- 
 tation or domination is the true one need not be 
 here inquired ; nor, should the inquiry be made, 
 could science give us any answer. What has 
 been said has reference only to this claim of 
 grandeur and enlargement, or this common 
 charge that the religious idea of the universe, as 
 derived from the Scriptures, is a narrowing of 
 the human mind. But more of this elsewhere. 
 
 The second head of this trine division of the 
 universe, or what I have called its time aspect, 
 belongs, in the main, to another lecture ; but 
 there are some suggestions in relation to it that 
 connect themselves with the train of thought in 
 which I have here indulged. There is a view of 
 the Biblical creative chronology to which this 
 charge of narrowness may be thought to have 
 some application. It is that which regards not 
 only the tellurian, but the whole cosmical evolu- 
 tion, as the work of one week, or six solar days of 
 our present reckoning, with an infinite blank 
 preceding. A view very different from this, or 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i 2 $ 
 
 one that regarded the times as immeasurable, 
 and even ineffable, was held by the best thought 
 of the Church very long before geology as a 
 science was ever heard of. The mediaeval doc- 
 trine of the cosmos was, in truth, a narrowing 
 from the wider science of the classical world, and 
 from the largeness, moreover, and freedom of 
 earlier patristic interpretations of the Bible. 
 Geographical knowledge, too, had actually sunk 
 within smaller limits, and the discoverer of 
 America but revived cosmical and tellurian ideas 
 which were familiar to some of the freer and 
 bolder thinkers of antiquity, such as Pythagoras, 
 Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Pliny. Dur- 
 ing these mediaeval times there had come in more 
 of the thaumaturgic spirit, and the mechanical 
 idea of creation, instantaneously, or almost in- 
 stantaneously, out of nothing — not only as 
 respects the primal force or matter, but the 
 separate parts and products of the great struc- 
 ture — became a favorite one. It may be said, 
 too, that it was more taken up with the theolog- 
 ical fact of creation than with the manner or 
 idea. God made the world ; in a religious point 
 of view that was all they sought or cared to 
 know. The divine power, the divine command, 
 the idea of instantaneousness, or of very brief ti mes, 
 were dwelt upon as having more of this wonder- 
 
124 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 working aspect, which the spirit of the times re- 
 garded as more closely allied to the religious 
 feeling. This blinded the mind to those other 
 time ideas of birth, growth, succession, evolution, 
 bringing forth, one thing coming out of another, — 
 in a word, of frninf"), " generations," natures, 
 genesis, which to one who now reads the sublime 
 Biblical account, under the influence of a dif- 
 ferent thinking, appear so prominent that the 
 wonder is they should have been so overlooked. 
 Now there is no need of shrinking from the ad- 
 mission that the change of the current thought 
 in this respect may be attributed, in a good de- 
 gree, to the influence of modern science ; though 
 there never was a time when such an interpreta- 
 tion as that of Saint Augustine would have been 
 deemed heretical. He held it, and others held it 
 in his day, as they have since, for an interpreta- 
 tion having good exegetical grounds in the letter 
 and spirit of the account. No science forced 
 them to it. They found ample support for the 
 idea of extraordinary times in the remarkable 
 language of the Scriptures, and in the peculiar 
 style they employ in setting forth the great facts, 
 in themselves so ineffable, of origin and escha- 
 tology. 
 
 Revelation is sometimes degraded by attempts 
 to which there is given the sounding name of 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. I2 - 
 
 " reconciliations between religion and science." 
 They are too apt to make science, or what as- 
 sumes to be such, the constant, and the Bible the 
 variable quantity in the equation. The Scrip- 
 tures must conform, or they must be made to 
 conform. It is not a work of fair exegesis, but of 
 possible accommodation. It is enough, for ex- 
 ample, that any utterly unproved hypothesis 
 denies a distinct beginning of the human species, 
 anything by way of organization or inspiration, 
 anything in the physical, or the spiritual, con- 
 stituting a specific difference, and making that to 
 be homo which before was not homo. Such a 
 sweeping conclusion in respect to divine possi- 
 bilities is taken, at once, as "established science," 
 and straightway some prepare themselves to 
 meet the case by the theory of an ideal Adam. 
 This will do, perhaps, until another demand is 
 made in the name of science, and that is met in 
 an equally prompt and easy way by the theory 
 of an ideal Christ, an ideal incarnation. Scripture 
 shakes hands with science. It is reconciled, as 
 the saying is, and this feat is accomplished by 
 going into the very interiora of the Christian 
 creed, and making the Second Adam as unreal 
 as the First. Thus we have our Bibles and 
 science too. We can laud both on the same plat- 
 form, and this is great gain. We say it boldly : 
 
126 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 better reverentially bury the old book than 
 treat it in this way. The boldest denial of infi- 
 delity is not more insulting than such a defer- 
 ential mockery. New facts, in seeming conflict, 
 from well-ascertained history, or well-established 
 science, may set us to re-examine former inter- 
 pretations, or former applications of them ; but 
 we must have an honest faith or none at all. A 
 purely mythical view of the creative account is 
 better than any scientific forcing it will not 
 bear. 
 
 There is no science in the Bible, either in its 
 language, its style, or its assumed teaching. At- 
 tempts to find it in the artless subjectiveness of 
 its truthful holy writers only leads to delusion. 
 The language of these seers of ineffable things is 
 grounded on their modes of conceiving ; their 
 conceptions are shaped by the knowledge of their 
 day. It is their true inspiration that takes this 
 language, and these conceptions, as the best 
 representatives of facts and ideas lying back of all, 
 and which the dialect of science and philosophy 
 fails to reach as much as the vulgar thinking. In 
 truth, nothing shows more strongly the fact of 
 some, divine supervision of the Bible, than the 
 absence of any such scientific or philosophic 
 language, or of a style assuming to be that of 
 any special thinking, or of anything esoteric, 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. I2 7 
 
 such as has characterized those who have as- 
 sumed to be religious teachers in all ages. This 
 is wholly lacking even in cases where there 
 would seem to have been the strongest tempta- 
 tion to such a mode of speech. A divine wis- 
 dom is here. The scientific or philosophic 
 language of one age is different from that of 
 another. No scientist would dare to say that 
 our own had reached a finality. It may appear 
 even childish a thousand years hence. Now 
 something has kept the Scriptural writers from 
 thus compromising the wondrous book of which, 
 through the ages, they have been the human 
 media of transmission. 
 
 In its account of the ineffable truths of origin, 
 the language of the Bible is optical, phenome- 
 nal, the vehicle of first appearances. It is a 
 universal language addressed to the most un- 
 changing of the human faculties. Its outside 
 symbols, the same for all ages, represent the 
 ineffable facts, the interior causalities, the ulti- 
 mate causalities, that lie behind the phenomenal 
 at whatever distance. The speech of science 
 can do no more. It sounds out a mile or two 
 farther from the shore of the directly seen. It 
 brings out a few more interior appearances, but 
 they are still appearances, (paivdfieva, having ever 
 some things yet more interior of which they are 
 
128 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 appearances. The difference is that the Scrip- 
 tures, in such cases, take the first phenomena, 
 the most visible outward of " the things seen," 
 as the immediate representatives of the deep un- 
 seen, whether near, or far off, or even infinitely 
 remote. It names them from such unchanging 
 outlying appearances. Thus there is no pre- 
 tense of being near the mysterious ultimate 
 causation — such a pretense as science sometimes 
 makes, though still " far wide," still holding on 
 to something they call a cause, but which the 
 next increase of the magnifying power turns 
 again into a phenomenon — an appearance of some- 
 thing farther back, and still farther back, that 
 appears through it. Thus do they ever verify 
 the deep idea of inspiration, that " the things 
 which are seen are made from things unseen," 
 from causalities that lie, and must for ever lie, 
 beyond the reach of sense, or any science 
 founded on sense. From this never-finished 
 process of turning supposed causalities into 
 new appearances, the dialect of science must be 
 ever becoming obsolete. But the Scripture 
 never commits itself to any mode of speech that 
 must change with changing knowledge of these 
 nearer phenomena ; and this is a striking dif- 
 ference between the Bible and other books 
 called sacred. The Koran fails here. It evi 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. I2 q. 
 
 dently affects sometimes a scientific language, 
 or supposed to be such ; as when Mohammed, 
 or his commentators, give the exact number of 
 the heavens, and even the distances, in miles, be- 
 tween them. Something of the same kind may be 
 traced in the oldest books of all other religions, 
 such as the Hindoo, the Persian, and the Chinese. 
 There are appearances of attempts, however 
 crude, at something like scientific theory — feeble 
 efforts at a sort of philosophising, or the utter- 
 ance of something seemingly above the common 
 mind, an assumption of some esoteric wisdom, 
 or a pretentious teaching style as of persons ini- 
 tiated into mysteries above the ordinary intelli- 
 gence. There is nothing like this in the Bible. 
 In that book all human thought is put upon a 
 level. From beginning to end, the Scriptures 
 go on their majestic way, manifesting every- 
 where this strange unconsciousness. There is 
 nothing of the thaumaturgic, or the wonder- 
 making, even when narrating the greatest won- 
 ders. When telling of God's descent in the 
 awful flames of Sinai, or of the song of the 
 angels at the Redeemer's birth, they are as calm 
 and unpretending as when narrating the pastoral 
 life of Jacob, or the friendship of David and 
 Jonathan. The Bible never calls attention to the 
 grand things it is saying, or going to say. There 
 6* 
 
130 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 is, m style, nothing legendary or sensational 
 about it. It nowhere stops, or stoops, to remove 
 objections ; it never betrays any anticipation of 
 cavils. Its perfect subjective truthfulness ; when 
 this is understood, the right-minded reader finds 
 it so difficult to resist the evidence of its ob- 
 jective credibility. So honest, so pure, so true 
 within, it cannot be false without. 
 
 Thus the Bible never commits itself to any 
 compromising language. It speaks of the heav- 
 ens in the plural, as it does of eternities in the 
 plural ; but it does not number them as the Mo- 
 hammedans and some of the Jewish Rabbins and 
 Talmudists have done. It speaks of the third 
 heavens, indeed, but only as the symbol of the 
 ineffable space-transcending glory. It has its 
 " heaven of heavens/' like its olam of olams, 
 or world of worlds, its all-comprehending 
 sphere, its all-containing time. It leaves these as 
 ever expanding ideas, capable of holding any 
 conceptional content that any science may ever 
 put into them. We may attempt to make it 
 more scientific by describing these plural heav- 
 ens as atmospherical, astronomical, planetary, 
 stellar, nebular, but all this never exhausts the 
 Scriptural language. It takes in something be- 
 yond all physical worlds which, in their widest ex- 
 tent, are but the lowest spheres in the kingdom of 
 
THE CO S MIC A L ARGUMENT. 
 
 131 
 
 God. It carries the mind to that transcending 
 ovpavbg to which " Christ lifted up His eyes " 
 when He said : "And now, Father, glorify thou 
 Me with the glory which I had with Thee before 
 the world was," npb rov rbv fcoa/iov elvac. The Bible 
 language is not to be limited by the conceptual 
 faculty, whether that of Solomon or of Herschell. 
 It points to the glory which is above the heavens, 
 over the heavens, super coelos. It goes up, up, to 
 the throne of God, the eternal seat of the highest 
 power and the highest intelligence, wherever 
 that may be, or in whatever space relations, 
 whether conceived as central, altitudinous, pro- 
 found, or all-present. " He looketh down to 
 behold the things that are in the heavens, as well 
 as the things that be on the earth." It is a locus 
 all-transcending ; it is a language all-satisfying, 
 intelligently guiding the common religious mind, 
 whilst giving a view, if we choose to take 
 it, inexhaustible by science or any amount 
 of inductive knowledge. The Bible state- 
 ments of origin, its view of the universe in its 
 relation to God — the only view of any spiritual 
 value — so transcends all sense-knowledge that it 
 can never truly come in collision with it, or re- 
 quire reconciliation. 
 
 And yet, in saying this, there is not excluded 
 a proper deference to science as suggestive of 
 
132 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 something in these ever-mounting senses that 
 certain preconceived limitations may have kept 
 us from seeing. We apply this principle of new 
 knowledge expanding, though not contradict- 
 ing, old language, and we find no difficulty in it 
 when we interpret the earlier Scriptures from 
 the standpoint of a higher theological knowl- 
 edge derived from the later revelations. Christ 
 and Paul give us a better understanding of 
 Moses and the Prophets. The mind receives an 
 enlargement from the New Testament writings, 
 and we legitimately carry this back to the better 
 interpretation of the Old, discovering thereby 
 " wondrous things out of God's ancient Law." 
 The Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophets, yea 
 the history, the genealogy, and the chronology of 
 the Old Testament seem to carry a higher sense. 
 Its devotional assumes a more heavenly, its 
 ethics a more spiritual aspect. That higher 
 sense was, seminally, there before, and some 
 minds of unwonted spirituality had, even then, a 
 glimpse of it. It is not a mere kabala, accommo- 
 dation, or type even. It is not a double sense, 
 or a mere arbitrary mystical sense. It is a mount- 
 ing sense, a germinant sense, built firmly, indeed, 
 upon the letter, and rising legitimately from it, 
 but now satisfying, or tending to satisfy, that 
 glow, and warmth, and elevation of diction 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT 
 
 33 
 
 which before seemed so strange in its connection 
 with facts of a seemingly lower order. David and 
 Pindar both seem to be celebrating temporal vic- 
 tories, temporal deliverances ; but what a dif- 
 ference in their styles ! What a rising is there in 
 the spiritual emotional as produced by the He- 
 brew Psalms when we read them in the revealing 
 light of David's greater Son, bringing out the 
 rays that lay latent in the spectrum, or were, in 
 comparison, but dimly seen. It is like the feel- 
 ing with which the newly-converted soul takes 
 up the whole volume of Scripture. What has 
 changed ? The language is the same. The logic- 
 al significance of words in their logical relations 
 are the same ; but how sublimely have they risen 
 in what may be called the scale of spiritual 
 emotion ! Though lexically the same, what a 
 glory seems now to invest certain oft-recurring 
 words : God, life, salvation, righteousness, truth, 
 mercy, holiness, forgiveness, the fear of the Lord, 
 the kingdom and people of the Most High, the 
 Anointed One of whom such glories are pre- 
 dicted, but which so shrink when applied to an 
 earthly monarch, or an earthly salvation. "Jeho- 
 vah reigns, let earth rejoice." Had we ever read 
 that before ? But there they stand, the same 
 words as of old before the Psalms became the 
 undying liturgy of the church; but how have 
 

 134 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 they all ascended, not to a different exegetical 
 defining, but to a higher plane of significance. 
 The temporal salvation ; how it expands into the 
 greater evangelical idea, not by taking a new 
 sense, strictly, for God's salvation is ever in 
 essence the same, even as the faith that looks to 
 it is ever the same — but by rising up towards 
 that measurement which is indicated by the 
 otherwise inexplicable glow of the language. 
 
 This train of thought might be farther pur- 
 sued. It has, however, been dwelt upon here 
 simply as the basis of another application, not 
 of the same kind, indeed, but suggestive of a 
 similar analogy. If an advance of theological 
 knowledge may, legitimately, have this retro- 
 spective effect in our interpretation of the older 
 Scripture, why may not an assured advance in 
 physical knowledge give something of the same 
 legitimate advantage, putting us in a position to 
 see — if it is really God's glory we wish to see — 
 more of vastness in the Scriptural language, a vast- 
 ness truly there, though veiled by narrowing con- 
 ceptions as much outside, in their assumed lite- 
 ralness, as the later knowledge that demands 
 conformity ? Interpreted from itself it has ample 
 room for both. 
 
 For example : the great time ideas had been 
 acknowledged by the best minds of an early age. 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 135 
 
 The older versions, Greek, Latin, and Syriac, had 
 given them with remarkable fulness. The strange 
 pluralities of the words by which they are set 
 forth appear in the Hebrew with a breadth and 
 power that cannot so well be expressed in our 
 modern, European tongues, in consequence both 
 of the vagueness and of the limitations that have 
 entered into the age-worn corresponding terms. 
 Hence it is that there have been given to such 
 expressions as " eternities," " King of eternities," 
 " kingdom of all eternities," " world of worlds," 
 "ages of ages," " secula seculorum" altogether 
 inadequate representatives. This Bible language 
 had become narrowed, too, from other causes, 
 such as the growing cosmical ignorance 
 before alluded to, and the too exclusive predomi- 
 nance of that religious dogma of the naked 
 divine power which favored the instantaneous or 
 mechanical view of creation, and thus threw into 
 the background the mighty significance of some 
 of the chief w T ords entering into the creative 
 account. But when the thoughts of men were 
 turned, though in another way, to the antiquity 
 of the earth, and the evidence of it all around us 
 — as capable of estimate by the common mind, 
 when aroused to it, as by the most scientific — 
 then this sublime Scriptural account of the 
 world's evolution was found to have a vastness felt, 
 
136 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 indeed, before by the profoundest minds, though 
 lacking the scientific data for reducing it to a 
 definite conception. There was something great, 
 mysterious, immeasurable — no thoughtful man 
 could read the First of Genesis without feeling 
 that — and thus there came easily, or without the 
 sense of forcing, the idea that there must be a 
 correspondence, in the picture, between the 
 great causation and the great effects, the great 
 evolutions and the great times through which 
 they were divinely evolved. This Scriptural ac- 
 count is most unique. It never grew as myths 
 and legends are known to grow. It is a whole, 
 as it must have presented itself to one mind. 
 The thought, then, suggests itself at once. A 
 narrative of things so wholly out of the way 
 of any human knowledge, direct or traditional, 
 is either a studied invention — a thing very 
 hard to be believed of that age, and of events 
 involving such a religious grandeur of idea — 
 or its claim to credence must be grounded on 
 the alleged fact of some vision revelation. The 
 pictorial style confirms this. It is a painting, 
 and, as such, demands a standpoint and a 
 perspective that shall bring the whole repre- 
 sentation into harmony. In rendering easier the 
 attainment of such a pictorial view, science has 
 aided us. It has helped us to appreciate the 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i^y 
 
 vast thought that is in the Scriptures with more 
 objective clearness, if not with more subjective 
 fulness of emotion. In taking this vantage 
 ground, we do not hamper ourselves by any def- 
 erence to outside authority. We explore the 
 Bible anew, but with the feeling that we are 
 not putting upon it a new sense. It is simply 
 getting from this sublime Biblical frontispiece 
 what lies fairly within the scope of its mighty 
 purpose, and the full significance of its most 
 vivid as well as most suggestive language. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS 
 IN TIME. 
 

LECTURE IV. 
 
 COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS IN 
 TIME. 
 
