MA S TER NEGA TIVE NO. 93-81628 MICROFILMED 1993 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library \^ COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Titie 17, United States Code - concerns the mailing of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or other reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.** If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a uction for purposes in excess of **fair use,** thatuser rhay be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: CRAWFORD-FROST, WILLIAM ALBERT TITLE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION PLACE* BOSTON, MASS. DA TE : 1906 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 201 0859 Restrictions on Use: I !■■■■ > ■■ W ^^ Crawford-Frost, William A[lbert] 1863- The philosophy of integration. An explanation of the universe and of the Christian religion. By Rev. William A. Crawford-Frost ... Ed. by James Wilson Bright ... Boston, Mass., Mayhew publishing company, 1906. I cm 3 p. I., 182, ill p. front, (port.) 19^* "The system of thought to which I have given the name 'Philosophy of integration ... was first made public in a paper read before the Brooklyn clerical league, in 1895, and published in outline, in 1896, under the title Old dogma in a new light' "— Pref . I. Bright, James Wilson, 1845- ed. 171'7i) o 6-3540 Library of Congress (Copyright A 136787) FILM SIZE: ^ S IMAGE PLACEMENT: DATE FILMED: /o/^, FILMED BY: RESEARCH PUBLIC/^ H/l iIB. nB UBLIC^ONS. TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO:___/6^ INITIALS _ 0/9^ INC WOODBRIDGE. CT c Association for information and Image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm imiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiLiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiihiiin^ |i | 'i | i | ii|' W i T |ii | 'i n' 'l'l'' l 'i'' i''l'' i'' l ' f 'l''^ 'l ''l' l ''<' l ^^ T Inches 1 .0 I.I 1.25 l&o |56 |63 Li 2:8 112.5 3.2 1^ 4.0 1.4 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 I I I I I I I 5 MfiNUFfiCTURED TO OHM STRNDflRDS BY APPLIED IMfiGE, INC. ^ON CL%S2 Columbia WinititTiitp LIBRARY GIVEN BY f* This book is due two weeks from, the last date stamped below, and if not returned or renewed at or before that time a fine of five cents a dav will be incurred. Bliiiiiiii task ill m WILLIAM A. CRAWFORD-FROST, M. A WIIJJAM A. (R AW roRD-FR* )ST, M. \ The Philosophy of Integration AN EXPLANATION OF THE UNIVERSE AND OE THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION By Rev. William A. Ck aw ford-Frost, M. A. Rector of the Memorial Church of the Holy Comforter , Baltimore, Md.^ 1896 to 1903 ; Instructor of Chemistry in the Baltimore Medical College; Member of the Society of Arts, England, Etc. Edited by James Wilson Bright, Ph. D. Professor of English Philology, John's Hopkins University; Hon. Secretary for America of Chaucer Society ; President, 1902-3, Modern Langiuige Association of America, Etc., Etc. IQOO MAY HEW PUBLISHING COMPANY Boston, Mass. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Copyrighted, 1906. VV. A. Crawfokd-Frost, M. A. All rights reserved. CHAPTER I. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Creation, Gov- ernment AND Destiny of the Uni- verse II. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. III. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Miracles of Christ IV. The Philosophy of Integration as Set Forth in the Teachings of Christ V. The Temporary Triumph of the Dis- integrator in the Sufferings and Death of Christ VI. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Place of De- parted Spirits, and of the Spirit- ual Environment of Man. VII. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Resurrection AND Ascension of Christ. VIII. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Phenomena of Pentecost and the Work of the Holy Ghost. . PAGE 2S 37 69 93 109 128 143 TABLE OF CONTENTS— CONTINUED PAGE CHAPTER IX The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Organization AND Aims of the Christian Church. X. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Communion of Saints and the Remission of Sins by THE Universal Integrator. . XI. The Philosophy of Integration as Explanatory of the Final Destiny OF Man. . . • - • 1^2 1 60 170 PREFACE, The system of thought to which I have given the name "Philosophy of Integration" resembles, on the one hand, the Ideahstic Philosophy of Hegel, and on the other, the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer; but it differs from either, or both, as a child differs from its parents. It was first made public in a paper read before the Brooklyn Clerical League, in 1895, ^^^ published^ in outHne, in 1896, under the title "Old Dogma in a New Light" for the facts in the life of Christ I have gone chiefly to the Bible itself, but have also made use of the works of Pearson, Blunt, Liddon, Westcott, Farrar and others, whose assistance I gratefully acknowledge. William A. Crawford-Frost. Baltimore, 1906. mmmm SB CHAPTER I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE CREATION, GOVERNMENT, AND DESTINY OF THE UNIVERSE. Mr. Edward Clodd and his friend, the late Mr. Grant Allen, agreed upon the following definitions of the terms 'Tower", "Force", and "Energy": "Power. Motion throughout the universe is pro- duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or lessened by two indestructible powers of opposite nature to each other, (a) Force and (b) Energy. Force is that which produces or quickens motions binding together two or more particles of ponderable matter, and which retards or resists motions tending to separate such particles. Energy is that which produces or quickens motions separating, and which resists or retards motions bind- ing together, two or more particles of matter, or of the ethereal medium." * Taking these terms in the sense here used, we shall proceed upon the hypothesis that force is only a name for the working of God, the Unifier and Preserver, the Integrator, in the universe, and that energy is a name for the working of His opposite, the Evil Spirit, the Destroyer and Disintegr ator, the person represented * Edward Clodd, "The Story of Creation", New York, Humbolt Publishing Co., 1888, p. 7. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. to us in the Scriptures not as an everlasting being like God but as a fallen angel, one having a temporal and not an eternal existence. By force we mean that which integrates and con- structs. By energy that which disintegrates and de- stroys. To say that force is God is not to say that God is mere force. All force may be God, and only some of God force; and that in Him which transcends it may contain His personality. , This accords with the conflict, observed m nature, between the creating and preserving force of unity on the one hand, showing itself in the three forms of chemical affinity, molecular cohesion and gravitation, and, on the other hand, the disintegrating energy o diversity, showing itself in the threefold form of,(i) light which causes, especially, disintegration of atomic or chemical union; (2) heat, which antagomzes, especially, molecular cohesion, and (3) electrical repulsion, wluch combats especially the gravitation of bodies. But chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation are three forms of the same force; and hght, heat, and electricity are not only one but also transmutable. Instead of reducing God to mere force, let us regard this trinity in unity, of chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation, as a mode of God s working. As He really is in Heaven, He may be without body, parts, or passions; but as He mamfests Himself to us on the earth. He may appear to have all these. He shows Himself to us as force in the natural world. For man we have the threefold manifestation of God's working as beauty, goodness, and truth, a THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. harmonizing trinity, together with the disintegrating trinity of ugliness, evil and error, which are the work of the Devil. The origin of evil is, therefore, a question inside a wider problem, which embraces also ugliness and error, viz., the problem of the origin and nature of the Devil. Our contention is that the Devil is God's own limitation and relaxation of Himself. He is God's servant, and is allowed for God's own pre- ordained purpose a succession of temporary triumphs. In reality God is Absolute Unity. In Him is no ''variableness or shadow of turning." Yet He has chosen to relax Himself into the Becoming by a con- flict v^th a part of Himself, which is a mere negation of Himself. The Devil is not a real person but only an apparent or actual one. By actuahty we mean the universe as we see it. By reahty we signify the universe as God sees it to be in its true nature. The Devil is thus a foil for the attributes of an All- Wise and Beneficent Creator. We are in the era of the gradual, but continuous, triumph of unity. When all the atoms in the universe are brought together into a solid, absolutely cold, homogeneous mass, our era will have ended, and the Destroyer will be annihilated, and there may begin the gradual triumph of separation which will end only when all the elements are distributed again throughout space into an imponderable, invisible, and altogether imperceptible ether, every atom of which, even though it be divided to nothingness, so far as our powers of apprehension are concerned, will be a partial incarna- tion of both God and Satan. I THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. All the heavenly bodies appear to be governed by fixed laws. Their movements are systematic. Hitherto we have not been able to fathom the secret of their actions. Condensation of nebulous matter into suns, and thence into planets, and thence into frozen sateUites, such as our moon, we observe, by scientific methods; and may we not legitimately infer, by analogy, that just as the motion of the moon is regulated by our earth, and that of the earth by our sun, so our sun with its whole system is governed by a still larger sun, which in turn takes its direction from a greater, and so onward till there is reached a central sphere which regulates all the stars, planets, nebulous matter, and ethereal media in the imiverse? Further, what is there incon- sistent, either with science or revelation, in our regarding this central sphere as the Heaven of the theologians and the abode of God's absolute self-consciousness or personality ? Even as my mind exceeds and transcends my body, so God's mind exceeds and transcends the material universe. Just as the motions of my body are worked from the co-ordinating centre in my brain, so the motions of the material universe may be worked from the centre of His personahty, which orthodox Christians locate in a place called Heaven. There only may dwell beauty, goodness, and truth in infinite perfection. On our distant little earth the atoms are partially conscious of their Godhead or devilhood, and beauty, goodness, and truth are slowly working their way Heavenward into recognition. Spectrum analysis shows us that nebulous masses arc composed of some of the same elements that make up THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. our earth; and though we have not succeeded in re- ducing our seventy-odd elementary atoms to one universal substance, we have observed in them certain rythmic inner laws from which we not unfairly infer that their differences may be merely quantitative, and that they may in reahty be one. The nebulous mass is a condensation of the infinitely rare distribution of these atoms. To us it appears as creation out of nothing by the deliberate design of an all-powerful God who manifests Himself as the great condenser and integrator. It appears as the creation out of nothing because it is beyond the sensuous apprehension or rational conception of man . The Christian believes in the omnipresence of God, nominally, but usually shrinks from admitting that God is in stones and trees. If we are to escape the unsatisfactory hypothesis of blind necessity, we must beheve that God and Satan fill every atom of the nebulous mass that condenses into a planet, and that it so condenses by the triumph of God over Satan. Although no atom can contain the whole of God, yet the two, God and Satan, are in each atom of our earth. Life is that which holds atoms together; death is that which disintegrates them. As integration is evolved, life is developed into recognizable forms, and begins to manifest its gradual triumph over death. All that is is alive. There is no such reality as inorganic nature. Rocks live. Their atoms have enough subconsciousness to enable them to combine with acids, or what not, by that which we call chemical affinity. Dead things are merely those of which the iorm of life is too minute for our cognizance. Everything in the 5 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. universe knows enough to do that which it does, and everything does something, if it be only to hold together and be itself. The subconsciousness of the atoms cohering in a piece of chalk is a different kind of con- sciousness from that of man. A difference of degree becomes a difference in kind. When we deny the subconsciousness of the atoms, we do not mean to assert that they do not know enough to cohere. We only mean that they do not know that they know. After the nebulous mass had condensed into a sun and the sun had contracted into our earth, that which we would call life became manifest. In the misty oceans that had been precipitated from the integrat- ing elements of the atmosphere teemed monera, and amoebae, and other little -differentiated organisms. This was not the creation of life from the lifeless, but simply the evolution of a form of life too fine to be recognized by us into a form that comes within our ken. Passing over ages of the continued struggle of God with Satan, of the constructing force with the destroying energy, we find that God has, in spite of Satan, at last made for Himself a machine called the human brain, in which He and Satan, as on a battle ground, contend to make good- ness and wickedness, respectively, prevail. We have no right to assume that our thought is in our brains. When one considers the number of ideas that are recorded in the mind of a man of eighty, recollections extending back to childhood, one is inclined to be- lieve that if there were retained in the brain a separate impression, or material change, corresponding to each thought, it would require a larger organ than THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. our brain to hold these impressions; and it appears far more conceivable that our thoughts are stored in our spiritual environment, which uses our brains to make itself manifest, just as electricity makes itself known in an electric machine. There is a little universe of living beings in the end of my finger. I examine its parts with the microscope, and I see the blood corpuscles and the minute cells. I can control this little world. I can cause violent motion of its inhabitants by warmth, or stagnation and apathy by cold. I can put my finger in the fire and disperse its atoms to apparent nothingness. I can put a ring around it and cause it to decay by defective supply of living organisms. It is a part of my body. So far as freedom is concerned, what it is to me our world is to God. In regard to government, what the personaUty of the blood corpuscle is to my personality, my personality is to God's. Each atom knows enough to do what I make it do. Each man knows enough to do what God makes him do. Yet each atom in the nervx, bone, blood, or muscle, is free to follow the laws of its own nature. It attracts or repels just what suits its purpose, and it builds or destroys, moves or stops, grows or decays, in accordance with its own free nature. Though I can control it, I cannot make it untrue to itself, because its true self is its Godhead. Its life is the life of God who inspires all things, not only men, but earth and rocks and trees and all that