 The creative account— Six solar days — Creation in time— Ideas of growth, 
 succession, evolution — Difficulties of the solar day theory — The word day — 
 Theperiodical in distinction from the mere metaphorical sense — Language 
 of birth and growth, as patent on the first of Genesis — Proportion in times 
 necessary to its conceivability— Feeling of vastness in the creative account 
 — Its exceeding sublimity — Its language to be treated as self-interpreting — 
 The words darkness, night, light, day, to be determined from the account 
 itself— The first day determines all the rest — The whole creation called 
 a day — No mention of short days in other parts of Scripture — No abso- 
 lute measure of time — Ratios alone conceivable — Impression of vastness 
 in other creative descriptions of the Bible, Psalm xc — Mountains born — 
 Birth-travail of the earth — Proverbs viii — Leaves an impression of immense 
 antiquity — Job xxxviii — The sea born — The Hebrew terms expressive of a 
 struggle of forces — The ungovernable sea — Psalm civ — Summary of Biblical 
 creative ideas — Charge of narrowness against the Scriptures repelled — 
 Stuart and Hitzig on the absence of divided time in the world to come — 
 The view unscriptural — The Malkuth kol Olamim, or "kingdom of all 
 eternities" — iEonic words of the New Testament. 
 
 The Bible in its relation to the space aspect of the 
 universe was considered in the previous lecture. 
 The time aspect in connection with the infidel ar- 
 gument drawn from our later cosmical and geo- 
 logical science, next demands our attention. The 
 Mosaic account of the terrestrial primordia has 
 become one of the principal grounds on which 
 modern scepticism assails the credibility of Rev- 
 elation. At the same time it has not received 
 from our theologians and commentators that at- 
 tention which its importance, as an outpost, at 
 
 (HO 
 
1 4 2 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 least, if not the very citadel of divine truth, so 
 imperatively demands. Its defence has been, in 
 a great degree, left to the mere assertion of the 
 truisms before alluded to, such as the impos- 
 sibility that the book of nature should contra- 
 dict the book of inspiration, since God is the au- 
 thor of both ; and then the argument that follows 
 is drawn almost wholly from science, or some 
 assumed scheme of agreement, instead of being 
 derived from the Bible itself, or any attempt at 
 an exposition of its wondrous ideas as grounded 
 on fair and careful exegesis. 
 
 The theory of six solar days, each of twenty- 
 four hours as now measured by the risings and 
 settings of the sun, is seldom maintained at the 
 present day, whether the Mosaic account is sup- 
 posed to refer to the terrestrial or to the cosmical 
 creation. This more limited view was the one gen- 
 erally held, and truthfully held, we may say, when 
 the purely religious idea of a divine creation 
 was the one prominently demanded, and there 
 were no outside views pressingly calling atten- 
 tion to the processes and the times, although it 
 could not have failed to be seen by the thought- 
 ful reader that creation in time, creation by 
 order, by evolving successions, generation, birth, 
 growth, was an idea lying on the very face 
 of the letter, and repeated with emphatic variety 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 143 
 
 of diction. Still the length of these times, the 
 evolutions implied in this peculiar language of 
 creation, or rather of generation, were, in the 
 main, overlooked as subordinate, or non-essential 
 ideas. It cannot be denied, however, that they 
 drew the attention of some thoughtful minds, 
 and those the greatest known in the early ages of 
 the Church. This has been already alluded to. 
 But the question comes to us for our own exe- 
 getical determination : Is there a time aspect, a 
 real time aspect, in the creative account ? Does 
 the evidence lie upon its very face? Does this 
 temporal idea enter into it as well as those of 
 power and a divine causation? Does the very 
 harmony of this w r onderful narrative, the true 
 perspective of this marvelous picture, require 
 that there should be also a true proportion in 
 these times, so as to make it a veritable creation in 
 time, instead of a mere show of it out of analogy 
 with the temporal processes fairly suggested by 
 the generative language employed ? There can 
 be no doubt of the ideas that would have arisen 
 in our minds, had no time word been used. 
 The great eventualities, as narrated one after 
 the other, would have resolved themselves into 
 corresponding periods. The " seas gathering," 
 the "land appearing," its surface "drying," the 
 waters " swarming" with life, the earth " bringing 
 
144 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 forth," the " herb-seeding- seed," man making 
 his appearance as the latest evolution of the 
 evoking Word ; all this would have associated 
 itself with an harmonious ideal of times and 
 successions, having something of that true pro- 
 portion without which the events, as events, 
 cannot well be conceived. No language in it- 
 self can be more opposed to that idea of me- 
 chanical or outside fabrication, which is some- 
 times ignorantly charged upon the Mosaic 
 account. 
 
 Now, does the introduction of the word day 
 control all this other peculiar phraseology, or 
 is it to be controlled by it, especially in view 
 of its well-known cyclical or periodical idea in 
 all the earliest forms of speech, and still show- 
 ing its traces in numerous modern idioms? 
 This is the great question for the interpreter, 
 although there are others of equal importance 
 that demand attention in connection with it. 
 Give us room here, if the language allows it. 
 Do there fairly come in the ideas of vastness, of 
 great successions, of mighty evolutions originated 
 by a series of divine fiats ? If the picture gives 
 us this, it gives us something more to complete 
 the harmony of its divine perspective. Have we, 
 then, this room ? Have we this mighty order 
 from chaos to light, from light to life, from life 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 145 
 
 to humanity, — commencing in darkness, form- 
 lessness, and vapor, rising by a succession of 
 most sublime stages, through the vegetable and 
 the animal, up to a world of rational, moral, and 
 spiritual being ? Have we this room ? Then let 
 science fill up the details of the grand outline 
 according to her means, and at her leisure. 
 There will always be room enough in it for 
 her as well as for the theologian. Whether draw- 
 ing on fact or fancy, she will always find her- 
 self somewhere within the bounds of this roll 
 of development. Even should one succeed, or 
 fancy that he had succeeded, in bringing the 
 Scriptural account, in all its stages, to a perfect 
 agreement with some scientific scheme, without 
 any overlappings or interlappings, or deviations 
 of parallel, it would be of little avail, since 
 there is no knowing how long that scientific lan- 
 guage might maintain its stamp, or how long 
 that scientific scheme would last before being 
 superseded by another. 
 
 But this is a lecture and not a treatise. Only 
 a few points, therefore, can be presented, and 
 they are all that are necessary for a fair un- 
 derstanding of the whole question, resting, as it 
 does, on certain strong grounds which can be 
 clearly, yet briefly, enumerated. There is, — 
 
 1st. The immense difficulty of reconciling the 
 7 
 
I46 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 primordial epochs of creation, as given in Genesis, 
 with the conception of a first day, having its be- 
 ginning even before the light, and yet made as a 
 day is now made by the rising and setting, or by 
 the setting and rising of the sun. If it be said 
 that we need not suppose those diurnal com- 
 mencings and endings, and especially that first 
 one of all, to be made as now, but in some other 
 mysterious manner, that would seem like giving 
 up the prime ground of those who have most to 
 say about literal interpretation, or about the 
 word day meaning day, that is, an ordinary solar 
 day, and nothing more. If it is not an ordinary 
 day, then it is an extraordinary day, or a dies 
 ineffabilis, as Augustine calls it, and they know 
 not how far this may lead them. Some such 
 idea of ineffability seems to have been in the 
 early Jewish mind in the days of Josephus, if we 
 may judge by what he says of it in the begin- 
 ning of the first book of his Antiquities. If any 
 choose to introduce the word mysterious, they 
 must make more of it. If they talk of unknown 
 hypothetical methods, they should be modest in 
 their denunciations of those whom they charge 
 with profanely departing from the plain letter of 
 the account. The mysterious, the ineffable, are 
 here undoubtedly, but it may be in the very nature 
 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i^j 
 
 of the day, or its ineffable duration, as well as in the 
 manner of its phenomenal production. The one 
 is no more an indispensable element of the diurnal 
 idea than the other. A certain duration is no more 
 a fixed component of the notion suggested by the 
 term, than a stated rising and setting of the sun, 
 or some revolution, real or apparent, by which 
 they are produced. The making of such a solar 
 day in the primordial epoch, as described in the 
 account, and giving it its exact length of twenty- 
 four hours, half for the day and half for the mys- 
 terious night that precedes, is a difficulty not 
 created by science, not to be cured by it. It is 
 patent on the very face of the account, if we 
 would make it consistent with itself, and it must 
 have been as evident to the early unscientific 
 mind to whom the vision was first given, and by 
 whom it was first narrated, as it is to us. In his 
 ecstatic vision, he sees no sun rising over the 
 dark waters of the tehom, but he hears a voice 
 saying, " Let there be light," and a light shines 
 out of the chaos, and upon the chaos ; formless- 
 ness gives way to form and visibility ; and this is 
 the morning of his first day. 
 
 Our second ground of reasoning is the periodi- 
 cal sense of the word day, and especially as it is 
 used in the early languages, classical and Shem- 
 
I48 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 itic. Closely connected with this is the sense 
 of day as a completed time, or the epochal idea, 
 as it may be called : 
 
 " Longa dies perfecto temporis orbe." 
 
 This epochal sense is a very different thing from 
 the metaphorical, with which some would con- 
 found it, and which, by itself, would furnish a 
 very weak support for so grave an argument. 
 Tropical or metaphorical would denote merely a 
 metaphora, or transfer to another form of thought, 
 presenting merely an analogy of cause, effect, or 
 incidental resemblance. Day, however, as epoch 
 or cycle, carries with it the essential idea of 
 completed period with its completed work. It is 
 a rounded course, determined not by mere dura- 
 tion, however measured, but by an order of move- 
 ment having its proper commencement and end- 
 ing as made by two contrasted states, as of rest 
 and progress, torpor and movement, death and 
 life, birth and growth, appearance and disappear- 
 ance, light and darkness, or evening and morning 
 — the one the privation or minimum, the maxi- 
 mum or complement, of the other. Any one 
 such application of the word day, dies, yom, to any 
 completed cyclical ordo, is no more metaphorical 
 than any other. Of such a time period the solar 
 day is to us the nearest, shortest, and most visible 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT, j^g 
 
 representative. Hence it easily enters language 
 as its readiest denominator. Thus day is used 
 for ordo, period, series of events, longer or 
 shorter, whilst year is rarely, generation more 
 frequently, but week, month, century, never em- 
 ployed for any such purpose. The language, 
 then, is not arbitrary, nor metaphorical, nor de- 
 pending on the fancy, but has a law determining 
 the class of ideas to which it is applied. Hence 
 dies in Latin is used for the period of human life, 
 as 7]fiepa in Greek is sometimes synonymous with 
 atov, or age, used in the same way — the period of 
 existence, life with its evening and morning, its 
 coming out of darkness, and its emergence into 
 light — venire in diem, as the Romans said. That 
 we are not forcing things here is shown by the 
 undeniable fact, that this cyclical idea is attached 
 to the word yom in the second chapter, where 
 it most unmistakably represents the whole pro- 
 cess, or rounded period of creation, whether re- 
 garded as tellurian or cosmical. It is all one day 
 from the primordial chaos up to man: "These 
 are the generations of the earth and heavens, in 
 the day the Lord created them" — in their being 
 created. The Hebrew is exegetical : EfcOSHSj " * n 
 the process called their being created" — the in- 
 tinitive in this case being more pictorial than 
 any noun representing simply the fact or event 
 
150 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 of creation could possibly have been. " Before 
 the day" was, or "from the day " I am He. Isaiah 
 xliii. 13. The day of the prophet must be the 
 great day mentioned here — dies longissima perfecto 
 tempores orbe. It immediately suggests to us the 
 7]\iEpdv al&vog, the asonic day, or the day of eternity, 
 as the language is used. II. Peter iii. 18. We 
 also think of the last great day of which the 
 Scripture so solemnly speaks, that "consumma- 
 tion of the ages, avvreXsia r&v aluvov, that rounded 
 series of events, be it longer or shorter, when the 
 closing physical changes shall take place, or the 
 present mundane system shall be wound up as 
 preparatory to a new day of creation still more 
 complete and glorious. The language of the 
 Scriptural protology is simply parallel to that 
 of its eschatology ; and there should be no hesi- 
 tation in applying the same mode of exegesis in 
 the one case that we so readily admit in the 
 other. It might seem like marring the artless 
 grandeur of this old language to admit the 
 thought of anything studied, and yet it does look 
 as though the writer had been led to use this re- 
 markable expression of day as applied to the 
 whole series, to prevent mistake in its application 
 to the six divisions, or as a key to its wider sig- 
 nificance, when the course of knowledge should 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 151 
 
 prepare the way for its more easy, but not less 
 natural reception. 
 
 The third thing demanding- attention presents 
 itself in the words before alluded to as denoting 
 growth, succession, evolving, or one thing coming 
 out of another, birth, generation ; in a word, all 
 that is meant by nature, (f)vatg, £"ri"i5iSV m tne °^ 
 languages, and their direct derivatives in the mod- 
 ern ; the very name Genesis, as coming from the 
 Greek Septuagint version, being suggestive of 
 this whole class of ideas ; since $ (3lf3Xog yeveaeog, the 
 book of Genesis, or Generation, is but a transla- 
 tion of the Hebrew frnMiTI H5& : " These are the 
 generations of the heavens and the earth." The 
 wonder is that such a kind of language should 
 have been so overlooked. There they are, these 
 words of birth and evolution, and they are not 
 mere meaningless expletives to be shrivelled up 
 in their wide significance, by being all made de- 
 pendent on the contracted notion we attach to 
 the single word of time. There must be propor- 
 tion in the chronology, or the time idea, so essen- 
 tial an element in the account, cannot keep the 
 emphasis its importance so evidently demands. 
 Now, in determining the proportion, there is no 
 exegetical reason why the word day should over- 
 rule the force of all these significant terms, rather 
 
152 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 than :hat itself should be interpreted by them. 
 Without it these other words become wholly 
 arbitrary, empty of any available meaning or ap- 
 plication — in short, utterly unthinkable. It could 
 not have been meant that there was a real 
 " growth " and u birth" a real " bringing forth," a 
 real " seeding seed," as by some real causation 
 passing through all its stages, and yet that the 
 cedar of Lebanon, from the quickening of its root- 
 germ in the earth to the waving of the topmost 
 branch of its lofty height, was produced in the 
 same time, or, rather, in an hour or so of the same 
 time, with " the hyssop that groweth out of the 
 wall." To instantaneous production, reason 
 could have made no objection. As a divine fact, 
 had it been so revealed, no science could deny 
 its possibility. But the other supposed mode, or 
 that of great evolutions in inconceivably dispro- 
 portionate times, or bearing no analogy to the 
 relations of parts thus evolved, is delusive, mag- 
 ical, inconceivable, unthinkable. The language 
 suggests a process, generative and physical, and 
 yet that process lacking the element of ratio, 
 without which it cannot, as a process, be made 
 an object of thought at all. We cannot conceive 
 of growth, or the passing of an organism from one 
 stage to another, except as a passage through 
 every intervening point, and in proportionate 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 153 
 
 times. The crowding, therefore, of processes so 
 immensely different into times having- so little 
 of a corresponding ratio, has all the difficulty of 
 instantaneousness, without its grandeur and its 
 conceivable rationality as the product of almighty 
 power. 
 
 This disturbance of the conceptive faculty 
 comes from the assumption of the short solar day 
 of a few hours, so apparently conflicting with the 
 other no less marked and unmistakable language 
 of birth, succession, evolution. Which is to con- 
 trol ? Is the single time word to be so inter- 
 preted as to take all meaning out of the others? 
 This would be all the more strange, when we 
 bear in mind that that same word is plainly used 
 for the whole great process of creation, from its 
 primordial amorphic state, until it ends in the 
 Sabbath and in humanity. What right has any 
 one to call such reasoning far-fetched, or to re- 
 gard it as putting a force upon the language of 
 Scripture ? 
 
 The fourth thing to be noticed in this summary 
 of an argument is the aspect of vastness — I can 
 use no better term — which gives its sublime 
 effect to this whole Mosaic account, and especi- 
 ally to its beginning. It is somehow felt by a 
 thoughtful mind, even when acquiescing in that 
 twenty-four hour dav view, which nothing from 
 7* 
 
154 VEDPER LECTURES. 
 
 without has as yet disturbed. Vast power, vast 
 bodies, vast forces, vast movements, vast changes, 
 vast causations, vast effects ! There comes along 
 with it the feeling of vast time. A feeling we 
 have called it, for such it is even before it as- 
 sumes the form of a distinct exegetical idea. It 
 was this which so affected the mind of Augustine, 
 and led him to characterize these times as " dies 
 ineffabiles" days unspeakable, either as immense 
 evolutions, morae, " delays " in nature, as he some- 
 times calls them, suspensions, or as transcending 
 the idea of time altogether. It is this, too, which 
 makes the vision theory of the creative revela- 
 tion so acceptable, as giving a relieving perspec- 
 tive, carrying what may really seem short, and is 
 short, as measured on the canvas, to the vast 
 proportion required for the pictorial harmony. 
 This may not be the experience of all in the study 
 of the passage, but it becomes very strong and 
 vivid when a contemplative mind, divesting itself 
 of all prepossessions, and giving full admission to 
 this sense of grandeur, regards the account as sui 
 generis, self-interpreting, defining its own terms 
 from the very nature of the ideas presented. 
 Thus read, this impression of vastness comes in 
 so naturally, that it affects our sense of the times. 
 The panorama so spreads out before us ; the dark 
 abyss of waters, the breaking light, that first mys- 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 155 
 
 terious evening- of the formless chaos, the morn- 
 ing, the separation, the naming, the evoking 
 Word — all is so great, so sublime, on the vaster 
 scale, that the forcing, if there be any, ap- 
 pears wholly in the narrowing interpretation. 
 Am I overstating this? Where in ancient or in 
 modern literature can there be found a page of 
 such superhuman grandeur of conception, of such 
 soul-awing majesty of diction as this : " In the 
 beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
 And earth was formless and void, and there was 
 darkness on the face of the deep. And the breath 
 of Elohim was brooding on the face of the 
 waters. And God said, Let it be light, and there 
 was light. And God saw the light that it was 
 good. And God divided between the darkness 
 and between the light ; and the light called He 
 day, and the darkness called He night ; and there 
 was an evening, and there was a morning — day 
 one/' The last clause is plainly exegetical, or 
 explanatory of what precedes. It tells us what 
 this night and morning were. It explains this 
 mystery of a day not measured by the sun, but 
 having an ineffable division of its own : And thus 
 was there an evening, and thus there was a morn- 
 ing — day one. The process itself defines them 
 in its two great evolving stages : And thus there 
 was a night, and thus there was a day, making, 
 
156 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 so far as this Mosaic account is concerned, the 
 primordial time in the earth's greater chronology. 
 To interpret this rightly, look not abroad. Keep 
 to the record, and you will find its meaning there. 
 There can be clearly traced all the ideas corre- 
 sponding to the mighty words — the night, the 
 day, the evening, the morning, for which you are 
 seeking. The account is self-interpreting. What 
 was that primeval night which comes first in 
 this creative movement, as it does in all tradi- 
 tional derivations? The answer is most distinct. 
 It was the darkness that was resting on the face 
 of the deep — the void and formless tehom. How 
 long had it been thus resting? No answer is re- 
 turned from the silence. To get twelve hours 
 here before the light, to find any rule for their 
 measurement, their commencement, or their sep- 
 aration from anything preceding — to do this is 
 the forcing, as I have elsewhere shown, and shall 
 not therefore dwell upon it in this rapid sum- 
 mary. And where is the morning? Once more 
 we interrogate the oracular language. The an- 
 swer comes again with unmistakable clearness : 
 It was the light which the divine Word evolved 
 from the darkness — the light that shone not only 
 on the darkness, but " out of the darkness," kit rov 
 onoTovg, as the Apostle understands it. These two 
 events make the chronological day, the primeval 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 157 
 
 period with its own peculiar work and history 
 separate from all others. It is God himself who 
 names and defines them, whatever may be the 
 import of that mysterious language. He gives 
 us our lexicon here : And the darkness He call- 
 ed night, and the light called He day — and thus 
 there was an evening, and thus there was a morn- 
 ing — day one. We get a reason for the strange 
 repetition of that solemn heraldic formula, taking 
 away all its seeming tautology. Why so often 
 said, and with such a proclamatory sameness, un- 
 less to call attention to something extraordinary 
 in the mornings and evenings so announced? 
 The view taken is drawn fairly from the lan- 
 guage arousing wonder like the similar heraldic 
 announcements of the seals and trumpets in the 
 Revelations. But now attempt to force in the 
 measurement of twenty-four hours, and what a 
 collapse of grandeur, what a derangement of 
 proportion seems immediately to take place. I 
 have dwelt upon this, because anxious to give 
 the impression so strong and clear to my own 
 mind, that these ideas of vastness come directly 
 from the face of the account, as read in its own 
 clear light, and are not forced upon it by any out- 
 side pressure. An interpretation thus pressed 
 upon us from without undermines faith instead of 
 affording any sure foundation. We use with 
 
158 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 confidence the language of Augustine : " These 
 are God-named times, God-divided times." 
 There is a vastness in the language, an infinite 
 suggestiveness compared with which, so far as 
 sublimity is concerned, the geological decimals 
 are utterly frigid and unemotional. The mind 
 is not narrowed in believing the Mosaic record 
 of creation. 
 