is. The omnipresent God may be a truly personal God as St. Paul understood. Theologians are oftentimes led to deny God's immanence in the material, through their anxiety to assert His transcendence of it. When one I "ssa THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. denies either, he falls into error. God is both immanent and transcendent. To say that man is part of God, that some of God is man, is not to say that God and man are merged in each other, or even that man is actually merged in God, for, evidently, God wishes that portion of Himself which I call myself to be regarded by me as a free and independent personal agent, and therefore I rightly look upon myself as such, yet, at the same time, as God sees me, I may be but a tiny atom or corpuscle of His Infinite being. Let us express our conclusions categorically: (i) Force is God. The unifying and integrating cause at work moulding nature is part of God, or a mani- festation of His power. (2) Energy is the activity of the Devil. The dis- integrating and destroying cause at work separating atoms, loosening molecules, and repelHng bodies from each other, is a manifestation of God's self- relaxation ^hom we call Satan. (3) Inertia is not a property of matter but merely a deadlock between God and Satan. A clod of earth is inert. If God chose further to triumph over Satan in it, there would be condensation of it. If Satan could get a sufficient reinforcement in the shape of heat, and so gain a temporary triumph over God, it would expand and disintegrate. The inertia remains in the clod so long as neither God nor Satan triumphs in it. (4) The Devil, though an actual person, is not a reality but only a temporary and voluntary relaxation of unifying force. God, who alone really is in the universe, is positive and absolute unity. Heat and light S THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. are not realities but merely relaxations of cold and darkness. (5) Heaven is a sphere, probably central, from which God regulates the motions of all the ethereal media, neb- ulous matter, suns, planets, and moons in the universe. (6) The history of the universe is a succession of windings and unwindings. We are in an age of winding or condensation. Our era began when the whole uni- verse was distributed throughout space in an imponder- able, invisible, inaudible, and altogether imperceptible ether, which nevertheless contained in itself potentially all the elements or atoms we know on the earth. This is for us the nearest conceivable approach to nothingness. It is for man actual nothingness, though for God it is everything in potentiality. At this period God's self-relaxation has reached its cKmax of triumph over His unifying impulse. He now begins to conquer His self-relaxation. The impulse to relax yet exists in every atom but it is relatively weaker than the impulse to condense. The result is that a nebulous mass forms at the centre. It condenses into a sun, thence into a planet, thence into a moon, thence into a substance which cannot be definitely described by us because we have had no experience of it in nature but which we call the absolutely solid oneness or universal substance. This is Heaven. But in the meantime, under fixed laws and at regular intervals, God has triumphed over His self- relaxation all through the universe and formed nebulous masses and suns and planets. One by one these con- dense and draw nearer the centre. Yet self-relaxation makes a hard struggle and the process is exceedingly THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. slow. Each expansion is smaller than the last, and, when all the matter in the universe is a perfect solid, our era will have ended. (7) The theory of Evolution can best be understood by supposing that the planets are closely related to each other chronologically and causatively in the order of their condensation, and that we once lived on the moon and have come to this earth, which had hitherto been the moon's sun, then a spherical "lake of fire", and that we, being one spirit, chose to incarnate ourselves in our earth's fiery elements, there to evolve into amoebae, fishes, reptiles, quadrupeds, and men. It was a fall from a state of limited purity into another world of sm; but we should emerge from that conflict with higher beauty, goodness, and truth; some of us should get from the earth, through Christ, directly to the center, and the rest, united in one spirit, should in turn go to our sun and, though there condemned to an evolutionary process involving perpetual pain, should attain one step nearer Heaven. It was the yearning for higher knowledge that God used in that one spirit to fulfil His judgment upon him, that he (for this spirit is the person who is alle- gorically presented to us in God's Word as Adam) should leave a home of deathless purity in the moon and choose to incarnate Himself in our earth so that out of the continued struggle there he might get nearer God. It was the yearning of a part of God to get back to the centre of His personaUty. The stor>^ of Adam and Eve as given in the Bible may have been intended by God to present to the unfolding mind of man the truth that originally his state had been one of purity THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and goodness but that through his desire for \vider knowledge he had chosen to fall from his high position. Like a great part of the Bible its full meaning was probably beyond the grasp of the person inspired to write it. There is always an underlying element of Divine, unifying, and connected truth, running through- out the books included in the canon, which, notwith- standing its inward infallibility, is overlaid by a mass of human misconceptions. Objectively, the revelation, by virtue of its internal infallibility, is a perfect one. Sub- jectively, there will be a growth of power in the Catholic or Universal Church to separate the eternal underlying truth from the temporal and fallible human channel which conveyed it. It will be only when we have reached Heaven, and read the plan of salvation back- ward, that the Bible will be a perfect subjective revela- tion. Whether written by Moses, or by Ezra, or by some contemporary of the latter after the return from exile: whether suggested directly to the mind of the writer, or discovered in some ancient Hebrew document, or de- rived from a Babylonian myth, this story of Adam stands at the beginning of the book which for many centuries has claimed to be a revelation of the creation, redemp- tion, and destiny of man, and which to-day is more studied and believed than when it was first compiled. To one who is assured that nothing happens by chance this must appear a truth of eternal cosmic significance, pre-established before the foundation of the world, this tradition of a fall from a state of purity, this theory of a gradual elevation and restoration to a higher per- fection. It is in harmonv with observed facts in our 10 II r N' )■■• I THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. human experience. It accounts for the presence of ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which never leave men in peace so long as they dwell in ugliness, wickedness, or ignorance. It explains our constant dissatisfaction with the imperfect present, our longings for loveUness, purity, and wisdom. Since the time of Plato men have possessed, more or less clearly, the belief in a former existence of the soul. To assert that our Ufe hereafter is eternal, but that it began with our birth, is to predicate eternity with one end. Men ex- perience certain transient flashes, or intuitions of the human mind, which seem to be recollections of our former state. The most familiar of these is the feeling one has of having seen before a landscape, a book, a person, and of noticing that the next two or three thoughts, or incidents, fit into the fleeting recollection of a previous scene. No satisfactory psychological solu- tion of this problem can be given, although it has been sought in such a phenomenon as