 The first great day determines all the rest. 
 They all have the mark of this higher chronol- 
 ogy. They were all divine evolutions. In each 
 of them the old chaotic darkness and formless- 
 ness more and more disappear. New mornings 
 break forth, "shining clearer and clearer unto 
 the perfect day," when humanity, as it had been 
 physically evolving out of the dust of all below, 
 becomes complete in the primus homo, made such 
 by the inspiration of God, and set forth as the 
 type of a new and higher order of being. Here 
 is no forcing. It is a view that comes from 
 the very spirit of the sublime passage, breath- 
 ing through every mysterious word, and filling 
 the soul of the devout reader with a feeling of 
 its truthfulness, as well as of its glory. It re- 
 quires no scientific hypothesis. It transcends 
 science. It needs no " reconciliation ; " for it 
 stands out of the reach of all collision. 
 
 In the fifth place I would briefly call atten- 
 
THE C0SM1CAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 159 
 
 tion to this aspect o { ' vastness, these ideas of 
 great time successions, as they appear in other 
 parts of the Bible. They have, indeed, a poet- 
 ical character, but this strengthens the argu- 
 ment. It was this very aspect on which I am 
 insisting that made the creative times such a 
 grand subject for poetry, and called out, in rela- 
 tion to them, such a poetical pictorialness. And 
 here is to be noticed, in the first place, a fact that 
 demands special attention. It is the absence, 
 from all other parts of the Scriptures of any al- 
 lusion to these brief days as such, or as being 
 solar in their character. The Fourth Command- 
 ment forms no real exception to this remark ; 
 since it is simply a repetition of the earlier lan- 
 guage, carrying with it the same scale of inter- 
 pretation, and confirming it by the undeniable 
 difference that must be admitted between the 
 divine and human days, if we would preserve at 
 all the analogous parallel between the human 
 work, the human rest, on the one hand, the inef- 
 fable divine work, and the ineffable divine rest 
 on the other. There is no longer type and anti- 
 type, no temporal sign of the Ionian Sabbath, 
 when both are reduced to the same measure- 
 ment. Now in all the other passages which 
 are not repetition^- but vivid descriptions drawn 
 from this original picture, the brief solar day, 
 
160 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 had it been really conceived as such, would have 
 been the most memorable, the most likely to 
 be recalled, of all the features of the account. 
 It would have been the great wonder, had the 
 Hebrew mind truly received from it such an 
 idea of chronological brevity. But no such 
 feeling anywhere shows itself. In some places 
 we have what seems to be a representation of 
 instantaneousness : " He spake and it was, He 
 commanded and it stood ; " but that refers to the 
 divine Word, or Fiat, as accomplished in its very 
 utterance — " the Word running very swiftly," 
 to use the language of the Psalmist, or as a 
 very early apocryphal writer interprets it, 6 
 Xoyog diTJtcoyv rrdorjg fuvrjoeoyg KLVTjriKGyrepog, " the per- 
 vading Word having a more rapid movement 
 than all motion ; " to us, indeed, the slow course 
 of nature and the ages, to God, swifter than 
 any electric current. To the divine mind all 
 effects must be patent in their causes, whether 
 natural or supernatural, and so the first, which is 
 this outgoing Word, is the veritable fulfilment 
 of the remotest sequence. This is shown in that 
 solemn formula so oft repeated in Genesis, »p irpii 
 " and it was so," it stood firm ; the nature com- 
 menced by the fiat had in it all that should be 
 evolved until that seminal force was spent, 
 or had prepared the way designed for a new 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j6i 
 
 evolution. But we know from the account it- 
 self, that neither in respect to the universal or 
 any partial development, was it instantaneous. 
 It was a creation in time. Such is a prominent 
 idea of the representation. Was it real or 
 seeming ? Had it relative proportion in its 
 parts? For of time, irrespective of its ratios, 
 we have no more any absolute measure than we 
 have of space. It is an axiom of Newton that 
 the space worlds might all exist within the 
 compass of what we call an inch, and yet every 
 ratio perfectly maintained as now existing be- 
 tween the parts. We are forced to admit the 
 same of time. The earthly history might all lie 
 within the extent of a minute, and yet with a 
 perfect proportion in every measure of its event- 
 ualities. Thus regarded, rapidity of growth is 
 wholly relative, though still growth in the truest 
 sense of the word. We have something like 
 this before our very eyes. In the few weeks' 
 incubation of the egg there is a series of trans- 
 formations, without leap or discontinuance, a 
 transition through every stage, and with as many 
 eventualities as Darwin's imagination finds in 
 the ages intervening between a portion of the 
 mundane egg of the nebulous fluid and the 
 perfect species as it now exists. Till science 
 can explain this, it should be more modest in 
 
162 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 its claims to understand the secret of life and 
 the origin of worlds. In fact, time absolute, 
 having no relation to other times, is inconceiv- 
 able. It is ratio that makes its rationality as an 
 object of thought. With it, time properly begins. 
 Proportion is demanded, or the ideas of birth, 
 growth, order, succession — in a word, ot genesis 
 or generation, — become wholly illusory. With- 
 out it, it is not succession, — the succession of 
 causality; it is not order; it is not natural; 
 it is not supernatural, originating nature and 
 working in it. It is contranatural, unnatural, 
 out of all order, out of all analogy. It 
 lacks alike the grandeur of instantaneousness, 
 and the reasonableness of a proportional evolu- 
 tion. The language employed in Genesis 
 would not have been used for a causality which 
 is neither timeless, nor having the proportions 
 which a real chronology demands. 
 
 We see this in studying those other passages 
 in the Bible of which creation forms the theme. 
 There is nowhere in them any allusion to this 
 wonder of time suspension, as in the miracles of 
 Joshua and Hezekiah. A far greater marvel 
 would it have been, far more likely to enter 
 into the thought and demand the attention, had 
 such time brevities, or time suspensions, been 
 really regarded as belonging to the story of crea- 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 163 
 
 tion, and as characterising- its great eventual- 
 ities. What a mighty series ! Light evolving 
 from a primeval chaos, waters dividing, an at- 
 mospherical firmament uprising, seas gathering 
 to their beds, oceans subsiding, lands upheaving, 
 the dry soil appearing, coming into view, 
 making itself visible, as the pictorial Hebrew 
 gives it by an optical deponent verb so sug- 
 gestive of gradualness — the waters teeming with 
 life of every kind from the infusoria to the tan- 
 ninim, or great monsters of the deep — the ground 
 bringing forth from the fungus to the oak — the 
 celestial bodies beginning their time divisions — 
 man at last derived in some way from the pre- 
 vious elements of nature, his physical thus 
 coming from the dust, " first of the earth earthly," 
 then inspired by God, separated from nature by 
 the divine image, raised above nature — in an 
 ineffable manner constituted a sexual duality — in- 
 vested with the dominion of the world — wonders 
 like these, evolutions like these, and all taking 
 place between sun and sun of a 24-hour solar- 
 day — a creation in time indeed, and that makes 
 it the greater wonder, but without the propor- 
 tions which such an immense diversity of works 
 would demand in a real causal or time process 
 wherein the parts bore a due relation, to say 
 the least, to each other ! Now this might have 
 
164 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 been. Our argument is not now to be under- 
 stood as contending against the possibility of 
 such a series of events in themselves considered, 
 or the credibility of such a time hastening, or 
 time suspension. It is the exceeding improb- 
 ability, the inconceivability, I might almost 
 say, of the fact, that such a wonderful dis- 
 proportion between the times and the succes- 
 sions so graphically set forth should have ac- 
 tually been in the thought of the Psalmist, and 
 other Scriptural writers who dwell upon the 
 creative scenes, and yet without the least men- 
 tion of it, though forming, as it would have done, 
 the great marvel of the account. 
 
 Are we not justified, then, in the conclusion 
 that the creative account, of which the poetical 
 writers of the Bible are so full, did not so pre- 
 sent itself to the old Hebrew mind ? The fact 
 is most significant in respect to the earliest inter- 
 pretations of this most ancient document. 
 
 In proof, let me first refer especially to Ps. xc, 
 civ., Prov. viii., and Job xxxviii. From all these 
 we derive a peculiar impression. It is that same 
 feeling of vastness by which we are affected in 
 reading the narrative in Genesis ; vastness of 
 power, vastness of event, vastness of time, all 
 alike transcending measurement. Now, from 
 none of these later pictures, if studied by them- 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ifc 
 
 selves, would such an idea of solar days, or of 
 comparatively brief time successions, have ever 
 been obtained. In all of them the idea of great 
 evolutions in correspondent times is strikingly 
 suggested, as it is also in the Persian cosmogony, 
 evidently a copy of this old painting, but in 
 which " six times " appear as the translation of 
 the " six days." It may be referred to as one of 
 the strongest proofs in respect to that oldest un- 
 derstanding of this matter which is now said to 
 have been forced upon us by modern science. 
 In the Biblical passages referred to, if we regard 
 them as standing by themselves, there is nothing 
 to interfere with the largest exegesis. The great 
 ideas, the frnblh, generations, evolutions, coming 
 out of one thing, or of one state of things, from 
 another, appear everywhere, both descriptively 
 and etymologically. They present vividly every 
 conception of the old account except that of the 
 brief day. I have already remarked on that 
 early title as given in the beginning of Gen. ii., 
 " the generations of the heavens and the earth." 
 The language of Job and the Psalms might be re- 
 garded as a commentary, or even as a transla- 
 tion. So the Greek title before alluded to, (lipXog 
 yeveaecjg, the book of Genesis, has something about 
 it most significant. There can hardly be a doubt 
 that this name, and the other generative terms 
 
t66 vedder lectures. 
 
 sounding then in the near vernacular of the 
 Septuagint version, did exert an influence on the 
 early Greek Church, and especially on men like 
 Origen and Clement, in predisposing them to 
 the wider interpretation of times and causalties. 
 The very word Genesis, although it is an exact 
 representative of the Hebrew irnbin* was un- 
 favorable to any idea of arbitrary or mechan- 
 ical fabrication. Had that name been given to 
 our English version : " The Book of Generations " 
 — the generations of the earth and heavens — it is 
 not too much to say that it would have greatly 
 modified the common thinking on this great 
 subject. 
 
 The language of the XC. Psalm has an unmis- 
 takable reference to the creative and anti-creative 
 times. The allusion is not simply to ancient his- 
 torical times on earth, to which the olamic or 
 geonian words are sometimes applied ; for it was 
 at a period before " the hills were born," that God 
 existed, Q:>"|2 12"! dbl2fa> from Olam to Olam, 
 dnb rov al&voq nat eug rov al&vog, a scecnlo in sceculnm, 
 " from world to world." Before the mountains 
 were bom : It is the passive of the verbal root of the 
 noun £"i"nbi£n, rendered generations. Poetical, it 
 may be said, but we have Aristotle's authority for 
 holding that poetry may be most closely allied to 
 philosophy. We know, too, that from early vivid 
 
THE COSMIC 'A L ARGUMENT. 167 
 
 metaphors philosophy draws its most impressive 
 language, however fossilized it may become in 
 its later abstractedness. " Before the mountains 
 were from — we put the emphasis on this word — 
 before thou hadst for med the earth or the world " : 
 The translation of the second clause is inadequate, 
 and too suggestive of bare mechanical or outside 
 fabrication. The verb employed is wholly and 
 strikino-lv generative, and the idea of formation 
 it denotes must correspond to it.* It is a term 
 used to describe the pangs of child-birth, from the 
 primary significance of twisting, thence writhing, 
 struggle, torture, just as the latter word comes 
 from the Latin word torqueo. Hence, in the 
 next stage, it becomes a general term for partu- 
 rition, from which the translation is direct to 
 that of production, or physical birth. But the 
 writhing, struggling, agonizing sense ever ad- 
 heres to it in all its applications. It is produc- 
 tion with labor, with overcoming strength ex- 
 
 * Had the word employed been the more outward or seem- 
 ingly mechanical term of formation, like -^n or ntES'j tne 
 idea would have been the same, though less vividly expressed. 
 For Scripture sometimes seems to reverse its language : "Be- 
 fore I formed thee," {fashioned, 1£"H!£" , )> ^ was sa -id of 
 Jeremiah. Here an undoubted generative process is repre- 
 sented as a direct work. So the "possessing the reins," the 
 " overshadowing in the womb," (the quickening), and the 
 "fashioning of the members," in Psalm cxxxix. 
 
1 68 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 erted against resisting forces. The old Greek 
 and Latin translators read the Hebrew word 
 without vowels, and regarded it as passive, with 
 the third person feminine preformative instead of 
 the second person masculine. Hence they ren- 
 dered : " before were formed or generated, ysvvtj- 
 Orjvai, the earth and the world." The Syriac 
 makes " earth " the subject, and yet renders it 
 actively : " Before earth travailed in the birth," 
 keeping up the same figure that is used in respect 
 to the mountains. With the established Maso- 
 retic punctuation, the only maintainable ren- 
 dering is that which takes it as active, with Deity 
 for the subject, and yet giving it the common 
 travailing or parturitive sense: " Before the 
 mountains were born, yea, before thou didst 
 travail in birth with the earth or the world, from 
 olam to olam, from eternity to eternity, art 
 thou, O God." It is an awful figure ; the anthro- 
 popathism is, indeed, a most bold and startling 
 one ;* but a tremendous idea was demanding ut- 
 
 * By giving the verb here the passive punctuation, and re- 
 garding " earth " as the subject, taken in the feminine, we 
 avoid the anthropopathism that some might deem offensive : 
 " Before the earth travailed in the throes of parturition? 
 But it is the same great idea of immense forces struggling in 
 the womb of generation. The boldest rendering, however, is 
 not only the most grammatical, but most clearly in the style ot 
 Scripture. So God's love is compared to a mother's yearning 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j6g 
 
 tcrance, and the soul of the prophet, the " Man 
 of God," as he is called in the title of this very 
 old psalm, was laboring to bring it forth. It is 
 the birth travail in the production of the world, 
 and that, strange as the thought may appear, 
 ascribed to Deity ! If it is an " accommodation," 
 as some would call it, an aid to our effort at con- 
 ceiving the ineffable, then let us be humbly ac- 
 commodated by it: 
 
 Before the hills were born, or earth 
 
 The throes of life had known, 
 From world to world, art thou, O God ; 
 
 Immovable Thy throne. 
 
 For emotional grandeur ; for the feeling that 
 comes from the " Living Word," and without 
 which thought and knowledge are dead, what 
 are meiocene, and pleiocene, and eocene, and the 
 frigid decimals of the geological notation to the 
 power of language like this? There is, too, an 
 awful suggestiveness in the figure. It brings up 
 
 affection for her offspring. Isaiah xlix. 15. There is the same 
 startling figure in Deut. xxxii. 18 : " The Rock that begat thee, 
 the God that bare thee." In the second clause it is the 
 participle of this same verb (meholet), and there is the 
 same idea of difficulty, God's travailing, as in the birth, with 
 the rebellious and refractory Israel, requiring the strongest 
 resources of His grace, as here of His power in nature. Hup- 
 FELD renders Psalm xc. 2, as above : " Bevor du gebarest 
 Erde und Land" See his comment and note on tekolel, iv. p. 6. 
 
i;70 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the idea of mighty forces in nature, of convulsive 
 throes, of immense strugglings, of Titanic resist- 
 ances, of a terrible ungovernableness in the cha- 
 otic and irrational material, as though rebelling 
 against the Logos, the divine Word or Reason 
 seeking to penetrate it with its formative, creat- 
 ing power, to infuse into it its spermatic ideas, 
 and to throw over it the bridle and " the reign " 
 of Law. 
 
 A similar feeling of vastness takes possession of 
 us as we read Proverbs viii., 22-31, or the sublime 
 description of the Hypostatic Wisdom, its eternal 
 generation, its everlasting going forth in the ideal 
 structure of the worlds. What a mountain of 
 grandeur does it display as it so suddenly rises 
 upon us from the comparatively lower plain of 
 this ethical book! There is much of the same 
 language we find in the XC. Psalm, whilst there 
 still more vividly presents itself the thought of 
 stages of antiquity going far back, one after the 
 other, to that most ancient date of all when Wis- 
 dom was alone with God, the First Born npb rtiv 
 al6v(*)v, before the beginning of His creative 
 ways. We recognize in it the choral anthem 
 of Genesis, with its key-note of ineffable times. 
 There is the same thought of great succes- 
 sions, of an organic structure, like a ktlok;, a 
 building, rising stage after stage to its com- 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. iji 
 
 pletion. The Word and the architectonical Wis- 
 dom are one. It is not only the commanding, 
 the fiat-giving voice, but the shaping, organizing, 
 harmonizing agent, ''rejoicing ever before Him, 
 and whose delight was with the sons of men." 
 Day after day, yom, yom, is he represented as 
 contemplating this rising structure until its con- 
 summation in humanity, in the beings who were 
 to bear His image, as He is the image of the in- 
 visible God, and whom He had " loved before the 
 foundations of the world." The word day occurs 
 here also ; but were the passage read by itself, no 
 one would ever think of twenty -four hours. The 
 whole spirit of the language repels it. 
 
 The thoughts on which we have been dwell- 
 ing, the ideas of succession, of generation, of 
 struggle, of birth-travail, of strong resistance, are 
 no less visible in the remarkable descriptions at 
 the close of the Book of Job. As in the repre- 
 sentations of the Psalmist the mountains and the 
 earth are born, so here the sea has its natal pe- 
 riod. There are more striking poetical accom- 
 paniments, but it is the same figure of birth, 
 generation, genesis, (pvacg, natura, which lies at the 
 root of all early contemplative language, and, as 
 before remarked, has become fixed, formed, fos- 
 silized, as it were, and unemotional, in philosoph- 
 ical and scientific speech. The sea issues from 
 
1^2 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the womb of the great evolution ; for to what 
 else can the mighty figure refer? It is nursed 
 like the infant ; the araphel, the primeval dark- 
 ness, is its swathing band. But it is an infant giant 
 full of mighty energies. As it grows in strength, 
 it becomes a most stubborn and rebellious 
 power. It is well-nigh ungovernable. It even 
 seems to tax the Almighty strength : " When 
 I broke over it my law." There is immense force 
 in the language as thus most literally rendered. 
 Our version : "When I broke up for it its decreed 
 place," comes near to it, but changes the figure, 
 adding the idea of place to that of law, or decree 
 clearly expressed by the word, as Jerem. xxxi. 35, 
 "the laws of the moon and stars ;" Job. xxxviii. 33, 
 "the laws of the Heaven and the earth," and else- 
 where, " the law of the rain." It falls short, too, of 
 the significance of the preposition, "pi^, " upon" or 
 " over it." The verb is a very common one, with 
 a very uniform significance, but it sounds so 
 strange here, that commentators have been far 
 out of their way to get for it the sense of de- 
 cision, which it never truly has, either in the 
 Hebrew or in the Arabic. Umbreit shows 
 great insensibility to the grandeur of the pas- 
 sage, when he attempts to get for it the sense 
 of measuring. Schlottmann, the best of the com- 
 mentators on Job, gives the true force of the 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. jy<$ 
 
 word : " There is in this verb "-QttJ," he says, " the 
 idea of immense force." He finds in the pas- 
 sage the figure of " an almighty power oppos- 
 ing itself to the stubborn force of the young 
 sea striving to extend itself towards the infinite." 
 The poetry is in the reversal of the figure we 
 should expect. It is law dashed, or dashing itself 
 against the sea — the strongest mode of repre- 
 senting the ungovernable sea dashing itself 
 against law, and reduced by it to the limits God 
 has assigned. It has the same picture of strug- 
 gle as is presented in the parturitive language of 
 Psalm xc. ; — an anthropopathism, indeed, but fur- 
 nishing the strongest expressions for the fact of 
 mighty forces in the early natures. It gives us 
 most vividly the idea of a real law, a real caus- 
 ality, instead of a train of shadowy sequences 
 such as a very late, as well as a very old, philos- 
 ophy would represent nature as being. 
 
 The CIY. Psalm is full of similar ideas. The 
 creative periods are evidently in the writer's 
 mind, as is admitted by Hupfeld, one of the most 
 rationalising commentators. Vast eventualities 
 are there, but there is not the slenderest sug- 
 gestion of their brevity, or of any solar day meas- 
 urement. The impression is all the other way. 
 Sublimity, vastness in time and space, successive 
 stages of life, in the waters, in the earth, in the 
 
174 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 air — changes in the condition of the earth, the 
 covering deep, " the mountains going up, the 
 valleys going down," till they find " the places 
 appointed for them." The soul swells with these 
 vast conceptions, the canvas seems to dilate, but 
 the narrow time idea nowhere appears ; should 
 it be forced into it, it would be like a collapsing 
 of the whole picture. Its absence from such a 
 painting can only be accounted for on the sup- 
 position that the writer of the Psalm derived no 
 such thought from his inspiring model. Other 
 passages might be examined in the same manner, 
 and to the same purpose, but our present limits 
 will not permit. My hearers will not misunder- 
 stand the ground or reason of this course of argu- 
 ment. It is not the absolute verity either of the 
 Scriptural, or of any scientific view, as compared 
 with each other, with which we are, in the first 
 place, concerned. The beginnings, and pro- 
 cesses ot creation, in their interior causalities, are 
 ineffable things. They are linked with the in- 
 finite, and must transcend the finite understand- 
 ing. It is only shadows that we can see in the 
 best representations of them as adapted to our 
 minds. The Scriptural and the scientific may 
 present a general outline parallelism, but it is no 
 disparagement to the former to say that both will 
 doubtless require supplementing, when we cease 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 175 
 
 " to behold them as in a mirror enigmatically," 
 or if we are ever brought face to face with these 
 dppTjTa, these now unutterable and inconceivable 
 facts of time-transcenaing origin. In all that is 
 here said, the design has simply been to meet 
 that objection drawn from astronomy and geol- 
 ogy, or the later knowledge of the cosmos, which 
 I have unyieldingly kept in mind. It takes this 
 shape : The view of things derived from the 
 Scriptures is narrow ; the creative account is 
 rendered obsolete by the advance of science 
 with its expansions of time and space. Now 
 which is really the grander view ? That is the 
 question. Do the conceptions .of the Bible, or 
 those that may be legitimately drawn from it, 
 narrow the mind ; or do they, on the other hand, 
 carry it to a height where induction falters, or 
 utterly fails to follow ? The question is not, 
 which gives us the most of fact knowledge, 
 or fact sequence, or of a dead mathematical 
 science never getting beyond the bare facts of 
 force and motion endlessly repeated, but which 
 most vividly reveals to us, in its grand paintings, 
 the true causality, the real law of life ? Which 
 presents the-sublimer view, the correlation of 
 forces, or the Scripture doctrine of the Logos ? 
 Let this be kept in view as the true issue and 
 the true mode of stating it. 
 
Ij6 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 What, then, are the true ideas given to us in 
 the First of Genesis as expressed in that old and 
 peculiar language ? They are : ist, Creation, or 
 the causing that to be which before was not, 
 whether in so saying, regard be had to the idea, 
 the essential form, or to the matter. 2d, Creation 
 by God a personal and designing power. 3d, 
 Creation by the Word, the Logos, or informing 
 Reason, the Bible mode of representing what 
 science would unmeaningly style creation by law, 
 or rather evolution itself the law, however 
 things may be evolved. 4th, Creation in time. 
 5th, An outline representation of creation in six 
 principal times. 6th, Creation by successions, 
 generations, births, or the bringing forth of one 
 thing, or one state of things, out of another. 7th, 
 Progressive creation, each step an advance on 
 the one preceding, from the lower to the higher 
 stages of being, — an idea which science has bor- 
 rowed, but which her inductions cannot prove, 
 though they often seem to contradict, 8th, The 
 repeated declaration at each stage, p iJTH, "and 
 it was so,'' or it became firm, established, se- 
 curing the permanent continuance of each new 
 word, thus making a reality of that idea of law 
 of which science talks so much, but for which, in 
 her bare fact causality, she can find no real 
 basis. 
 
THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 
 
 177 
 
 These are the essential ideas, of the Scriptural 
 account of creation. Science may worthily 
 occupy herself with tracing and filling up, but 
 can never reach, much less transcend them. 
 
 I have dwelt on this Mosaic account of crea- 
 tion, as it is called, because it has become the 
 main target of modern scepticism. An affectation 
 of contempt has been added to deadly hostility. 
 It is too narrow, the time has gone by for any 
 longer belief in it. The changes are rung in this 
 way throughout our literary world. Ignorance is 
 constantly reiterating it ; the young mind es- 
 pecially is overcome by the sheer impudence of 
 its repetition. But the objection is not confined 
 to the creation narrative. The Bible, it is said, 
 is narrow throughout. It is confined to the 
 idea of one world in space, our little earth. It 
 knows, moreover, but one world in time, the 
 single earthly epoch, not long ago starting out of 
 nothingness, with a blank undivided antepast eter- 
 nity immediately preceding, then a narrow isth- 
 mus of time close shut in on the other side by a 
 similar blank of undivided duration. In opposition 
 to this I would present the greater time aspect 
 of the Bible as revealed in its great aeonic 
 words, to which due attention has not been 
 given by many commentators, as they have been 
 entirely overlooked by the scientists, and the 
 
1 78 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 literary men, who are so fond of making these 
 charges of narrowness. Let me have your pa- 
 tience in briefly dwelling upon them as the 
 closing portion of this lecture. The Olamic 
 words, as I would style them, have not only been 
 too much overlooked in our Biblical study, but 
 some of their most remarkable peculiarities have 
 been covered up by general expressions in our 
 modern translations. Of these, it may be said 
 that none of them exhibit that startling force 
 these words carry with them in their original 
 Hebrew and Greek, and in the older versions, 
 Greek, Latin, and Syriac. The reference is to 
 what may be called the seonic words of Scrip- 
 ture, the terms of duration undefined by any or- 
 dinary chronological measurements, or used as 
 transcending time altogether. One feature of 
 this class of words, as distinguished from any- 
 thing corresponding to them in modern speech, 
 presents itself in their remarkable plural forms, 
 so vivid in the original, but so disguised, in our 
 translation, under the vague adjectives, eternal 
 and everlasting. A necessity of human think 
 ing brings into the Hebrew language, as in the 
 other earliest tongues, a word for a time or 
 times transcending history, and incommensurable 
 by astronomical phenomena. It is in Hebrew the 
 word Di"l^) rendered age, Greek al6v, saeculum, 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. T yg 
 
 aeon, and denoting a world, or world time, 
 though sometimes hyperbolically applied to long 
 historical periods. In its more essential sense, 
 however, as used in the course of the Scrip- 
 tural development, and especially in the New 
 Testament, it means times transcending the his- 
 torical earthly movement, whether regarded as 
 known or unknown. With its plural Qifti^ es- 
 pecially, though so often disregarded in the trans- 
 lation, it brings before us the great times of the 
 absolute kingdom of God ; as in the XC. Psalm 
 already quoted, where the divine existence is rep- 
 resented to be Qb"l2 1V1 Ebl2fa> from olam to 
 olam, from world to world, as our brief earthly life 
 is from year to year, or in its race aspect, from gen- 
 eration to generation. In Ps. cxlv. 13, its mighty 
 plural is still further extended by a superlative 
 word : janfcb* ^ tTObfc "jSV.Dbfr, " Thy king- 
 dom is a kingdom of all eternities," an olam made 
 up of all olams, a world the complement of all 
 worlds, a magnus o?do embracing all periods. 
 It is this language which St. Paul had in mind, 
 I Tim. ii. 17: fiaoiXevg ro)v cuoyvcjv, "King of the 
 Aeons," King of the worlds, of the world-times, 
 " Kinge of Worldis," as Wickliffe renders it from 
 the Vulgate, Rex Seculorum, " Malco deolme, King 
 of the worlds, or leolam leolamolemin, for the world 
 and for the world of worlds, as it is given in the so- 
 
l8o VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 norous Syriac. Our version/'the King eternal,'' has 
 a grand sound, but its vivid time significance is 
 greatly marred in the neglect of the plural 
 forms. In this way are described the " goings 
 forth " of the Logos " from the days of eternity," 
 Mic. v. I. It has reference to the birth of Him 
 who was to be " ruler in Israel,'' " ruler in the 
 great kingdom of God,'' " King of the ages," 
 though born in one of the least cities, of one 
 of the smallest provinces, of one of the most 
 diminutive space worlds of the cosmical uni- 
 verse. It was spoken of Him who by His 
 personal union with the eternal life-giving, law- 
 creating, order-evolving Logos, was to intro- 
 duce a new evolution in humanity, raising it 
 to a higher sphere transcending the physical, 
 and to a brotherhood of higher beings which 
 nature never could have reached, nor any 
 scientific induction made known. 
 
 The word olam, and the corresponding New 
 Testament alov, are reduplicated and retripli- 
 cated to express the absolute eternity. They 
 are employed to aid the human sense conceiv- 
 ing faculty in its goings forth towards that in- 
 effable idea, which an abstract negative can 
 only name in its unemotional barrenness. In the 
 later Biblical Hebrew, and in the books inter- 
 vening between the old Jewish and the New 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 181 
 
 Testament canon, olam is used for world, this 
 world, the other world, the world to come, 
 worlds in general, as expressive of the malcutJi 
 kol olamim, or kingdom of all worlds, according 
 to the language, Ps. cxlv., xc, and other passages 
 in the older Scripture, where the world-sense is 
 disguised in the translation. The idea goes into 
 the Greek of the later Scripture, modifying the 
 classic aiuv, employing its plural form, which is 
 comparatively rare in classical usage, and giving 
 it the world significance derived from the Hebrew, 
 though occasionally found in the Greek poets. It 
 is thus that in the New Testament diuv, di&veg, 
 are so frequently used for worlds, time worlds, 
 as distinguished from Kovfioc, or worlds in space — 
 a plural that is never found in the sacred writ- 
 ings. The argument is wholly untenable that 
 this word al&veq, as thus used in the New Testa- 
 ment, denotes stellar or planetary worlds, or 
 astronomical spheres in any sense. From its 
 predominant usage, the Syriac translators mis- 
 took it in some few cases, and the cosmical 
 view becomes still more apparent in the later 
 Rabbinical ; but it can easily be traced to certain 
 crude scientific ideas that began to have in- 
 fluence upon this comparatively modern dialect. 
 The expression, " time-world" may seem strange 
 and forced, but the idea was very easy and nat- 
 
1 82 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 ural to the early mind. It belongs more to the 
 interior thought, and has less to do with any 
 outward scheme of science, than the space con- 
 ception. Hence it is less hindered in its goings 
 forth by the limitations of our sense-knowledge. 
 It has, moreover, a solid foundation in the ne- 
 cessities of the human thinking. A little reflec- 
 tion shows us, that the time of a thing is as in- 
 herent in its reality, or its true being, as the por- 
 tion of space it occupies, or the force which may 
 be said to constitute its dynamical entity. 
 
 For very clear proofs, or specimens, of this re- 
 markable aeonic language, I would refer to such 
 passages as I Cor. ii. 7, npb r&v aluvuv, before the 
 aeons, before the worlds, where the reference 
 is unmistakably to ante-terrene, ante-mundane 
 things : " The wisdom of God in a mystery" — 
 " the hidden mystery ordained before the 
 worlds" — the moral or spiritual kingdom, with 
 its developments, existing before the physical 
 worlds, and as the basis of their manifestation in 
 time and space : (3a<uXevg rtiv aluvuv, " king of the 
 worlds," 1 Tim. i. 17, before referred to : Kara 
 TxpoBeoiv r&v alcjvwv, " the design of the worlds," 
 Eph. iii. 2 : " To Him be glory during all the 
 generations of the world of the worlds," elg 
 ixdaag rag yeveag rov alcovog rtiv al&vuv, the world 
 that is made up of all worlds, all time successions, 
 
THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ^3 
 
 all the fciTibivi, or " generations of the heavens 
 and the earth,'' all the evolutions of all the eter- 
 nities. There is the language used in reference 
 to the Logos, Heb. i. 3 : " By whom He made 
 the worlds, the aeons." Again, " By faith we 
 understand that the al&vag, the worlds, the world 
 times, were set in order by the Word of God," 
 the architectonical wisdom of Prov. viii. and Heb. 
 xi. 3. " To God the Only Wise, be glory, and 
 greatness, and might, and dominion, for all 
 worlds of worlds," elg rravrag rovg al&vag t&v aluvuv, 
 Jude 25, Rev. vii. 12. "And He shall reign elg 
 al&vag r&v al&vuv, for ever and for evermore,'' 
 through all the eternities of the eternities. We 
 ask again : What are meiocene and pleiocene, 
 and eocene; what are Prof. Thompson's inter- 
 minable rows of idealess and conceptionless 
 decimals ; what are our millions and billions, and 
 billions of billions ; what are they all for emo- 
 tional effect as compared with the living ideas 
 that agitate us in the utterance of the ancient 
 words, and their sublime reverberations ? It is 
 like the barren x y z of a frigid algebraic com- 
 putation, as compared with the endless re-echo- 
 ings of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. 
 
 The power of this mighty Scripture language 
 consists in the fact of its being so far above all 
 earthly divisions, leaving them so far behind, not 
 
1 84 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 merely in numerical estimate, but in the power of 
 thought they represent. In distinction from 
 dead formulas, or dead facts, they are living 
 ideas ; they belong to God's great kingdom of 
 life and spirit. They carry the soul with them to 
 the contemplation of the greater chronology, the 
 world of worlds, to which all physical worlds of 
 space and time, all purely physical evolutions 
 are wholly subordinate, and from connection 
 with which, as I have said before, — but it cannot 
 be too often repeated, — they derive all their 
 value. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
 THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
 PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
 THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
 PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 
 
 Preliminary ideas — Greatness relative — Distinction between conception and idea 
 — Names of Deity in Genesis — Value of man not determined, increased or 
 diminished, by any space extent of the universe — Psalm viii. and its interpre- 
 tation as given in Heb. ii. — Psalm lxviii. — Christ's ascent above all worlds — 
 His raising humanity to higher spheres of being — Beings higher than man 
 — Bible presentation of these higher ranks of existences — Nature producing 
 beings capable of interfering with nature herself— Science stops with man — 
 Man, just evolved from a very low condition, the highest product of a past 
 eternal evolution ! — Inconsistency of this — The hideous Hysteron proteron 
 — Biblical order — The Logos in the beginning — Idea first — The perfect 
 first — Physical order — Matter and force first — The nebula in the beginning 
 — All things made by the nebula — The highest in the lowest. Quantitative 
 or dynamical, as distinguished from spiritual value : the first the ratio of 
 force-being in anything to the amount of force-being in the universe ; the 
 second measured by nearness to God the centre of being — Faith, the value 
 ascribed to it in the Scriptures as the measure of spiritual worth — Old Tes- 
 tament faith compared with heathen virtue — Dictum of Strauss that the 
 Hebrews had the personal, the Greeks the absolute idea of Deity — Absurd- 
 ity and falseness of this — The absoluteness infinity, timelessness of 
 Deity, more powerfully and clearly expressed in the Bible than by Plato — 
 Examples — The Divine ubiquity, Psalm cxxxix. — The Infinitely Near, as 
 well as the Infinitely Far — The tremendous equilibrium as maintained in 
 the Scriptures — Pantheism — The Scripture Pantheism, Acts xvii.— Anthro- 
 pathism of the Bible — All revelation of the Infinite to the Finite necessarily 
 anthropopathic: not a make-believe accommodation, but a real coming into 
 the Finite— The Word, the Reason becoming flesh — Revelations through 
 nature, anthropopathic — Scripture equilibrium of apparently opposing 
 Divine attributes— God the Universal Power and at the same time a pa- 
 trial Deity — No inconsistency — Boldness of the Bible writers — Philosophy 
 cannot keep its balance here — Need of more study of the Bible as the 
 great defence of faith. 
 