that of the successive action of the two hemispheres of the brain, the explana- tion being that when the slower half of the brain per- ceives the picture, the mind recollects the impression on the quicker hemisphere and mistakes the brief interval between them for the lapse of an indefinite time. But we have the same feeling sometimes in the case of words that we hear spoken, and even of thoughts that arise from internal suggestion. Therefore we are obliged to fall back upon the reahty of our pre-existence. That alone satisfactorily accounts for intuitive ideas, and for the inner motives and underlying realities of which the outward acts of individuals or the histories of nations THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. are but the external and mechanical manifestations. If, from all of these independent trains of thought, we accept the inference, not capable of logical proof, that we have lived somewhere previous to our present life on the earth, have we anything to indicate the probable whereabouts of our former abode ? It may, of course, have been in the souls of our ancestors, or a previous incarnation, but water cannot rise above its level, and we find ourselves with ideals that are higher than any our ancestors could have had, inasmuch as the race has been ascending in beauty, goodness, and truth from the beginning and still continues its progress. Our previous life may have been on some of the other planets, but none of these seems to have any direct connection with, or relation to, our earth. There are the far-distant solar systems, but we cannot perceive that we have any immediate connection with them. On the other hand, we perceive a relationship, as it were in a straight line, direct and somewhat intelligible, between our moon and the earth, and our earth and the sun. If we believe that we have once Hved on any of the visible heavenly bodies, and that after this life we will go to live on another of them, the great weight of inference will be in favor of the moon and the sun, between which our earth is a sort of intermediary. It is true we must have lived originally on the central sphere whence everything that is has expanded, but that must have been many stages before our life here, else probably we would have remem- bered more of it, being, upon that hypothesis, only one remove from infinite knowledge. Herein is the great difference between the Christ and other men. The ques- 12 13 f^ THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. tion then arises, Which way are we probably going ? May we not have come from the sun and be on our way to the moon ? We reply that this view is opposed by what we know of the sun and moon and of the nature of things on the earth. On our planet we find that prog- ress means condensation; that integration is the secret of evolution. We know that the earth is growing colder year by year; and though the short period of human history and tradition is not sufficient to give us a ver>' clear idea of the rate of progress, as it is so tiny a fraction of even our planet's life, yet the variations we perceive within our Uttle period of consciousness are enough to establish the gradual triumph of unity. Let us turn now to the moon. The moon is a worn-out world whereas the sun is a new one. The moon represents the victory of darkness over light, of cold over heat, of contraction over expansion, of force over energy, of God over the Devil. We see on her frozen surface mountains and valleys, extinct volcanoes, silent and dark. We have no right to infer that the moon has ceased to grow cold. We know very little of what cold really is. AVhen matter becomes heated beyond a certain point it may pass out of all forms recognizable by man, and when it be- comes frozen below a certain point may its constitution not become such that it would require beings endowed differently from us to perceive it at all ? The moon may get colder and colder until it will not even reflect the rays of the sun, which may have been the fate of all the moon's moons, if there were any. On our moon we see the end of the process that is now taking place on our earth. We know that human beings like ourselves THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. could not hve on such a cold sphere. If we beheve that at one time it has been warmer and inhabited, should we beheve that its inhabitants were entirely annihilated ? Is it not more in harmony with science to believe that as life is an entity, and that as anything that is cannot be destroyed, so Hfe may be changed but cannot be destroyed, and therefore that those who lived on the moon when it was warmer must have gone, or been transferred, from the moon to some other heavenly body? And which of these bodies would be so avail- able as our earth, which even now attracts the moon to itself with all that is in or on it ? What supposition is more natural, a priori^ therefore, than that, if our life has come from any Heavenly body, the moon is that body? (8) According to the theory of the triumph of unity or condensation, the next abode of some of the earth's inhabitants should be the sun. We recognize that the moon is kept in its place by the exact adjustment of energy and force, the one tending to throw it off into space and the other to draw it to the earth. We see further that our planet is kept in its orbit by the dead- lock of the same two enemies, one of which would draw it to the sun. But who raises the question as to what keeps the sun in its place? If it appeared to be the center of the universe, we might understand that it could be kept still by the tension of all parts of the uni- versal sphere towards itself. We know, however, that it is only one amongst myriads of larger suns, and that therefore it appears dependent upon the attraction of some other body or bodies for its fixity of position. The 14 15 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. » sun may not at present be circulating around its regulat- ing sun; but, if this be true, we should expect it to do so at some future time. It is a significant fact that our whole solar system has been declared by astronomers to be moving toward a point in the milky way. By the pro- cess of condensation, when the sun has cooled down into a planet, and our earth and our planets have become shrivelled into little moons, and the moons have become frozen and contracted beyond recognition, then the sun will probably have been drawn so near to its immediate regulator as to be obhged to move around it, if it is not doing so already. Let us not lose sight of the fact that it is by the gradual triumph of God over Satan that this will be accompHshed. The centrifugal energy is Satan. The centripetal force is God. The reader may think we have proceeded too quickly. "How do you know", he may ask, "that our sun is condensing into a planet ? " To this we reply : (a) We behold nebulous masses, which, the spectrum shows us, are composed of many of the same elements that now make up our earth. (b) By the laws of chemical afi&nity, molecular co- hesion, and gravitation, the atoms in these nebulous clouds would be likely to combine into molecules, the molecules to cohere in bodies, or patches, and the bodies to gravitate towards each other. (c) Hence there would be motion towards the centre of the nebulous mass. (d) At the centre where these motions would end, an amoimt of heat would be generated that would exactly correspond to the amount of motion destroyed there. i6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. (e) By an argument a priori^ therefore, we would ex- pect to find a fiery central mass with a cold atmosphere pressing towards its centre, and containing the same atoms with which we are already familiar. (/) Our latest discoveries by photography of the sun and spectrum analysis have plainly verified our ^ priori conclusions. It is now clear that the rice-grained ap- pearance of the sun is due to the flaming points of burn- ing hydrogen bursting out from the centre of the fiery mass, and that the sun spots are immense funnel-shaped openings leading in towards the centre of the sun and caused by the rushing down of the cold atmosphere; and, although we have not yet discovered all of our atoms or elements in the sun, we have found so many that we can fairly infer the presence of the others. (g) As a final proof, we see in our solar system some bodies which are in the transitional period between the sun state and the planet state, and they are those that appear to be surrounded by the largest number of moons or bodies which are half planet and half moon. Jupiter, whose bulk is 1400 times that of the earth, has so small a density that its mass is only 338 times greater than that of the earth, and it exhibits phenom- ena of belts, and has four moons. Saturn, whose bulk is 735 times greater than the earth and only 100 times greater in mass, exhibits the phenomena of belts and also of concentric rings, and has eight moons. Can- not the significance of this be easily seen? Saturn appears more sun than planet; Jupiter half sun and half planet; our earth a planet with one moon left; Mercury, Venus, and Mars planets that have lost all or some of 17 * THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 11 their moons. The planetoids or asteroids which have been discovered within the last century may be the lost moons of these planets. (9) According to this centralization theory of creation, Heaven, our final home, must be an absolutely cold, dark, and magnetic sphere which attracts everything that is to itself. The darkness and coldness of Heaven are, of course, opposed to the popular conception thereof, and also to what has hitherto been the opinion of scientists. Scholars, however, must soon learn that cold, darkness, and magnetic attraction are attributes of reality and that light, heat, and electrical repulsion are merely negative motions. It will be hard to convince the many that material light is a principle of evil, because all through the ages it has been held to be a distinctive attribute of the good and creative force. It was so regarded by the specula- tive cosmogonies and theosophies of Oriental nations; and even the language of Holy Writ is tinctured with the conception that light is pre-eminently the attribute of God, and darkness that of the Devil. Reflection may perhaps show us, nevertheless, that the popular con- ception is as false as was the supposed flatness of the earth, and that, as in the latter case so in the former, the language of the Scriptures must be regarded as spoken to men in popular and understandable form rather than in that which is scientific and accurate. With regard to heat there will not be so great difficulty, though scientifically, light and heat are supposed to be the same thing, namely, undulations of greater or less length, tension, or frequency. Yet the public has been so 18 accustomed to think of Hell as a place of everlasting burning that it will be rather predisposed to predicate heat as an attribute of the DeviPs working, though very loath to admit the same thing of light. Yet light is ex- tremely painful imder certain circumstances. Some barbarous nations, as a means of torture, cut off the eyelids of victims. Invalids who suffer from insomnia find light distressing and require their windows dark- ened in the daytime. One cannot sleep soundly in a lighted room. There is something in the nature of light that causes unrest, motion, struggle. Darkness alone is fully adapted to rest. It is in keep- ing with this thought that Heaven, being a place of ab- solute and blissful, though not, of course, unconscious, repose, should have in it no such thing as material light. Being a condition necessary to human vision and the perception of external objects and consequently necessary for the acquisition of a great part of our knowl- edge, light has come to be used as synonymous with knowledge. But a condition necessary to the existence of a thing must not be confounded with the thing itself nor always regarded as the cause of it. The light is not knowledge any more than the eye itself is knowledge, nor is it the cause of knowledge. All that the light does is to enable certain disconnected, incoherent, and dis- integrating impressions to fall upon the retina. It is the xmderstanding, or the innate unifying and discrim- inating function supplied by the mind itself, that seizes these isolated sense impressions and unites them into a concept, or intelligible notion, of an object. In other words light is an element necessary to the per- 19 I i( I v| THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. ception of a visible object just as a knowledge of evil is necessary to the perception of good, but the knowledge of evil is not therefore the cause of the perception of good, nor, above all, should it be looked upon as itself good. Neither should light be considered a cause of knowledge or confused with knowledge itself. Light is a form of motion necessary to the perception of a visible object, but it gives man only a chaotic assem- blage of unintelligible, isolated impressions that would but serve to make perception impossible, did not the integrating God overrule this anarchy and make orderly conceptions and knowledge out of it. It is easy to imagine higher forms of existence in which our knowl- edge will not be conditioned by sense perceptions at all or, if so, will be not limited to the perception of ob- jects by these poor eyes of ours, which require physical light to see but which do not at best see things as they are, for when we supplement their power by telescopes and microscopes we see wider and deeper into the con- stitution of things. Can we imagine our state of in- finite knowledge in Heaven Hmited and hampered by our present weak and imperfect organs of vision ? Shall we have the same false powers of perception, or shall we not have faculties that see things as they are? If then we are not to be hampered with our present limited and untrustworthy vision when we reach Heaven, why should we there need material light, which is necessary only for those imperfect powers ? Material light should not be confounded with spiritual illumination. Serious doubts may arise in the minds of many from the numerous and direct references in the Scriptures, 20 ii' I THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. especially in the Gospel of St. John, to Christ as the "Light of the World", and it requires a violent wrench from the ordinary conception to accept our hypothesis. How can we reconcile it, for example, to such a state- ment as "In Him was light and the light was the life of men." To this we reply that at the time these words were written and, indeed, up till the present, light was regarded as a cause of fertility, growth, and vitality in the organic world. It is easy to account for such an idea. Plants will not grow without light. Therefore it is an obvious, but not necessarily a correct, inference that the light causes the plant to grow. Again, since light is a necessary condition of all visual per- ception, one is inclined to affirm that light is a source of knowledge. These ideas have become so associated in our minds that we can hardly express the imparting of knowledge without employing the figure of enlightening or illuminating. Throughout the Bible, and in our Lord's own discourses, words are used in their simple popular sense, to convey ideas which can be imderstood by the people to whom they were written or spoken. It is in this sense that St. John speaks of Christ as the light of the world. He was the source of truth and the cause of all spiritual vitality. As to the question. Would God in His revelation al- low us to remain under an impression exactly the op- posite of the truth, namely that light was an attribute of His own working in nature while it was really that of the DeviPs? We would reply, God has never de- ceiyedjman in any way, but for His own good reasons He has allowed the Devil to do so in many ways. All igno- I i ai I THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. ranee