 The greatness of an object of thought is wholly 
 relative. So is the attendant conception : so is 
 
 (187) 
 
1 88 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the emotion it inspires. It is this latter element 
 that enters chiefly into the spiritual measure of 
 value. In one sense, it may be said that we are 
 what we think. In a still truer sense, we are, 
 spiritually, what we feel in view of what we think. 
 One soul may have a higher feeling of God's 
 greatness, in connection with a very limited 
 knowledge, than another whose scientific or no- 
 tional views extend immensely beyond it. One 
 soul may have a more religious emotion, a really 
 greater emotion, a higher inspiration from the 
 sight of a mountain, than another from the con- 
 templation of the starry heavens, or the utmost 
 thinkable spaces, and motions, and forces re- 
 garded simply in their mathematical interest. 
 Thus, as has been already said, but will bear to 
 be repeated, David, and Pythagoras, and Socra- 
 tes, with their little astronomical knowledge, 
 may have had a higher feeling, and, in this sense, 
 a really higher view of that highest thing, the 
 divine glory, as exhibited in the cosmos, than 
 D'Alembert and La Place. The unscientific 
 Jonathan Edwards may have felt more in the 
 contemplation of the astronomical heavens than 
 a Herschel or a Peirce. 
 
 In such estimates as these, a distinction must 
 be made, too, between two words often con- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 189 
 
 founded — a conception* and an idea. In the same 
 mind the one may be very small, quantitatively, 
 and yet representative of an idea as lofty, as limit- 
 less, and as perfect as might exist in connection 
 with the highest knowledge. Let me endeavor to 
 make this plainer by an illustration : Abraham 
 had very little of what may be called astronom- 
 ical science. The sky over his head not very far 
 off, and a great personal being ruling on earth, 
 yet more specially dwelling in the vast unknown 
 space that lay above the visible dome ; this was 
 his sense-conception when he thought of God, 
 his diagram by which he represented Him in 
 space, as he was compelled to do if he would 
 think of Him at all. It was a very limited con- 
 ception, we may say, but, after all, not greatly 
 differing from the sense-conception we are now 
 compelled to take when we would thus repre- 
 sent to ourselves that idea. It was, I say, his 
 conceptual diagram, and ours is very much like 
 it, though we know, as Abraham probably sus- 
 
 * The word conception is used, not as denoting 1 a mere 
 sense-image of God, but that sense-notion of His power, great- 
 ness, and other attributes, or that abstracted concept of His 
 mode of existence, suggested by our best knowledge. The 
 idea is different from this, as being wholly intellectual, wholly 
 for the reason, and in that aspect, perfect, though incon- 
 ceivable. 
 
190 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 pected, that it was far from filling the measure 
 either of the spiritual thought or the spiritual emo- 
 tion. There is, however, no reason for doubting 
 that the patriarch's idea, in distinction from the 
 limited sense imaging his knowledge allowed, 
 was as high, as complete, as perfect, in every 
 way, as that of Sir William Hamilton. Above 
 him and around him lay the infinite, as expressed 
 in those three mighty Hebrew words that meet 
 us so early in Genesis — those three infinities, Jj$ 
 Db"l2> God of eternity, it© Jj$, God Omnipotent, 
 \Vb$ b^» God Most YLigh—al(x>vwg, TTavro/cpdrcjp, 
 vipiarog — time, space, rank of being — living be- 
 yond all duration, strong above all might, high 
 above every conceivable altitude of glory and 
 dignity. What a contrast between this sublime 
 monotheism, and the grotesque horribleness of 
 the Assyrian and Babylonian theology, as de- 
 ciphered from the exhumed tablets to which our 
 attention has been lately called ! And what must 
 we think of the criticism that would regard these 
 as furnishing the " Editio Princeps," whilst rele- 
 gating Genesis to the position of an unauthentic, 
 second-hand copy derived from such foul de- 
 formities ! It was the same grand patriarchal 
 idea expressed by Zophar, the Naamathite, Job 
 xi. 7, under similar conceptual representations, 
 and challenging comparison with any philo- 
 
 . 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. igi 
 
 sophical attempt to set forth the unknowable, 
 whether made by a Spencer, a Mansell, or an 
 Arnold : 
 
 Eloah's secret, canst thou find it out ? 
 Or Shaddai's perfect way, canst thou explore ? 
 Higher than Heaven's height, what canst thou do ? 
 Deeper than Hades' depths, what canst thou know ? 
 
 Heaven above, and the supposed Hadean deep 
 below ; these were the Hebrew conceptual limi- 
 tations used to express the illimitable, as they 
 were in our Saviour's day, and as they appear in 
 His language concerning the doom of Capernaum. 
 But the idea itself they are chosen to represent, 
 has no sense bounds. The representative figure 
 is, in truth, the necessarily finite diagram of 
 infinity. 
 
 There is another thought on which I would 
 briefly dwell here as introductory to the main 
 argument of this lecture, though it has been 
 alluded to in Lecture III. The enlarged modern 
 knowledge, it is also said, has interfered with the 
 old idea of Providence, whether as general or 
 particular. We cannot believe in it, especially 
 in the latter, as in former days. It is very diffi- 
 cult to hold now to any such minute supervision 
 of human affairs as might have seemed credible 
 for a smaller world. The immense size of the 
 cosmos throws into insignificance the destinies 
 
I92 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 both of nations and of individual men. The 
 objection, moreover, assumes a philosophic air : 
 it claims to be an enlarged view, far more 
 grand and lofty than the old religious notion 
 as grounded on what it calls the narrow space 
 and time conceptions of the Bible. But with 
 all its pretension, it is, indeed, a most human 
 mode of thinking. It wholly overlooks the 
 thought, of all others most important in a re- 
 ligious point of view, namely: that in the true 
 idea of the Infinite One, there must enter also, 
 as the complement of its fulness, the acknowl- 
 edgment of the infinitely near as well as of the 
 infinitely far and the infinitely high — a thought 
 on which we would more fully dwell in a sub- 
 sequent part of this lecture, as forming the 
 marked distinction between the Biblical and the 
 philosophic theism. We can think of but one 
 thing at a time. He who transcends this, tran- 
 scends it immeasurably. " As the heavens are 
 high above the earth, so are my ways above 
 your ways, my thinking above your thinking, 
 saith the Lord." Vastness of space does not 
 tire, innumerableness of objects does not per- 
 plex, their infinity does not exhaust : " Have ye 
 not known ? have ye not heard, that the ever- 
 lasting God, the Creator of the earth," — " He 
 who sitteth above the orb of the world,'' y\ft b2 
 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. jqj 
 
 y^l^Tl — " fainteth not ; He is never weary ; 
 there is no searching of His knowledge ; " " He 
 bringeth out His hosts by number ; it is be- 
 cause He is strong that not one of them faileth.'' 
 " How can God know?" Such is their real' 
 language. How can He be present in every 
 part, with a knowledge of each thing, as it is, 
 without losing for the time, the thought of 
 others, or having His attention drawn from the 
 great totality, the proper object of the infinite 
 mind. This is simply a judgment of the infinite 
 by the finite. We think of a great totality, or of 
 a great system of causation, as something sep- 
 arate from its parts and sequences. We are 
 compelled to take things piecemeal, as it were, 
 not from the greatness, but the exceeding narrow- 
 ness of our finite thinking. The idea of some all- 
 embracing intelligence we take on trust as the 
 necessary complement to our own deficiency. 
 But with God, or a mind we call infinite, all 
 effects must be seen in their causes, and there- 
 fore, as distinctly known, ever known, without 
 any intermittings of knowledge, as the great 
 movements, the great causes, or the great totality 
 itself. It is astonishing how it can be supposed 
 that this difficulty, which comes from the object- 
 ors' own poor thinking, can be remedied by that 
 exceedingly human and finite idea of machinery, 
 
194 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 carrying on an original impulse like the turning 
 of a crank, or the opening of a valve, and thus 
 relieving the original power, and the original in- 
 telligence, from all after-supervision or control. 
 A semi-conscious plastic nature created by God 
 and endowed by Him with exquisite skill, such 
 as Cudworth imagined, or Plato's Anima Mundi, 
 which is very much the same conception, or a 
 view, not obscurely intimated in the Scripture, 
 of mighty superhuman beings carrying on the 
 movements of God's providence ; these have a 
 spiritual dignity, though not unattended with dif- 
 ficulties ; but the idea of a dead machinery such 
 as we use — trusting all the time to a foreign force 
 to carry it on for us — is wholly anthropopathic. 
 It is thus indeed that machinery helps us; in as- 
 cribing it to the Deity we are measuring Him by 
 ourselves, and all our talk of gravity, or of " the 
 correlation of forces," fails to relieve the diffi- 
 culty. And so we may say in regard to what is 
 called a general intelligence. As applied to 
 man, it is simply another term for imperfect 
 knowledge ; as predicated of Deity, it is without 
 meaning. If the universe can do without God 
 now, it could have so done without Him in the 
 indefinite past. So, too, an absence of the divine 
 thought at any time from any part is equivalent 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 '95 
 
 to a failure of that presence always and every- 
 where.* 
 
 But let us state the case more familiarly : 
 For the sake of the argument, then, the sup- 
 position may be made, without objection, that 
 the doctrine of providence, to the extent in 
 which it appears in the Bible, is not incredible 
 when connected with the thought of this being 
 
 * Instead of having any claim to be regarded as an enlarged 
 or scientific mode of thinking, there is nothing, in fact, more 
 deserving of the name of a vulgar prejudice than the dispo- 
 sition to limit the moral grandeur, either of a miracle, or of 
 what is called a " particular providence,' 1 by the spatial 
 or dynamical littleness of their physical means. The theist 
 or theologian, of the Colenso stamp, may do this, but the 
 man of science, however sceptical he may be, ought to 
 know better than to reason in that way. He understands 
 too well that the wonders of the microscope equal, if they 
 do not exceed, those of the mere outline masses, or repe- 
 titions of masses, which the telescope brings to our view. 
 His investigations are constantly leading him to suspect that 
 the smallest things lie nearest the secret of life, and that 
 the smallest movements, apparently, may be most closely 
 connected with the highest workings of the organizations to 
 which they belong. Especially is this belittling disposition 
 shown, sometimes, in respect to certain miracles recorded 
 in the Bible, and that without any regard to the grandeur of 
 the moral reasons on which their true credibility so essen- 
 tially rests. Thus the theologian above named objects to 
 the miracle of the " plague of gnats " as recorded Exod. 
 viii. 12, and referred to Ps. cv. 31. It is beneath the dig- 
 nity of Deity, he thinks, to suppose Him immediately en- 
 gaged in the production of such insignificant creatures as 
 these Egyptian kinnim. Now, the language of the account 
 
Iq6 vedder lectures. 
 
 the onty world, and the human race upon it the 
 only class of rational beings aside from God and 
 a few spiritual essences, called angels, dwelling 
 in some adjacent spheres, atmospherical or aethe- 
 real, connected with the earth. On such a scale, 
 then, we may regard it as admitted that the 
 Scripture ideas of providence, of redemption, 
 and the degree of divine care for men that they 
 
 is perfectly consistent with the idea of a purely physical 
 process, if there were anything to be gained by such hy- 
 pothesis. We know not what physical secrets may lie near 
 the surface of nature, ready to manifest themselves suddenly 
 when brought into the proper conditions ; as new plants un- 
 expectedly make their appearance in an old soil, or new in- 
 sects, like our plague of grasshoppers, whose seeds or eggs 
 may have lain buried for ages. But, as a miracle proper, what 
 has reason to say against it, unless it can allege the absence 
 of any higher law, or moral reason for it from the hyperphys- 
 ical sphere ? Beneath the dignity of Deity ! But the kinnim 
 are made somehow. Their law, therefore, their idea, their 
 reason, must have had a spermatic place in the original plan of 
 the cosmos. So the scientific theist must say, if he would 
 shun the blankest atheism. But the immediate or super- 
 natural production of such insignificant creatures ! That is 
 the objection. Let us look at it. Why is it more irrational 
 than to have provided, billions of ages ago, for their ultimate 
 evolution, — to have made a machine, to make a machine, to 
 make a machine, and so on, to terminate at last in such a 
 result ? Where is the economy ? Where the saving of labor 
 or of dignity ? Another element, moral and hyperphysical, the 
 element on which we have so much insisted, is to be brought 
 in to determine the rationale of either process, general or 
 special, according to the higher laws and higher reasons of 
 the great divine kingdom. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 I 9 7 
 
 imply, would not be incredible, or beyond the 
 very probable bounds of a rational belief. Now, 
 suppose another world to be added to our knowl- 
 edge, is this credibility diminished, and in the 
 inverse ratio ? Suppose two, three, more, to any 
 extent ; does the care, the providence, the super- 
 vision grow less in the same proportion : one- 
 half as much for two worlds, one-third as much 
 for three, one-thousandth part for a thousand? 
 or does the moral ratio — the moral value — remain 
 unchangeable, measured not by a varying universe 
 according to a' magnitude real or supposed, but 
 by the relation, physical, moral, or spiritual, 
 which each part, especially each rational part, 
 bears to the immutable God ? Does the meas- 
 ure of human sins, and the worth of the human 
 soul, thus rise and fall? Bigger in a small world, 
 less in a greater, vanishing to an infinitesimal in a 
 universe supposed to be immeasurable ? Or must 
 we regard each individual world, and each in- 
 dividual rationality, as never falling below that 
 estimate of moral and spiritual value it would 
 have were it alone with God, the only world, 
 the only rationality, in infinite space and infinite 
 time? To think otherwise, as has been said be- 
 fore, is to suffer the lower power of imagination 
 to cloud, for a time, the higher faculty of the 
 reason; it is to imagine God to be just such a 
 
I98 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 one as ourselves ; it is to sink down to the low 
 conclusion that moral ideas, truth, holiness, soul, 
 c Deity itself, are but quantitative or mathematical 
 notions, having no absolute value, but measured 
 on a sliding- scale ever rising and falling with the 
 space dimensions of a hypothetical universe. 
 
 The force of this pretentiously philosophic, but 
 really anthropopathic view, is supposed to press 
 most heavily on the scheme of religion called 
 Evangelical, with its leading ideas of atonement 
 and redemption.* The universe is too big for 
 that. But there is no stopping here. Carry it 
 farther, make the cosmos bigger still, and there 
 must be a denial of any of that care for men 
 which the easier scheme of " Liberal Christian- 
 ity" is supposed to allow. Pull out the slide of 
 the telescope, and a general providence goes with 
 the particular; retribution, moral government of 
 any kind, punishment of wrong by any designed 
 process, penal or consequential, rewarding of 
 virtue either by making it its own reward, or in 
 any other way, become as incredible as special 
 or general answers to prayer. Human virtues 
 and human sins are small affairs, becoming smaller 
 
 * This is a train of thought pursued elsewhere in a note to 
 the American edition of the Lange Commentary on Genesis, 
 pp. 183, 184. It is introduced here, in an abridged form, as 
 appropriate to our present subject. The paragraph devoted 
 to it is deemed an essential part of the general argument. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. Igo , 
 
 and smaller with every widening of the physical 
 scale. There is no holding on to anything par- 
 tial, however large it may seem from our point 
 of view. Imagine the universe larger still, and 
 the generic begins to share in the diminution. 
 Races as well as individuals disappear in the com- 
 putation. Particular worlds become too small 
 for the divine thought. Carry out the ratio, and 
 systems, solar, stellar, nebular, vanish in like 
 manner. We are left with a God who has no moral 
 attributes, no care for parts of any kind, no thought 
 of individuals, no knowledge, in fact, except of 
 one vast boundless, indivisible totality. We have 
 reached a region where all divine thought, all 
 divine knowledge are merged in a mindless blank. 
 The conception of totality, too, has vanished ; for 
 a real whole, in distinction from a mere all, or 
 aggregate mass, cannot be truly thought with- 
 out its parts. In our imperfect thinking, we may 
 take it on trust from a higher mind without its 
 filling up, or we may get an obscure hold of it 
 from some dim and exceedingly partial deduc- 
 tion from a few parts, by which we leap the vast 
 unknown, or supply its chasm by hypothesis. 
 But to the Perfect Intelligence, where all things, 
 if they appear at all, must appear as they really 
 are, and in all their relations, whether universal 
 or particular, there cannot be a whole, as a zvhole, 
 
200 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 without a distinct vision, and a distinct thought 
 of every part, as a part, in its relation to such 
 whole, and to every other part. 
 
 If, however, we admit an ideal change of ratio 
 for man as accompanying a supposed enlarge- 
 ment of the universe, it will be in a direction the 
 opposite of that which the objection seems to re- 
 quire. For all things that can be called ends, 
 such as are all rationalities, all rational exist- 
 ences, whatever may be their physical proportion 
 of being, such change, if admitted at all in an ab- 
 solute estimate* must be in a ratio direct, instead 
 of inverse. The anthropopathic view against 
 which we are contending seems to say : Man be- 
 comes of less account, — it is less easy to believe 
 him to be the subject of a particular providence, 
 or of an intense divine care, as a member of an 
 immense universe, than when regarded as dwell- 
 ing on a lone planet, the only region of life to be 
 found in all space. Reason teaches just the con- 
 trary. The importance of man as a rational be- 
 ing — his spiritual importance, though in itself an 
 unchangeable quantity, — is relationally enhanced 
 by the greatness, both spatial and numerical, of 
 the rational spheres. He is the greater being 
 the greater the city of which he is a citizen, and 
 as embraced in a scheme of redemption designed 
 to raise him to some higher iroXireviia, some higher 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 20] 
 
 sphere. It is more easy to believe that for this 
 the Eternal Logos became flesh, that now, 
 through this great evolution accomplished in the 
 Second Adam, man who had been of the earth 
 earthy might be raised to a higher stage of being, 
 and made " to sit ev rolg enovpavioig, in the heavenly 
 places in Christ Jesus." Which things, says the 
 Scriptures, " the angels bend down to look into." 
 Thus viewed in its spiritual aspect, the scheme 
 of redemption becomes grander, more gloriously 
 credible with the expansion of the rational as dis- 
 tinguished from the physical universe. The in- 
 terpretation which the author of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews gives to that wonderful VIII. Psalm, 
 shows that the germ of this idea had, even then, 
 its inspiration in the mind of the royal seer. 
 This germinal thought was the destined human 
 glory as shadowed in the physical inferiority 
 itself: " Lord, what is man ! When I survey the 
 heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and 
 the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man 
 that thou rememberest him? What is a son of 
 Adam that thou shouldst have regard to him ?" 
 It is then, as the Apostle interprets it, there 
 comes the thought of a " Son of man," of " one 
 made a little lower than the angels for the suffer- 
 ing of death, yet crowned with glory and honor." 
 Dominion over nature had been given to man at 
 9* 
 
202 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 his creation. But he had lost it, in its highest 
 spiritual sense ; for nature ruled over him. He 
 was the slave of appetite and passion. David 
 well knew that. But the " Son of Man," the 
 typical humanity, was one in whom the language 
 was to receive its highest inspiration. " All 
 things," says the Apostle, in seeming contradic- 
 tion to the Psalm, "all things were not yet put 
 under him;" that is, under the Adamic man; 
 " but we see Jesus," one in whom the dominion 
 was to be complete ; we see one man, the head 
 of a new humanity, and "to whom all power" — 
 the highest spiritual rule — " was given in Heaven 
 and in earth." Such is the glorious harmony of 
 Scripture. It is the same One who is spoken of 
 in another Psalm, interpreted in like manner by 
 the Apostle, as a conqueror, "ascending up o.i 
 high, leading captivity captive," that he might 
 receive " gifts for men," and introduce humanity 
 itself into the highest spheres of being. Immense 
 the rising, as immense had been the descent. 
 " Now that he ascended, what is it but that he 
 descended first into the lowest parts of the 
 earth,' ? Karurepa fieprj rr\q yrjg, the lowest state of 
 physical being, the silence, the darkness, the 
 immobility of the grave. " He was crucified, 
 dead and buried." 
 