is the work of the Devil, and God is only overcoming it by a gradual process of inspiration. He is reveahng His truth by degrees. The Devil tries to deceive to the ut- most, that is, wherever he can he endeavors to make us beUeve the very opposite of the truth. God, for exam- ple, never told man that the earth is flat. It was the Devil who did that, and it was only after many years of struggle with Satan that God was able to let man un- derstand that the earth is round. Here we see the Devil making us beheve the exact opposite of the truth, that the sun moves around the earth, whereas the earth moves around the sun. It is in accordance with this that he should, for so long, have made us beheve that Hght and heat, which are really disintegrating and destroying mfluences, and which never, under any cir- cumstances, created anythmg, are in themselves benefi- cent and preserving principles. When Kepler presented his defence of the Copermcan theory to the academic senate of Tubingen, the divines were of opinion that it contained a deadly heresy, because it contradicted the teaching of the Bible in that passage where Joshua commands the sun to stand still, lo which Kepler rephed that as the Bible addressed itself to raankmd in general it spoke of things in the life of men as men in general are accustomed to speak of them. This must be our reply to those who object that hght is spoken of as the good principle in the Bible and darkness as the evil. It is so expressed in concession to the popular misconception that light is able to impart life and growth to plant organisms, joined with the practical ob- servation that darkness acts as a cover to hide evil deeds 3S I'! THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and that dayhght makes the evil manifest. This last fact only shows that evil may serve a good purpose; but good remains good and evil remains evil for all that. A man might find it necessary to tear down a small house on a valuable piece of land in a crowded city in order to con- struct thereon a larger and better residence. In that case the work of destruction would be for a good purpose and would result in a higher construction; but the act of tearing down the old house would be, though justified by the end in view, a destructive act, and nothing but a destructive act. What a singular misconception it would be if one should think that, because the end justified the means, the act of tearing down the first building was in reahty an act of construction! Yet this is precisely the mistake under which those persons labor that regard the action of light in plant growth as a vitalizing and constructive influence. All that the light does is to disintegrate the particles of the plant and set them in motion. The result would be utterly de- structive of the organism, did not God, manifesting Him- self as the worker of chemical affinity and molecular co- hesion, overrule the disintegration caused by light and heat and therefrom construct a larger plant organism. Throughout, the action of light and heat has been destructive. Of course, the growth could not have taken place without it. So likewise moral growth can- not take place without temptation, or temptation without sin; and the existence of evil is thus necessary to moral advancement; but no one would be justified therefore in mistaking the evil for the good. Evil remains evil even when it is overruled by God for a good end. It 23 i» ! J THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. is the work of the Devil and not of God, except that God in the beginning, for His own wise purposes, al- lowed the Devil to exist and to bring evil upon the uni- verse. The only answer to the question as to why God allowed the Devil to exist must be found in the hope that when the Devil is finally conquered, and the universe completely condensed, and love finally triumphant, the joy will be greater than it would have been if there had been no struggle ; and that the excess of happiness then will more than counterbalance the temporary pain we have now. While we may not say that whatever is now is best, we shall ultimately see that whatever has been has been for the best, though we may not know this till the whole plan is sur\^eyed backward from Heaven. Of course the terms "good" and "evil" as appUed to the moral conduct of man are much fuller of meaning than when used of the operations of the physical world, but the principle is identical in each. It is the same designing, conscious, evil spirit who destroys matter by light, heat, and electrical repulsion, or centrifugal energy, who in men tries to mar all beauty, to seduce all virtue, and to hamper all knowledge. One cannot say, for instance, that it is morally wrong for a man to light a candle ; but what we say is that when he does so, he calls into existence two destructive and dangerous motions, light and heat; and he is only justi- fied in doing so when he is prepared to hold them in check and to make them serve some good purpose. It would be wrong to light a candle and leave it so near a magazine of powder as to disintegrate the latter and de- stroy life and property. Man instinctively acknowledges that light and heat are dangerous disintegrating motions, when he confines his fires to stoves and fireplaces to keep their destructive properties in check. When prop- erly guarded they serve many good purposes, but they themselves are essentially evil and destructive. Even the gentle sunbeam, which causes pleasure to the human eye and agreeable sensations in a man's body, will ruin the vegetables in his cellar. At the same time that God holds the Hght of the sun sufficiently in check to make it serve some good purposes on the earth, in so far as it acts at all it is always a disintegrator. Every house- wife knows that she must keep her storeroom dark and cool in order to preserve her vegetable supplies from fermentation and rottenness. It may be said that great cold is destructive ; that, for instance, it as surely destroys certain things to have them frozen as to expose them to light and heat. But this is not the case. So long as any vegetable or animal substance is frozen it is not destroyed. It will keep indefinitely. But let heat approach it, and disintegration sets in at once. In the process of freezing one's body, the pain is caused by the conflict with heat. When heat is conquered and the face is frozen, there is no pain. It is only when heat is applied that the pain begins. Freezing may cause our Hfe to depart elsewhere, for our souls now need bodies which contain heat; but they may be other- wise constituted some day; and cold is never a disintegrating process, though it may give rise to disintegration, just as evil may follow from the excess of any good. It may seem fanciful to use the terms "good" or "evil" in speaking of merely 24 25 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. physical actions, nevertheless the principle cannot be gainsayed. The action of gravitation, like darkness and cold, is always beneficent and preservative, though the Devil may bring evil results out of it also, as where people fall from heights and are killed. Yet the same law, which would be so misused by the Devil, is that with- out which we would all be hurled into space. Good springs from evil, and evil from good ; but the two are al- ways antagonistic. The Devil uses every integration as a stepping stone to a wider disintegration; and God uses every act of destruction as material for a higher reconstruction. But no matter how closely good and evil are related as cause and effect, they are always dis- tinct from each other. Evil is nothing but evil though good should spring from it; and we must never confound the evil with the good. Light and heat are always the work of the Devil even though God, by holding them in check, brings good out of their destructive action. The amount of light and heat upon the earth from the sun will depend not only on the amount of each generated in the sun, but also upon the distance of the earth from the sun. Throughout all parts of the struggle between the Integrator and the Disintegrator there must be uniformity in the rate of God's triumph. If, for example, God, as the centripetal or magnetic at- tractive force, were to gain too great an advantage over the centrifugal or electrical repulsive energy, our earth would be drawn much nearer the sun than it is at present. We should therefore be burned, unless the sun had grown correspondingly cool. If the rate at which 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the sun cools should correspond to the rate at which the ^ntripetal force conquers the centrifugal energy, the temperature on the earth might remain the same as It is now, even if we were drawn as near to the sun as the moon is now to the earth. If the centripetal force which draws us to the sun conquered too quickly, we should be burned. If the condensation of the sun took place too ouickly, we should be frozen; but God, who, by His ereat love, cares for each atom throughout the whole expanse of the universe, triumphs over Satan graduaUy in all parts together, and with sympathetic symmetry. 27 CHAPTER II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST. It is to be expected in an age of observation and scientific experiment, when men have discovered the fruitfulness of inductive methods, that natural laws, many of which assuredly throw light on the unexplained phenomena of life, should be regarded with an exaggerated importance that is truly marvellous to those standing far enough away from the scientific turmoil to view the whole position. We should strive after a rational and comprehensive judgment that coolly accords to each incident in the scene its due value and nothing more. The empirical scientists of the present day are down in the midst of natural phenomena. They are sur- rounded on all sides by material and secondary causes. They deal with what they can see and handle. The enormous mass of facts, experiments, technical terms, and limited generalizations prevents their breadth of vision. They cannot view the whole question in its relation to primary and efficient causes. Because a "law of nature", or uniformity in observed processes, may be for them the object of their search, they are apt to think that such a law is a final or ultimate principle and that it explains fully the facts about which they are reasoning. They find it hard to see that these laws are merely the most frequent modes of the working of a de- 38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. signing power. That same power may, on exceptional occasions, work by different laws; but the tendency is to overlook this. Hence men are apt to infer, because the conception of a human being in most known cases oc- curs upon the fertilization of the ovum by the spermato- zoa of a male, that it could not occur otherwise. It is absurd and presumptuous, however, to affirm, merely because we have found this to be necessary in those cases which have come under our notice, that no con- ception could occur without male fertilization. Be- cause the sun has risen every day within the memory of man, we may infer that it will rise tomorrow. There is an extremely strong probability that it will do so; but no one will argue that because it has risen every day it must rise again tomorrow. The reasoning is precisely the same with those who say that spiritual conception is impossible. It is improbable, viewed an- tecedently, we admit, that a human being could come into the world without the instrumentality of a material father, yet it is just as clearly possible as that the sun may not rise tomorrow. We admit the antecedent improbability of the con- ception of a human being without male co-operation of a material character, yet if we can show that the whole life of Jesus was unique, then the a priori improbability will be reversed. The historical position of the Naz- arene is, we assert, one without parallel. Mahomet and Gautama were sent by God to found great systems of religion. They have fulfilled a great part of God's plan in human growth, but would anyone argue (i) that either of these systems, if universally adopted, would 29 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. produce an ideal state, one worthy of being the cUmax of human development; (2) that these reUgions have shown themselves actually possessed of inherent power sufl5cient to lead to the hope of their universality and perfection? On the other hand, will any deny that if the Kingdom of God, as described by Jesus in His parables and teachings, were realized upon the earth, it would be an ideal state, one of perfect happiness, suffi- cient justification and explanation of man's origin and development? Or will anyone deny that the Church of Jesus, which has overcome the rehgious bigotry of the Jews, the refined skepticism of the Greeks, the proud selfishness and mighty power of the Romans, the superstition of the Middle Ages, the heresies of inward traitors and outward foes, and holds to-day the civiUzed and self-governing nations of the world in its rapidly widening grasp, possesses a mysterious power, one diametrically opposed to any human force, namely the power of self-abnegation, love, weakness, — the mightiest principle which the world has ever seen? Do not all the tendencies of the present lead to the hope that this strange power will continue to work Uke leaven till the whole earth is impregnated thereby, and subdued thereto, and God's will shall b Hone on earth as it is now done in Heaven? Jesus occupies the center of History. He stands alone. No other man ever made such claims and had them substantiated by such a spot- less hfe and sublime death, or by the self-sacrificing labors of His followers, the cheerful death of martyred saints, the unprecedented triumphs of his teachings. If then, apart altogether from the miraculous and supra- 30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. sensuous elements in the life of Christ, one arrives at the perfectly rational conclusion that His place in the plan is different, not only in degree but in kind, from all others, we should naturally expect three things: (i) that the soul of Jesus should come from a different sphere from that of all others; (2) that it should be incarnated by a different process ; and (3) that the development of self-consciousness and power, which proceeds slowly in other men, would be exceedingly rapid in Him, and that He would perform acts appearing to men to be super- natural, which they would call miracles and imagine to be contraventions of the laws of nature. Looked at from this point of view, the immaculate conception of Jesus appears to be precisely what we should have ex- pected a priori, especially when we find that in so many startling particulars He fulfils the prophecies of the Jews regarding their Messiah, and the expectation that their deUverer should be bom of a pure virgin. It may now be observed that pre-established harmony is an explanation quite sufficient to make us view this procedure as natural and orderly. The control of the de- tails of the universe by its Creator may be by the con- tinual adjustment and exercise of His ever-present power, or it may be by a pre-arrangement of forces that contain sufficient strength to carry them onwards, under His Divine permission and guidance, of course, to ful- fil their work ages after the creative act first proceeded from the Divine mind. In such a view of things the pre-estabhshment of a harmonious relationship between co-ordinating physical conditions would fully account for the existence in the Virgin of a species of ovum 31 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. which would contain all that was'^necessary forfthe production of a man child. We mean that the Creator in arranging the details of man's life on earth, with Divine foresight and power, might have so planned the physical development of the line of David that a descendant of that house, the Virgin Mary, should be of this nature and possess this