 Thence He arose ascending high, 
 And showed our feet the way ; 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 203 
 
 "above the heavens," vnepavo), " far above the 
 heavens, far above the physical cosmos, to the 
 spheres of supernatural and spiritual glory," or, 
 as the Bible language gives it, " to the right 
 hand of the Most High." " Lift up your heads, 
 ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye doors of eter- 
 nity, that the King of Glory,'' — dpxiybg rrjg farjs, 
 the " Prince-Leader of Life," — " may enter in.'' It 
 was that glorious ascension having to human 
 sense its beginning here on earth, as His rising 
 form faded away from the human eyes so rap- 
 turously gazing upon it from the summit of 
 the Mount of Olives. We must not explain 
 this away into a phantom show, or an unmean- 
 ing spirituality. The Scriptures more than in- 
 timate that this risen body of Christ transcended, 
 in some way, the ordinary conditions of mate- 
 rial being in respect to time and space. And 
 yet it was a real cosmical transition, though 
 to the questions, how, or where, or through what 
 spaces, our best conceptions return no answer. 
 It may have passed through all spheres, thus 
 connecting man as saved and glorified, and 
 raised above the physical, with the highest or- 
 ders of being, and, through it, manifesting to 
 them tt\v ttoXvttolklXov ocxpiav rov Qeov, " the im- 
 mensely diversified wisdom of God." Men may 
 dispute the truth of such a doctrine, and deny 
 
204 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 its evidence, but they must not say that it 
 carries with it a narrowing conception of God's 
 cosmical kingdom. The very lowliness of man, 
 physically, enhances the spiritual greatness of 
 the Bible revelation. When science of herself 
 can give us assurance of any such glorious hu- 
 man destiny, it may venture to challenge a 
 comparison. 
 
 It is this idea of higher orders of being, of 
 worlds transcending the physical, and of man's 
 eventual connection with them, in which the 
 Bible leaves behind it both science and philos- 
 ophy. In the space aspect of the trine universe, 
 as I have called it, the Bible language falls short 
 .of the modern scientific statement as numerically 
 expressed, whilst excelling it, even here, in emo- 
 tional power. In its time aspect, and time lan- 
 guage, it has a conceptive grandeur, to say the 
 least, which our decimal notation can never sur- 
 pass. In the third dimension, or that of height, or 
 rank of being, no scientific view of the cosmos 
 comes near to it in spiritual elevation. I have 
 already touched upon this dimension, to some 
 degree, in treating of the two others. Worlds 
 beyond worlds ; that is the space view. Worlds 
 after worlds, that is the time conception. Worlds 
 above worlds : this is the thought to which the 
 Scripture calls us; not in the space relation, 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 205 
 
 where there is really no above and below, but in 
 that of rank and spiritual value. Thus we speak, 
 and truly speak without a figure, of the moral 
 world, or the world of worlds viewed in the 
 moral design, as distinct from the mere material 
 evolution. Again, there are worlds, so called, 
 and properly called, from the kind of beings em- 
 braced or the ideas manifested by them — worlds 
 intellectual, ideal, artistic, it may be — worlds in- 
 effable, transcending both sense and idea — such as 
 " eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the human 
 heart conceived " — real worlds, yet having no ref- 
 erence to space, or correlation in space with other 
 worlds, yet filled with a higher order of being — 
 worlds hypercosmical, supra-mundane, if such ex- 
 pressions do not seem paradoxical ; as where 
 Christ says : " I came forth from the Father into 
 the cosmos, and again I leave the cosmos and go 
 to the Father.' * 
 
 There is nothing in science, indeed, to exclude 
 such ideas of higher worlds than the physical 
 and material, or of higher and higher orders 
 of spiritual being ; but this can be safely said, 
 that since the days of Kepler and Newton, the 
 course of scientific speculation has not been 
 favorable to it. What is called " the Positive 
 school," especially, with its many able advo- 
 cates, is directly hostile to any such tendencies 
 
206 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 of thought. The reason for this, however, is 
 moral rather than scientific. It comes from an 
 aversion to the thought of anything superhuman. 
 That would be too suggestive of the religious. 
 Something higher than man ! the conception 
 must be barred out, or it will mount up to a 
 higher, and higher, and higher still It cannot 
 stop short of a highest, of a comparative su- 
 preme, some mighty personalty, having in his 
 hand vast control of nature, though produced 
 by nature, and thus falling infinitely below the 
 true theistic idea of the eternal, the unorigi- 
 nated, or the unborn. This thought of a phys- 
 ical Titanic god or demon, as a conceivable 
 product of the great unknowable force, has al- 
 ready been dwelt upon in the First Lecture. 
 Here would we apply it to the still more con- 
 ceivable hypothesis of superhuman beings, simply 
 regarded as transcending our own power of in- 
 terference with the physical order. There is 
 the possibility — according to the mathematical 
 doctrine of time and chances, there is the strong 
 probability — that this awful nature, from whose 
 eternal play of atoms comes all that is or seems 
 to be ? may have produced such beings, im- 
 mensely superior to man, and yet with no se- 
 curity drawn from any possible knowledge of 
 nature herself, that they may not be beings of 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 0J 
 
 inconceivable malignity. Physical science has 
 no a priori law or idea demanding that the 
 atoms shall produce a good and benevolent, 
 rather than an evil and a hating consciousness. 
 It may be, too, a being or beings capable of 
 interfering with Nature herself; as in the awful 
 imagining of Milton : 
 
 " Gnawing their mother's bowels ; when they list, 
 To the womb returning, — hourly thus conceived, 
 And hourly born, with sorrow infinite." 
 
 For according to the hypothesis against which 
 we are contending, or the unqualified evolution 
 scheme, nature has produced, in man, such a 
 being capable of interfering with nature to a 
 vast extent, of deflecting it from its course, or 
 of making it do what, if left to itself, it would 
 not have done. Now whether we call it the 
 supernatural or not, there is nothing in the way 
 of conceiving it as belonging to mightier beings 
 evolved from this unknown fearful womb, — and 
 to mightier still, and mightier still, as far as 
 the utmost effort of our science-aiding imagin- 
 ation can carry the appalling idea. Thus science 
 may have to admit the miraculous, or, not to 
 dispute about names, the mirabilia, the things 
 beyond our utmost sense, our utmost induction, 
 stupendous wonders as judged by Hume's rule, 
 
208 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 — in other words, phenomena depending on an 
 unknown personal interfering will, far out of 
 any traceable chain of impersonal physical se- 
 quences. It is these sense-transcending mirabilia, 
 this thought of appalling personal interferences, 
 which the infidel science would exclude from 
 the cosmical being. But here they are again, 
 in spite of " the Positive Philosophy " and on 
 the very hypothesis that seems to exclude them. 
 Here they are again, without the unoriginated 
 I AM, the unborn God of Love and Reason, to 
 shield us from their malignant power. 
 
 I have dwelt on this, digressively, to show that 
 the very inconsistencies into which the system 
 of unqualified evolution is compelled to run, in 
 its denial of the higher being, prove the strong 
 aversion of its adherents to the thought of any 
 personalities above the human having been, as 
 yet, evolved from nature, or that primal nebular 
 substance in which all things have been lying 
 potentially from the beginning. But be the 
 cause what it may, the fact is undeniable. The 
 scientific form of infidelity is inclined to stop 
 with man. It would, perhaps, admit any amount 
 of mere physical being as occupying the space 
 universe ; but rational being, if elsewhere exist- 
 ing, is essentially a repetition, in rank at least, 
 whatever diversity there may be in form, of our 
 

 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 209 
 
 earthly homo. Here they are the narrow think- 
 ers ; they are the ones who make earth the 
 centre, or our own sphere of being the central 
 sphere in dignity, if not the space centre of the 
 universe. 
 
 How immensely does the Bible transcend this ! 
 How much more expanding as well as elevating 
 its view ! For here our discussion has reference 
 mainly to this charge against the teachings of 
 the Scriptures, that they narrow the mind, and 
 that, in this respect, modern science has out- 
 grown religious faith. The Bible does not, in- 
 deed, give us imaginative or descriptive detail, 
 but it most vividly sets forth this altitude dimen- 
 sion of the universe, or of universal being. It 
 transcends any view which would give it simply 
 duration in time, or an endlessly expanding evo- 
 lution in space — making it a mathematical uni- 
 verse, an immeasurable series of motions, a limit- 
 less play of correlated forces, an endless repetition 
 of elemental phenomena — immense length and 
 breadth, we may call it, with a lack of height, or 
 an almost infinitesimal thinness, as compared with 
 the idea germinant in all religious thought, and 
 which the Christian Scriptures so wonderfully 
 confirm and expand. The Bible, both Old and 
 New, places God in the empyrean. He is de- 
 scribed as " inhabiting the high and holy place," 
 
2io VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 transcending in rank, immeasurably separate in 
 moral purity ; the heavens are not clean before 
 Him. $«c oIk&v dnpooLrov ; He dwells in light 
 unapproachable. His name is the Most High. 
 He rules over the kingdom of all eternities, of all 
 worlds, in time, in space, in rank of being. It is 
 a spiritual as well as a physical kingdom — the 
 latter subordinate to, and deriving its value from, 
 the first. This kingdom contains countless ranks 
 of being far below Deity, yet still many of them 
 transcending man. The names given to them 
 are not to enlarge our scientific insight, but simply 
 to denote superlative excellence and power: 
 Angels, Archangels, Seraphim, or burning ones, 
 Kedoshim, or holy ones, Bene Elohim, Sons of 
 God, Morning Stars, Thrones, Dominions, Princi- 
 palities, and Powers. Immense the range, incon- 
 ceivable the height in this upper direction. 
 The more exalted their rank, the more occupied 
 are they with the glory and adoration of their 
 still infinitely transcending Maker : 
 
 To Thee, Cherubim and Seraphim 
 Continually do cry. 
 
 Again there are orders of being that may be con- 
 ceived of as more nearly related to earth, and 
 the lower physical being. There are references 
 to cosmical powers of this kind of which science 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 II 
 
 has nothing, and can have nothing, to say, either 
 by way of proof or disproof. They are set forth 
 in the Bible as God's ministers ruling in the ele- 
 ments, having an invisible elementary organiza- 
 tion, yet exercising power over nature as man does ; 
 doing things which are not miraculous in their 
 sphere, however they may be regarded in ours. 
 The angels of the Egyptian plagues, the angel of 
 the pestilence in Israel, the mighty power that 
 smote the Assyrian host, belong to this class. 
 They deal with the interiora of nature, the springs 
 of nature, lying far down below our deepest 
 science, the keenest search of our chemical 
 analysis, the most penetrating gaze of our micro- 
 scopes. On the pages of revelation the " curtain 
 of the dark " is sometimes drawn aside, and these 
 powers are symbolically exposed to view; but 
 how often, in the history of the world, may be 
 ascribed to such unseen agencies as these, events 
 that so puzzle, as they are now puzzling, our best 
 science ! New diseases, sudden and strange in 
 their form, ever and anon invade the world ; in- 
 explicable phenomena present themselves. Don't 
 be afraid, is the cry ; it is indeed hard to explain, 
 if it be not jugglery and delusion ; but even if 
 real, it is still law ; it is all law somewhere, and 
 that comforts us, that magic word so much more 
 tolerable than the idea of a near personal God, or 
 
212 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the near presence of any of His more immediate 
 ministers. AH law doubtless, even as man's 
 operations in nature may be said to be in accord- 
 ance with natural processes on the nearer surface ; 
 but who or what wields the power of law in these 
 deep interior stages, or these more hidden 
 springs? Our scientific conventions take up the 
 matter; they begin to trace some of the plainer 
 sequences. They get hold of a few of the nearer 
 links ; and lo, another form appears, or some other 
 inexplicable manifestations present themselves. 
 All law doubtless, but how does that reiteration 
 help the matter in cases where we stand in most 
 pressing need of help, whilst medical science, 
 and all science, instead of its usual vaunting, can 
 only confess its incompetency ? The same 
 thought is suggested by what may be called 
 seemingly abrupt transitions in nature — some re- 
 vealed by geology, others occasionally present- 
 ing themselves in nearer historical manifestations. 
 The clock strikes a new hour ; we are startled 
 for a moment ; but soon comes the comfort 
 again: there is a law for it somewhere; there 
 are no leaps in nature. True, but what has 
 made the connection? There may have been, 
 as has been intimated in a former lecture, cogs 
 and wheels far below where science sees ; law 
 has been going on in the silent approach of these 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 213 
 
 in that awful depth, or there may be unseen 
 powerful beings that by means of other natural 
 forces have hastened the momentous contact. 
 These may be ministers of God, or, take the pure 
 evolution scheme, they may be of nature's own 
 evolving, entering into the bowels of their parent, 
 as has been said, or interfering with nature even 
 as her younger child man has derived from her a 
 power thus to interfere. The juxtaposition of 
 atoms have made our consciousness, our thought, 
 our will, our strength, our power to interfere 
 with the all-breeding parent ; why may not a 
 congeries of higher and more ethereal atoms have 
 somewhere and somehow produced a higher con- 
 sciousness, a more energetic will, a mightier 
 strength for analogous purposes, and still mightier 
 and more science-baffling effects ? I may refer 
 here to the phenomena now predominant in what 
 is called spiritualism, but which have manifested 
 themselves in other ages and from the earliest 
 times. The evidence has so accumulated, that 
 the easy talk about the imagination and " uncon- 
 scious cerebration," and the power of sympathy, 
 has become stale. That there is a high measure 
 of reality here can be no more doubted than 
 some of the positions of science itself, as based on 
 similar evidence. Equally clear to a sane relig- 
 ious mind is the proof that it is an evil as well 
 
214 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 as a very ancient thing-. Its defenders adopt the 
 common style; they, too, babble of "law," and 
 show a like tendency to include all things in a 
 godless physical system. In reference, however, 
 to our present argument, there is need only to 
 insist on the fact of its wholly baffling the positive 
 irreligious science ; and I would only remark, 
 once for all, that when I seem to speak harshly 
 of science anywhere in these lectures, I mean no 
 other. Here, however, it is enough to maintain 
 that no science can deny, any more than it can 
 affirm, the possibility of aerial and aethereal ex- 
 istences, good or bad. There may be organiza- 
 tions transcending the utmost ken of the micro- 
 scope or the laboratory, and yet as real as any- 
 thing visible on earth — personal beings, benevo- 
 lent or malignant, having control over the 
 electric, magnetic, or odic forces, call them what 
 you will, or themselves connected with them as 
 correlated organic agencies. There is something 
 very significant in the name the Scriptures give 
 to some of these powers, whose existence it un- 
 hesitatingly assumes. It calls them Koofionp&Topag 
 rov gkotovc rov al&voq rovrov " the cosmical 
 powers of the darkness of this world," aeon, or 
 sphere — the unseen agents that rule in the dark 
 world of nature, and who are also parties in the 
 moral conflict in which the Christian is called to 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 215 
 
 wrestle, Eph. vi. 12. In Eph. ii. 2, they are 
 called e^ovolai rov dspog, " the powers of the air," 
 whether the term refers to the nearer surround- 
 ing atmosphere, or to the space-filling aether, a 
 notion which the ancient mind, both philo- 
 sophical and poetical, clearly recognized, and 
 which modern science is rapidly confirming. 
 
 But turn we now to the higher regions of 
 cosmical and spiritual being, and the higher 
 beings before referred to as named by Paul in 
 his glorious nomenclature, from whatever source 
 derived : Angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, 
 principalities, and powers. Immeasurable height ! 
 And yet above all these did Christ ascend when 
 He "left the cosmos," and "returned to the 
 Father, to the glory which he had with Him 
 before the cosmos was." A narrow conception, 
 shall we call it, this sublime scale of being, and 
 that high destiny to which men are called 
 through the mediation of the uncreated Logos! 
 Place it in contrast with that well-known view 
 of the positive philosophy which makes man the 
 etre supreme, the highest order of being the 
 infinite evolution has yet reached after an ante- 
 past eternity of working. Not man redeemed 
 by Christ, not civilized man, even, with all the 
 animality and vice to which we give that name, 
 but man as he was only a short time ago in 
 
2i6 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 the evolution chronology, when he first devel- 
 oped a thumb, and began to walk erect, though 
 still a prognathian troglodyte surrounded by 
 stone implements and gnawed bones — the Strauss- 
 ian or Hegelian man, in whom the universal 
 force, the hitherto undeveloped cosmical soul, 
 was just emerging into consciousness. Think of it ! 
 An endless evolution, an eternal working, an infi- 
 nite causation, and yet an effect so finite. Nature 
 has been working upward from eternity, and 
 has just passed the long-armed ape who begat 
 Prognathus, as Prognathus begat the troglodyte 
 homo. What becomes of our doctrine of 
 progress? As sure as mathematics, it should 
 have been all evolved, all that we now have, 
 over and over again, — all out, or far more of it 
 out than has come out, incalculable ages ago. 
 An eternal ante-past of progressive working ' 
 To what a height should it have arisen ! It 
 should have transcended all our ideals. The 
 most exalted finite being should have been 
 reached, the most exalted that our minds can 
 conceive, instead of this creature man, so poor, 
 so low ; lor my hearers will bear in mind that I 
 am speaking of him as measured by no higher 
 scale of value than that afforded by this physical 
 hypothesis,- man evolved from nebular gas — 
 man just coming out of darkness and so soon to 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 217 
 
 return to darkness again — e tenebris in tenebras — 
 man just stepping above the ape, or just emerg- 
 ing from the fungus, and having nothing to 
 secure him against speedily returning to nothing- 
 ness, or becoming manure to the fungus that* 
 succeeds. 
 