exceptional power. Moreover, even this hypothesis is not necessary when we reflect that God not only governs by the pre-estab- lished harmony of His own machinery, but that every- where, and in all things, He rules by direct oversight from Heaven, that He makes one substance different from another by altering the afiinities of its atoms or the polarities of its ions or molecules. Now the difference be- tween an imfertilized ovum and one that is fertilized, or even between the zoa of the male and the female seed, is merely one of atomic and molecular arrangement, as are all differences in phenomena, all being various ex- pansions of the universal substance. Therefore the simplest and, after all, the most rational, idea of the conception of Jesus in the Virgin by the Holy Ghost, is the old-fashioned belief that the power of the Most High came upon her and changed the constitution of the ovum, perhaps by the alteration of the polarities or affinities of its atoms, so that it became fertilized directly, instead of intermediately by the instrumentality of an earthly father. It may be argued that the ground of this controversy has been shifted by the Higher Criticism to the au- thenticity of the first chapters of St. Luke and other portions of the Gospels, which describe the conception 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. and birth of Jesus, It was only to be expected that men looking first at the antecedent probability of each detail in the story would assert that the narrative was written to fit m with a theory of Messiahship as it existed in the mind of a not-unbiassed writer, or as it was handed along by oral exaggeration. We have shown, however, that the most reasonable and philosophical atti- tude is that of a spectator who views the whole question in the light of its historical developments, and then, after getting his true bearings as to the general character of the Incarnation, begins an examination of the details of Our Saviour's life. It is asserted by some, who lay especial stress upon the genealogical record in the First chapter of Matthew, tracing the descent of Jesus from Abraham down, that Joseph was the father of our Saviour. In the i6th verse of this chapter we read : "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was bom Jesus, Who is called Christ." We should not fail to notice that this verse is the only one of the series into which the name of a woman is brought. If it were intended to be inferred that Jesus was the son of Joseph, why should not the form of this verse be the same as that of the preceding fifteen verses? We should expect the verse to have been: "And Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Jesus, Who is called Christ." The exceptional way in which the sentence is worded, and the manner m which the Virgin is introduced, make it plain that while the writer regarded Mary as unmistakably the mother of Jesus, he either did not believe Joseph to be His father or had at least his doubts regarding it. Matthew might 33 ^f I I I THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. not have happened to know much about the manner of our Lord's birth, and might have been merely in doubt as to whether or not Joseph was really the father of Jesus. This is supposing (contrary to our admission) that, though the first seventeen verses are authentic, the re- mainder of the chapter is a later interpolation, mserted to make the narrative fit in with the prophecy of Isaiah: "Behold a Virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which being interpreted is 'God with us\" We have shown that, even if this were the case, the manner of St. Matthew's narrative in the first eighteen verses would indicate that he had his doubts of Joseph's fatherhood. Again even if Joseph had been the father of Jesus (which we do not admit), it would not have proved that the conception was not the work of the Holy Spirit. We cannot tell how the male zoa fecundate the female when the two come together by the co-operation of the sexes. There is required in the conception of every human being the guiding and indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, who influences the spermatozoa and makes them perform their work by a direct act of the Divine Will. You cannot explain the fertilization of an ovum by any material causes. You say that the two forms of matter possess an aflSnity for each other that makes them unite and a fertilized ovum is the resuU. But what is affinity ? Blind attraction ? Certainly not. That is the ultima thule of unreason. There must be a conscious designing power at the back of the motions of the spermatozoa by which they are impelled to unite with other animalculae in the ovum and to begin the work of 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. creatine Uttle communities of Hving organisms, which in the aggregate make up what we call a human body. Under any circumstances, therefore, Jesus must have been conceived by the Holy Ghost and bom of the Virgin Mary, even if Joseph had been a human in- strument used by God as an intermediate matenal agent in the process (which he was not). The same reasoning holds true of any of the other disagreeable theories that may be advanced, whether it be asserted that the possible earthly agent might have been a Roman soldier, or a fanatical priest of the Temple, who, deceiy- ing or mayhap self-deceived, worked upon the creduhty or hysteria of the Virgin, rendering her the unconscious co-agent in the work. There is something intensely repugnant and inherently discordant with the whole system in any of these suppositions, especially m the theory that Joseph was the father. Upon this supposi- tion we might search for a long time in the laws of heredity to discover the probable production of such a son by such a father. Canon Liddon has pointed out, in his *Bampton Lectures', the difficulty of accounting for so strange— so audacious— an ambition in an unlearned and obscure Galilean, upon any other supposition than His divine origin. Whence came the unparalleled claim of a world-wide empire, an undying kingdom, the absolute yielding of the hearts and wills of aU men to Him? Surely not from the blood and bram ot a commonplace Joseph. We see therefore that the state- ment of the creeds, "He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, bom of the Virgin Mary," stands impregnable, aad that the most probable and fitting view, as weU as 35 f '■M I'll 1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. the most rational and scientific, is the old-fashioned orthodox belief which we have heretofore held, that the conception was an extraordinary working of the Divine power directly from Heaven. if 1 I CHAPTER III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. As Jesus grew into manhood, constant brooding over His plans would develop within Him that inner power which sees below the surface of phenomena and pierces the eternal mystery of the Real. Vistas of the true laws that govern nature would be spread out before Him. The ever-present consciousness of His destiny, that resistless river within each soul, which sweeps men on through life, surged within His breast. Those occasion- al gUmpses which all get of their former Hfe— those fleeting, indescribable presentiments that lift the veil of the future for the millionth part of a second--came to Hun frequently and were recognized by Him to be what they are,— revelations from the Father. In- trospection with Him meant communion with God. All knowledge comes from within. Experience of ex- temaUties furnishes only the material for the mind to work upon. The persistence, power, and vividness of internal suggestion are the most prominent character- istics of all true prophets, poets, or inventors. Their minds assume control of their bodies, their senses, their experiences and aU their material environments. So this vitalizing, moulding, classifying, and formative something within took full possession of the young Galilean. The world of outward facts about Him was 37 B«iiicitr»mn'iiiN