 This all comes from that hideous vorepov npo- 
 repov, that inversion of all necessary thinking 
 referred to in the quotation from Aristotle, Lect. 
 Third. Nature first, it says, matter first, an im- 
 palpable nebulous nihilism first, the lowest and 
 most imperfect first ; life, thought, reason, idea, 
 their junior* products, and God, therefore, the 
 last product, if there be a God at all, or anything 
 to which such a name can possibly be given. 
 And we are asked to adopt this, and call it 
 grand, whilst rejecting as narrow and soul-con- 
 tracting the Revelation which makes God first, 
 reason first, idea first, the perfect first, — as 
 has been said before — the imperfect and the 
 finite ever a departure from it, whether in the 
 scale of order or of time, whether as exhibited in' 
 processes of lapse and deterioration, or the con- 
 trary seeming of recovery and restoration in 
 cyclical rounds. The two schemes have two 
 entirely different modes of speech. Says the 
 mere physical hypothesis : In the beginning was 
 the nebula, and all things were in the nebula, 
 10 
 
2i8 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 and all things were self-evolved from the nebula 
 — even life, thought, consciousness, idea, reason 
 itself, having no other source. The other speaks 
 to us in language like this: Ev dpxq rjv 6 Aoyoq, 
 " In the beginning was the Word,'' the Aoyoq, the 
 Reason, " and the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was God. All things came into being 
 by Him. In Him was life," Zwfj, and "from this 
 life ,; — not from motions, or molecules, or cor- 
 related forces, or the vibration of fibres, or the 
 arrangements of nebular atoms, but from this life 
 of the Logos, the eternal reason — " came the 
 light of men " — the mind, reason, conscience of 
 humanity, — even " the light that lighteth '' every 
 rational being, " coming into the comos." St. 
 John and Herbert Spencer! This human light 
 itself shall judge between them, and we need 
 have no fears for the ultimate decision. But let us 
 hear more of this magnificent style of language : 
 " Who is the image of the unseen God, the First 
 Born before all creation, the impress of His 
 substance : because in Him were created all 
 things, — things in the heavens, and things upon 
 the earth, things seen, and things unseen,'' — 
 things of the sense world, and things transcend- 
 ing sense — all ranks of being, " whether they be 
 thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers, 
 — all things were by Him, and for Him, and in 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 219 
 
 Him all things consist, ovveoTTjice, or stand tog-e- 
 ther " — in Him the Logos, the reason, the idea, 
 the wisdom, the eternal and "only begotten Son 
 of God." This is the narrow view ; this is the 
 order of things we are asked to give up, that our 
 minds may be enlarged by the more lofty method 
 of science in its wholly hypothetical scheme of 
 the universe, — a science which puts the nebula 
 " in the beginning," and makes man, the ape- 
 evolved man, the highest product that has yet 
 been produced from a past eternity of progress. 
 
 There is a tendency, even among some who 
 believe the Scriptures, to depopulate the vast in- 
 terval between the human and the divine, leaving 
 it an immeasurable blank, or a few angels, per- 
 haps, who fly about the only inhabitants of the 
 vqjd. But this overlooks the sublime signifi- 
 cance of the Bible language. The reason for it, 
 however, easily suggests itself: The ascending 
 view seems to impair the dignity of man as the 
 subject of so great a redemption. But this is 
 all changed when we come to regard that re- 
 demption itself as the lifting up of man into a 
 higher sphere of being, and the rescuing him 
 from that sinking into nature through which he 
 tends to the level of all below, or to the lowest 
 forms of a demonic animality. 
 
 The other idea proceeds, moreover, from a 
 
220 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 false conception of dignity or moral worth. It 
 confounds two totally different modes of estimat- 
 ing value, the spiritual and the physical — the quan- 
 titative or the dynamical, as compared with the 
 estimate of faith, or nearness of relation in which 
 the finite being, however small, physically, may 
 stand to the infinite centre of all being. In the 
 one aspect, the value of any individual part sinks 
 in the proportion which its total capacity of being 
 bears to the whole of physical existence. The uni- 
 verse, not God, is the sponsor and index of value. 
 The bigger the universe, the less are human sins, 
 the less the human worth. It is, as before inti- 
 mated, a variable quantity, which, when this ratio 
 is carried out, becomes an infinitesimal. When 
 measured by the other scale, it is a constant quan- 
 tity, unchangeable in itself, whilst, in this cen- 
 tral faith relation, it may even be said that, instead 
 of sinking, it truly rises, and that too in the direct 
 ratio of the greatness of the universe considered 
 as entering into the greatness of the Creator. In 
 other words, the more glorious the universe in 
 all the aspects mentioned, and especially in that 
 of ascending ranks of being, the greater is man 
 in this moral aspect, that is, when regarded as a 
 rational, conscious participant and contemplator 
 of this glory. " All things are yours ; for ye are 
 Christ's, and Christ is God's." If so be there are 
 
THE KIXGDOM OF GOD. 2 2I 
 
 immense degrees above him, th3 higher is his 
 own value as one rejoicing in it, and thus losing 
 himself, as it were, in an adoring view of Him, 
 by whom, and through whom, and for whom are 
 all things. The lower the vale, physically, from 
 which this rational, conscious contemplator looks 
 up, the more beautiful and serene the heavens 
 above, the more sublime the idea of the Supernal 
 One sedentis eternitatem, " inhabiting eternity" 
 11 dwelling in the high and holy place, with Him 
 also" — O immeasurable contrast ! — with him also 
 " who is humble and contrite in spirit, and who 
 trem le h t my word." 
 
 Physical or quantitative value, as I have called 
 it, is numerical or mathematical. It has a fixed 
 summation in decimals, if we could find room in 
 which to put them. It is quantitative, therefore, 
 in distinction from that transcendental calculus 
 which no arithmetical summing, no algebraic 
 equation, no fluxional series can ever state. It 
 is this moral nearness to God, as distinguished 
 from such quantitative relation to the universe, 
 which is so pathetically represented in the Scrip- 
 tures. Man, as a rational being, is allied to the 
 divine; the imaged likeness, though frightfully 
 deformed, is still discernible to the all-seeing Eye ; 
 God recognizes this distant relationship as He 
 sees him lying in spiritual ruin, and then, when 
 
222 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 he believes, the distance is gone ; it is his 
 faith which brings him near to the Infinite One, 
 and makes him, in some sense, a partaker of His 
 infinity. This is his value. Hence the power 
 of that glorious scriptural anthropopathism : The 
 Almighty Shepherd leaving the ninety and nine 
 to seek the one that is lost in the wilderness. 
 Hence it is that the ranks of ascending being, 
 who are represented as standing before the face 
 of our heavenly Father, rejoice over the sinner, 
 the one sinner, that returns from his straying, and 
 through faith in God becomes united to that 
 higher fold, that higher spiritual sphere tran- 
 scending all the spheres of force and nature. 
 
 In his mere physical aspect, man is, indeed, 
 allied to the lowest things. Science, in tracing 
 him through the inferior animal types, does rrot 
 present this lowly aspect more emphatically than 
 is done in the language of Abraham : " Who am 
 but dust and ashes ;" or in the moaning of Job, 
 when he had lost his sense of the divine com- 
 munion, the link that bound him to the Eternal, 
 and having in itself " the power of an endless 
 life" : " I said to corruption, thou art my father ; to 
 the worm, thou art my mother and my sister." It 
 is something more than a mere despairing ejacu- 
 lation. In his physical being, " as ol the earth 
 earthy,'' man is, indeed, allied to all below, as in 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 2$ 
 
 Christ he becomes allied to all above. And this 
 suggests the thought whether the lower creation 
 may not rise with him in some proportional 
 ascent? Scripture encourages the idea. The 
 KTioig, the creation, " the creature, groans with 
 man." It is " waiting " in mute hopefulness, ovv 
 d-ottapadoKia, with bended head, with forward- 
 gazing eye, with outstretched neck, as the pic- 
 torial word implies, with longing expectation, 
 elg ttjv d~ofidXvipiv r&v vi&v rov Oeov, "for the reve- 
 lation of the sons of God." It is thus, too, we 
 see what grandeur links itself with this human 
 lowliness in the cheering language of the Pro- 
 phet : " Fear not, thou worm, Jacob, for it is I 
 who have redeemed thee ; I hold thee by thy 
 hand, I call thee by thy name ; thou art mine." 
 " Fear not ; only believe." " For I am per- 
 suaded," says the rapt Apostle, " that neither 
 death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
 powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 
 nor height, nor depth, nor any thing created, 
 shall be able to separate us from the love of Goi 
 which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." What won- 
 drous ideas are these ! So new to the world ! 
 new to any phase of its speculative theosophy, 
 newer still as a living emotional human utter- 
 ance ! " The love of God" — the love of God in 
 Christ Jesus the Incarnate Redeemer — " the love 
 
224 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 of God that passeth knowledge ! " That heavenly 
 strain; whence came it ? That superhuman flash 
 of glory ; from what philosophy, Greek, Latin, 
 Egyptian, Chaldsean, Persian, Hindu, was it ever 
 developed ? All space, all time, all rank of being 
 — the universe in its trine aspect — all is here. 
 Science shrinks from the mighty declaration : 
 " Nor height, nor depth," no power of the cosmos, 
 either in its altitude or its profundity, can separate 
 from God, or affect the estimate of souls that truly 
 believe. Here, we say, is glory. But the infidel 
 philosophy cannot see it. " Its eyes are holden." 
 Extent in space, dynamical change, duration, 
 motion, physical evolution, endless repetition of 
 material being — these fill its range of vision. The 
 height and depth of the spiritual universe, or as 
 manifested in the glory of God ; these are ideas 
 which its inductions ever fail to reach. 
 
 So is it to a great extent in the literary world. 
 The sublimest Bible truths are unknown. The 
 organ for their discovery is not wholly lacking, 
 but the frivolousness of the predominant sense- 
 philosophy prevents their true appreciation. The 
 mere litterateursees nothing in passages which to 
 the believer are full of glory, whilst things not 
 worthy to be named in comparison from classic, 
 Brahminic, or Confucian writings, call out raptur- 
 ous expressions of admiration. The Bible is full 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 225 
 
 of anthropomorphisms, they say. How offensive 
 to their spiritual tastes are Hebrew gnats, whilst 
 swallowing, without the least difficulty, the most 
 monstrous of Hindu elephants and the most 
 deformed of Assyrian camels ! And yet to the 
 devout student of the Scriptures, even the por- 
 tions over which the careless worldly reader is 
 most apt to stumble, are full of evidence that 
 they are from an earth-transcending sphere of 
 thought. Many have been thus stumbled, per- 
 haps, on reading the glowing eulogy of the Old 
 Testament believers as contained in the eleventh 
 chapter of Hebrews, — or the long record of the 
 men " who pleased God" because they had that 
 thing " without which it is impossible to please 
 Him," even their faith. They wonder that the 
 writer should speak in this manner " of Gideon, 
 and of Barak, of Jephthah, of Samuel, also, and 
 of David." What was there in these uncultivated 
 semi-barbarians that they should be pointed out 
 as favorites of Deity, or as men " of whom the 
 world was not worthy." To the Bible-taught 
 soul the answer comes with an unearthly light 
 and power : " They believed God," says the 
 record ; " they endured as seeing Him who is 
 invisible." It is the trait which most allures the 
 spiritual eye in those grand old patriarchal 
 figures, so uncultivated, as some would say. In 
 10* 
 
226 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 their unfaltering trust, they confessed themselves 
 to be " strangers and pilgrims on the earth ; they 
 were looking for a better country, seeking for 
 something stable, ' even a city which had foun- 
 dations.' " They had that gem of faith shining 
 far up in the highest heavens, and more precious 
 in the sight of God, even when seen in the heart of 
 an old Hebrew warrior, like Gideon or Jephthah, 
 than all the philosophy of Plato, and all the pre- 
 tentious ethics of an Epictetus, a Seneca, or an 
 Antonine. 
 
 It was the saving faith of Samuel, of David, 
 and those other rude old Hebrew men, so differ- 
 ent from that which has been invented, and some- 
 times on the most untenable grounds, for what 
 are called u heathen worthies." The belief in the 
 salvation of Socrates, it has been said, stands on 
 the same footing with our belief in that of Noah, 
 Moses, David, or other Old Testament saints, so 
 called, who died before the coming of Christ. 
 But it is ignorance of the Bible alone that can 
 confound the cases. The faith of these Old Tes- 
 tament men was ever a belief in a righteousness 
 out of, and higher than, themselves. It was to 
 this they clung, whatever the message, rite, or 
 symbol by which it was represented. It was ever 
 a righteousness of God's own providing. I will 
 yield to no one in due reverence for Socrates. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 227 
 
 But could I find that for which I have earnestly 
 searched among his best utterances, any hearty 
 confession of sin, any self-condemning humility 
 aside from his frequent ironical disclaimer of 
 Knowledge, anj^thing like the prayer of David or 
 the Publican, any confession like that of Job, 
 when, renouncing his own unsatisfying argu- 
 ments, he falls upon his face and says, " I repent 
 in dust and ashes," — any language of deep self- 
 distrust, any recognition, in short, of any the 
 least need of a righteousness higher and holier 
 than his own — could I discover any trace of these, 
 I could draw from it more hope of his salvation, 
 in Christ's sense of the word, than from all the 
 fine sayings that have ever been truly or igno- 
 rantly ascribed to this noblest of the heathen, this 
 prince of all the philosophers. " The heavens 
 are not clean in Thy sight ; Thou art of purer eyes 
 than to look upon evil ; Thou desirest truth in 
 the hidden parts ; O wash Thou me, and then 
 shall I be clean ; when Thou shalt judge me, 
 then shall I be whiter than snow ; a broken heart, 
 O God, Thou wilt not reject ; search me, O God, 
 and try me ; explore me, and see if there be any 
 evil way in me, and lead me in the way everlast- 
 ing ; I will make mention of Thy righteousness, 
 Thine only ; for with Thee is the fountain of life, 
 and in Thy light do we see light " When we 
 
228 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 can find anything like these utterances in 
 Socrates, or Epictetus, in Seneca, in Antonine, 
 in Confucius, in the Zend-avesta, or in the Vedas, 
 then may we have some charitable respect for the 
 parallels which certain literary men are so fond 
 of drawing. Sublime examples for our argument 
 are still more abundant in the New Testament, 
 but, for obvious reasons, it was thought best here, 
 and in citations to follow, to keep in view chiefly 
 the earlier revelation. 
 
 "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." Hunt 
 through all the dialogues of Plato, hunt through 
 all the Vedas for anything like that. Sin as 
 against God, against God alone ; Socrates knew 
 nothing of it. It is an idea hardly to be found in 
 the classical Greek literature. The Grecian sage 
 acknowledged a war in the soul ; the lower had 
 got above the upper. It was a civil war, de- 
 structive of all good. That he saw clearly. The 
 disordered spirit he would compose and recon- 
 struct, but he would do it by philosophy. He 
 would make peace between the reason and 
 the appetite. He would put to sleep the wild 
 beasts, or chain them up, or set them in balancing 
 antagonism one against the other. But he could 
 not "cast them out." That could only be done 
 by prayer, and fasting, and penitent confession 
 that acknowledges sin to be in the centre of the 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 229 
 
 soul, and seeks peace there by first seeking peace 
 with God. It was the primal defect of the Pla- 
 tonic or Socratic thinking, that it made matter 
 the original evil, and laid all our sins upon the 
 wretched sympathising body. Of that older war 
 between God and the spirit, of which the Scrip- 
 tures are so full, Socrates knew nothing. The 
 Psalmist, too, was acquainted with this strife be- 
 tween appetite and the reason ; but he found not 
 the cure in philosophy. " Unite my heart," he 
 prays (Psalm lxxxvi.), make one my divided heart, 
 as it literally reads, " to fear thy name" How 
 deeply Paul felt this inward strife we learn from 
 that wondrous seventh chapter of Romans, and 
 we know, too, his only remedy, " O wretched 
 man, who shall deliver me? I thank God 
 through Jesus Christ my Lord." " Let him lay 
 hold of my strength that he may make peace 
 with me, make peace with me" as the Prophet so 
 tenderly repeats it. 
 
 " Our modern monotheistic conception of 
 God," says Strauss, " has two sides, the absolute 
 and the personal." "The first element," he pro- 
 ceeds to say, " is Greek," — that is, we derive it 
 from the Greeks ; " the second comes from the 
 Hebrew Christian sources." The distinction 
 between the Greek and Hebrew conception, such 
 a favorite with Strauss and others, is a mere 
 
230 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 tinsel antithesis, having a false show of learning, 
 but without any real foundation. Especially i<= it 
 false on the Hebrew side. The personal in Deity 
 is indeed set forth in the Scriptures with awful 
 distinctness, but in no writings is the absolute, 
 the infinite, the unconditioned, the knowledge- 
 surpassing, the time-and-space-transcending as- 
 pect of the divine character more sublimely 
 presented : " The I am that I AM, the '0 D.N, The 
 Being pre-eminently, who IS and WAS, and IS TO 
 COME, and whom no tense form can adequately 
 describe — the one — the all — " who filleth all 
 things," " who inhabits eternity," " of whom 
 there is no similitude," with whom "one day is as 
 a thousand years, and a thousand years as one 
 day," whose " ways transcend our ways, and 
 whose thinking is above our thinking, even as 
 the heavens, the infinite heavens, are higher than 
 the earth." Where do we find anything like this 
 in Plato or Aristotle ? For Strauss must have 
 reference to the Greek philosophers rather than 
 to the intensely personal conceptions of the poets. 
 Where do we find anything in any of the Greek 
 schools which so sets forth the absoluteness, the 
 eternity, the infinity, the incomprehensibleness of 
 the divine character? It does not detract from 
 this, that such representations of the timeless 
 absoluteness are sometimes made through the 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 23 I 
 
 most vivid sense-picturings, though there are 
 other cases, and equally sublime, where the gen- 
 eral or abstract forms of speech are used. 
 
 It is so, also, in regard to conceptive power. 
 This has already been alluded to in what was said 
 of the old names in Genesis, and the comparison 
 between the ancient and the modern sense-imag- 
 ing accompanying those terms. God does not 
 seem, after all, much higher to the modern as- 
 tronomer than he did to Abraham. No figure of 
 immutability surpasses that of the Hebrew ^y \jty> 
 inhabitans eternitatem, "inhabiting eternity" — 
 filling the changeless totality of being ; or, as 
 Boethius expresses it, tota simul et interminabilis 
 vitae possessio. So also the representations of the 
 divine unknowableness to which reference has 
 already been made. Again, God's mighty har- 
 monizing power — "the reign of law " — which he 
 has established throughout the worlds, and the 
 Scripture mode of expressing it, as set forth in 
 Lecture Third. There is no show of philosophiz- 
 ing ; no assuming to speak the language of any 
 science. It may be said, perhaps, that there is 
 an attempt here to get more out of this style of 
 speaking than the words will warrant ; but it 
 cannot fail to be seen and felt how directly it car- 
 ries the mind to the ultimate causal ideas, and 
 causal forces, be they what they may. 
 
232 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 Take again those attributes which, though 
 physical in their manifestation, are connected 
 with the moral aspect of the Divine, — the ideas 
 of providence and omnipresence. How won- 
 derfully are these brought together, in one pic- 
 ture, the near and the far, the intimate person- 
 ality and the unconditioned absoluteness of 
 Deity ! We have a remarkable example in the 
 CXXXIX. Psalm ; the loftiest co ceptual ex- 
 pression of the space-filling presence followed 
 immediately by language denoting the closest 
 personal familiarity with the finite human soul : 
 " Whither shall I go from Thy spirit, or w^ ere 
 shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend to 
 the heavens, Thou art there; if I make my bed 
 in Sheol, behold Thou art there ; let me take the 
 wings of the morning and dwell in thj uttermost 
 West; even there Thy hand shall guiJ.e me; 
 Thy right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, 
 let darkness bury me, the night shall be light 
 about me. No darkness hides from Thee ; the 
 night shineth as the day ; the darkness 's as the 
 light." All philosophical and scientific language 
 is ultimately grounded on figures ; but what 
 figures for the soul can telescope the remote 
 more powerfully than these ? And, then, in al- 
 most immediate sequence, the ineffable nearness : 
 " For Thou dost possess my reins ; Thou didst 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 233 
 
 overshadow me in my mother's womb. How 
 precious are Thy thoughts of me, O God, how 
 great their sum ! When I awake I am still 
 with Thee." It is as though the soul that thus 
 apprehends the Infinite by faith did, in some 
 way, partake of God's ubiquity. In heaven 
 above, in Hades deep below, in all conceivable 
 spaces that lie between the remotest East, where 
 morning begins its flight, and the uttermost 
 parts of the boundless sea, the conceptual limit 
 of the illimitable West, — wherever Thou art, 
 there " am I still with Thee, — still with Thee 
 — evermore with Thee." And so in the time 
 aspect. God's eternal thought transcends dura- 
 tion and succession. The longest as well as 
 the shortest intervals disappear before the time- 
 less contemplation ; as in the language already 
 quoted from the Psalmist and the Apostle : " A 
 thousand years ; '' it is numerically finite, even as 
 one day or a watch in the night ; but concep- 
 tually it is a symbol of eternity, of a timeless eter- 
 nity. The thousand years represent the idea as 
 well as the longest row of decimals. It is simply 
 the most vivid way of setting forth the ab- 
 solute timelessness of God's being except as 
 He chooses to manifest Himself in the flow 
 of the finite. Talk of the Greeks, and their 
 superiority to the Hebrews in respect to 
 
234 
 
 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 this idea of the Divine absoluteness ! what, as 
 compared with the Psalmist's language, is Plato's 
 labored effort in the Timaeus to give us the 
 difference between aldv, the immovable eternity, 
 and XP° V0 $, or time, its revolving mirror. Indeed, 
 the human mind must ever fail to grasp the idea 
 of timelessness, but no language can carry our 
 thought higher or farther in that direction than the 
 solemn musing of this old XC. Psalm : " A thou- 
 sand years in Thine eyes as yesterday when it is 
 past, and as a watch in the night ! " The wings 
 of Plato's abstractions grow weary in every at- 
 tempt to soar to such a height. Compare, too, 
 the effort of the same philosopher to set before 
 us his much-labored distinction between the ra 
 ovra and the yiyv6[j,eva t the absolute and the flow- 
 ing, the opara and the dopara, the visible and the in- 
 visible, the diodrjra and the votjto,, the sense world 
 and the world of ideal or necessary truth. Great 
 as that is, compare it all, I say, with that short 
 soaring sentence of Paul, the Hebrew of the 
 Hebrews : " For the things that are seen are tem- 
 poral (TrpoGKaipa), they belong to time ; the things 
 unseen are eternal." Or go back to the older 
 Hebrew prophet, the cotemporary and the min- 
 ister of King Hezekiah : " Lift up your eyes to 
 the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath ; 
 for the heavens shall dissolve like vapor, and the 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 235 
 
 earth shall wear out like a garment; but MY SAL- 
 VATION shall be for eternity, and MY RIGHTEOUS- 
 NESS (my moral kingdom) shall never fail." Take 
 it in connection with the near language of the 
 railing Rabshakeh, which now so repeats itself, 
 in all its bald sameness, everywhere on the As- 
 syrian tablets. What must we think of those 
 who talk of these monuments as shedding light 
 upon the Bible, or of the ideas it derives from 
 them, or from the kindred Egyptian darkness. 
 To a serious intelligence the conviction is irre- 
 sistible that there was something unearthly in 
 those Hebrew books, as distinguished from the 
 literature of all cotemporaneous surrounding 
 nations, and that this fact furnishes an unanswer- 
 able argument for their inspiration and unearthly 
 origin. 
 
 And yet such is the nature of this vivid Hebrew 
 style, that, whilst it rises beyond all philosophizing, 
 the child can feel, and, in that feeling understand, 
 its lofty meaning. It elevates the soul while it 
 sets it pondering ; calls out the contemplative 
 spirit, showing the truth of that pregnant Scrip- 
 tural declaration : " The entrance of Thy word 
 giveth light." It quickens the intelligence 
 through the awed emotion : " it giveth under- 
 standing to the simple." At the earliest dawning 
 of the youthful intelligence should the grand Old 
 
236 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 Testament ideas, and this sublime Old Testament 
 language, be made as familiar to it as possible. 
 It is, indeed, above them, but that is no reason for 
 making it stand aside. Trust the power of God's 
 word for lifting up the youngest minds to some 
 good measure of its comprehension. 
 
 It is astonishing how ignorantly some of uor 
 literary men will talk of the narrowness of the 
 Old Testament, and the lowering conceptions it 
 presents of Jehovah as an earthly and patrial 
 Deity, — as a God bloody, vindictive, jealous, in 
 the human sense, narrowly competing for earthlv 
 sacrifice and earthly homage — or pictured simplv 
 as thundering in the sky, or walking on the seem- 
 ing vault above, or inhabiting temples built by 
 human hands, or " snuffing," as the gross infidel 
 says, the savor of the burning victim. Solomon's 
 sublime prayer, before referred to, would be suf- 
 ficient for the refutation of this, aside from all the 
 other passages cited from the Prophets and the 
 Pentateuch. Let it be remembered, too, how 
 much that prayer reveals of the spiritual culture 
 of the Jewish nation; Barbarians, as some would 
 style them in comparison with the Greeks. In 
 the simplicity of an adoring spirit, Solomon seems 
 to feel that every heart in that great assembly 
 throbbed in unison with his devout utterance : 
 "Will the Most High dwell with men? Will 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 237 
 
 God indeed dwell upon the earth. Behold the 
 heaven, yea the heaven of heavens, cannot con- 
 tain Thee ; how much less this house that I have 
 builded," "for the name of the Lord God of 
 Israel." Talk of the Greeks ! Fancy such lan- 
 guage used at the dedication of a heathen temple ; 
 fancy an Athenian, a Corinthian, or a Boeotian 
 audience listening to such a strain ; fancy the 
 wonder that we should feel at finding a supplica- 
 tion like it in Pindar or Sophocles. How would 
 the page be marked, had there been found in the 
 writings of the noblest of the Greek theosophists, 
 or the most celebrated of their lawgivers, thoughts 
 so elevated, so unearthly, as are uttered by Moses, 
 the man, as some say, who derived his best ideas 
 from the dark animal- worshipping, or, at the 
 utmost, symbol-adoring Egyptians : " Take heed 
 lest ye forget the covenant of Jehovah your God, 
 and make for Him the likeness of any similitude," 
 as before quoted ; " take heed lest ye lift up your 
 eyes unto the heavens, and when ye see the sun, 
 and the moon, and the stars, ye be tempted to 
 worship them." Think what was all around this 
 peculiar people, with their most peculiar litera- 
 ture. Think of this strange monotheistic cleft 
 lying between a misty pantheism, rilled with all 
 monstrous shadows on the East, and the foul 
 polytheism that everywhere spread beyond them 
 
238 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 in the West. What was the restraining power 
 which so " dwelt in the tents of Shem, this She- 
 kinah presence that abode so constantly in the 
 ark of Israel." A due consideration of the spiritual 
 wonder here, casfe into the background the im- 
 portant, though still subordinate, question of 
 physical miracles. 
 
 Strauss would regard the ideas of the infinite 
 and the absolute as inconsistent with the personal 
 character. But how do he and Spencer know 
 what is inconsistent with the unknowable? Even 
 pantheism may be so held as to admit the idea of 
 personality. In fact, the only pantheism we need 
 fear is that which strips God of His moral attri- 
 butes by sinking Him into nature* I may believe 
 in God as the to nav, and yet regard this Great 
 Whole as a person who knows me a personal 
 part, and thinks of me, and numbers every hair 
 of my head. For personality is the most defin- 
 able of ideas. It denotes a being, whether all or 
 part, whether infinite or only very great, of 
 whom I can use the personal pronouns, saying 
 " He is," or " He is good," or " He is the 
 rewarder of those who seek Him." Or it means 
 one to whom I — even as a part — can say THOU 
 — imploring Him in the language of the dying 
 philosopher : O thou Great all, Summa rerum, 
 Summa Omnium, Causa Causarum, MISERERE MEL 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 239 
 
 I can believe thus in God as the TO II AN, and 
 yet, if I am a Christian, can say, Elohai, MY GOD, 
 — even as the Apostle warrants us, when he says : 
 "All things are yours ; for ye are Christ's, and 
 Christ is God's." It was the Hebrew Paul that 
 gave these philosophical Greeks a lesson in 
 absolutism, when standing upon Mars hill he said : 
 Ev dvrti yap ZflMEN, real ravovfieda, aai E^MEN; 
 " For in Him we live and MOVE, and have our 
 BEING" — not yLvojieda, but E2MEN : in Him we 
 live and move and are. 
 
 The infinite can have its finite aspect. The 
 infinite may enter into and act in the finite ; may 
 assume the finite. The denial of this is, in fact, 
 the denial of the infinite. It is virtually saying that 
 God cannot do all things ; that because we can- 
 not ascend to Him, therefore He cannot come 
 down to us. It is the idea which makes intelligi- 
 ble, and renders so precious all the anthropopath- 
 isms of the Bible, as they are called. It is the 
 ground of the doctrine of the incarnation. All 
 revelation, whether in written language or 
 through nature,, is necessarily anthropopathic. 
 Those who talk of holding communication with 
 God through His works use anthropopathic lan- 
 guage. The Bible only goes beyond in making 
 it mutual. God " comes down to see what the 
 children of men are doing." The youngest Sab- 
 
240 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 bath scholar is not deceived by the language ; 
 whilst the highest minds may thank Him for such 
 a condescension to our poor thinking, our sense- 
 bound conceptions, our yearning for communion 
 in some way, between the infinite and the finite 
 mind. We may bless God for such a mode of 
 speech ; but we should not forget how sublimely 
 these same Scriptures set forth also the far 
 aspect, the high aspect, the philosophic aspect, 
 if any prefer the term, as well as the near pres- 
 ence. It is the great peculiarity of the Bible in 
 distinction from all other writings, that it so unites 
 the two — that with such unshrinking boldness it 
 maintains this tremendous equilibrium of the 
 near and the far, and sometimes in closest con- 
 nection: "Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, 
 and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in 
 secret that I shall not see him ? Do not I fill 
 heaven and earth, saith the Lord ? " But phi- 
 losophy cannot keep its balance here. In soaring 
 towards the infinite height, as it would esteem it, 
 it loses sight of the infinite depth, the infinite low- 
 liness ; in stretching itself out towards the in- 
 finitely far, it. fails to comprehend the infinitely 
 near. The Scriptural writers have no misgiving 
 in the use of such a style : " The high and holy 
 One "— " the humble and broken spirit to 
 whom He comes down." There is no incongru- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 241 
 
 ity ; both notes belong alike to the mighty sweep 
 of this infinite diapason. It represents the fulness 
 of the divine, the fulness of Him that filleth all in 
 all, — entering into the finiteness, knowing the 
 knowledge, thinking the thought, feeling the feel- 
 ing, and thus truly using the language of the hu- 
 man m its intensest and most human utterance. 
 It is no inspiration of earth that dares to employ 
 such a style as this. 
 
 There is a mode of intelligence which the Bible 
 represents God as challenging to Himself, when 
 he says : " My thinking is above your thinking as 
 heaven is high above the earth." Timeless, space- 
 less, without succession, one great totality of 
 cause and effect as they are mutually seen in each 
 other ; we try to talk here, but our words fail 
 us. They are aiming at something ; they are not 
 altogether meaningless ; we are confident that 
 there is some reality to which they point, as we are 
 sure that there is a real North to which the needle 
 directs its tremulous motion in the dark night of 
 storms ; but that is as far as we can go. " Such 
 knowledge is too high for us ; it is wonderful ; we 
 cannot attain unto it." The Scriptures go be- 
 yond Hamilton, Mansell, and Spencer, in what it 
 affirms respecting the divine unknowableness. 
 But still it is the known of God that gives this 
 idea of His unknowableness. " His thoughts are 
 11 
 
242 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 not as our thoughts." Most true indeed. But 
 again the question returns, and we may defy any 
 one to show that it is an irrational one : Is the beliet 
 in this transcendent thinking and knowing at 
 war with that other belief on which all religion is 
 grounded, that God may also, if it pleases Him, 
 think as we think, and know as we know, and even 
 feel as we feel, — entering not only into our finite 
 thought, but into our sense- world, — yet remaining 
 infinite, as He dwells unchangeably in the time- 
 and-space-and-sense-transcending sphere ? This 
 is the great Bible idea, " the Logos, or Eternal 
 Reason, becoming flesh." Believing it, we have 
 no more trouble with the Scriptural anthropo- 
 pathisms. To know, to think, comes under this 
 term as much to remember, to feel, to love. 
 We hail these modes of expression ; we rejoice in 
 them as the language of a father with his tran- 
 scending intelligence coming down to his finite 
 children, and that, too, not as a mere show, or 
 make-believe, but as really entering into that 
 lower sphere, and there really speaking the child's 
 language as the truthful though far-distant re- 
 flection of His own eternal thought. All this, it 
 may be said, involves the absurdity of the infinite 
 becoming finite, or entering into the finite sphere 
 without ceasing to be infinite. But how dare we 
 thus apply our measurement to One we declare 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 243 
 
 to be unknowable, and boast of the declaration 
 as the highest attainment of a knowledge tran- 
 scending the vulgar? If we resort to scholastic 
 reasoning, it would certainly seem that the denial 
 of the possibility of such a becoming would be a 
 denial of the infinity itself, a limitation of the very 
 idea expressed by the term. Another question 
 is raised in respect to these anthropopathisms : 
 Why could there not have been used a more 
 philosophical style, though still human, or one 
 more adapted to cultivated minds? The answer 
 is, that whilst nothing would have been gained in 
 point of significance, or any nearer approach to 
 the ineffable idea, much would have been lost in 
 power and vividness. All philosophic and scien- 
 tific terms have sense images at their roots. It 
 is impossible for human language to get out of 
 this. It is ever metaphorical in the conveyance 
 of ideas transcending sense. By the fading away 
 of the metaphorical hue, words become dead ab- 
 stractions, algebraic symbols, as it were, deficient 
 in vividness of meaning, yet compromising the 
 truth sometimes by cheating the soul into the 
 notion that there is more in them than they really 
 contain. When thus dead and dried, they are 
 laid away in the fossil cabinets of philosophic, or 
 scientific, or learned speech. They are the lan- 
 guage of "culture," as Mathew Arnold would 
 
244 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 say. In this state they become a dead weight 
 upon our thinking-, whilst the simpler or earlier 
 language, never losing its unchangeable freshness, 
 leaves the soul at liberty to follow the illimitable 
 idea, whether in the direction of the infinitely 
 high, the infinitely far, or the infinitely near. 
 
 This same awful equilibrium, as we have called 
 it, is preserved ever in the representation of the 
 divine moral attributes. It is another peculiarity 
 of our Holy Scripture in which no other resem- 
 bles it. The terribly severe, the meltingly mer- 
 ciful ; the inexorable judicial righteousness, the 
 loving fatherhood ; we find them both expressed, 
 — and in the same passage, sometimes, — without 
 the least shrinking from the near conjunction of 
 things, to our thinking, so seemingly antagonistic. 
 The same view may be taken of the unshrinking 
 representation the Bible makes of God in His 
 universality, as Lord of all worlds, u Lord of 
 Hosts," of all transcending ranks of being, as 
 E n tob2 "Tbfa> " King of eternities," and at the same 
 time, and sometimes in near connection, as a 
 local deity, a patrial deity, a Oeog narpoiog, J^ 
 i^tl^j el Israel, God of Israel,God of His people, 
 — the I AM that I AM, the f O.N, and in the next 
 verse almost (Exod. iii. 13) "the God of the 
 Fathers, God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob," 
 that much-used Old Testament formula in which 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 245 
 
 our Saviour, in His argument with the blinded 
 Sadducees, the broad churchmen, or wide-think- 
 ing people of His day, found so much of " the 
 power of an endless life." It is that same presen- 
 tation of the infinitely far and the infinitely near 
 on which I have been insisting, and which is so 
 striking a feature of the Bible as distinguished 
 from all other books. 
 
 By such writers as Strauss this near patrial 
 language, so precious to the believer, is cited to 
 prove tnat the Bible represents Jehovah as rank- 
 ing with the gods of the surrounding nations, 
 like Zeus, or Thor, or Dagon, or Bel, or Chem- 
 osh. In such a charge there is wholly over- 
 looked, or purposely ignored, these declarations 
 of absoluteness and universality, sometimes in 
 the same chapter, and so transcending the loftiest 
 language of any philosophic or scientific theism. 
 God is, indeed, set forth as a 6eog narpmog, a 
 patrial deity, the God of His people, of those 
 who are near to Him by faith. Not unfrequently 
 does this language become still closer, more 
 familiar, more personal. He declares Himself a 
 tribal and family divinity. " His mercy is unto 
 children's children of those that fear Him." He 
 is, moreover, the God of the individual, of every 
 one who believeth. He permits the worshipper 
 to address Him by those near personal pronouns 
 
246 VEDDER LECTURES. 
 
 that so astonish us by their boldness in the 
 prayers of the Old Testament saints : " O God, 
 my God ; early will I seek Thee." " Why art 
 thou cast down, O my soul ; for still do I make 
 confession unto Him, the salvation of my coun- 
 tenance " — my salvation ever before me — "and 
 my God." 
 
 What the age demands is a more intense study 
 of the Holy Scriptures, accompanied by the 
 earnest prayer : " Open Thou mine eyes, that I 
 may behold wondrous things out of Thy law." 
 The Bible itself must be brought out, and its 
 mighty spiritual power unfolded, as the best 
 answer to infidelity — the Bible subjectively, the 
 Bible objectively, as the great standing miracle 
 of human history, — as presenting a train of events 
 most unaccountable in their bearing on the 
 world's course, as containing ideas which no 
 philosophy, no theory of development, can ever 
 explain. To such study it will reveal itself as 
 " the power of God." Other defences are, indeed, 
 important, but without this they are shorn of the 
 great strength which alone can make them avail- 
 able to the pulling down of " strongholds," and 
 the overthrow of the truth's unwearying foes. 
 
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